As long as I'm wishing for things...

I've realized recently that if Marvel were to write a comic just for me it would be an ongoing series starring Magneto and focusing on how he relates to his family. You could set stories where he's a good guy and a bad guy, because he certainly switches, is horrifying or sympathetic, and where he fights the X-men or helps them, but the main draw for me would be a promise of seeing the family ("the family" is to be referred to with Ron Howard's voice because I've watched too much Arrested Development). ALL of his children and grandchildren (even Luna now that she's got funky mind powers) qualify as super-heroes, and he is a Big Time super-villain. If you do not find that interesting, I don't understand you.

Right now in Children's Crusade, the main thing that keeps me picking it up (other than desperate hope that Wanda will do something) is watching Tommy, Pietro, and Magneto all try to out-smartass each other. (Billy and Wanda should join in once they've finished laying out the exposition.)



Marvel could easily pick this up after this series ends, and we'll have two sets of twins plus Grandpa. You already have some serious dramatic potential there, with the two sets of twins trying to become a full family again, and Magneto trying to be an X-man still. While he's trying to do the hero thing, he's also trying to rebuild those bridges now that he's got a couple of stepping stones put down again.

Bring Lorna back from space with the boyfriend, and you have another set of characters to enfold into the family. Polaris and Magneto is already a compelling interaction, Polaris plus the twins (and new twins) after House of M is so fascinating to me that I can't understand why Marvel wants to let this lie.

And while Magneto would be the central character, this would be an excuse to showcase how the family interacts with each other. We could get my Pietro-Lorna teamup here, Wanda and Lorna doing sister stuff (and fighting evil), Wanda and her children, Lorna and her niece and nephews...etc...

Along the way, natural storylines would bring in Crystal and Luna, Hulkling, the Kaplan family, the Shepherd family, Rogue and Professor X for an issue or a few arcs. Tommy could get a little robot girlfriend. Magneto could try to manipulate Pietro into dating a human or mutant woman. (I think he'd leave Wanda alone since even down to the basic "I make bad things happen" power she's not someone wise to mess with, and she's already had two mutant children.) Ideally they'd find excuses to bring back the old Vision (not the dumb emotionless one, or the admittedly nice baby one, but the Vision who married Wanda), Astra, Joseph, and--for me the Holy Grail of potential Magneto stories--Magda.

Marvel, I promise you that unless you put an absolutely DIRE creative team on it I would buy the hell out of this.

Scarlet Twilight could have used a parallax view.

I've mentioned earlier that I consider Wanda Maximoff the Parallax of this decade. Think about it. She was a Silver Age hero who suffered a worldshattering tragedy that was resolved in her storyline but used by a new creative team as an excuse to turn the character into a crazed villain and reboot the franchise. She was made powerful to an unusable extent and the resulting madness was central to a universe-changing crossover where she attempted to rewrite reality to undo the tragedy. After this, she becomes a boogeyman in the superhero community, a name dropped to conjure the dark possibilities of a trusted friend turning into an enemy.

With Hal and Wanda we have a male character and a female character having served the same purpose for the company, written in an incredibly similar character arc but handled differently in some very unsettling ways. Take point of view, for instance.

Hal Jordan as the star of the solo Green Lantern title gets a story following his point of view when he loses his mind. We follow him (the issue after he has made peace with the Coast City destruction) on his attempts to rebuild his hometown, through his painful realization that he can't sustain the illusion, through his justification for needing to gain more power and lash out at his friends, through his wild rampage until the book is officially handed off to his successor Kyle. Then, once Hal's journey into madness has been properly documented through his eyes so we all know the flimsy reason that the hero we've all read and loved for thirty years is now the main villain of the series, and his successor has been chosen, the camera goes to another character. The momentous reveal of Hal's transformation to his shocked friends and teammates in a teambook comes only after the Fall of Hal Jordan has happened in his own book, following Hal as it happened and featuring scenes that showed his state of mind as it deteriorated.

Wanda Maximoff as a member of the Avengers teambook doesn't get this treatment. Her turn towards the dark side is told through other viewpoints, by the surrounding characters speculating about her mental state. Way back when they started this womb crazy mess in "Darker than Scarlet" her memory was erased, she spent time catatonic, and she lost her sanity for a bit. Agatha Harkness, Magneto, Quicksilver and the Wet Coast Avengers provided the exposition during this when they discussed Wanda. Wanda, having no memory of the trigger for this (thanks a bunch, Harkness) was not able to express this reasoning herself, she could just say Bad Girl things and be egged on by her father. It wasn't until after this story arc concluded that she regained her memory of the children and could express the pain she'd endured in her own words.

Avengers: Disassembled is even worse in this respect. It's a mystery. Wanda's turn is the big reveal at the climax. We don't even get to watch Wanda undergo this breakdown as other characters explain, the entire matter is a secret while we follow the others. And while one could argue that we saw it in Darker than Scarlet, the entire matter was resolved in the interim. This book retconned the resolution away, and didn't show the second breakdown in detail at all. Anything in between that dealt with Wanda's feelings about her children was erased so we have never gotten the Wanda POV to this story. (Or if we have, it was in a side-book that wasn't part of the crossover that somehow I and the other obsessive Wanda fangirls managed to miss completely) For the second time we don't get Wanda's point of view, and here we don't get to see her until she's completely gone. The surrounding characters explain EVERYTHING. Dr. Strange explains her powers, her mental state and the changed continuity (contradicting all prior statements he's made about the character and erasing the resolution of the trauma that triggered this breakdown), while Wanda is offstage. When they fight Wanda, all she says is a grim "Leave my children alone" a few times. We can pity her, and we can infer where she's coming from.... But we never get to see where's coming from.

We never get Wanda's viewpoint until House of M and even then the vast majority of the story is told through the viewpoints of Magneto, Wolverine, and Quicksilver. Out of eight issues we get Wanda's point of view in one scene of issue one (before Prof. X tries desperately to suppress it for her own good, of course), and a few scenes issue seven, most notably before she takes out 99% of her species. That's not really even one issue. We get Wolverine's viewpoint steadily for over five issues.



That, of course, is still much better than what we're getting from Children's Crusade, where everyone except Wanda tells the story of how Wanda lost her sanity. Iron Man, Magneto, Quicksilver, Wiccan, and Dr. Fucking Doom have all told us about Wanda's life and her mental state, while Wanda stands there clueless and powerless. We're coming on the halfway point and she's still a total amnesiac.

And yeah, there's an argument that this is all over being in a teambook rather than a solo book, that this is to preserve suspense and that sexism has nothing to do with this difference, but with this being such an important matter for the metaplot of the Marvel Universe, with Wanda's behavior being so vital to rebooting two major franchises.... Surely they could have spared an issue or two during one of these crossovers to spend some substantial time inside her head after the reveal? Walk through Wanda's delusions with her? Show how wanting her children back led to destroying her adopted family?

Disassembled was ridiculously massive. House of M had 5 full issues of "Getting the band together." Children's Crusade is on issue four and they just now got to giving Wanda lines. These stories are dragged out to an amazing degree, but when it comes to exploring the complex mind and emotions of a woman suddenly everyone's into compression and it's sufficient to have a man come in and give his expert opinion of "bitch crazy."

Marvel Marketing Pisses Me Off Again

Play along with me, readers, as I list the ways that the Avengers: Children's Crusade #5 solicit pisses me off. Can you guess all six?

AVENGERS: THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE #5 (of 9)
Written by ALLAN HEINBERG
Pencils & Cover by JIM CHEUNG
THE SCARLET WITCH WAR IS ON! Latveria becomes a battle-ground as Magneto battles Doctor Doom — and the Young Avengers take on the Avengers — to determine the ultimate fate of the Scarlet Witch. But the mysterious reappearance of the time-traveling Iron Lad unleashes Wanda’s reality-altering powers upon the timestream itself, changing the game, and the Marvel Universe, forever.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

To be fair, I do like some of the things Heinberg is doing (though honestly, I think everyone so pleased with the last issue just has lowered the bar so much that if Wanda's not actively murdering people they consider it a good thing) but the way Marvel is pushing--and in other places not pushing--this series and Wanda's storyline annoys the living fuck out of me. Everywhere they tell us that Wanda is "criminally insane" and responsible for a more effective genocide than her father could have dreamed of. Every indication is that if they do bring her back, they aren't going to fix any of the real problems she caused and give her a real redemption. And everywhere I look there is no foreshadowing and hell, no reference at all to this storyline in any of the surrounding books, as though there is no intention that it will change anyone's opinion on Wanda in the future.

Now we get this solicit, which contains the following implications:

Battle lineups don't include Wanda, she's just the toy being fought over. For the fifth issue of the third event in the seventh fucking year, she's just a toy being fought over. I really don't see the need for a clever meta-commentary about this for a character who was an active decisionmaker from 1964-2004, with one fucking exception in the 80s so they could retcon away those kids you brought back (apparently so they can decide her fate for her).

"Reality-altering powers" I foolishly thought we were through with this "Wanda is a Nexus Crawler" bullshit. Billy gets magic, they have always treated it as magic, and Pietro's experience with Cthon was treated as magic too. Why are not okay with the magic explanation again? What was wrong with a soft retcon? I mean, they retconned out all the previous interaction with Dr. Strange with Disassembled? Why not just fucking forget those two pages? Or we could find out that was an imposter rather than Dr. Strange? Or mind control? Why do we have to go back to the exact problem that Bendis invented to make her unusuable as a hero to begin with?

Iron Lad releashes Wanda's powers upon the timestream. See Problem 1. Once again, she doesn't get to make decisions, someone else makes them for her. At issue 5, we really should be past the sort of shit that makes No More Mutants look good.

The cover does a thing I really hate, and it's not just a Cheung thing but something that has been bugging me on and off for years. Wanda and Pietro look like they are very different ages and different levels of attractiveness. Funny how whenever an artist does that, it's always the female twin who looks hotter and younger?

April? Issue 4 was out in January. You can't even keep to a bimonthly schedule here after you put this fucking special off for over two years?

Changing the Marvel Universe forever. I know, I've been wanting this to have a confirmed effect on the rest of the line... but they found a way to tease that and annoy me too. I would not put it past them to be serious here, and using the opportunity of another Wanda appearance to implement some M-Day or One-More-Day-style change they've been aching to shove in there. Something that, like M-Day, they plan to pin on her CRAZY Nexus Crawler powers that she can't control and can never redeem herself properly for, because they want to make it permanent. So, nothing real changes about Wanda (she's still a crazy weak woman who can't control her powers and needs her male family members to care for her) but they get to use her as an excuse for whatever shitty change they can't blame on Mephisto now.

Shit. This is how Storm and Black Panther aren't going to be married anymore, isn't it?

(ETA: Okay, that last one might not be so bad, but that still won't change the first five problems with this solicit.)

Stuck on a moment

Girls Read Comics Too is putting together a Women of Marvel Memorable Moments poll (which is still accepting nominations until Sunday), and the list is pretty good. I want to make that clear before we go on. I like this list, I like this idea, I think you shoudl all go nominate stuff and vote.

But as with all fanlists, there's a couple in there that some fans loved but that make other fans cringe because everyone has different tastes. I'm pretty sure you all know which one I'm talking about:

NO MORE MUTANTS. Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch changed the lives of every person on the planet in House of M

What really got me was the sheer number of people suggesting it in the first post. I'm sure there's a number of Wanda-fans looking at that list and going "Oh HELL no, what's WRONG with people?"

See, House of M and Avengers: Disassembled are two of the absolute worst things to ever come out of Marvel for those of us who like Wanda. It's like Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour for Hal Jordan fans, two books that are fucking based around taking a hero we love and making her fucking crazy for no reason other than someone wants to change the franchise. Wanda Maximoff is the Parallax of the last decade (a comparison I've been on about in chat that I really must elaborate on in the future), and this is basically nominating Scarlet Twilight (No, we won't be going with Crimson or Ruby Twilight, it is going to be Scarlet Twilight) for an award while Scarlet Witch: Rebirth is experiencing shipping delays.

There is something distasteful just about seeing the storyline mentioned and driving home the point that everyone read her losing her mind, every book in the entire Marvel universe was affected, and every fan and writer has had "Womb Crazy Wanda" and the results shoved down their throats for the past six years.

And of course, the first defense of nominating this storyline is, like Zatanna in Identity Crisis (another nomination I complained endless about on Twitter) it was a major decision made by a woman that changed the world. It also underscored the sheer power the character contained, and the weight of their decisions. And in this case, perhaps because I favor the Scarlet Witch over Zatanna as a character, that might actually turn me a bit.

It is also the moment most fresh in fan minds about Wanda, being her last notable appearance prior to Children's Crusade (as an amnesiac guest star she is just a shadow of her true self, and flashback/AU appearances were far under the radar), so that has an effect.

But I don't think any of that is the real reason this sticks in our minds, the real reason it won't go away even after Children's Crusade brings her back and M-Day is undone. I think the real reason is the "I've had just about as much of this shit as I can stand" effect.

In the set of stories that would fall under the umbrella of "Scarlet Twilight" (West Coast Avengers: Darker than Scarlet, Avengers: Disassembled, House of M) Wanda has been fucked over severely from all sides. Her kids have been erased from existence, and she's been told by a demon, her fellow Avengers, and now her father and her "therapist" (Yeah, I'm sure Xavier has a degree but the bastard probably mind controlled his teachers into passing him) that not only were they not what they appeared, but they didn't exist. Her trusted Mentor Agatha Harkness has meddled with her memory. The Marvel Authority on Magic, Dr. Strange, contradicted all of his prior statements about Wanda and stated that she has no magic and it's been her freaky powers all along. The Avengers take him at his word, and do nothing to investigate whether or not her behavior was caused by an external force (such as that demon that took away her children). Captain America turns her over to a father who has a history of manipulating and using his children. Her father turns her over to the world's worst therapist. She's removed from her friends (Magneto's reaction to finding Pietro at her side implies he wasn't even allowed to visit), imprisoned, drugged and subjected to invasive telepathic therapy. The X-men, a team created to protect mutants from a society that feels they are too dangerous to live because of their powers, says that she is too dangerous to live because of her powers. Her friends in the Avengers have chosen to discuss this with them. Her father tells her brother that nothing can be done to stop it. (She was watching that.) And to top it off her sense of reality, her memory, and her powers--her very genes--are rebelling against her, tearing her in different directions and have caused her to kill several teammates--including her close friend Clint and her own husband.

Through all this, all she has left is her brother--who cannot obtain an ally to help save her life--who sacrifices his own independence (as well as his relationship to his wife and daughter--both of whom where absent in M-World) to hide her in a world. For this, for giving everything that their father could possibly want to him and finding a way to do this without destroying all their friends, her brother--bringing to life a nightmare she's had since they first met Magneto--becomes a victim of her father's violent temper.

I hate House of M and the effect it had, but I honestly can't make a case that it was Bendis hating on Wanda. She is the most sympathetic character in the story, the most put-upon woman in the universe. She has gone from having a full SUPERHERO family and friends to just having one person left in the universe who is willing to fight to save her life and sanity, and when she almost loses him... she loses it.

"No More Mutants" was a horrible moment. It was sheer rage and misery. It nearly destroyed the Marvel Universe. But unlike the previous two stories (the first of which was just cruel and the second of which made NO sense and totally ignored the resolution of the first), it was a logical continuation of her story. It was born of grief, anger, pain, abandonment, disillusionment horribly out-of-character actions by the rest of the cast, and kneeling in the blood of her twin brother after her father had beaten the life out of him.

It was not a heroic moment, though you could argue that after her experience with her own powers she honestly thought everyone would be better off. It was more of a "Fuck you, I'm leaving" to her father, to the hypocritical X-men, to the New Avengers, to the world, and to whatever cruel deity had given her those awful powers. It was Wanda, after being jerked around by EVERYONE for two crossovers, finally putting her foot down.

It was not a heroic moment. It was not a positive moment. It was, however, a powerful moment.

And while we're all betting on the Phoenix as the final winner, I have to wonder what it means if it wins. Because this moment is the one that classifies the Scarlet Witch as her father's daughter. It is a very Magneto thing to react to being hurt and betrayed by taking it out on an entire species. It is a very Magneto thing to think you are doing good when you act that way. It is a very Magneto action, the sort of action that allows him to be a compelling villain that can be allied with heroes from time to time. But... it is not an action that you can attributed to someone and classify them as a hero. It's defining moment of villainy and in order to use the Scarlet Witch as a hero it will need to be undone somehow. The effects will need to be reversed, and it will likely be attributed to lingering mind control (though sadly not hair-graying mind control because that would have looked pretty cool).

At least, I sincerely hope it will be undone. I liked the X-books better with the expansive attitude of the Morrison era, and the optimism of the 90s or the Silver Age. I don't like this dying race angle. I don't like it all being Wanda's fault. I don't like Wanda as a villain, or in limbo. And honestly? I hope next time we do a poll like this it doesn't even pass the agency rule.

Happy New Year

This was my personal favorite cover from 2010. It's got 3 of my favorites and that fairy tale motif I love. I know some people don't like it because Wanda's in the wicked witch role in the back, but part of the appeal for me with Wanda is that she's the Fairy Tale Witch as a good guy. Since I was a kid I've had a fascination with the Witch archetype on either side of the moral divide, but especially as good guys. (And as cover artist Jill Thompson also created Scary Godmother, it's safe to say I'm not alone in that fascination.) For some reason, I just want it to turn out to be a misunderstanding, and for the fairy tale heroine to get trained as a witch after befriending her. Wanda's history is that of a fairy tale heroine (she and Pietro are very Hansel and Gretel and the Brother and the Sister to me) and her powers are that of a fairy tale witch. She's ideal for exploring feminine roles in fairy tales, as well as the overlap between folklore and modern superheroes.

The Airing of the Grievances

I was doing a meme of Caroline's called "My Year in Fannish Favorites" when I came across a question so big it deserved a post on its own: Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year? There were so many fuck-ups to choose from just involving Marvel and DC, and as it is Dec 23rd and I have been watching Seinfeld all day I thought I'd go ahead and give this one it's own post.

So this year Marvel and DC have disappointed me in the following ways:

First, there's Blackest Night. The 2009 lead-up to Blackest Night was fucking gold. Rage of the Red Lanterns, Sins of the Star Sapphire and the BRILLIANT Agent Orange storyline are still some of the best Green Lantern stuff I've ever read. I even like that fucking FCBD story with Barry and Hal at Bruce's grave. The crossover itself sucked shit. I stopped reading when I realized that the White Lanterns weren't going to be recognizably as horrible as the Black Lanterns, and Johns lost the potential moral of the story, but not after being horribly dismayed by:

Hal's prominence over Kyle in Blackest Night. After two crossovers that centered on Hal and Kyle, suddenly it's Hal and Sinestro. It's like a crossover trilogy bait-and-switch trick (and Marvel pulled this shit too).

Katma Tui wasn't actually coming back to life, she'd just be a Black Lantern for a couple issues.

Soranik bringing Kyle back to life by way of Miri's ability to manipulate love energy rather than her impressive medical skill.

The massive WHAT THE FUCK of Wonder Woman being the Star Sapphire while the Atom is an Indigo Lantern. No, Greg Rucka could not save that.

Then when we get to Brightest Day they kill off the better Atom, and bury him in a matchbox. So cheerful.

Beyond that, they put Judd Winick on Power Girl, which used to be one of my favorite reads.

Stephanie Brown is still Batgirl (yeah, I said it), Cassandra Cain is still not back.

I was horribly let down by the entire Flash series, which I am still picking up for Manapul's art.

And of course, Wonder Woman's relaunch which has been an incredible miss for far too many reasons to list here.

Over at Marvel, they lost one of Magneto's kids.

A lot of people have asked Tom Brevoort on Formspring about Lorna being Magneto's daughter, and he pretty consistently said he thought it was forced and unnatural. He also, early on, stated there were no plans to bring her into Children's Crusade but I can't find that link. It makes me a little sad that they're ignoring this rich mine of soap opera drama, and it makes me a little worried that someone's going to retcon it away again and Lorna will become the Power Girl of the Marvel Universe.

They squandered numerous opportunities to bring Jean Grey back to life.

Second Coming and Hope Summers didn't really do it for me.

They let Greg Land do the covers to their Women of Marvel issues.

They continue to hire Greg Land.

The Massive Fucking Lie told by Quicksilver wasn't resolved by the finale of the series he told it in, and instead they decided to carry it over to another series. All of this, of course, is giving me the impression that there is no plan to exonerate Quicksilver for Son of M in Children's Crusade, because I find it so hard to believe they're dragging such a thing out when someone has a clean mind control explanation up their sleeves.

The topper, though, was that Scarlet Witch wasn't the big reveal in Seige. Instead, for the final of a trilogy of company crossovers (and Marvel did admit that Disassembled and House of M led to Seige) where Wanda was the centerpiece in the first two they decide to give SENTRY the sendoff. And this is not just "Fuck the Sentry" (But seriously, fuck the Sentry).

They dropped a lot of hints about a big surprise world-threatening villain, and a heroic redemption and such so we were down to Wanda or Bob. I was really hoping that Marvel would use that crossover to fix the mess Bendis made of Wanda Maximoff but no, the actual cleaning up for this character is to occur in a maxiseries rather than a company crossover like they fucked her over in. Yes, Heinberg is going to write a much better story, but he's going to take 9 issues bimonthly to do it and it is a side-story that other books won't tie into. That is how Wanda will be returned to sanity.

The thing is, it took THE ENTIRE MARVEL LINE to turn her into a villain and code her as baby-crazy. Every book was hijacked by House of M, and every fan reading and every writer writing got Crazy Wanda into their brains, but a single writer and a book that ties into nothing is supposed to undo that? Fucking Marvel. All those fans who read those crossovers but aren't fans enough of Wanda to read Children's Crusade, how many of Marvel's next crop of writers will be coming from that group? How long before someone decides that Womb Crazy is the real characterization, because that's the characterization she had when THEY started reading? What the fuck, seriously? That's like writing obscene lies about someone in a phone booth right where someone's eyes are looking during a call, and then instead of blacking it out you write "Not really, she's a nice person" on the inside of the handset. It's not hidden, but you certainly expended more effort making sure someone would look at the lies.

Everyone knows why I'm reading Avengers Academy anyway.

Yesterday's Talking Comics With Tim was an interview with Avengers Academy writer Christos Gage. Of course I dove in hoping for information on one of my favorites, and I wasn't disappointed:

O’Shea: With Avengers Academy–while the students are the core of the series, it’s the instructors that offer almost as much interest for me. For example, I love your use of Quicksilver. Was it your idea to have him in the cast, or how did he get added? Are there certain eras of Quicksilver history that appeal to you and fuel your approach to the character?

Gage: I asked for Quicksilver because I thought he fit in perfectly with the theme of the instructors being Avengers who have flawed, checkered pasts. Avengers Academy is meant to be a place of redemption for student and teacher alike. Just as the best counselors for people trying to stay off drugs are recovered addicts, the Avengers Academy teachers are people who’ve been down some tough roads and come back. Quicksilver was a teen villain, then a teen hero. He was raised to be a terrorist and grew to be an Avenger. My favorite point in Quicksilver history is when he first joined the Avengers…he did this incredibly heroic thing in terms of breaking from Magneto, and putting himself out there in front of a world that hates and fears mutants…but the whole time he was constantly backseat driving and second-guessing Captain America, of all people! Now that’s what I call cojones. Quicksilver is so much fun to write because he gets to say all the snarky things I want to say to people who irritate me, but don’t want to get smacked in the mouth for.

Two things here, number one that yes, that point in history is absolutely one of the best things about Quicksilver. He'll give even Steve Rogers shit. The prototype for Horrible Boss in his life is none other than MAGNETO, a man he has worked for multiple times (a man who repeatedly showed a willingness to just leave him to die even after they found out they were related, a man who actually killed him once--long after they found out they were related), but that doesn't make him grateful just to be treated like a person. He'll let anyone no matter how good (or how bad, because he was always the guy standing up to Magneto in those Silver Age X-men) know when he thinks they're going in the wrong direction or just not acknowledging him enough. I believe it leads back to sincere trust issues, but even then it really takes some nerve, and I like to read people with some nerve.

The second is the one the part I think a lot of fangirls will take issue with:

Quicksilver was a teen villain, then a teen hero. He was raised to be a terrorist and grew to be an Avenger.

I remember a panel was being passed around on Tumblr a few months back where it states that he was trained by Magneto. Thing is, I absolutely love this idea because as I said yesterday about the children of supervillains, the harder it is to break free of the parent the more heroic it is. I actually like the idea he had a few years to indoctrinate the kids and the twins still sabotaged and then left him. It shows a great deal of strength to begin with that they left this incredibly terrifying person, but when you make it that they left him after several years of training because putting the stuff into practice was too horrible it seems like a feat of Herculean strength. Not only that, every time Pietro and Wanda stood up to him it wasn't because they were shocked by the new revelation of what sort of people they'd fallen in with, it was because they still managed to hold onto their values despite being trapped in the group and cut off from the support network that taught them those values.

I do get the feeling, though, that we're witnessing a slight retcon. I think they are slowly being retconned to join Magneto at a younger age than originally intended. I like this, again, because it emphasizes the character strength it took. I used to use they'd just simplify the Maximoff's origins and have them raised by Magneto all along, but I can't help but notice that losing their mother at birth and being passed from Bova to the Franks to the Maximoffs to the streets (or rather, hillsides) to the grip of Magneto finally to a decent life in the Avengers seems to fit their attitudes somehow. They kept getting bounced from place to place and only had each other. (I would like the Citadel of Science "stasis while waiting for a proper family to adopt" explanation traded for a retcon that their mother was a time-traveling mutant, which would nicely explain why neither twin has powers even approaching their father's and truly simplify their origins--but somehow I doubt Marvel will ever realize that there's a really easy way to explain those powers right under their fucking noses.)

I'm optimistic about Gage in a way I'm not about Heinberg. After how Maximoff twins have been handled since Disassembled I really appreciate that a writer thought about their history so he could concentrate on actually portraying the sort of person the character was originally created to be. I would a hundred times prefer that to an in-depth metastory that continues the cycle of weakness to explain how the cycle started. (You can do your explanations and excuses while you're portraying the character as actively heroic, thank you.) They've been pretty much destroyed from all sides in two consecutive crossovers, and ever since then the plots, flashbacks and expositionary dialogue has only served to underscore them as a woman who couldn't handle her powers or not having the family she wanted and a man who couldn't handle losing his powers or losing the family he had. Even now when the lie storyline presents Quicksilver as someone who couldn't own up to his own deeds and had to take the easy way out, Gage's emphasis on his past as a villain and how he broke free of that mitigates the impression and really makes me expect that his coming clean will be a major revelation that's used to advance the overall story arc in AA. And while I'm waiting for that, and for Wanda to finally get repaired, it's still a relief to see at least one of them handed to a writer who recognizes the strength of will that was present in the Silver Age over the plot-induced madness.

The Long Pants of Evil

"Hero goes evil storylines" are fairly common in comics. Everyone has one or two, and they're okay provided they don't seep into the collective consciousness of the potential creator's pool as genuine characterization. That's usually not a problem provided it's acknowledged in the narrative as strange behavior, confined to a single storyline in a single book and not spread out over two company-wide crossovers, five writers and eight years... *Ahem*. Not that I mean anybody specific or their twin brother.

Still, even if a writer keeps it in the series, wraps it up at the end and explains it away neatly as the plot of such-and-such-villain there's still some seriously irritating trends with "Hero goes evil storylines", and no small concern is the tendency of artists to take advantage of an excuse to "slut up" an otherwise sensibly dressed female character and dress her in a ridiculously sexualized skimpy and cutaway costume. Off the top of my head I can remember this shit happening to the Invisible Woman, Linda Danvers Supergirl (admittedly those vented jeans looked pretty stylish and I liked the jacket a lot), Kara Zor-el Supergirl (which took some doing in comparison to the outfit they'd had her in before), Mary Marvel, the female heroes in Final Crisis who'd been converted to Female Furies (I don't remember if Wonder Woman was attached to that or not, but I liked that her anti-life version was just her normal look with a really ugly beastmask), Jade, and Polaris (really, anyone who's been possessed by Malice).

Strangely, most (but not all) possessed men prefer adding armor, new capes and dark masks to discarding unnecessary articles of clothing. I'm sure there's some complex analysis in the way male and female sexuality are differently repressed, but I suspect that the high incidence in mind control/possession storylines on female characters dressing like strippers over male characters exploring deeply repressed homosexual urges invalidates it.

Anyway, there are a couple female heroes that get to put more clothes on whenever they get a "Suddenly a Bad Girl" plot and interestingly enough they're both from Silver Age X-Men. They go from minidresses and swimsuits to full body suits.

Of course, everyone's familiar with Jean Grey's iconic "Dark Phoenix" look. Only an idiot would mess with the sincere "oh shit" reaction characters get from seeing Jean (or any of the Xerox Jeans in the Marvel Universe) decked out in red and gold. Interestingly enough, of course, after the first sash and leggings costume she never went back to the minidress. That's the power of proper fashion.

Even by Silver Age standards (where she started as a villainess but not an Evil Villainess), Wanda Maximoff always dressed a little skimpy with some pink nylon at best. She's usually in a red one-piece with pink nylons, but she ran around in a loincloth and a halter top in the 90s. But when she goes bad, she pulls out the winterwear. Check out Darker than Scarlet's look. She's got full sleeves, a more covering cloak and long pants.



Avengers Disassembled: Draping her cloak around her.



Later on, when injured she appears to have changed from nylons to pants but that may just be her thigh-high boots. They caught her by surprise in this one, though.





House of M: A long baggy gown. (The Civil War mini also has her in a long gown, in drastic contrast to Lorna's dayclothes.)



Children's Crusade: Medieval Chic.



She's more well-meaning and misguided in House of M, and I suspect that's what Heinberg's going for with this Doom thing so maybe in addition to the Long Pants of Evil we have the Long Skirt of Delusion. Either way, if she's wearing more than the Nylons of Virtue we're in trouble.

The most interesting, though, is the Possessed by Elder God Chthon outfit from Nights of Wundagore:



This isn't interesting because it's unlike Wanda, in fact it probably sets the trend of off-the-shoulder cape, mild cleavage (especially compared to her good girl look) and of course the Long Pants of Evil that come with all of her bad girl outfits. What makes it really interesting is Chthon as an entity is not opposed to showing extra skin. How do we know? Check out Possessed By Chthon Quicksilver:



Granted, he is also wearing long pants. That might be the thing.

This is without even getting into how the Vision's presence could've averted the whole thing.

I was going through my LibraryThing where I came across something that got old irritations going:



Avengers West Coast Visionaries: John Byrne, Vol 2: Darker Than Scarlet (Prelude to House of M)

I normally adore long, unwieldy titles, but this did not bring me joy. No, it did not.

Prelude to House of M. Who do they think they're fooling?

I don't know if that was a fan or if Marvel retitled it (I've heard they did re-release it), but we all know no one planned this far in advance. We know that the whole shitty Darker Than Scarlet storyline was just to get rid of the husband and kids so they could use Wanda as a sexpot again. It was just a really stupid story that left a really stupid open end that Bendis thought he was oh so clever in catching, even though he missed the storyline afterwards where the whole crazy thing was settled and the children were too. Really it wouldn't piss me off so much that he'd used it as an excuse to break up the Avengers if he'd closed up the loophole at the end but no... He had to leave Wanda crazy so he could do House of M.

House of M wasn't a great story idea. It certainly didn't justify leaving the Scarlet Witch in that state. I don't COMPLETELY hate it (I think Pietro and Wanda are the most sympathetic characters in the mess, followed by Magneto and poor innocent Lorna) because it had nice art and issue 7 was heartfelt, but it was really just 5 issues of getting the band together framed by domestic violence and the X-men being hypocrites. This was never anything more substantial than a way to off the mutants and undo the really awesome stuff Grant Morrison did with mutant culture. It also provided a convenient excuse to completely divorce the X-men from the high ground by having them throw aside everything they've ever fought by suggesting they kill a mutant--who hasn't done anything to THEM--for being too powerful. Honestly, one of the reasons I fucking hate House of M is it has made most of the X-men entirely unreadable to me. (I still give Cyclops a pass for a lot of horrible shit because he was the only dude on that side to say "Wait.." but nobody listens to Cyclops when he doesn't want to murder people) They're a bunch of fucking hypocrites, and will be as long as no one points out that they pretty much caused M-Day by reacting to Wanda exactly as nonpowered humans react to them. There wasn't a single mutant at that fucking meeeting that hasn't lost complete control of their powers at some point in their careers. Professor Xavier ALSO took out the Avengers when he did, and no one--not even Pietro who was for having the government put him under guard--suggested he get executed.

I honestly can sympathize with the Avengers in that series. None of them except Wolverine pushed to kill her. They didn't want Magneto to take her away, they had to bargain to try and get her back. No one could really trust that Pietro wasn't going to freak out the second they tried to explain this, so of course they didn't tell him. I can get through House of M and still like the Avengers, and I even suspect this was on purpose. After all, didn't things end for the Avengers with getting Hawkeye back to life? They got a little reward it seems.

Of course, their actions, going along with the X-men to do a full assault on Magneto and distract him while Dr. Strange snuck in to see Wanda (because... this wouldn't make anyone tighten security around the most important person in the universe to the perpetrator/the only family member the deluded and ridiculously powerful party guests would believe couldn't defend herself?) were pretty stupid, but I think the Avengers overall handled it better. No one wanted to kill her and the Wasp wanted to ask Wanda for her input.

But oh god, the X-men. Every time I look at it I can't help but think they deserved to get slammed on for taking that position in the beginning. Before the beginning, even. Professor Xavier was entrusted to treat a woman who was said to be losing touch with reality. When confronted with memories of her giving birth--an event that even after Darker than Scarlet did happen was still something that happened OUTSIDE of her head--he decides to tell her that the children never existed and to forget that memory. Which is bullshit. The children did exist, they just were a trick from an external force. They weren't a delusion only Wanda saw. They weren't a delusion she caused everyone else to see by telepathy. They were a fucking trick by a fucking demon. All the events happened. The children weren't a result of her breakdown, her breakdown was a result of the children turning out to be a big trick. And as the trigger for her original breakdown was that Agatha Harkness fucked with her memory (and to Byrne's credit, the entire WCA team thought that was stupid and her father and brother knew nothing about it until after she freaked out), naturally the solution to a relapse is to fuck with her memory again. Professor Xavier can only have made her WORSE with his "therapy", but he gets none of the blame for House of M nor for supporting the option of killing her. ("I don't know what else to do, Scott" my ass.) He really should have been the one saying "Now, Emma" in the damned X-meetings, but instead he was breaking the idea gently to Magneto.

Hell, Emma actually prevented the peaceful resolution of House of M by stopping them from recruiting Captain America. Despite the fact that he's probably the only person in the group who could have talked down Wanda (and, after the reveal, Pietro), Emma vetoed him because he was too old. So in the big fight scene, when they find out who's idea this all is and they need someone with a clear head around to take control, Steve Rogers is not there. Instead we have a bunch of idiots who let the person who knows the least about any of the players--someone those jackasses really should have been looking after in case she might decide to get hurt or do something really stupid--decides to activate Magneto, the biggest most violent temper on the board. All change of a peaceful resolution disappears, and the mutants of the universe get fucked over because they didn't have Jean Grey at the meeting telling them they were a bunch of assholes for coming up with this.

That said, I did notice that Dr. Doom came out okay during the whole mess. So maybe they did mean to fix Wanda and blame Doom for both her breakdown and Pietro's really bad idea (Seriously, he was helping her focus her powers and unless he was under the same mindfuck I don't see how they'll explain how he let Reed Richards and Sue Storm are dead while Dr. Doom is still in power slip by), or maybe it was a really fucking big oversight and Heinberg caught it. It doesn't solve my problem with X-men, but it does make me optimistic for the Maximoff twins.

FINALLY

Released at the Cup O' Joe Panel:



Over on Formspring, brevoort's been fielding one or two questions a week asking about the Scarlet Witch and/or Children's Crusade, and he's pretty much had the same answer for all of them. July 2010.

It's going to be painstakingly long, 9 issues bimonthly, but it's Heinberg and not Bendis so it shouldn't be as miserable as the non-Maximoff parts of House of M.

Pietro Maximoff and the Soulsearingly Massive Lie

Yesterday I learned that Quicksilver is going to be a teacher in Avengers Academy. This makes me feel a lot better for really complicated reasons about the proper way to structure a redemption arc, and Slott's pacing on the Pietro subplot.

The Pietro subplot, which still gives me a nasty taste, is not a horrible idea for a redemption arc. It covers Pietro's major issues since at least House of M: he's lost trust in just about everyone, he's retreating into deception, and he is absolutely terrified of living without Wanda. He didn't trust the new Avengers to defend Wanda from the members of the X-men who wanted to kill her. (This may have been rooted in the fact that they were willing to discuss it, but Steve and Tony didn't have much choice in that Wanda was actually in Magneto and Prof. X's custody, and they couldn't just say "No, we can't kill her" and expect her to be given safely back.) He didn't trust his father to prevent Wanda's execution. (Okay, that may have been a reasonable one.) Wanda wouldn't let him just run away like he likes to, so he tried to hide her in a MASSIVE Lie. And to make the MASSIVE Lie work, they tried to make it as pleasant as possible so that everyone just got pissed off when they found out it was a lie. Magneto was so upset he killed Pietro. (But does he have the Furies hounding his ass to the edge of the world and back? No, he gets to have the moral high ground next meeting with Pietro, and then go be a "good guy" for a while after he spills his son's blood all over the place). Wanda brings him back to life, but is so upset by his death that she curses her father (but he gets his powers back, and no one calls the Furies on his ass), and the rest of the family (who eventually get their powers back), and all of the innocent mutants in the world who had nothing to do with this (They don't get their powers back. She gets all the blame for this, of course, even though she was kneeling in her twin brother's blood--the twin brother who'd been trying to prevent her death--and still suffering the effects of whatever actually caused her breakdown in Disassembled, and the effects of Professor Xavier's incompetence. I mean seriously, who the fuck treats being out of touch with reality by trying to convince someone parts of her life that happened, that she remembers happening, that other people remmeber happened, never happened? The demon babies were demon babies, but they were actually BORN, you arrogant jackass! What the fuck?). She runs off, but loses her depowered and thoroughly traumatized little brother somehow. He resurfaces in New York to offer us an unobstructed view of his heartwrenching descent into madness.

To be honest, Son of M is a compelling and disturbing story. I don't really want it wiped from continuity, even though it has my favorite character doing some really heinous things, because it strikes me as a genuine mental breakdown. This story is the result of being killed by his own father after becoming the submissive robotically loyal son the old man's always wanted. He's depowered, abandoned, suicidally depressed (Spider-man accidentally talks him into jumping off the roof), and seizes at the first chance to at least get his powers back. He's always put most of his self-worth in those powers and how useful they make him to the team, and how they allow him to protect his sister. He exposes himself to a dangerous chemical, and gets even further unbalanced by the substance and the powers he gains from it. Well, maybe not the powers so much as his manipulative evil future self. (Never trust any version of yourself you can look in the face without a mirror, kids.) The rest of plot in Son of M is really uncomfortable, because this is a father turning to drugs and then giving the addictive substance to his daughter while he's high. His last sane act is to send the little girl back to her mother before he just up and becomes the full villain. From there he descends to the lowest point, burns all the social bridges he can, and makes everyone who ever loved him regret having met him.

He plays around with X-Factor for a bit (I found myself rooting for him to kill Layla, actually, because she's a fucking manipulative asshole but now it's too late for that) before we get to David's shot at a redemption arc. I'm being generous when I say arc, because it's a one-shot (X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead) where Pietro spends a night in jail, hallucinating pep talks from loved ones who won't actually talk to him (the one offrom Magneto lets us know that even in his fantasies Pietro can't get a hug from his Dad). While he's being counseled by figments of his imagination that he's a person worthy of love and forgiveness, he's distracted when he sees someone else in trouble. When he focuses on getting help for that person, he suddenly just gets his original powers back (maybe that first hallucination really was Wanda popping in to check on him) and decides he wants to be a good guy from now on. We can only conclude from this that Pietro Maximoff's imagination is the best therapist in the Marvel Universe, and that Wanda would have been better served by her brother's hallucinations than by that fucking arrogant telepath.

All joking aside, there is an incredible display of conscience and determination in this issue. David actually took all the stories where Pietro was being used as a plot device to drive the mutants and the Inhumans into the worst settings possible and used them to support his point that Quicksilver is an inherently good person underneath all the manure.

Villainy in the superhero genre is normally the result of a spiral of misery that causes the villain to lash out at others. Many villains have misfortunes--often their own fault--that they blame on the hero or society. They might desire revenge. They try to get revenge and are thwarted, which they blame on the hero rather than their own actions, which leads to more revenge attempts, more failure, and more blaming external forces for problems that are really their own fault. Or they might feel they're shortchanged in life, and try to rectify this injustice. When that fails, they feel even more cheated and try to rectify the injustice again, making things worse, making themselves feel more cheated and so on and so on. A villain like that is trapped being a villain because he never takes responsibility for his own actions.

In House of M, Pietro blames his father for his sister's breakdown. He convinces her to fix herself and her own actions, and while she's at it to fix this and that and ooh, that other thing even though it's suspected that any use of her powers just worsens her mental state. He knows mind control is wrong. He knows lying is wrong. He knows his sister is not supposed to use her powers. But he rationalizes that this can save her life, and if they actually replace the old world with a better one it's not as wrong. In Son of M, Pietro still doesn't realize that the action wasn't justified, and has the further misery of not having his powers anymore. He thinks they could have done it better, but now he's lost his sister from the "imperfections". When he does get a brief glimpse of just how wrong his actions were, he attempts to kill himself. When Spider-man stops that, he goes back to blaming external forces for his problems. He sinks further into the cycle of villainy, destroys what little is left of his family (which I think was a blessing in disguise because he and Crystal were a colossally horrible marriage, Crystal is about as interesting as wet cardboard, and Luna has powers now so there's less chance of her being Lianed), and ends up deciding on Layla as the cause of his troubles.

But after he gets well and truly defeated by the good guys, this bad guy does something most villains don't. He drags himself out of the twisted wreckage of his life, looks around and sees that he's the one who destroyed everything, and rather than decide to continue blaming his father or Layla for his problems, he accepts that it was really his own idiocy and arrogance that caused it, and then concludes that he can move past that and be the sort of person who helps people again. That is a heroic feat. The lower he's sunk, the more enemies he's made, the more trapped in the villain mindset he seemed to be before this, the closer he is to the Point of Absolutely No Return Ever, the more difficult it is to make that sort of breakthrough. The more horrible the actions, the more dangerous it is for your own sanity to face the responsibility. And heroism is directly proportional to difficulty and danger. Really, I find this sort of turnaround so incredibly admirable that I'm glad they didn't wipe all of this experience away to make him turn out to be a Skrull.

I finished the X-Factor one-shot incredibly happy, and this lasted until I picked up Mighty Avengers and found out he'd been lying about being a Skrull. While it would be stupid to have Pietro completely fixed after one night of hallucinating, it still jarred me to see him lying. Pietro is a character with an honor debt in his origin. I was very worried that he was back in the cycle of villainy until they did the Unspoken storyline. Pietro's not externalizing the blame anymore. His thoughts during the battle with the Unspoken were that the entire mess was his fault because he caused that war, and he wanted to make it right. He doesn't blame Crystal for remarrying, and doesn't waste any thoughts on the new husband. He's not mad at Luna because she rejected him for lying. The primary thing on his mind is this Big Fucking Lie and how he can't get out of it. (And he contrasts Hank Pym here so neatly I get the impression one of Hank's tasks is to save Pietro.)

So he's stopped blaming Daddy for his problems. He still got three big issues, though. Trust, Truth and Wanda. He doesn't trust his friends to accept him after what he's done, he's still turning to deceit as a way to make his life easier, and he's still fixated on Wanda to the exclusion of everyone else's rights. (The Wanda fixation is just one of the reasons a proper Pietro redemption arc has to end before Wanda gets back, the others being that she's his reward and he's her reward. He needs to be redeemed before he deserves to be reunited with her. And when her redemption arc is finished? She's supposed to be rewarded by seeing the bundle of anxiety issues she loves and not the bundle of self-loathing we've had running around since she left.)

I was expecting that with Loki revealed in Mighty Avengers #34, Pietro would drop the deception but no, he kept with it and just rejected everyone else. It seemed like he was slipping back to blaming others so I got antsy for a while, especially as there were only two issues left to resolve the Lie. I was actually angry until I saw the last issue. All he gets is a half-page, but I believe it touches all of the issues I've noted. He even manages to blame others a bit (though after what Hank pulled I can't really call that bit of dialogue backsliding) as he wonders why the hell he acts the way he does.



We're down to one issue to resolve his plot, but he's the sort of character who will impulsively blurt out a confession in a public place. And the news that he'll be in Avengers Academy with Hank Pym of all people tells me he's not still upset at Hank, and they will at least make some progress on his trust issues and his fixation on Wanda.

I really want them to fix the Lie next issue, though. I want them to fix it three issues ago. Until they do, he can't properly bond with a team, he can't be reunited with his sister, and he can't claim the moral high ground with his father.

Mutants, Cowardice, and a Severe Misunderstanding of Quicksilver's Behavior

"We're trying to completely reimagine the concept of the super hero team book here," Mark Millar told Wizard. "I mean, wouldn't it be interesting to see some people chicken out and call in sick when there's somebody they know can kick the sh-- out of them?"

--Mark Millar during the runup to Ultimates

"It's a cynical corpse of a superhero universe"

--Kalinara, Miller vs. Millar: A Rant About Cynical Superhero Storytelling

I must confess that back in the 90s DC I had no aversion to a Mark Millar writing credit. I remember my sister pointing out--when he wrote DC books--that he had an irritating "twist" ending at the end of all of his stories that was predictable in itself, but I never really had a problem with him. It wasn't until they launched the Ultimate Universe over at Marvel that I realized that I hated Mark Millar's work.

I initially liked the line, Bendis's Ultimate Spider-man was quite good and the first storyline of Ultimate X-Men featured my favorite set of villains--Magneto and his two brats. But there was something about Ultimate X-Men that rang hollow, though at the time I couldn't quite quantify it. This had been meant to be a slick, streamlined relaunch but there was a sleazy layer of grime to it. Wolverine in particular seemed... lesser. As a fan of Wolverine's more relatable aspects (the cranky uncle of the Marvel Universe, the guy who finds it all the more irritating that he can't really hate the man married to that girl he loves, the brooder who stays above his animalistic nature but doesn't let on about it, the smartass old bastard on the team) I'm not impressed by making him a more brutal or successful fighter. I'm not impressed with crazy eyes or hostility from this character. (He's blunt, not hostile.) Millar seemed to have lost thehuman side of Wolverine. I'm quite attached to him as the guy who stands around the breakroom in his cowboy hat drinking beer and being kind of a dick to Cyclops, who puts up with it because he knows they can count on him in any situation. The inherent trustworthiness of Wolverine wasn't there. Maybe it was coming on to a teenager instead of a grown woman. Maybe it was not enough standing around the breakroom in his cowboy hat being good-naturedly dickish rather than just dickish. Whatever the problem, Ultimate Wolverine just didn't work for me.

Ultimate Magneto was another problem. The common complaint is that Magneto is more honorable, but that wasn't precisely my problem. My problem is that Magneto is more mature than he was in the Ultimate universe. Really, attacking the White House and throwing around cars just seemed puerile to me. It wasn't something the arrogant old fuck we all know and love to hate would do. It's too small and childish for the guy who reversed the polarity of the whole fucking planet in the regular universe. The worst bit was him begging Xavier for mercy. Our Magneto is a sneaky hypocrite, but he has too much pride for that. He's a dignified bad guy. That's why he's such a big-name bad guy.

Still, Ultimate X-Men featured a genuinely creepy Professor Xavier and Pietro turning on his father (the look of shock on Magneto's face was a good moment) so I didn't consider the first arc a huge disaster. It was enough to bring me over to Ultimates, which promised an appearance by my two favorite Avengers (who also happen to be two of my favorite X-Men villains). That is where I realized exactly what was wrong with this entire universe.

There weren't any heroes there.

Seriously. Marvel has always been famous for the fundamental flaws in its heroes, but there were always redemptive qualities that balanced these flaws out. Mark Millar's reimagining of the "superhero" concept deliberately stripped the characters of their redemptive qualities. In Ultimates, Bruce Banner doesn't attempt desperately to cure himself while running from a man who wants to turn him into a weapon. He is addicted to being the Hulk and knowingly activates it again. Tony Stark doesn't seem to feel any guilt about his inventions at all. He is purely in it for the rush of being a superhero, there's no nobility or responsibility balancing his hedonism as there is in the mainline and the movieverse. Thor (who to be fair was one of the better re-imaginings just because here everyone assumes he is insane) is content to gather a cult and withhold his help based on politics. (Yes, it was funny, but it wasn't exactly a heroic idea.) Giant-Man and the Wasp were in a deeply abusive relationship that robbed both of their best qualities (his genius and genuine desire to do good, her strength in actively obtaining powers and leaving the relationship once the first punch was thrown).

Captain America is without a doubt the absolute worst. His core concept is that he is the absolute ideal of every American history book, the complete best that the country could possibly have to offer, the moral pinacle of the American culture preserved perfectly in time from what is almost universally regarded as the most just position the USA has ever taken in wartime. Instead, he is the embodiment of the most shameful aspects of his generation, and an indictment of the worst aspects of the prevailing US political climate.

That didn't make me drop it, though. What ultimately made me drop it was when Millar's above quote came into effect and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch sat out fighting the shapeshifting aliens because they were "sick."

When I first read Millar's quote on calling in sick, my traditionalist mind pictured one of the younger team members sitting by a toilet sick to his stomach with fear while Captain America talked some sense into him. Or, at best, the guy that calls in sick, then changes his mind and shows up at the climax. But that was the fault of my foolishly conventional mind, Mark Millar had other thoughts for a heroic story. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, my two personal favorites, chickened the fuck out the first mission and sat it out. Because giving in is apparently more interesting than someone transcending their weaknesses.

Now, I have an idea why Millar might have picked those two. On their first mission as Avengers, Pietro establishes his especially bad habit of running ahead of the group. Not two panels pass before a terrified Pietro runs back to Captain America.



I find this actually quite adorable, and not just because Don Heck drew an adorable Quicksilver. This is a necessary component of heroic stories. Fear. It's something you need to overcome to face the monster, and seeing one of the heroes get out of sorts when coming face to face with the bad guy emphasizes the danger. Pietro's a young man (I believe at this point he's a teenager, but that's a long unsettled argument between Kalinara and I), and this is his first time out as a hero. It is natural that he's going to panic a little. That's not cowardice, because he doesn't run off from the battle or hide from the bad guy. He just has the character trait of being fearful. It emphasizes his heroism rather than detracts from it, because it's something he has to fight through. Cowardice is when the character is fearful, but doesn't fight through it.

The Ultimate Universe is the Marvel Universe reimagined without nuance or complexity. (I've long argued that it is Marvel's answer to the DC's Crime Syndicate, and I eagerly await when the two meet and Captain America kicks Captain Jingo's ass while scolding him for disrespecting our oldest allies.) When Millar recreated a character, he first distilled them to his or her basic character components. Then he carefully discarded the merits and magnified the flaws, occasionally adding completely different ones. All he had to do afterwards was add profanity. Pietro and Wanda go from being wide-eyed and fearful on their first mission to being full cowards. Rather than joining the Avengers to build a positive reputation and prove themselves better than Magneto, they join to hide from Magneto who scares them shitless.

To be fair, this is reasonable considering he seems to have raised them in the Ultimate Universe. I'm not sure exactly how early he got them, but I imagine he would have fucked them up even more royally if he'd known they were his kids right away. Magneto somehow manages to be an even worse father when he actually tries to be a father. (See Magneto Rex, House of M.)

Still, as much sense as this chain of events makes in how people behave, I don't read superhero books to root for cowards and glory-seekers who never learn that it's bad to be cowards and glory-seekers so I dropped the book to preserve both wallet and blood pressure.

I'm glad I dropped it when I did, because subsequent scans have revealed the Loeb ran with the incest angle on the Maximoffs. That really pissed me off.

See, Quicksilver has long been criticized by the arrested development set as having a "creepy" relationship with his sister. I can only conclude that these critics are either severely emotionally underdeveloped, or they have never sat down and thought through Quicksilver's personal history.

Pietro and Wanda were separated from their foster parents (whom they believe are their real parents) at a young enough age they don't have a clear memory of them. They're twins so no one really has seniority, but they've been raised in an old world mindset so Pietro has picked up some sexist attitudes about male responsibility. He's not so much a chauvinist as a chivalrist, but still, quite sexist in that he believes that as the boy he's the stronger and should be the more responsible.

Couple that with their natural personalities. Pietro is an anxious, very grounded in reality, and holds a serious outlook. He has physical (or at least, manifesting as physical) powers, and wonderful control over them. They're nothing but a boon to him, and these speed powers seem custom-made to make him an excellent protector and provider. Wanda is a distracted romantic, a dreamer. She has trouble from an early age distinguishing truth from fiction (in "Nights of Wundagore", a 70s story, they establish that her foster parents told her stories about WWII and she believed that they'd happened to her), is much slower perception and reaction-wise than he is, and her powers manifest as bad luck/clumsiness. It probably took until Magneto found them before they realized she was powerful instead of simply clumsy and unlucky. Not only that, when they DO realize she has powers, they realize she has almost no control over them. (This is actually part of the appeal of Wanda. She is incredibly awkward and clumsy early on, and grows into being a pretty badass superhero. That's also why that West Coast Avengers storyline, Disassembled and House of M were so fucking infuriating. They threw away the growth and returned her to poor Wanda with the crazy powers who needs her baby brother to protect her.)

So, in Pietro's mind, he's got a slow, clumsy, gullible and chronically unlucky sister. He loves her very much, but as he can see it he's got the advantage and it's his job to take care of things. And to make matters worse, she grows up to be HAWT. I believe it's safe to assume that even before they ran into Magneto, they ran into a lot of predatory types.

Now we have a set of orphaned and alone twins, a girl who is chronically unlucky and a boy who is very athletic. The chronically unlucky girl is in the wrong place at the wrong time, a fire starts, and she gets blamed for it. They are now fleeing an angry mob when OUT OF NOWHERE, a man appears and fends off the mob with his fantastical powers. There's probably a great deal of bloodshed, but we don't know for sure because you couldn't show that sort of thing in a code book during the Silver Age. The man collects the terrified twins, who are in awe of his fantastical powers and the violence he's willing to put them to.

They were probably fooled early on into thinking this man is a benevolent protector (unless, of course, he graphically killed the whole fucking town in front of their tender adolescent eyes like I think he did), but I imagine that misconception went away the second the recruitment drive started and they saw the unsavory sorts they were forced to room with. What we end up with is two traumatized teenagers in a room filled with terrorists.

So we have Pietro--with what he considers his slow, clumsy, gullible, chronically unlucky sister--in room full of terrorists with fucking amazing powers. The old man has unimaginable power, designs on world domination and is perfectly willing to maim, kill, mutilate innocents and even let his own men (specifically, Pietro) die if it'll get them towards that goal. One of them casts illusions and doesn't even hide that he wants to fuck his sister. The other likes to gross out his sister and will sell them both out to the old man if it'll get him a treat. Oh, and the old man is perfectly willing to present his sister as an incentive for more powerful men to join the group.

Is the protectiveness not starting to look less like incest and more like a Type A personality's natural reaction to a truly fucked-up situation?

And as this happened during their formative years, it's a habit you won't discard even in the safety of Avengers Mansion. He might not trust unfamiliar people right away, especially as Magneto had presented himself as a savior. He might worry that allowing them to disrespect her will lead to them taking even further liberties. (This isn't so far off, considering that every male in the Avengers seems to go through a point of crushing on Wanda, Wonder Man even going so far as to prevent her husband's restoration to get in her pants. Hell, Hawkeye was willing to sleep with her while she was an amnesiac, which is pretty creepy.) He might not fully trust the robot who was made by their worst enemy to take care of her. He might react very badly to finding out all these people that he learned to trust slowly over time (overcoming the anxieties formed by spending his adolescent years in the Brotherhood working Magneto) are willing to--after not killing Kang, not killing Loki, not killing Dr. Doom and so on--discuss executing his sister while she's ill.

And the incest idea really annoys me because it shows me that either the writer has not actually sat down and considered where Pietro's character comes from, or the writer's just an incredibly cynical person who sees a sexual motive in any closeness between two members of the opposite sex. (I'll give you, this is one place Bendis managed well in House of M. He got where those two were coming from and wrote a tragically devoted relationship without creepy overtones.)

This is without going into the underlying truth of the relationship, which is that for all Pietro's worry and protectiveness, Wanda is the one actually in control. Wanda, the idealist, is the one with the real core of strength here. She's from a traditionalist mindset when it comes to gender, but that doesn't mean she lets her brother push her around. She'll defer to him on some occasions, but more often than not she knows better than to put baby brother in the driver's seat. Pietro's anxiety weakens him, and he has an inherent softness to him. He's an emotional, family-oriented worrywort who tags along to make sure she's safe. Wanda is the one who makes decisions for her own life and happiness, and progresses as a person. He just orbits her. He has no worth in his own mind except for his powers and how he can use them to help his family. That's why after House of M he starts to lose his fucking mind, while she's content to make a a secluded life without him or power. (Yes, even regressed as she was by those two crossovers, she still comes off stronger than her brother.) Part of why he's so zealous to protect her physically is because he can't handle a life on his own. It's a very old world gender dynamic.

Why bring this one up? Because it carried over into the Ultimate Universe. Wanda was the controlling twin. She was the primary decisionmaker. She comforted and supported him emotionally. So, if incest was going to happen, it was actually more on Wanda's head as the stronger in the relationship than on her anxious, needy brother. So the incest angle really tears her to pieces, and reduces the primary relationship in her life to a sexual one. This is especially problematic as Wanda is one of very few female characters in comics who places such importance on a nonsexual relationship.

Of course, I haven't read the actual issue, and the incest may not be Wanda's fault. But that's even worse because then the balance in the relationship between the Maximoffs is thrown out of whack. Pietro (and a version of Pietro that is inherently weaker as a result of Magneto's influence than our beloved mainline basketcase) the physical protector and provider is now also the decisionmaker, and Wanda has no pull whatsoever. Some 21st Century updating of the Avengers.

I shouldn't comment on this one.

I think what's making me irrationally pissed off about the "Silver Age had no meaningful women" argument going around is that I used to think that way.

I used to think that the female characters in the Silver Age were complete bubbleheads, bad sitcom women who stood on tables and cried "Eek a mouse" and spent all their time swooning over the male leads. There were a variety of "look at the sexism" scans in books and on the Internet to support that, after all. And we all knew the 60s were sexist.

Then, at my sister's urging, I read some Silver Age comics. The Essential X-men, in particular. And holy fuck, yes there was Jean mooning over Scott and the guy's making utter asses of themselves to get her attention. But there was also Jean throwing the biggest guy on the team across the room with just the power of her MIND, and Scott being the one who fainted, and the telepath/empath on the team was the old bald guy while the girl was the heavy artillery.

And there was Wanda Maximoff.

Holy shit, there was Wanda Maximoff the one-girl wrecking crew who just pointed at stuff and destroyed it. She was saddled with an overprotective brother... who ended up injured and on the ground much more often than she did. (Which made the couple stories where she accidentally takes him or herself out with her power much more humorous than insulting to me.) She was the pretty girl Magneto pointed out to lure guys like Namor to his side, but she wasn't there because she was pretty or had some controlling men power. She was there because she pointed at things and broke them. Behind that beauty wasn't the sort of fake power that girls get so much, there was real destructive power. She made bad things happen. She was the Scarlet Witch, and god help you if you knocked her brother down in the fight.

And then, in search of more Wanda, I found myself seeking out the Avengers. And the Essential Avengers features the fucking Wasp saving the asses of Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America on a regular basis, dammit. Yeah, she was a clotheshorse and kind of frivolous, but she had the power to shrink to a fucking spec and they used it and her cleverness to make her a force on a team with a GOD on it.

And I know, some of you are going to argue "Well, our point was girls who weren't derivative and could carry a story..." Well, stuff it. First, EVERY superhero is derivative of Superman, that's just comics. Second, these women could carry titles if it weren't for the constant glossing over of everything appealing about their early appearances by people who haven't bothered to look.

Seriously, if you find yourself arguing that Silver Age Nostalgia is exclusionary to women? Do yourself a favor and go read some fucking Silver Age comics. And if you have and you think that, you seriously missed something there. Because buried underneath all that 60s sexist shit is some solid gold.

It still puzzles me.

I've been reading the cross-community blogathon about the whole Spider-man thing, and I swore I wouldn't post on it but I broke that rule two days ago and I may as well get this one off my chest.

Admittedly, as a DC fan I'm probably more accepting of soft reboots, so I can get over the reset button and the regression. The problem is that I will never, ever understand what Marvel was thinking with Mephisto.

I mean, okay, so you don't like the marriage, you want to go back to fanland and you're too chickenshit to do a divorce (that's a rant for another day). That's one thing (). There are ways to do it without killing your character's moral standing.


There's The Scarlet Witch!, for one.

I mean, this character was ruined for a reason, right? Her powers were vague and unwieldy as a protagonist, so they made her crazy. That way she's available for use as a crossover villain and/or cheesy plot-device to make whatever the hell they want happen?

Ever since Peter took off the mask in Civil WAr I've been expecting her to pop up and fix everything. (It's not like anyone remembers what happened to her after House of M, anyway.)

Why the hell didn't they just do that? Have Peter or MJ personally piss her off.

*Sigh*

Stupid Marvel.

Joe Q: Villain or Menace

David Brothers has a great post up in defense of Joe Quesada called Joe Q: Villain or Menace, and I must admit that I liked the guy as the EiC when he first took over.

I'm sure you all know my current feelings about the editorial Marvel.

I can't agree entirely with David's take on DC's handling of women vs. Marvel's. Comparing Storm cold to Wonder Woman isn't really fair (especially since Storm's handling in her home book, Black Panther, is not really hetr book, or even her home book, and isn't an impressive use of the character. Wonder Woman has been consistently a force to be reckoned with outside of her book, despite editorial flounderings with the title itself. She's at the forefront in heroic society.) The issue is far more complex. Why not take Sue Storm, Spiderwoman, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Scarlet Witch, Power Girl, Black Canary, and Manhunter (which is uncancelled, thank you David) into account? How about Lois Lane's treatment vs. Mary Jane's? And for Spiderman loves Mary Jane vs. Supergirl, we have Birds of Prey vs. Heroes for Hire. And DC just hired McKeever, didn't they?

And before I get called a DC apologist, there's Jean Loring, Spoiler, Black Canary and Green Arrow, any Green Lantern girlfriend, Star Sapphire especially, about a third of the posts on this blog are about DC idiocy.

Point being, both companies have excellent moments and moments of stunning stupidity. But this is before work and I don't really have time to get entirely into it.

I will give him that John Stewart in the background is fucking stupid.

Anyway, its an interesting post. Go read it.

There goes my last Marvel read.

Daredevil #98:

Karen Page. Elektra. All the women Matt Murdock has loved have been violently taken from him, victims of unspeakable tragedies and in Daredevil #98, his wife Milla Donovan may be next! The Gladiator has returned, more enraged and brutal than ever, with one purpose in mind: making Matt Murdock suffer! With the defender of Hell’s Kitchen in police custody and the Gladiator alone with a terrified Milla, things aren’t looking good for the wife of Daredevil…and history isn’t on her side either. The penultimate chapter of “To The Devil, His Due” will have huge ramifications for Daredevil as he races towards the milestone Daredevil #100.

Brubaker shows and gets into an argument with an offended party, with the regular Newsarama peanut gallery in the background. Of course, this is a golden opportunity to tell a pro precisely what I think of this story idea so I couldn't pass it up (even though I hate the boards there). Here's what I posted:

Mr. Brubaker,
I like your stories and I don't think you'd kill Milla in a horribly tasteless fashion, and were it other circumstances I'd say you sound more reasonable and side with you, but here's the thing:

That solicit calls up the disposable girlfriend trope. It points out a trend in Matt's life. It plays it up for tension. And the disposable girlfriend trope, the "You touched my stuff" story (where the hero gets personally offended because his loved one was hurt/murdered) is sickening in all forms of media, and that article plays it up.

Milla is a fairly new character, she's not Foggy. She hasn't been around long enough to be an indispensable part of the franchise. She's not Elektra. She doesn't have the fan appeal to be brought back to life to kick ass on her own. She is to all appearances a disposable girlfriend, so its not a big stretch to figure she's on her way out when we see a solicit like that.

And in the comics world, where nearly all of the female characters are dating other heroes who can protect themselves, but the majority of the male heroes (who are also the vast majority of the heroes) have disposable love interests or set damsels-in-distress, its hard not to get the message that women are disposable to the writers and get really annoyed when you see advertisements that play it up as exciting.

And its really hard to get the motivation to spend money on something that sounds almost sure to offend, so if you'll excuse me I'll wait until after Milla's fate is leaked to decide if I'll buy another issue of Daredevil.

They probably won't notice me, though, as they are arguing over whether or not Scarlet Witch's breakdown was sexist.

(Whatever they decide about that one, it sure as hell wasn't in character.)