Spider-Man General Discussion

I think Moira Mactaggart was the one responsible for dicking with Magneto's mind.

It was a dumb retcon, as is every retcon where they go 'this person wasn't honestly making an attempt to be better! Someone brainwashed them into it!' which has also been done with Sandman and Catwoman if I recall correctly.

Edited by Bocaj on Aug 15th 2019 at 12:31:10 PM

@Bocaj-

Well, he is making progress, even if it's small steps.

More seriously though, in the original "Superior Spider-Man" series, Ock would regularly dish out savage beatings that would make the Punisher flinch and his motives were pretty bad (like he practically killed Boomerang more because Boomerang was calling his gang "The Sinister Six" than out of any moral indignation). And when he was briefly possessed by the Venom Symbiote, he wanted to kill people for texting and driving.

So, while threatening families is still pretty bad, doing it to save lives and showing more physical restraint is progress.

And while before, he didn't listen to anyone (i.e. Ghost Peter or other superheroes) who called him out on his behavior, now he listens to Anna Maria.

Edited by Hodor2 on Aug 15th 2019 at 11:37:38 AM

1. He found out that she altered his mind when he was a baby (she was trying to give him a "second chance," which now sounds even more ominous now that we know more about her in House of X), but...
2. ...it didn't actually change his mind or moral compass. Per Wikipedia, "Moira's alteration of Magneto did not go unnoticed indefinitely. Enraged when he discovered Moira had tampered with his free will, Magneto took Moira captive and forced her to perform the procedure on half of the X-Men, turning them against their teammates.[8] While Moira's alterations worked, it was revealed that, due to mutants' powers requiring their body chemistry to operate in a specific manner, use of a mutant's powers would cause them to automatically resist the 'programming' and reverse the effects of the procedure, so anything Magneto had done was of his own free will."

Edited by alliterator on Aug 15th 2019 at 9:42:22 AM

Ok so didn't actually mean anything. So why then?

Because he thought she had taken away his free will, but she actually hadn't.

Even if it was nothing, Magneto is a total hypocrite to get mad about it.

He once forced his daughter to sexy dance for him by controlling her brain... electricity?

Ah, but that's different, because...Silver Age?

So there was an in-universe acknowledgement of how dubious the consent of the Spock/Anna Maria relationship was? Hellz yeah.

Edited by HamburgerTime on Aug 15th 2019 at 12:00:23 PM

CB Cebulski on events and Spider-Man: Full Circle. Which sounds kind of amazing?

That does sound like an interesting writing exercise

Like exquisite corpse

Edited by Bocaj on Aug 15th 2019 at 1:52:04 PM

Sounds like the DC Challenge. https://www.cbr.com/did-you-solve-dc-challenge/

Edited by lalalei2001 on Aug 15th 2019 at 11:51:15 AM

x4 It’s more than that. Otto even admits it himself.

DC did something like that for Kamandi a few years ago to celebrate the Jack Kirby’s Hundredth Anniversary.

I read the first few issues, and it was actually pretty fun to see how the each writer would dig themselves out of the hole the previous one created.

Edited by megaeliz on Aug 15th 2019 at 4:21:55 AM

I recently read Cullen Bunn's Magneto (2014) series and it's an interesting take on a character. Magneto is obviously someone who has always been a step away from heroism and villainy and Bunn basically does a series showing that Magneto is beyond redemption for his actions, for the cruelties he inflicted on his family, his children...but that at the same time there's something of value in the choices he takes and the action he does. I feel you need to do that with villains, make them interesting without redeeming them. Alan Moore's Killing Joke ends with the Joker more irredeemable than he started but you still understood him to a point and he became an interesting character. Triumph and Torment, Emperor Doom and other stories show a softer side to Doom as well as a somewhat heroic dimension but at the start and end he's still a bad guy. OR take Kraven's Last Hunt or Revenge of the Green Goblin and A Death in the Family. Those stories go into the mentality and psychology of Kraven and Green Goblin but the story still has them as bad guys. Osborn has tragic qualities in the latter two stories but he still does stuff like torture Peter and cripple Flash.

The fact is that certain characters are created to serve primarily and essentially as villains. If you redeem them what you have done is create a hole in the rogues gallery which can't easily be filled. If you redeem Magneto, you have taken away from the X-Men their greatest enemy, and biggest threat, not only in terms of power but politically since Magneto matches Xavier in charisma, ideology, and intelligence. Nobody can fill that void. I mean sure you can say X-mutant is stronger than Magneto, like Apocalypse, but Apocalypse isn't a political threat to the X-Men's ideology.

If you remove Dr. Octopus and redeem him...you have removed the villain of such stories as The Sinister Six, The Master Planner Saga, the Owl/Octopus War, the Death of George Stacy. Those stories are several magnitudes greater than Superior. Dr. Octopus was created as a powerful physical opponent and challenge for Spider-Man to beat up and look like a boss in doing so. That's all he will ever be. That's what he works best as.

I would argue thats exactly why Magneto should have permanently heel faced or had something else happen with him.

It highlights the flaws of X-Men's message and metaphor if they're always going to have this same political opponent. If nothing ever changes for them so that they're always fighting Magneto.

Not to mention that Magneto could have different opinions than Xavier and still be a threat to his dream while not being a supervillain anymore.

I don't have a dog in the Octopus redemption race but does Spider-Man still look like a boss if he's beating up the same guy over and over? If Octopus is best and primarily just a powerful physical opponent then he's easily replaced. Spider-Man has a lot of powerful physical opponents.

Edited by Bocaj on Aug 15th 2019 at 4:47:54 AM

I'm personally quite in favor of redeeming Magneto, so I don't think we are going to agree. Besides his original presentation as a Card-Carrying Villain (and Grant Morrison writing him as a "mad terrorist twat"), Magneto has pretty consistently been an Anti-Villain and has had long stretches as an Anti-Hero.

So, I would not agree that him being the Big Bad of the X Men universe is most true to his character.

I do feel that one problem with probably most of Magneto's sympathetic moments/redemption arcs is that they involve him caring about the well-being of mutants. And while that's nice, that really doesn't get at what makes Magneto villainous, which is the fact that he writes off all of humanity in his defense of mutant rights (and at times outright mutant supremacy).

But like if you have (I think this was in a recent Claremont comic?) Magneto empathize with undocumented immigrants, or something like that, I think he works as an anti-hero.

Also, is it your position that no villain should ever do a Heel–Face Turn? Like I kind of agree that it creates problem to turn major threats into allies, but Octavius is more in the B-tier than the A-tier, and I'm thinking of how Abner Jenkins has been a hero for a long while now and works quite well as one.

And of course Eddie Brock started out as a major villain but has had significant periods as an Anti-Hero (even during times when he had a murderous hatred of Spider-Man). I think it's only in the last couple of years though that he is anything close to sane though.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that part, which I think is the strongest argument. Magneto's "shtick" is that he's more militant that Xavier and has different solutions to the same kind of problems (typically various degrees of murderousness toward humans and an advocacy of mutants having their own society), but you can still have that without having him be a villain (all you need is for him to drop the murderousness).

Edit- RE Octavius, with him, from what I recall, he was killed off at one point by Kaine, and had Redemption Equals Death at that point and then somehow he came back, and there was a story where because he was physically battered and dying from all of his confrontations with Spider-Man, he decided to go out as a legend by killing billions of people. And then it's right after that he ditched his body by taking over Peter's body. Which does kind of weigh against making him into a hero. But what I'm saying is that before the body swap, his days as a physical opponent were over.

Edited by Hodor2 on Aug 15th 2019 at 3:52:55 AM

There needs to be a certain needle. You can make Magneto a villain and so on but he should never become Ultimate Magneto or you know Planet X. I have no problems with Magneto in Fatal Attractions for instance or him extorting the UN into giving him Genosha. Those are extreme actions in line with his character, and they don't wash out his heroic motivations and actions. Cullen Bunn's Magneto has him delivering a "World of Cardboard" Speech at the end where he says that his fate is to be "a mutant boogeyman" for the humans. At the end of the day remember Magneto is fundamentally anti-Democratic. If he were to take mutants to the promised land, best believe he'd want to be in charge. So I don't think the character is fully capable of being a total hero. He's a flawed guy who does terrible things for noble reasons, occasionally feels regret and guilt, and but is always capable of ignoring that if he thinks the cause is just. That's entirely believable and realistic in terms of psychology of an extremist and terrorist.

In the case of Dr. Octopus if he has been beaten too many times the solution is to make him tougher. Like in the Gauntlet arc in BND they made many of Spider-Man's old rogues tough again and so on. So you can do that for Ock. And even in the JMS and Jenkins era, Octopus was pretty badass and his fights were dangerous stuff. Where I think people go too far is them forcing stuff in. Tom Defalco wrote backstories for Otto in The '90s where he pitched the idea that Otto is who Peter could grow into...when that had no grounding in any story published before. I don't think enough Arc Welding has been done to show how this newfangled backstory gels with the character in the first 30 years.

And even outside of all that...Superior Spider-Man fails as a story because nothing in that coheres thematically with Dr. Octopus. Dr. Octopus has mechanical arms and is a mad scientist obsessed with radiation and so on. That part of himself is consistent in Master Planner (since the plot revolves on this isotope that Peter needed to cure Aunt may and Otto stole it first) and the Owl/Octopus War (where he wants to destroy Manhattan with a neutron bomb). What exactly does identity theft have to do with that? I mean identity theft is a Chameleon story. Bendis did that wonderfully in his Ultimate Comics Spider-Man run with largely similar beats and to better effect. It's also I guess a Mysterio story. But it's not in any way a Doctor Octopus story. Erik Larsen roasted Slott on twitter by pointing out that the entire Parker Industries story is stupid. If Ock was that savvy about business why the hell didn't he create one without using Peter's body...he could have started a dummy corporation or another identity and do it. The logic of that has nothing to do with Otto as a character and more to do with, "Evil people know how to make money and that's what they'd do if they were in good guy's shoes". That kind of mentality suits the writers of Game of Thrones but it doesn't make for good storytelling.

I like your analysis about Magneto. Personally, I lean in favor of him as heroic for two reasons. One is that I'm Jewish, and since Mags is one of the few Jewish characters, I like him being a villain (or at least not A Nazi by Any Other Name). Also, supposedly the impetus for his character is that he's the Malcolm X to Xavier's Martin Luther King. Since Malcolm X was not actually a violent extremist, it's never quite sat right with me that Magneto is.

It makes me feel old, but if the idea of Ock as a dark mirror of Peter dates from the 90's, then it doesn't really seem like a stretch for more recent works to latch onto that.

Also, I suspect from the Doyleist perspective that the impetus for the "Superior" idea and that retool since is to give Ock a younger and physically stronger body and as a compliment make him Younger and Hipper. Relatedly, I have some heavy suspicions that the "Superior Octopus" idea was based on someone's cool-looking Dr. Octopus redesign and that he ended up in Hydra, because a "Doctor Octopus Spider-Man costume" happens to look like a Hydra uniform.

Conversely, while I am not saying that Superior Spider-Man!Ock is an exact match for Ditko's version of Peter (although I think he's kind of like an evil version of what people think Ditko's Peter was like), since Peter is now a pretty pop-cultured savvy guy in the comics and the MCU version of him is a kid, I think there was a need for a Spider-Man who is a stick-in-the-mud, and Octavius fills that nicely, since he's literally an old man in a young man's body. Of course, so does Peter B. Parker in the Spider-Verse movie, and he has the benefit of not being a former super-villain.

Edited by Hodor2 on Aug 15th 2019 at 4:40:10 AM

Oh I absolutely am following that. I think Hickman sees Magneto similarly. Magneto is following Xavier because he likes the idea of Xavier playing hardball but as he tells Xavier in POX #2 if Charles backs out, Magneto won't. I think Charles and Magneto's relationship will follow a similar pattern to Hickman's take on Reed and Doom. The X-Men are trying to act like the brotherhood but find that they aren't good at being supervillains and eventually Magneto will show them how it's done and while the X-men will save the world and mutantkind from Magneto. Doom did a better job stopping the incursions than the Illuminati but ultimately it was Reed who saved the multiverse from Doom.

Well that dated comparison isn't the only way to look at it. I mean the issue of extremism opposed to peaceful means has a long history. Magneto can be seen as a Che Guevara figure. I mean that's what the whole "Magneto was Right" t-shirts and his merchandise selling well with humans in Cullen Bunn's run is about. There's also Meir Kahane who might have been closer to Claremont's idea, and that also ties into the Zionist metaphor in Hickman's run. I will also say that Xavier being a rich white guy isn't a good fit for Martin Luther King Jr.

I think Superior Spider-Man is at heart a parody of Peter Parker. But it feels like it's also trying to be a serious story at the same time. That can work if done well but it's not...

The cool thing about the most recent relaunch of the book, is that it’s actually moving Otto beyond that, and giving him some legitimately meaningful and lasting character growth.

Personally, I think the end of HOX/POX will see Xavier and Magneto retire for the next generation to come about or something similar.

Edited by alliterator on Aug 15th 2019 at 3:30:43 AM

Fun bit of trivia: if you don't count the Sublime/Xorn debacle, this year is the 20th anniversary of the last time Mags was unambiguously a villain - the Eve of Destruction arc.

Edited by megaeliz on Aug 15th 2019 at 9:17:38 AM

Magneto was villainous in House of M, the lead-in to and even then he's the ultimate cause for Wanda going No more mutants.

That was actually Quicksilver. And Wanda going crazy was later retconned to being due to Doom.

Edited by alliterator on Aug 15th 2019 at 5:05:54 AM