My Favorite Marvel: Magneto

In a previous post regarding Green Lantern Hal Jordan, I mentioned that the dream of Professor Charles Xavier was a strong motivating force in my life. Next thing you know, I'm writing not about how Xavier is one of my favorite Marvel characters, but about how his arch nemesis Magneto is one of my favorite Marvel characters. On the surface, this seems like a strange contradiction, but there are a lot of reasons it makes sense for me to like Magneto over Charles Xavier.

Charles Xavier is a rich boy who just happens to become interested in the rights of mutants because he is a mutant himself. He has every resource in the world at his command because of his wealth and his ability to read minds. I can count the amount of people who can relate to such a character on one hand, and that's only if you count Bradley Cooper's character in Limitless as a real human being in the real world. While Xavier is creeping around his parents' mansion trying to steal an expensive cookie from an expensive cookie jar, Eric Lehnsherr (or Max Eisenhardt), the boy who would one day become Magneto, was a Jew in Nazi-controlled Germany (and later Poland). The recent story called X-Men: Magneto Testament tells Max's story of great loss and suffering during the Holocaust. One of the best moments in the first X-Men film surrounded the first manifestation of Magneto's powers as being the moment when his family was dragged off to a concentration camp. And most of the best parts in X-Men: First Class similarly surrounded Magneto and his Holocaust suffering. Because we also suffer, we can connect with the troubles of Magneto.

As a result of his suffering, Magneto's intentions are more clear. Xavier has always dreamed of a world where humans and mutants can live in harmony. He was able to devote his life to dreaming as a result of the fact that he never had to fear for his life and hide from any authority. Xavier was born a wealthy white male in the United States of America. But because of the things that Magneto has witnessed in his life, he has a strong motivation for protecting the mutant population at any cost. He has seen what happened to the Jews and other "undesirables" during the Holocaust, and as a result he wishes to do everything in his power in order to prevent that from happening to the second group of people that he ever identified with, the mutant populace. Whereas the Jews prayed to God to deliver them from their trials, Magneto was blessed with the powers of a god, and surely he, if nobody else, would hear the cries of his people and respond.

So, why is Magneto considered one of the greatest villains of all time rather than one of the greatest heroes of all time? The beginning of Magneto's departure from heroics was his decision that his goal was to be accomplished by any means necessary. In the Ultimate Universe, Magneto conducts himself much the same as a terrorist would, destroying certain targets in order that his words can be heard. He takes over television broadcasts in order that regular humans should fear him. But most of all, Magneto has no trouble killing innocents in order to accomplish his end. The thing that we can relate to the most about Xavier's dream is that he intends to protect his people, but only through the right methods, and peacefully if possible. But Magneto's utilitarianism leads to destruction and corruption. Add in the fact that with Magneto's godlike powers, he puts himself above the rest of the population. Humans to him are like insects to a god. And instead of exercising great responsibility with his great power, he brings great pain and suffering to the world. Some might say that he had no choice. One like Magneto, who survived the fuhrer and gained considerable power himself, would have little recourse but to become another fuhrer. We would hope that he could overcome these feelings, that he could choose a path of peace and respect, and at times Magneto has done exactly that, but it does sometimes seem like fate that a terrorized Jew named Max would become a tyrant named Magneto.

I've mentioned a couple of times now that Magneto has put aside his hatred and become a hero here and there. As a matter of fact, I remember somewhere in the 200s of Uncanny X-Men, Magneto and Kitty Pryde, both Jews, attended temple together in memory of Holocaust survivors. And there was something incredibly touching about that. Furthermore, in nearly every alternate reality, Magneto is the one who is leading the heroes to victory, not Xavier. And let's not forget that in the recent events of X-Men: Schism, Scott Summers chose both Xavier and Magneto to provide expert suggestions for how to proceed in difficult times. There is a reason that Charles Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr are first and foremost friends. They both believe in the same cause. And they both want to do the right thing for their people.

Though Magneto has some of the most fantastic powers, he happens to be one of the most real characters that Marvel has ever created. Whether he's villain or hero, both or neither, I think that I will always love him. He could mourn Xavier's death and unite all mutants in Xavier's dream (Age of Apocalypse) or he could kill Xavier himself (Ultimate Marvel). Either way, he's a fantastic character, and we have a lot to learn from him.

My Favorite Marvel: Kitty Pryde

Like Jean Grey before her, Kitty Pryde has suffered her way through a bunch of code names. When she joined the X-Men she was originally called Sprite. Professor Charles Xavier, however, would have named her Ariel. Later, the name Shadowcat would stick for quite a few years, but whereas Storm was often called Storm in the field, Shadowcat was still usually called Kitty Pryde in the field. But none of those names needed to stick. It was the person of Kitty Pryde who has resonated with readers throughout the years. Of all of the young side-kicks of Wolverine that have been tried out - Rogue, Jubilee, etc. - Kitty is easily the best. As a matter of fact, I kind of wish that the X-Men films had developed their stories from her point of view rather than Wolverine's. And I'm not the only one who loves Kitty Pryde - Joss Whedon claims that his quintessential female power character Buffy the Vampire Slayer is largely based on Kitty Pryde. As you probably know, Whedon would go on to write Astonishing X-Men, a series which spent a great deal of time developing Kitty Pryde.

In many ways, I think that Kitty Pryde is Chris Clairmont's re-casting of Stan Lee's Jean Grey. Stan Lee wanted a gorgeous Ginger-type, status quo, all-American, WASPy, all-the-pretty-ones-are-redheads kind of girl, Clairmont gave us a girl-next-door, Mary Ann, a Jew who is not over-sexed (which is uncommon in the comic book industry) and who looks as young as she actually is. Whereas Jean Grey has always been fully-developed, both in terms of her adult body and her incredible powers, Kitty Pryde is a scrawny child when we meet her and she doesn't really know how to put her powers to use effectively. I do have to give Stan Lee some credit here. Giving Jean Grey the kind of power that could overwhelm anyone else on the team was really a fantastic way of literally empowering women, but she was often submissive to the leadership of the boys. Kitty Pryde has always had more on the ball than those around her. She's young and inquisitive, and without having any kind of mind-enhancement abilities, she's highly intelligent. What she lacks in great power, she makes up for in thinking outside of the box. This makes her accessible and it makes her the model of what every girl in the nation could become.

I think the real reason Kitty was important in the early days was because, with the combination of the first-wave X-Men and the second-wave (retconned to third-wave in the 2000s) X-Men, there was bound to be a lot of disagreements between the adults regarding leadership, personal issues, and how to proceed as a team. The only thing that could cut through what amounted to a great deal of political tension was the tender heart of Kitty Pryde. As a matter of fact, I remember reading a lot of issues where some really insane and difficult stuff is going on only to read, in the next issue, a Kitty's fairy tale story-line where she recast her team members as fantasy characters in a dream. Even though X-Men #1 began by teasing the love between Jean Grey and Cyclops and developed a strong fatherly relationship between Xavier and his X-Men, the entrance of Kitty Pryde was the moment when the X-Men really felt like a family, when the X-Men were bound not by a dream or a duty, but by love.

I think that Kitty Pryde did for the X-Men what Peter Parker / Spider-man has done for the rest of the Marvel universe. With Kitty, we began to realize that there was more to life than saving the world. You had to get good grades. You had to worry about boys. As a mutant who is also a child you deal with both mutant problems and the problems of coming of age. This is another way in which the character of Kitty Pryde became universal. When neither the X-Men nor the New Mutants felt they could relate to Kitty, she felt alone and hurt. We've all felt that at some point. I think that Brian Michael Bendis emphasizes this side of Kitty Pryde the best when he includes her in his Ultimate Spider-man books. After Kitty leaves the X-Men, she begins to go to school with Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy. She becomes involved in the love triangles with Peter Parker (because Colossus is gay in the Ultimate Marvel universe).

Though Cyclops and Storm are leaders and many of the characters are good looking and Wolverine is a badass, I really think that Kitty Pryde is the reason that the X-Men have remained good over the years. While I relate the most to Cyclops and feel that he is more of "my" character, I think Kitty Pryde might be the best export Marvel has ever given us. I also think she is the invisible hand behind the success of the X-Men from the Clairmont years until now. Kitty Pryde reminds us that we can all do extraordinary things for the good of those around us, and that's a message that we all need to hear.

My Favorite Marvel: Jean Grey

If there is one person who really has his act together in the Marvel universe it is Mr. Sinister. I don't mean that he has his act together in that he's fighting for the right cause or doing anything good in any way. I mean that he just has the best taste in mutants. Mr. Sinister has been obsessed for hundreds of years with the bloodlines of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, and they just happen to be two of my absolute favorite characters in the Marvel universe. For that, Sinister ought to be applauded. He's like a foodie, only with individuals who have genetic mutations that give them amazing and terrible powers. For all the other stuff, Sinister can go... Well, I'm sure you know what he can do with himself.

If I had begun my X-Men experience as a child reading X-Men #1 and continuing throughout the various X-comics, I think my first love would have been Jean Grey. (As it was, my first X-Men experience involved watching X-Men: The Animated Series, and my first love was Rogue. Or was that my first lust? When you're young and being burned alive with testosterone those boundaries can be confusing.) Jean Grey was much like many of my real-life first loves for the boys of the original X-Men team. Many of them had never been noticed by a girl before, much less one so beautiful, and though they were constantly racked with doubt - I'm talking mostly about Scott Summers now, but I'm sure the others had their moments - Jean Grey made them feel really good about themselves when she was there and made them miss her when she was gone.

There was never a better use of thought bubbles than when Jean Grey wondered whether Scott Summers loved her and when Scott Summers wondered whether Jean Grey loved him. Maybe this is the side of me who really adored the first couple of seasons of Dawson's Creek, but the added brilliance of the X-Men comics was that Jean Grey would develop the ability to connect those thought bubbles, to bridge the gap between thought and speech. Originally, her mutant ability was limited to telekinesis, and later she was given a degree of Professor Charles Xavier's telepathy. (Of course, I think that post-Phoenix this was retconned, but I'm not sure about this. The way I imagine the story has something to do with how the X-Men movies told Jean Grey's story. When she was young she was haunted by voices and her amazing power, amped up by a confusing and unknown force that would later be revealed to be the Phoenix force. When Xavier encountered her, he was forced to hide these powers behind a psychic wall. Thus, when Xavier gave her a degree of his telepathy, I imagine that to actually be Xavier tearing down part of that wall, perhaps the part that could have kept the Phoenix from taking over...) With the power of telepathy, one of the most romantic concepts ever conceived came into being, the psychic rapport between the lovers Jean Grey and Scott Summers. Because of their commitment and love, their thoughts would never be separated, regardless of distance and any other intervening factor short of death.

Now, much of this has been my understanding of Jean Grey through ruby-quartz glasses. But there is something about Jean Grey outside of Scott Summers' perception of her that is fantastic. For one, she's possibly the most powerful mutant of all time. But like Superman, her power is accompanied by a great deal of personal strength, of will. The first appearance of the Phoenix power manifested itself in Jean Grey when she was piloting a doomed space craft to Earth. Though there were others who were better pilots, others who were more manly, she sacrificed herself for the sake of the safety of the others. And through this sacrifice we were introduced to the Phoenix force for the first time. It was this show of great strength that brought Jean Grey strength beyond imagination. Once the Phoenix force was established, Jean Grey showed us what we should have been learning from over-powered DC characters for years, that immense power is tempting and terrifying, that it will drive you mad, that you will spend all of your life trying to keep this power under control.

Though Jean Grey represents acceptance, love, power, courage and strength of character, I think the most important thing about her is that she represents life. From the beginning, Jean Grey was the green-eyed lady, and while some associate green eyes with greed, there has always been a kind of folk myth about the ephemeral green-eyed lady, the ones who come and go from your life. Jean Grey is fleeting like life. Once you got used to her being around, she went off to college. Once you got used to her being around again she died. Once you got used to her being around, she died again. I guess it is a little depressing, but then again, so is death. On the flipside, however, let's not forget that one can also encounter acceptance, love, power, courage and strength of character in life. It may not last forever, but it is full of great beauty. Such is the myth of the green-eyed lady. Such is the myth of the Phoenix.

And such is the myth of Jean Grey. Whether you're calling her Jean or Marvel Girl or Phoenix or Red, Jean Grey is simply one of the best characters ever created.

My Favorite Marvel: Cyclops

In the last few years, the only thing I ever hear people say about Cyclops / Scott Summers is how much they hate him. It's almost become a refrain to say, "I think his superpower is whining." And believe me, I think Cyclops has made some iffy decisions in the past: cheating on Madelyne Pryor with the newly resurrected Jean Grey, abandoning his child, cheating on Jean Grey telepathically with Emma Frost. The list could probably go on and on. I've started this post - the first of my new column called "My Favorite Marvel" - with all the reasons you shouldn't like Cyclops so that we can just get them off of our chests. And feel free to add more reasons in the comments section. But the fact of the matter is that I think Cyclops is possibly one of the absolute best characters ever created by Marvel comics.

I can understand why there's a climate of hatred for Cyclops right now. Most of the comic book critics of today were children when the X-Men cartoon was on air on Saturday mornings from 1992 to 1997. Cyclops was always goofy-looking and uncool, sometimes a dick, sometimes a whiny little boy. The X-Men film franchise did nothing to alleviate this image. Instead they presented Cyclops as a jealous little man who feared that the main character Wolverine might take away the one good thing in his life, Jean Grey. I think a lot of people are going to respond that these are accurate depictions of the Cyclops that was created in X-Men #1 by Stan Lee, and to some degree they are right. But there is depth to that Cyclops. If he's a dick, if he whines, it is connected to other things. I think that the television program and movies have taken Cyclops out of the context of his struggles. And any of us taken out of the context of our struggles is going to be at best a flat character and at worst a hated character.

I think that Cyclops, if you follow his story from X-Men #1 until the current day, is one of the characters that people can relate to the most. Whereas Superman and Green Lantern are nearly omnipotent and full of courage and all of the best of impulses, Cyclops is first and foremost a broken man, both literally and figuratively. When young Scott Summers had to parachute from a plane that his father was piloting before it crashed, he hit his head on a rock. For years Cyclops experienced a lack of control of his mutant ability (force beams shot from his eyes) as a result of the resulting concussion. Of course, Emma Frost suggests in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men that the lack of control is psychological, but I'm not certain if that explanation has remained canon. This accident is what I mean when I say that Cyclops is literally broken. As for figuratively broken, Cyclops has no lack of psychological disorders. He certainly has abandonment issues and trust issues that just continue to compound as his family members disappear, his loved ones die, and his heroes betray him. In the end, Cyclops can be summed up in the way we imagine Professor Charles Xavier first found him, as an orphan who can't stop a deadly force from erupting from his face (let's not ignore the pregnant metaphor here about ugliness in teenager culture). He doesn't trust his own worth and he fears his true self. Everyone abandons him, and perhaps rightly so: he might kill them with his mutant powers otherwise, and who could deal with that kind of guilt.

Though I've just mentioned that Cyclops was an orphan, one of the best things about Scott Summers is that he has one of the most developed families in both the Marvel and DC universes. His father is a man named Christopher Summers. An air force major, Christopher piloted a plane with his wife Katherine Ann and two children Scott and Alex which came under attack by a then unknown alien race called the Shi'Ar. Christopher was able to get his children out of the craft before he and his wife were abducted. Scott and Alex are a couple of the most important mutants, both solar powered. While we know Scott became Cyclops and lead several X-groups, his little brother Alex became Havok, one of the first mutants to join the X-Men after the formation of the original group. Alex has the power to funnel cosmic energy into force beams that emanate mostly from his fists, and he took command of X-Factor after his brother left the team. Later it was revealed that Major Christopher Summers survived the plane crash and became a space pirate named Corsair. He surrounded himself with a completely different kind of family after the death of Katherine Ann called the Starjammers. In a really troubling storyline called X-Men: Deadly Genesis it is revealed that Katherine Ann was pregnant with a third child when she was killed, that the Shi'Ar removed the child from her dead body, and turned the resulting child into a slave. This child, named Gabriel Summers, would return to Earth, where Xavier sent him on a mission that should have killed him. Awakening from his near-death, Gabriel became the murderous villain Vulcan, and honestly I think that he's one of the best X-Men villains in recent history.

Of course, we know even more about Scott than his immediate family. In the 1980s, we meet Scott's grandparents. They own a shipping company in Alaska. In the limited series The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, Scott and Jean travel to 19th century England and meet Scott's first American ancestor, a boy named Daniel who adopts the surname Summers at Ellis Island. Furthermore, various children of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, Nathan Christopher Charles Summers (Cable), Nate Grey (X-Man), Rachel Anne Summers (Phoenix), appear from various different timelines. In the X-Men cartoon we even see that Cable has a son named Tyler. Scott's family populates a great deal of space and time in the Marvel Universe.

There is another family, however, that Scott Summers claims a close affinity with, the X-Men, with Professor Charles Xavier as his surrogate father. When Scott was an orphan in desperate need of help controlling his abilities, Xavier appeared to him, offered him a home, and offered him a way to become something other than a devastating weapon. I cried when I watched the series finale of the X-Men animated series because Xavier, on his deathbed, claimed Scott as his son in a really emotional way. And Scott, for years, has played the dutiful son. He's taken on the X-Men as his responsibility through some terrible times and done everything in his power to keep Xavier's dream alive even in the most intolerable times. It's been suggested in the Ultimate universe that Xavier may have been mentally influencing his students to stay in the X-Men, and in the regular Marvel universe that Xavier manipulated Scott through his love for Jean Grey. Furthermore, after it was revealed that Xavier sent Scott's brother Gabe on a suicide mission and then wiped Scott's memory of the event, the connection between Xavier and Scott was essentially severed.

This brings into focus perhaps one of the most important characteristics of Cyclops that makes him such a fantastic character, the balance of leadership and loneliness. Regardless of his reasons for becoming the leader of the X-Men, I believe that he has done a great job, showing care and dedication. The reason we might think he's a dick is because he is committed not to being everybody's best friend, but to making sure that these mutants who are feared and hated by society have what it takes to survive. And not only to survive, to battle those who stand in the way of peace, who would enslave the human race. In some ways Cyclops is the Batman of the group, the one who will always sacrifice happiness for the good of his X-family. I relate to Cyclops in much the same way I relate to Jack Shephard from LOST. Both characters find themselves thrown into positions of leadership. That leadership alone is enough to alienate them from fellow mutants, let alone the fact that Scott's father was kind of a deadbeat, his mother and wife Jean were killed, all of his loves were occasionally evil, his mentor committed a heinous crime against his mind, and his children all tell stories of a horrific future that he cannot stop from happening.

Cyclops is rough around the edges. He is occasionally crazy. Everything in his life turns from hopeful to terrible. But he takes up responsibility not only for his family or his team, nor only for Homo sapiens superior. He takes responsibility for all life on this planet and often on others. Cyclops carries Xaviers banner of peace between humans and mutants with a vehemence that will never be seen by another. He might not be the guy that you want to sit and have a beer with, but he's probably one of the most important individuals in the universe, one of the best developed characters, and one of the most realistic examples of how these powers can change a person. He is a leader, regardless of what stands in his way. He's one of my favorite Marvel characters, possibly the first in my heart.