QUOTE: Xavier was in his 20s when we were introduced to him in X-MEN 1. Yet, a few years later, he was revealed to have served, as an adult, in the Korean War.

That still could have worked, if Xavier had been drafted at 18 or 19 to serve in the last year of the war he would still have only been 28 or 29 ten years later in 1963.

••

Why do serial killers never think of this when they get caught?

"John Wayne Gacey? No, I want to be called Roy Schneider from now on! There, all better!"

QUOTE: I never thought he was in his 20s. I think that may largely have been due to my stereotype of wheelchairs and the disabled. I just associated them with someone much older.

Also being bald and a Professor lends to the impression of him being over 40.

Max Eisenhardt is his new good guy name. Brand new in X-Men: Schism. Eric did lots of bad things so he wants to be called Max now. 

***

That is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Whatever happened to the real Marvel?

Take a gander at this letter from the Incredible Hulk #6, (March 1963) note how Stan dismisses the crazy suggestions of this reader, sadly today it would probably be considered.

••

Which is how it should have stayed.

One of the things I came to appreciate, as a reader, was how DIFFERENT Magneto was from Doom.

Doom's history we knew in quite intimate detail. We'd "met" his father. We knew about his mother. We'd seen his first love (slipped magically into scenes where she had not been before, rather like the Jack Black character on that episode of COMMUNITY). We understood him to have his own kind of tortured nobility, his own set of rules, which might be messed up, but to which he could be depended upon to adhere. Doom, in a really twisted way, was someone we could trust.

Magneto, on the other hand, was a cipher. We knew nothing of his background, his upbringing, his ethnic heritage. We knew nothing of his family, mother, father, wife, children. And there was no question of him being "noble" in any way. He was the complete opposite of Charles Xavier, even more than Doom was the opposite of Reed Richards. He was, in a nutshell, a complete and unabashed son of a bitch.

And I really liked that! I liked very much that Marvel villains were not the cardboard cutouts I had grown used to at DC. They had depth, they had motives (beyond Kill The Hero. But Magneto -- there was no shading to him. He wanted to enslave humankind -- and there was always that sense that having done so, he would set about enslaving the rest of homo superior, too!

Having recently read the entire original X-Men run, I totally agree.

Magneto was truly evil from the start--not a freedom fighter by any stretch. His goal was to RULE. He treated his "allies" as mere tools. He sought to impose his will upon humans and mutants alike.

Magneto was the quintessential X-Men foe because his goals were the polar opposite of theirs. We didn't need to know anything more about him than that. He was the sort of mutant the X-Men were created to stop. That's all that mattered.

While Doom and other Marvel villains were fleshed out in some detail, Magneto represented those villains who come out of nowhere and are just plain evil. The how and why is not important.

••

Astonishing the number of people I have seen invoke abused child syndrome to explain this -- the abused child grows up to become himself abusive. Sure, it happens. But move that into the environment of a comic book -- especially as the backstory on a mass-murdering supervillain -- and it becomes the worst kind of insulting psychobabble.

Lee and Kirby -- both Jewish -- knew exactly what they wanted to say with that neo-Nazi imagery. In was instant and unmistakable shorthand for "This guy is the worst kind of bad."

Count Dracula was always portrayed as being noble in his own way as well, and he's murdered a lot more folks than Doctor Doom ever did.

Plus, it isn't just himself, it's his people. Wolfman wrote his people as
hating him and he looked at them as mere pawns of his will, but over
last 20 years, we see he cares about his people, provides for them and
they love/respect him. I don't know if Wolfman's views matched what
Stan Lee wrote, but that's why I said, I never considered Doom noble
(by any view) before JB. (But I like this view better.)