Jean and Wolverine had their 'secondary mutations' years ago. It's been part of those characters long before Grant Morrison came along.
what are we saying Wolverine's "secondary mutation" is? i always thought he basically had one power: an extremely nasty feral metabolism, which incorporates the healing factor, the senses, and (post-Fatal Attractions) the bone claws into one "power", and that everything else was part of the Weapon X/Plus upgrade package...
Beast only changed his appearance. That character hasn't really changed.
you could also say that these changes are the result of lingering long-term effects from the self-experimentation which turned him blue and furry to begin with.
Did you ever REALLY think Magneto was dead?
well... yes and no. i thought he'd be dead until the end of GM's run, and then he would promptly return in a Very Major Event.
And it's not at all out of character for either of them to do this kind of stuff. You can pretend that you're reading the Invisibles (which I believe was roughly ten thousand times more lame at the end of its run),
heretic! =P
but let's face it, you're reading the X-Men. And the X-Men is essentially a story about Magneto Vs. Xavier. Don't pretend that it's not.
first off, let me say for the record that i love Magneto with all my heart and soul. he's one of my favorite superhero comic characters ever, and quite possibly my favorite villain period (the only possible rival i can think of to him is the Joker).
that said, i'll be really disappointed if he comes back, especially if he's Xorn.
i think that it has been Xavier vs Magneto in the past, but that it really could move on from that. my favorite period in X-Men before this point was when they were running around in Australia, with Magneto mostly offstage and Xavier off in the Shi'ar Empire, when the remaining X-Men were left trying to make their own way in the world post-Xavier.
i think the series as a whole took a major step backward back in the early 90s when they brought Xavier back and rejoined the original five/X-Factor (around the time of the X-Men #1 launch) and then spent the rest of the 90s trying to recapture something which had already passed.
i liked the fact that GM was taking certain elements of the core mythology and reworking them, adding new elements, and subtracting old ones. Xorn was a major new element, and the death of Magneto was a major subtraction. to me, it really felt like the X-Men had finally stopped spinning their wheels and moved on in a new direction. this would make it seem like that was less true.
now, all of that said: i think it's entirely possible that the whole Chinese prison thing was a sham and i also think that it's plausible that Magneto could do just about everything Xorn has done.
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on the point of the Scott Sabah Nur theory: Weapon XV clearly chose not to kill Scott. why? has that been kicked around sufficiently yet?
i'm more favorably disposed towards the return of Apocalypse via Scott than the return of Magneto via Xorn, partially because the whole arms race between mutantkind and Weapon Plus seems like something that fits his shtick really well, and because i think that Apocalypse is a really cool villain on some level who just hasn't had a truly great story yet, and i think this might fit the bill.
i suppose Scott could be Apocalypse and Xorn could be Magneto at the same time. that would be just plain weird, however... |
), I'm intrigued to see how this is going to work out. The pieces do seem to add up from where I'm standing, but I can't quite see the angles, the "why"s. It seems, perhaps, needlessly complicated. Again, must parse th' Xorn arc.