I’ll second that.
He’s riveting.
AoA is probably one of the best X mini-series they’ve ever done. The whole “hmmm, i wonder if this side character is really this reality’s incarnation of…” factor was lots of fun, and unlike most stories, it had a beginning and and end: a scope. When characters died, it was for good, and it was all only this one shot.
Dark Beast, by the way, did have some major retcon interaction after he came back to this reality: it was he that, apparently, created the Morlocks, and also the reason that Sinister had them killed (he didn’t like the DB stealing his ideas). Not sure what happened to DB after the whole Onslaught stuff, though I know he was in the Brotherhood for a bit with Alex Summers prior to Alex’s getting blown into an alternate reality. X-Man became a shaman, and when that got lame, died. Holocaust is, as far as I know, still kicking around. I couldn’t give two squirts of piss what happened to Sugar Man: he was fun in AoA, but I have no idea what he did back in the real world.
Semp wrote:
Ah, 80’s XMen I know about; much after that I don’t, though…
Magneto was reduced to infancy and then reaged only as far as a younger man early in the new XMen- 110ish I think.
In UX 150, Magneto issues an ultimatum to the world to cede him control of every country or else. At this point, he’s not so much evil as convinced that everything is humans vs. mutants, and he’s determined not to allow the humans to win (and kill all the mutants.)
The Soviets (this was published in 1981) launch nuclear missiles at the island he’s on from a sub; he neutralizes them and sinks the sub. He then destroys a small town in siberia by making a volcano erupt there using some really fancy looking equipment and the ‘Earth’s magnetic field’. He has some sort of nullifier set up which makes all mutants except him powerless, but the X-men show up and wreck the nullifier while powerless, and then lose in a big fight with Magneto, but in the process he injures Kitty and has a crisis of conscience and abandons his plan.
UX 161 is a flashback to Magneto and Xavier as young men, in which the seeds of good in Magneto are further developed.
In UX 200, he turns himself in, and there’s a big trial. The trial includes Magneto claiming self-defence against the nations of the US and USSR- essentially that he was acting as his own nation. This trial never actually concludes on account of being attacked by some of Magneto’s enemies. Xavier is dying, and extracts a promise from Magneto to replace him in running his school. (Xavier doesn’t actually die, but does leave Earth for several years.)
Magneto serves as Headmaster of Xavier’s school for several years, and fights with the X-Men and the cadet team the New Mutants during this period.
Magneto does go to trial yet again in the XMen vs. the Avengers mini-series, and is aquitted.
Later, Magneto stops believing that Xavier’s dream will ever work, and again becomes a radical, but I stopped following it around this point.
I wasn’t slamming Ian at all. He seems to have a lot of fun being a wonderfully diabolical Magneto. He & Patrick Stewart are two of my favorites.
But the Ian Magneto is very different from the comic’s Savage Land style Magneto.
I’d probably turn bad for either of them.
Something like fifty percent of them, only you couldn’t really tell because she spent the whole series running around like she had Ms. Marvel’s powers instead.
This thread is kind of funny because I had taken a break from re-reading all of the AoA issues to surf the dope and one of the first threads I saw on the board was this. Excellent series and a good one for people who are only slightly familiar with the X-Men in that you don’t have to know their forty years of backstory to get the whole story (actually it’s better if you know the backstory 'cause then you’re going “They did what to Multiple Man?!”, but it’s still good for casual X-fans).
Correct – she’s an adult, probably in her late 20’s. Also, Magneto isn’t so old. Comic book time isn’t particularly consistent, and Mags I’d say was probably in his 50’s when they had their adventure in the Savage Land.
–Cliffy
Yeah, but apparently Rogue doesn’t even have any powers anymore or something, so she can bump uglies with whomever she wants.
I loved the AoA, with the exception of Factor X and Amazing X-Men. The artwork and storylines just sucked. Generation Next though, was fantastic! I pretty much stopped collecting after this because I got sick of the continuous cross-overs (the following storylines were Onslaught and Operation Zero Tolerance which I just didn’t care for), so I never understood Sugar Man all that well. What the hell were his powers exactly? He gets killed about three times in Generation Next, changes size a couple of times, and manages to somehow kill someone while they’re in gaseous form by stabbing them with his tongue, but there’s really no explaination to him. Did they ever get into him more in the “normal” universe, adn what exactly happened to him?
Reading this thread makes me even more amused by the small but vocal minority of X-fans who continue to gripe about the changes made for the movies. “Rogue’s not a teeny bopper, she’s in her twenties!” Well, yeah, in the more current comics she is, but when she was first introduced, she looked and acted about 35 or 40. As another poster stated, she seems to have gotten YOUNGER over the years . . . so making her a teen in the movies isn’t really such a crime. Heck, NONE of the characters have been really consistent in their age rate, so why should anyone care if the movies play around with it a little?
That said, I would have liked to see Rogue kick some butt, Claremont style, in the movies – I always thought it was cool when she’d absord Colossus’ powers and turn metal, or touch Nightcrawler and go “Bamfing” around while turning slightly blue and elfish for a while. She’s one of my favorite characters, and was really underused in X2. Thankfully the rest of the movie was pretty spiffy! 
Ah, I liked FactoX and Amazing. They weren’t quite as good as everything else, but they were still necessary parts of the sum total story, and they had the same geekgasm factor of seeing beloved characters in new roles.
And it hit me: they did two Tales of the Age of Apocalypse specials dealing with the Brood and the Inhumans, and there was a follow-up What If…? comic where Galactus attacked the AOA Earth. Oh, and the AOA Blink is (or was) a regular in Exiles.
My dear holmes, allow me to correct you. The Magick series us what happened when Colosus’ little sister aged 8 years in a few of our world’s seconds. This series would have been somewhere around 1984, and I think I still might have it somewhere in my parents’ attic. I’m pretty sure it was during that series that Kitty Pryde, aka Shadowcat, aka Ariel was transformed into a cat-like slave. In fact, (it’s coming back to me as I type):She is enslaved by Belasco, but resists him and helps Illyana (Colosus’s sister) escape her captivity.
It’s been years since I’ve read this stuff, and I was afraid it had lost a step. Looks like it hasn’t! By the way, does anyone else remember when Kitty Pryde had the nickname Ariel and how much she hated it? Then again, who would want to be named after an antenna?
CJ
My favorite part of the AOA was Quicksilver’s (my favorite character) position as that universe’s Cyclops. The staunch leader and boy scout. I liked his team of X-men the most… except for Exodus. Not an interesting character. I liked how he and Storm were together since the regular MU Quicksilver used to be written as a bit of a racist.
Gambit and the Externals was the shittiest of the AOA books. Why Gambit is the leader of a group of mutants…who happen to be thieves… in a world in the grip of destuction…made little sense… let alone them having to steal the M’Kran crystal from the Shi’ar. Yeah that was pretty shitty.
The Rogue/Mags Savage Land story is alright. But Magneto’s monologue about how he was a fool to try to play Charles Xavier as he slaughters Zaladane… is awesome.
I did a little digging…it seems that Holmes and Siege are BOTH right…in a way. According to what I’ve found (On this site and www.uncannyxmen.net/db/issues/showquestion.asp%3FfldAuto%3D814+%22Kitty+Pryde%22+cat+Belasco&hl=en&ie=UTF-8]this one, to name a couple) the “Kitty Pryde as Furry Sex Slave” storyline DID occur in the "mainstream"continuity…but it was an ALTERNATE Kitty Pryde. One from another Universe who’d been trapped in Belasco’s Limbo, eventually becoming a being known as “Cat.” (“Cat” Beh. Try searching for a name like that with google. At least names like “Uberlord Bönegobblerman” will show up on a search engine.)
Ranchoth
(Who knows? Maybe this version of Kitty even came from a “What If” universe that Marvel already showcased, but that didn’t focus on the X-Men, like a one where Gwen Stacey was the one who was bitten by the radioactive spider, or something)
The more I see “Magneto,” the more I try to read it as “Magento.”
There have been poorly-colored issues of the books where “Magento” wouldn’t’ve been a bad name for him, on second thought.
Since she’s younger in the movies she can’t control her power as well, evidently. I was suprised to see her do what she did with Pyro.
I think her character in the movies is pretty stupid, actually. I don’t understand why they even included her since all things considered she’s a fairly minor character in the books. Back in the day before the first movie came out and I heard she was in it I figured it was a fanboy thing. And I guess because they wanted another female character. But casting Paquin to play her seems to defeat that purpose.
I’m also not sure I agree with you that we should just ignore all the continuity changes in the movie and pretend like it’s canon because sometimes they do that in the books. It’s true that things get confusing, there’s a lot to keep track of, and continuity isn’t always perfectly maintained in the books, but that doesn’t mean at all that there is NO consistency or continuity in the books. While it irks me what they did with the Rogue character in the books, does turning her from a bitter and world-weary butch into a southern belle sexpot compare to stripping her of her entire history, and about 20 years of age to boot? No, it doesn’t. Especially for that particular character, since her history is such a strong part of who she is – so much so that her powers are based on past events (her having what’s her name’s powers from absorbing too much of her back in the day). That’s a much more major change, and hers is a unique case in that none of the other characters suffered so much random manipulation in the books. Continuity burps in the books aren’t even close to what was done for the movie.
In the “What If The X-Men Stayed In Asgard” issue, Rogue took advantage of the fact that she could touch people without sucking their memories out by marrying one of the Warriors Three.
She’s been a major character in the X-books since she returned to in Uncanny #269. She’s a flagship X-character. She’s been featured promiently in each of the cartoons. And isn’t she the leader in Extreme X-men?
EVERY screen treatment for the X-men has included the new kid coming to the school. In the original 80s cartoon it was Kitty Pryde. In the 90s cartoon it was Jubilee. In the 2000 cartoon it was Spyke a completely original and uninteresting character. In the original film treatment from the 90s it was again Kitty Pryde.
So it is fully expected that the movie they eventually would make has that element. And who should they pick for that part? One of the flagship characters like Rogue whose origin and power fit easily into the plot… or someone like Kitty a character that was never THAT popular.
It’s not so much a “new kid” as it is “a daughter figure for Wolverine.” I mean, everytime they get a young girl on the team, Wolverine turns into Pappa Bear. Happened with Shadow Cat, then With Jubilee, then with Marrow. So, it made sense that there would have to be one for the movie. And admit it, with the plot they had set up, it made it more plausible for that figure to be Rogue than Shadow Cat.
I think I’m the only person who didn’t mind the recon of her character. I’m glad they cut the roster down the way they did, because we’ve all seen movies where they try to include waaaayyyy too many characters just to please the fans (Anyone remember the Mortal Combat). Sure, they’ve still got all that in this movie as well, but if they tried to make the team anywhere near as big as the comics, that would just be too crazy. And they do it for every adaptation. Fox’s X-Men cartoon was the closest to the current storyline, but they still had a ton of character recons in that that didn’t seem to piss off too many people (such as Mystique, Angel/Archangel, Nightcrawler, and x-Factor to name a few [Cyclops and Havok weren’t even brothers…how’s that for a recon?]). We’ve all seen enough “Multi-verse” kind of storylines, just take the movie as another one, and it’s really no big deal. The movies are still enjoyable.