My comic book reading days were the 1980s. I avoided them througout most of the 1990s as they became slicker, and by default duller, and publishers resorted to increasingly irritating gimmicks to boost sales, rather than publish decent stories that folks would want to read. Occasionally, I got interested in reading the graphic novel collections of stories (such as Grant Morrison’s run on the X-Men), but haven’t followed any series regularly.
Anyway, I was re-reading a book of Lovecraft stories over the weekend, and that got me to thinking about Magneto’s island. It was circa issue #150 (of the original series) - Magneto dragged it up from the bottom of the ocean (how he managed to do this was never explained) and installed a super-generator to magnify his magnetic abilities so that he could do things like create volcanoes strong enough to destroy entire Russian cities, and uhm, uh, hinh…
Well at any rate, Cyclops & his then-girlfriend Lee Forrester washed up on the island’s beach and explored it, and it was clearly meant to be “R’yleh (whatever)” - the island from the Call of the Cthulhu, complete with non-euclidian architecture and giant statues of Cthulhu. Eventually Magneto was defeated. Then Prof. Xavier had the brilliant idea of moving the X-Men’s base of operations there - apparently on a whim, since there was no plausible rational for the move. Poor li’l 5-year old Illyana Rasputin got sucked through a dimensional gateway to Belasco’s limbo, and he used her as the lynchpin of a convoluted plot to ‘ressurect the Old Ones’ (more evidence that this was indeed Cthulhu’s island - even though none of them were mentioned by name), and wound up doing one of these convenient superfast aging tricks wherein she went from a useless 5-year old girl character to a teenaged sidekick of Kitty, and eventually a New Mutant.
It was after this point that I’d started losing interest in series. I do recall looking over some post-“Fall of the Mutants” comic books wherein Illyana was reverted back to 5-years old and (I guess) no longer a half-demonseed. And apparently she got killed, and (remarkably) has remained dead(!!)
But what happened to the island? It’s very existence was one of those ridiculously open-ended storylines from the Claremont era in which nothing definitive would ever be resolved, and would be ignored for long stretches of time, only to be abruptly brought up for no reason - some characters would just show up on the island, remark on the ‘alien-ness’ of it, there would be cryptic remarks about who built all that non-euclidian architecture, etc. Then everyone would forget all about it for like 25 issues. But was there ever any solid explanation for it by anyone, and what happened to it? Does it still exist in the current Marvel universe, or was it simply forgotten about?