X-Lapsed, Episode 308 – X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #5 (2022)

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• I come away from this series thinking it would be easier to just say that from West Coast Avengers 50 until yesterday Wanda has been a Skrull. How many times can they try to redeem her without it sticking? I imagine there is a sign up in the Marvel offices saying “It has been 20 days since we F’d up Wanda Maximoff” and they keep having to reset it to zero.

  The worst thing about this series is you can see glimmers of how good it could have been as an X-Factor story. Make it 2 or 3 issues, remove the Avengers and the Kaiju and we could have a Lorna-focussed story where she is torn between her step sister and her father while X-Factor investigate. Even Wanda’s suicide/spell would have been less annoying if it wasn’t in an overhyped series.

  As you say there has been confusion over how the resurrection protocols work and why getting Thunderbird back is such a big deal. I don’t know if you are aware but Jonathan Hickman was interviewed on the Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast as a kind of exit interview and he revealed that his biggest mistake in his time on the X-Men was one line of dialogue where a character other than Vulcan referenced Petra and Sway. His original intention was that those two should be figments of Vulcan’s imagination and not actually resurrected because they couldn’t be as they were pre-Shi’ar. Of course my first thought was what about the Editors? Surely their primary purpose is to notice when the writers/artists are breaking their own story. Particularly on something as pivotal to the set-up as the resurrection protocols. I also wonder why I am learning important story information in an interview and not in the book where almost nothing happened for a couple of years. You do begin to believe that “Head of X” is code for “Don’t you dare edit me!”

  If you allow yourself to forget Petra and Sway this becomes a bigger deal and I understand the use of Thunderbird as the iconic death pre-Shi’ar. In reality it’s characters like Northstar’s daughter that bring more story potential but I get them going for iconography over emotion for the first.

  Of course if they can resurrect any character who would have been a mutant does that mean they can resurrect Peter and MJ’s miscarriage from the clone saga. We know from the MC2 line that she would grow up to be a mutant.

  Talking of Thunderbird, have you collected the 80s-launching Classic X-Men series? I mentioned when we were discussing Giant Sized number 1 that I first read the version from Classic X-Men number 1 which combines the pages where Xavier recruits all the new X-Men by Wein & Cockrum with a retelling of the rest of the story by Claremont & Bolton. Claremont adds quite a lot of time into the story both between the pages of that first story and also between Krakoa and X-Men 94. This is the secret origin of the Jean/Wolverine romance and the Wolverine/Angel antagonism that Claremont started pushing in the mid 80s. All-in-all you could argue that Claremont adds about a month between the new X-Men meeting and the death of Thunderbird. This allows Claremont to add lots more angst to the X-Men’s reaction to his death but also supports Banshee’s claim that Thunderbird is an old friend. They did spend a significant time living together in the same house.

  It’s amazing how much nonsense I can generate from reading a book I didn’t really enjoy. I feel I should mention I thought the art was very good which is another positive in the “Will Immortal X-men be good?” analysis.

  Well that’s one major turning point ticked off. Now I’m just waiting for you to get to the end of Inferno.

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