in superman adventures #19, there’s a villain named multi-face who can convincingly disguise himself as anyone, even tricking dna tests and x-ray vision. Superman initially can’t stop him
and the only reason he gets caught is because multiface decides to disguise himself as, of all people, CLARK KENT i’m screaming
why do villains always mess up so badly
Clark Kent attending Bruce Wayne’s yacht party where Bruce told Clark to wear his clothes and……
Ta-Da!
Sard borken
calling the people at the party Bruce’s “fake friends” as if he’s Bruce’s only real friend and he’s low key jealous
Okay I absolutely love this comic but I gotta offer a correction because I got the chance to read this recently and the real context is even better:
Clark and Bruce have never met at this point. Clark ended up on this yaught by accident and the people there just assumed he was Bruce Wayne making an entrance because none of them have ever met him. Clark isn’t even Superman at this point, he’s still just a twenty-something from kansas with super powers trying to figure his shit out, and he just stumbles into a billionaire’s yaught party and then foils an assassination attempt on accident.
The best part is that Bruce finds out about this incident bc he obviously has surveilance on the parties he never attends and he’s just completely fucking baffled. I’m pretty sure this incident is why he knows Superman’s secret identity. What a fucking first impression. Absolutely legendary.
Why do we have an X-Men Prequel trilogy that is not, in any way, based on Magneto’s (and to a lesser extent Charles’s) actual backstory?
I don’t mean the Holocaust survivor part. That has at least been acknowledged, though it really should be fleshed out more.
No, I mean how Max Eisenhardt (Magneto’s birth name) was actually the kindest, gentlest man who just wanted a quiet life before the world forced him to become a mutant symbol.
Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed First Class. It was fun and interesting and super gay. But they completely screwed up Magneto’s personality.
In the comics, Max Eisenhardt was a Jewish boy whose parents and sister were killed in the camps. When he was freed (by Captain America and Wolverine, who were soldiers for the Allies), he and Magda, a young Roma woman who he had known since childhood, went off to make a life together.
Max did not build his life on revenge. He just wanted to live in peace and with the woman he loved.
Max changed his name Magnus, in order to protect his identity as a survivor, and he and Magda married young and had a daughter, Anya.
They lived in quiet peace until Magnus’s powers were accidentally revealed to his neighbors.
They formed an angry mob and burned down the family’s home, accidentally (or on purpose, depending on what version you read) killing little Anya.
Magnus, in a fit of (very justified) rage at the loss of his child, kills the mob and destroys half the city with his powers.
Magda, terrified of his powers, runs away and eventually (unbeknownst to Magnus) gives birth to Wanda and Pietro, who are adopted by the Maximoffs, a Roma family who had no children of their own.
This story of an angry mob who kills Magneto’s daughter is brought into the final film of the trilogy, but in the worst way.
In the film, Erik uses his powers and this exposes him as a criminal who is already responsible for multiple deaths.
In this case, the neighborhood is afraid of him because he has already established himself as a killer.
So their fear may be misplaced, but at least it is justified.
In the comics, Magnus had never done anything wrong. The fear his neighbors had was because he was different.
This becomes the key to Magento’s argument: people fear what they do not understand and we need to protect ourselves as mutants from them.
But what happens next?
Does Magnus become Magneto and reject humanity and become angry and bitter and helping no one but mutants?
Nope. Not at all.
Magnus changes his name, yet again, to Erik Lehnsherr, a Jewish and Roma man who is looking for his wife. Which he is. Because he understands why his wife was terrified and wants to make up to her. Because he still loves her very, very much.
On this path, he winds up in Israel. There he starts working at a center for holocaust survivors, as well as volunteering at a psychiatric hospital.
Why? Because he just wants to help.
Does this sound anything like the man presented in X-Men First Class who is perfectly okay with murder as long as it helps his goals?
(Granted his goals are good ones because killing Nazis is always good, but still.)
It is volunteering at the hospital in Israel where he meets Charles Xavier.
Charles is also not the drunken party boy we meet in First Class.
Charles Francis Xavier is the survivor of physical and verbal abuse by his step-father, Kurt Marko, and his step-brother, Cain Marko.
By the age of 15, he was completely bald due to stress from being a child genius. (And as much as I love McAvoy, he is way too pretty to play Charles. Charles was handsome enough, but he was a bald and kinda thicc traveling adventurer, not a twink.)
He fought in the Korean War and got doctorate degrees in both genetics and psychology.
When he meets Erik, he is traveling the world as a renounced “miracle worker” in the field of psychiatric medicine, who helps people whose minds seem destroyed.
What he really does is save them using his gift of telepathy. Because unlike the Charles in First Class, who is a sweet man but who mostly uses his gift to flirt with people, he is committed to making the world better in very tangible ways.
He also has no idea if other mutants exist. Because Raven was not raised as his sister and he has never met another mutant before.
He and Erik become best friends and circle around the idea of whether mutants exist (in theory) until Erik, in a dangerous situation involving Nazis, is forced to use his powers.
They then “come out” as mutants to each other and work together for a while until eventually all of Erik’s horrible experiences catch up to him and he finally becomes Magneto.
It did not come to blows on a beach: it came from years and years of the same argument being worn down until eventually they just could not see eye-to-eye anymore.
It should also be noted that Charles’s loss of his legs did not come from Erik.
It came from being shot in the back by a Nazi in a fight when he and Erik defended each other from the onslaught of Nazi weapons.
I guess what I am saying in this piece is that the current X-Men films, while a fun ride, do not honor the real depth of storytelling that the comics presented us.
And most importantly, they do not give Erik the full scope of development that he needed to become Magneto.
I always thought it was an injustice that Charles and Erik were never given the chance to mourn the opportunities for fatherhood that they both lost, in the comics and in the films. I hated the prequel movies with a passion, but I would have loved to see Charles and Erik together in Israel, and to see Charles meet Gabrielle Haller. That was such an excellent arc.
jinlinli 