X-Men 97 Review: 'Magneto Was Right'
By taking the X-Men's archenemy seriously, X-Men 97 forced a reckoning with "tolerance."
X-Men ‘97 ended on a high note. The breakneck pacing that characterized the season switched into a perilously high gear, even by the standards of cartoon superheroes. Compared to the plodding pacing of modern prestige TV, it was a runaway minecart. I understand the argument that it was a little too much — that some of the emotional beats might have hit harder if the show took time to linger here and there — but it’s such a refreshing clip that I’m hesitant to knock it. That’s one of X-Men ‘97’s major successes. The other was how skillfully it handled Magneto, a character it treated as neither hero nor villain, but a secret third thing.
Lazier X-Men adaptations have been pretty simplistic with Magneto. In such stories, Magneto is just there as an example of the wrong way for oppressed people to seek justice and liberation, while Professor X is an example of the right way. Magneto is a bad example because he is violent and mean and doesn’t care about hurting his oppressors’ feelings. Professor X is a good example because he cares about what happens to the people who hate and fear him. It’s probably not a coincidence that most of these lazy adaptations have been written by people with very little experience in being oppressed.
Now, this isn’t to say that there isn’t merit to exploring the pros and cons of both Professor X and Magneto’s respective sides. It’s just to say that there’s historically been very little exploration of any kind. The creative teams in charge took it for granted that Professor X was obviously good and Magneto was obviously bad, and that was that on that. X-Men ‘97 taps into a more nuanced view, but it’s not the first to do so. Things weren’t always so simple in X-Men comics.
A lot of 90s kids probably remember that time Pizza Hut teamed up with X-Men for some sort of promotional thing with exclusive comic books and VHS tapes and everything. At the time, the X-Men were far and away the most popular thing in Marvel Comics; one of the more popular properties in pop culture. They were everywhere. They were keeping the whole industry afloat. Their creators were flying private. So Pizza Hut got a bunch of Marvel Comics brass in a room and slapped together a big, fat pizza/comics marketing crossover.
Part of that crossover involved getting X-Men creative talent Stan Lee, Scott Lobdel, Fabian Nicieza and Bob Harras in a room to talk X-Men, because what kid doesn’t love a roundtable discussion? It’s pretty interesting, actually.
Stan’s in full circus ringmaster mode (nary a mention of Jack Kirby, of course), and Lobdell praises the X-Men’s gender and racial diversity (at a time when such comments wouldn’t lead to a Congressional hearing)1. Everyone’s so jovial you’d never know they were all fresh off running Chris Claremont out of Marvel following his brilliant 16-year tenure as the X-Men’s chief architect.
In the middle of this conversation, there’s a brief, fascinating digression into Magneto that inadvertently captures his complicated place on the hero/villain spectrum. At one point, Lee says “Now, to me, Magneto, he always thought he was a good guy …He felt ‘We’re persecuted. We’re hounded and hunted. Why shouldn’t we strike back?’ …From his point of view, maybe he was right.”
It’s pretty rich that Lee takes credit for this nuanced characterization, something he had absolutely nothing to do with. In the X-Men comics Lee himself wrote, Magneto is as one-note as villains come, endlessly monologuing about ruling mankind when he’s not saying things like “Bah!” and “Curses!” and all that.
The X-Men never really took off under Lee, so he handed writing duties off to a series of other writers and Marvel’s mutants spent years floundering before Claremont got his hands on them. Claremont was an aspiring British filmmaker with a flare for melodrama, a finger on the pulse of seedy NYC subculture, and zero interest in an editor. Marvel Comics leadership was so focused on Spider-Man that they largely left Claremont to his own devices, and he really ran with that editorial freedom.
The result was sixteen years of some of the wildest yarns being written in any medium. Galaxies were created and destroyed. Characters would die, resurrect, transform, possess, and be possessed with startling regularity. It is, as I’ve written elsewhere, more soap opera than superhero comic. Things are often romantic, generally operatic and surprisingly kinky. Everyone is someone’s mother or half-brother or former lover or all of the above. Lore upon lore is added, with time travel and dueling timelines and alternate realities and clones and children of clones and children of clones from the future and children of clones from alternate futures and so on. Characters strike using “the focused totality of my telekinetic power!” or are “nigh invulnerable when I’m blasting!” or are “fire and life incarnate, now and forever!” They all talk like that. It’s a lot. Mostly a lot of fun. But definitely a lot just generally.
One of Claremont’s great wrinkles was the slow redemption of Magneto, who he shepherded from mass murdering monster to sympathetic quasi-villain to full-blown hero. By making Magneto a Holocaust survivor, Claremont introduced a startling twist in this bad guy’s backstory — something that made it a lot harder to write off his schemes as power mad bluster. Now, Magneto looked less like a guy just taking his personal issues out on everyone else and more like someone who had good reason to never stand by and let mankind oppress others again.
Over time, Claremont sharpened Xavier and Magneto’s competing dreams into something a little less obviously “good” versus “bad.” Professor X and Magneto weren’t fighting over whether humans should be protected or wiped out. They were fighting over whether mutants should strive to integrate with the rest of humanity or whether they should isolate themselves away from those fearful and bigoted humans. Professor X believed that if his X-Men could save the world enough times, humans would be convinced to let mutants peacefully coexist among them. Magneto believed that one mutant dead was too many for this dream, and mutants would be better off creating their own society.2
Anyway, back to that Pizza Hut roundtable. “Professor Xavier could always understand [Magneto],” Lee continues, before cracking into a wry grin. “Now as far as you guys are concerned…”
“We changed all that!” Lobdell interjects, while Nicieza and Harras laugh knowingly.
The reason they start laughing is because as soon as Claremont got kicked off the X-Men (long story), the editorial department set about reshuffling the sides into definitive “good guy” and “bad guy” boxes. Under their leadership, Magneto was swiftly written back into being a bad guy who would happily genocide humanity and Xavier was the obviously right good guy with whom we were supposed to sympathize.
“One of the reasons we changed all that is because Magneto was becoming too popular! Too recognized as a good guy!” Nicieza agrees. “So we had to find a way to bring tension between them.”
“A hero is only as interesting as the villain,” Lobdell muses. “Maybe it was very interesting at the beginning, but if [Magneto] got too good…” before he starts meandering.
“You gotta get him back to being a villain,” someone else (Nicieza, I think). “You’ve gotta destroy a city!” Okay, guys. Let’s calm down.
It’s pretty rare that Stan Lee comes across as the voice of reason in any group of creatives, but I really wish these guys would have shut up and let him cook. Lee was imperfectly getting at something that is actually pretty morally useful.
People with power and influence will always prefer the oppressed to be a little more like Professor X and a little less like Magneto. We sense that we may have occasionally been complicit in the marginalization of others, and want them to be a lot nicer in seeking justice than we were in denying it to them. We’ve found ourselves on the business end of MLK’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail and, having set the terms of the injustice, are now trying to set the terms of the fight for freedom.
You saw all this in the punditry around things like Black Lives Matter marches or Free Palestine rallies. “I sympathize with what they’re asking for,” you hear politicians and talking heads say. “But why do they have to ask for it like that?” They’d definitely prefer these people went about their liberation a little more like Professor X does. Is what Professor X does effective? Well, that’s the million dollar question. And it’s Magneto’s main point of contention.
By centering this contention, X-Men ‘97 doesn’t exactly make Magneto into a hero, nor should it. But the show demonstrated a willingness to interrogate Xavier’s dream honestly. It still comes down pretty definitively on the side of Xavier, but not without acknowledging some hiccups in his vision. After all, as the series repeatedly insists: “tolerance is extinction.” To put another way that might cast Magneto’s side of things in the most favorable possible light: Tolerance is no substitute for justice.
This is years before Scott Lobdell faced a slew of sexual harassment allegations that drove him from mainstream comics work. Always good to remember that talking a big game about social good is not a substitute for being a good person.
This was most famously explored in God Loves, Man Kills. Even if you think you’ve never read this comic, you’ve probably encountered at least one panel.
