Fool's Wisdom

Anonymous asked: Are we any closer to fixing this stupid Power debacle of BMB and the Phoenix? Going on 20 issues now with nothing but clusterfucks. Namor doing good and response from Marvel that he didn't have it very long but Magneto never had it at all but is affected. This has been turning me off of the run especially when I came into it with so much high hopes for it. simple little things like this makes me aggravated at a company and writer I both enjoy and Love

thedefaultlocation:

onionhighonionandrenown:

brevoortformspring:

I think I’ve answered this something like five times. I get that you don’t like the answer, but that is the answer. We saw Magneto get caught in the crossfire between Phoenix-Cyclops and the Scarlet Witch in AVX #11—that’s what loused his powers up.

Yes, but that doesn’t make any sense.

Do you think, perhaps, that that’s why people keep asking what the hell happened?

He got trapped in the crossfire of two deus ex machina powers; Phoenix Force and Hex Powers, how on earth does his energy manipulation powers getting messed up not make (comic book) sense? Particularly considering that Cyclops considered him a traitor at that point and when gunning for him.

Because of the history involved.

Look, I’m willing to let this go – I wouldn’t even write this response to you, honestly, given that I was being flip and I can probably write the whole thing off to being a bitter old-school fan who doesn’t like change, except I don’t want to be rude and anyway you did ask.

If you go back and read over the years, the Scarlet Witch’s hex powers are written in a wildly inconsistent way, but up until House of M she wasn’t anything like that powerful.  It was the magic that she learned back in the ‘70s from Agatha Harkness that made her dangerous; her powers were really low-level.  (To be fair, Bendis is hardly the only writer who forgot this over the years.)

Until suddenly, with no explanation, she wasn’t.  (Nearly ten years later, we got one, in the form of Doctor Doom saying he’d been making her powers more powerful.  Which was pretty damn incoherent, if you ask me, but it was better than we were given at the time.)

Now, yes, Cyclops had every reason to be angry with Magneto at that point, and wasn’t acting rationally, and was chock-full of Phoenix Force.  And yeah, deus ex machina being what it is, there’s a certain logic in Cyke subconsciously zapping Magneto and screwing with his powers.  But it doesn’t appear in the damn script.  It’s never stated outright.  It’s at best implied, and that causes confusion.

All that said….

I admit, I mostly wrote what I did because I was irritated as hell at Tom Brevoort.  He used to be one of the people I admired most at Marvel (in comics, really) but after watching the snotty I-know-better-than-you way he interacts with people in social media – and, honestly, seeing the way he responds to even the gentlest criticism of anything Marvel publishes or the way they do business… and boy, that’s the thing that really burns me up – I’ve gotten more and more frustrated.  Especially when he doesn’t answer the question being asked (which to be fair he does do above) or, as he had only moments before I responded to this post, outright stated that people’s opinions on a different subject didn’t matter because sales were good.

Which is an argument that pushes my buttons.

So maybe I was a little too much of an old-school pedant, and maybe I let my dislike for Brevoort’s cavalier dismissal of any criticism color the way I responded.  But I still don’t think that what happened to Magneto’s powers was addressed adequately in the moment. They didn’t earn it, to be blunt, not in my opinion anyway.  It’s just change for the sake of change, and what’s worse, it’s badly-executed change for the sake of change.

I’ve said many times (not that you’d know this, of course!) that it’s starting to be clear to me that comics today just aren’t being marketed to me.  I became a comics fan in the mid-80s, when I was a little boy, and now I’m thirty-five and… y'know.  I am no longer in the target demographic.

TL;DR version: Yeah, you make a valid point, but I think both the original scene and the explanation are badly written, and I think Brevoort was a dick in answering the question.