Marvel's Broken Timeline

[stryke]

Haven't followed little James Howlett in a while but isn't he entirely fine no matter the date what with the whole ludicrous levels of regeneration, being centuries old anyway, and having a tendency to come down with missing memories every so often?

[Madner Kami]

but once that's done sure you might have a great story but you've also rather arrogantly declared that no one else gets to play with your toys anymore.

You do realize that this works both ways right? Why is it any more fair telling me that I have no right to decide in how the following generation plays with my toys, than it is telling the following generation that they have no right to decide how I play with my toys?

[stryke]

You do realize that this works both ways right? Why is it any more fair telling me that I have no right in how the following generation plays with my toys, than it is telling the following generation that they have no right to decide how I play with my toys?

Easy, cause they're not your toys. These are characters who have in some cases have been around since the 1930's, and even the newer breed of major characters are mostly getting into their fourth decade now with their original creator long ago having handed them over to writers, and then to other writers, and so on.

You want to kill and maim these characters then you should make up new ones, or at least bother to thinly disguise your totally-not-Superman, like Kirkman did with Invincible, Ennis did with the Boys or Moore did with Top Ten. Obviously how well that works in practice is very much subject to taste.

Edit: Or going back to a previous comment just make it an out of continuity Elseworld type thing like Kingdom Come, Golden Age or that very odd comic where Peter Parker inadvertently killed MJ with his radioactive y'know.

[McAvoy]

Magneto. WW2 Holocaust survivor. In 2022 he would have to be knocking on the door of 100 years old.

You cannot keep this guy aging. You could do some hocus pocus and make him immortal like Nick Fury, but that's about it.

And the problem is, I think that the X-Men would be greatly diminished without him as "the Holocaust" is the perfect example of what the X-Men are fighting for. This is what they are trying to prevent happening a second time. That moment in the first film where he flases that serial number on his arm is massively powerful. I think this is actually why X-Men First Class decided to go back in time, solely to protect Magneto from being too old.

I don't know how the MCU is going to get around this as any other massacre just isn't going to have the same audience ressonace. Personally I hope we do get a "past" X-Men as well as a "present" X-Men so we don't miss out on some great stories.

There are characters where you can alter their origin story for modern time. Like Iron Man building his first armor in Vietnam in a hut whereas the current version is in the Middle East in a cave. Or you don't have to change their origin story since it's not set in a specific time period like Superman or Batman.

Then you get Magneto who has to be connected to the The Holocaust. But he is a mutant without the help of regeneration like Captain America or Wolverine.

The farther away we get from the Holocaust (especially when it inevitably goes away from living memory), the more they have to do to Magneto to keep him in the comics.

[Thebestoftherest]

I wonder if they will have it be base on a later massarce, which sadly we have more of than we like.

[McAvoy]

I wonder if they will have it be base on a later massarce, which sadly we have more of than we like.

Yeah. Though not quite as 'dramatic or public' as The Holocaust.

[Thebestoftherest]

You are not wrong.

[McAvoy]

You are not wrong.

It's not just Magneto but Professor X. Best friends at one point, similar of age. Both are pushing 100. Patrick Stewart for reference is in his early 80's.

Also when the series came out in 1963, Magneto and Prof X could easily still be in their late 20's for reference.

[SpikePrime]

2. Do you think things would overall be better now if Marvel HAD continued in the tradition of Stan Lee and other Marvel writers, allowing characters to grow as they once did?

This reminds me of the 'Batman should kill the Joker' debate both of which to me just miss a fundamental point about comics to me. Namely that the current audience and the current readers are not the only one, and you have to bare in mind that there's always going to be both new writers and a new generation of readers. Sure you might have this amazing story of Joker getting shot in the head by some random bystander for his many, many crimes, or Peter Parker dealing with male pattern baldness, but once that's done sure you might have a great story but you've also rather arrogantly declared that no one else gets to play with your toys anymore. Which means that that later writer down the line who has a great Spider=Man adventure or Joker caper won't get to write it, and that new younger audience won't get to read it.

Some characters are just frankly too important to discard so easily, and the writers should realise that they're stewards too for whoever has them next. Many writers don't sadly and then you have unfortunate periods like when it took a decade to detoxify Tony Stark after the first Civil War. Not saying you can't tell those stories where you do break them but best to leave those for Elseworlds and the like.

See this is where I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding my point. I also think you're flat out wrong about the consequences of moving characters on in age and development.

First, I want to address that point about arrogance: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko hotly argued about whether Peter Parker should grow up and graduate high school. Lee believed he should, that it was important for characters to grow with their audience, and Ditko argued on grounds of iconography. Lee won that argument, and frankly the majority side with him in that, because it was needed. The audience would be sick of high school Peter by now.

Lee was arrogant about a lot of things back in the day, but was he arrogant about that? I'd argue no. He knew what he was doing, and made the best decision.

Now with that said, here is my proposal for how the broken timeline and storytelling should have been prevented from happening in the first place:

Marvel should have allowed the ongoing comic seires' go on (Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Avengers, etc) to continue on and allow ageing and developing, as Lee originally intended. Let them age as they should, let development stick and don't walk back on developments earned.

Then, create separate mini-series' which feature prequel material, side-adventures and supplementary materials. Hype them up, push the marketing, make sure those are worth the audience's time and money to invest in.

Let's say a writer has a really good story in their minds for a story about Spider-Man in his teen years, but in the main story he's in his 40s. Marvel could simply have run a book called "Spider-Man: Adventures of Yesterday!" Or similarly titled books for each character. They can be set whenever for whoever the writer wants. The audience, editors and writers can decide whether they like the book enough to consider them canon or not.

Moving the characters on in age, letting them die naturally and stay dead in the ongoing narrative, etc, doesn't mean we never get to see that character again. It simply gives Marvel the excuse to let its writers off the leash somewhat, and tell stories in a more short-form narrative in mini-series', while the audience gets to see the world of Marvel develop. Let the characters grow up with its audience. Even Dragon Ball, for as little imagination in creative storytelling as Akira Toriyama has, allows characters like Goku, Gohan, Trunks etc to grow up!

You'd get the absolute best of both worlds: Classic characters still get stories from their prime years, but the audience and writers interested in more than the status quo also get to explore where those characters go.

Win-win.

[SpikePrime]

Magneto. WW2 Holocaust survivor. In 2022 he would have to be knocking on the door of 100 years old.

You cannot keep this guy aging. You could do some hocus pocus and make him immortal like Nick Fury, but that's about it.

And the problem is, I think that the X-Men would be greatly diminished without him as "the Holocaust" is the perfect example of what the X-Men are fighting for. This is what they are trying to prevent happening a second time. That moment in the first film where he flases that serial number on his arm is massively powerful. I think this is actually why X-Men First Class decided to go back in time, solely to protect Magneto from being too old.

I don't know how the MCU is going to get around this as any other massacre just isn't going to have the same audience ressonace. Personally I hope we do get a "past" X-Men as well as a "present" X-Men so we don't miss out on some great stories.

With mutants like Magneto, you can easily get around his age disparity. You could have some characters who are literally immortal, or who age slowly. Captain America has been established as ageing very slowly thanks to his super-soldier serum. In the animated series X-Men: Evolution, Magneto uses tech to absorb youth from others to sustain himself. So while characters like Tony Stark and Peter Parker may age naturally as their appeal is a degree of relatability, other more icon-driven characters needn't move on so fast.

Note another response of mine for how I'd keep series' going featuring the iconic heroes in their prime as separate mini-series to fix the other issues.