Grant Morrison and Chuck Austen’s simultaneous New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men runs offered a big unsolved mystery surrounding a Magneto impostor’s death and some abandoned plots.
“I was thinking of everything that had been done before and trying to do an updated version of it,” Grant Morrison admitted in Comics Creators On X-Men. His run was inspired by the classic X-Men stories Chris Claremont made with Dave Cockrum and John Byrne. Morrison practically used the same chronological order as they had for appearances by the Sentinels, the Shi’Ar with Princess Lilandra and her Imperial Guard, Jean Grey becoming Phoenix, the Hellfire Club, Days Of Future Past, Magneto and even some new mutants thrown in as he gave it all his own modern spin. And when he seemingly killed Magneto off again in New X-Men #150, it happened almost exactly as in X-Men vol. 2 #113, only this time Magneto lost his head. How for subsequent writers to bring the X-Men’s archvillain back from that?
“I remember the Neal Adams run on X-Men, the one that ended with Magneto in the Savage Land,” Grant Morrison told Comics Creators On X-Men. “We had this white-haired guy walking around for the whole issue (in X-Men #62) and then we discovered he was Magneto. It was one of the greatest reveals in the history of comics. When I took over the book, I wanted to do a basic cliffhanger like the Neal Adams one, where you suddenly realize that this character you’ve known all along is actually a master villain.”
Grant Morrison’s Magneto story became that he had infiltrated the X-Men by posing as Xorn, a mutant the X-Men liberated from a prison in China in New X-Men Annual 2001. In New X-Men #146, Xorn revealed himself as Magneto, saying he built that prison himself to complete the ruse. In #147, Magneto explained to one of his followers that Xorn wasn’t real, but a role he had played. Now he was Magneto.
However, when Magneto was on the verge of defeat by the X-Men in #150, he reverted to the role of Xorn, with Xorn finally insisting that he wasn’t Xorn, but Magneto before he then killed Phoenix and got killed himself by Wolverine. Now, no one stays dead in the Marvel Universe, and with the identity problems Magneto had suffered at the end, Grant Morrison had left a door for subsequent writers to revive him. Chuck Austen, who had been writing Uncanny X-Men while Morrison wrote New X-Men, moved over to New X-Men to pick up the pieces. New X-Men became X-Men vol. 2 again with #157 and Austen got the dubious honor of solving the Magneto/Xorn mess. Who had impersonated who?
“Originally, (in Uncanny X-Men #442-443) Wolverine climbed up to the top of the Magneto sculpture and pissed on it, but they wouldn’t let me do it. It was a little too far, really (… but) Wolverine would be so angry because Magneto murdered our God Queen Jean Grey,” Chuck Austen told Power Of X-Men. “(Editor) Mike (Marts) and I talked about it. He said, ‘Well, you know, something else that people always wanna see is a great funeral, so let’s have all the mutants show up on Genosha to have a funeral for Magneto.’ And my conversation with Mike wound up being the conversation between Xavier and Wolverine where I was saying, ‘You know what, dude, what Grant did is turn Magneto into Osama Bin Laden. He killed all of these people. He flipped a bridge. He did all of this crazy stuff. People died left and right. That’s horrific.’ (…) Mike said, ‘Let’s discuss this and we’ll get back to you.’ So, the decision was to take Xorn back the other way and make it so that he was never really Magneto - he was Xorn. He said, ‘How would you do that?’ I said, ‘Well, Xorn is supposed to have a star for a brain, maybe he had a twin brother who had a black hole for a brain?’ So, that’s kind of what we did. So that way Xorn was actually the mass murderer who killed all of those people.”
Austen’s team of X-Men went to China in X-Men vol. 2 #157-160 and encountered the twin Xorn, Shen Xorn. In X-Men vol. 2 #162, Emma Frost ascertained that Shen Xorn had a twin brother, Kuan-Yin Xorn whose body Magneto had appropriated for his last stand against the X-Men. This would explain why Magneto had trouble separating himself from his Xorn masquerade at the end, assuming Kuan-Yin Xorn’s mind was still in his body, vying for control with the possessor, Magneto.
However, Chuck Austen didn’t leave it at that but also suggested that the Magneto who had appropriated Kuan-Yi Xorn’s now dead body, wasn’t the real Magneto. Shen Xorn sensed a hateful and malevolent presence within the X-Men’s midst who was “seeking to turn others” against them. So, now Kuan-Yi Xorn had been brainwashed by this evil presence to think he was Magneto, and his identity problems at the end must have then been attempts to fight the brainwashing before he got killed by Wolverine.
Havok was dating the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning’s school nurse Annie who had a son named Carter. When Annie and Carter left the school in X-Men vol. 2 #164, Carter had an imaginary friend riding along in the car. The friend was a “she” only Carter could see, and most likely this was the evil presence Shen Xorn had sensed among the X-Men and who had turned Kuan-Yin Xorn into thinking he was Magneto.
Many readers assumed that Carter’s imaginary friend, “the evil presence”, was Professor X’s evil twin Cassandra Nova. “It was actually what I intended, and she had been drawn in there fully - there wasn’t just the eyes. They thought about it more after they got it and took out most of the rest of her,” Chuck Austen told Power Of X-Men. “It’s funny, because she was not there originally. Originally, Carter was in the back, sort of air-juggling metallic objects, the idea being that he had Magneto’s powers - something in that direction. Mike (Marts) and I talked about it, and he said, ‘Well, you know we wanna kinda bring Cassandra Nova back at some point because she’s such a great villain. How about instead of doing that, we have Carter sitting on one side and Cassandra Nova as a kind of a ghost is sitting next to him?’ And I said, ‘Look, they’re your characters, I’m leaving the book. You can do whatever you want.’ He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ I saw the artwork. (Artist) Sal (Larroca) had put her fully in, in the seat. She was sitting there with this really evil, sinister smile looking right at Carter. And then when the book came out, it was just the eyes.”
With Chuck Austen ending his X-Men run and the exit of Annie and Carter, this was also the last readers saw of Carter’s imaginary friend who had made Xorn run rampant in New York and killed Jean Grey. Cassandra Nova would show up in Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 by Joss Whedon which started in 2004. There Cassandra Nova was psychically influencing Emma Frost from her prison at the X-Mansion to get Emma to free her, so maybe Cassandra Nova just shifted her focus from Carter to Emma Frost, but this has never been explained.
When Grant Morrison was done writing New X-Men he had basically ruined the series by having Cyclops committing adultery, killing Jean Grey and Magneto and leaving Xavier’s school as a ruin. ”It’s funny, but the only death threat I ever got was from a Jean Grey fan. He threatened to kill me because I had destroyed Jean Grey,” Morrison revealed in Comics Creators On X-Men.
“The frustrating aspect of the current publishing environment is that you can’t allow things to evolve and percolate anymore. It happens too often where storylines and characters that have been introduced are forgotten as soon as a new creative team takes over,” Claremont lamented in Comics Creators On X-Men. “Guys come in with agendas. Grant Morrison came in with a Manifesto that outlined thirty-odd issues of New X-Men. This is what he’s going to do and basically what he did with a couple of tweaks along the way. The problem is that at the end of the thirty-odd issues, the canon was left in ruins. Grant doesn’t care. He’s off writing Superman. Someone else comes in and does his twelve issues before moving on. Everything is done in neat, confined boxes that are great in self-contained compilations. For me, the X-Men was an exercise in telling the life story of these characters. The stories and characters were always growing, always evolving. Now you have all these guys coming in for specifically defined periods and they all start from scratch and reboot from zero all over again. Do you try and pick up where the previous guy left off or what?”
The real Magneto showed up in Chris Claremont’s 2004 Excalibur series which took place in Genosha. This would be his first appearance since X-Men vol. 2 #113. Grant Morrison’s Magneto was called “an impostor.” This didn’t invalidate Morrison’s run if you only read that, but in the overall X-Men canon it did. Like reviving Jean Grey for X-Factor #1 devalued her death in X-Men #137. Chuck Austen had an opinion about that in a Comic World News interview: “If you kill someone, (readers) say, ‘Oh, they’ll be back soon.’ No one feels anything anymore when they’re reading comics.”
Colossus who died to cure the Legacy Virus would come back. As would his sister Magik. Later Cable would die and come back. Nightcrawler too. When Jean Grey died again in Morrison’s run, no one expected her to stay dead this time either and eventually she did come back again. And certainly, no one expected Morrison would be allowed by Marvel Comics to kill off the X-Men’s arch-nemesis Magneto.
Way too many mutants
“The X-Men represent the next generation,” Grant Morrison philosophized in Comics Creators On X-Men. “The next generation always frighten the older generation, because basically, our children are our replacements. We’re going to die and they’re getting to carry on. For me, who’s a young guy and a punk rocker of the ‘70s, the X-Men are the kids who are going to change the world. That’s why the rest of the world hated them, feared them and wanted to stop them. That’s the angle I came up with – it’s the children versus the adults.”
“I wanted to get back to the whole idea of a world which hated and feared them,” Morrison continued. “The world would only hate them if it looked like their numbers were growing. I wanted mutants to be like any other new generation, and want their own music, their own shops and their own fashion designers. I thought that would increase the tension level of the whole human-versus-mutant struggle.”
“There became too damn many of them,” Chuck Austen commented to News@rama. “Holy COW, are there a lot of mutants running around.”
As previously reported in the Changing X-Men Directions chapter here on the Secrets Behind The X-Men blog, Chris Claremont thought so too. “I think there are more mutants in the Marvel Universe than there are other superheroes right now,” he said. “It's hard to be the downtrodden minority when you outnumber everyone else two-to-one.” And another former X-Men writer, Scott Lobdell agreed, telling Comics Creators On X-Men: “I’ve looked at the books, and you just see 40 completely silly mutant students going to class and we don’t know their names, and we’re not supposed to know their names - we’re not really supposed to care about them. They’re just wallpaper. What was always fascinating to me about the X-Men was their uniqueness. I always liked the X-Men when mutants were rare, I always believed there were maybe a hundred mutants on the entire planet. Every once in a while, the X-Men would stumble across another one. (…) Mutants are so prevalent now that parents don’t want their kids listening to mutant rap music. It just leaves me scratching my head. You look at the books nowadays and it’s like somebody goes in to order at Burger King and there are tentacles coming off the head of the person behind the counter. It just took everything that was rare and unique about the book and about the X-Men Universe and made it somehow pedestrian. My understanding is that the Scarlet Witch changed all that with the House of M storyline. Hopefully that will allow the creators on the books to get back to telling exciting and poignant stories about the rare and unique characters that populate the mutant slice of the Marvel Universe.”
House Of M became the “mutant massacre” event John Byrne dreamt of back in 1991 because he thought there were too many mutants even back then. Published 14 years later, in 2005, the House of M event limited series written by Brian Michael Bendis had the Scarlet Witch utter, “No more mutants” in a moment of distress and the Marvel Universe’s mutant population was immediately reduced to the 198 who were protected from her spell. Of course, the X-Men remained, but all the “wallpaper mutants” were gone.
Abandoned Morrison plots
Grant Morrison told Comics Creators On X-Men that because of 9/11, he had to downplay his Afghani mutant Dust’s part in New X-Men. “After 9/11 I moved away from the original story that I had planned to do with her. I had some really good powers for her, but the real-world situation had become so volatile that I just didn’t want to touch her after 9/11. The world had just got too serious. There’s a point at which you can comment on things and a point at which the world becomes too big for comics. These issues mean so much to certain people that it’s best to just shut up. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone getting any death threats.”
The Dust character was one of the 198 mutants who survived House of M, though. She continued to appear in various X-Men titles afterwards.
Another of Morrison’s plots never went anywhere beyond his run. “The basic idea I wanted to go with is that mankind is in trouble, reversing the last 40 years of the X-Men where it’s the mutants who were in trouble,” Morrison told the Wizard X-Men Spectacular 2001. “You don’t quite know the truth behind it until, like, the fifth issue, but they’ve discovered the extinction gene inside humanity. It’s there, the programmed destroyer of that species. Humankind will be extinct within four generations, and suddenly they all go, ‘Now what?” With that, the war between man and mutants heats up outrageously.”
When New X-Men started, Morrison didn’t wait for the fifth issue to reveal that bombshell, leading right off with it in #114, but the notion that humanity would be extinct after four generations wasn’t touched upon by subsequent X-Men writers. Instead, mutant kind seemed headed for extinction after House of M.
Abandoned Austen plots
“I was a big fan of the Claremont/Cockrum, Claremont/Byrne era, so in a way I wanted to kinda go back in that direction a little bit.” Chuck Austen told the Greymalkin Lane podcast. “I wanted Colossus, and I wanted Kitty Pryde and I wanted a lot of those characters, but none of them were available.”
When Austen started writing Uncanny X-Men with #410 in 2002, he told Comic World News: “My first question when I took over was, ‘What happened to Krakoa? Is he still floating around out there in space? Did he re-enter the atmosphere?’ There is a dangling plot thread that goes back to the very re-introduction of the X-Men. Come forward from there and you trip over at least two an issue. Why was Mystique being chased by those villagers? How could she toss her own child over a waterfall? Does anyone remember there were elves in issue #102? What was that all about and what happened to them? And the biggest dangler of all... Who’s the third Summers brother? Some of those will be answered during my run. All of them, if sales go up and I stick around.”
But Austen’s run only lasted for a couple of years, and he only got to answer the Mystique questions. Writer Jonathan Hickman had the X-Men move to Krakoa in 2019, while a third Summers brother would get revealed twice as reported in the Post-Apocalypse chapter here on the Secrets Behind The X-Men blog, leaving only the elves unaccounted for. They did appear in Generation X #8 by Scott Lobdell in 1995, though.
Chuck Austen also had plans to bring back Reverend William Stryker from the 1982 X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel written by Chris Claremont, but so did Chris Claremont himself in the pages of X-Treme X-Men, both wanting to tie in with the second X-Men movie which featured a version of the character. So, Austen had to change his story.
“It all kicks off with Uncanny X-Men #423-424, the two-issue arc called Holy War that stars Nightcrawler and ties into the release of X2,” Austen told Wizard X-Men Special 2003. “The story deals with religious themes and has Kurt going up against the Church of Humanity. We were going to pit him against William Stryker, but when Marvel asked Chris to do God Loves, Man Kills II, he asked me if I would mind not using him so he could use him in his sequel. So, we changed it over from Stryker to the Church of Humanity, and the story basically brings to a close Kurt’s associations with the priesthood.”
Nightcrawler’s association with the priesthood had begun in X-Men vol. 2 #100 by Claremont, so with Stryker appearing in the X-Treme X-Men #25-30 story arc entitled God Loves, Man Kills II it was a give and take.
Austen’s plans for Husk and Stacy X
Chuck Austen told the Greymalkin Lane podcast; “I once asked (editor) Mike Marts, ‘What happens to all of Husk’s husks after she sheds her skin?’ And he just kinda looks at me and goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Well, can I write a story where there’s a guy who goes around collecting them? He’s saving them. He’s got some of them pinned on his walls and stuff.’ He goes, ‘Eew, that’s super creepy. Yeah, you can do that.’ So, I was leading towards a story where she winds up getting kidnapped by this guy. He just wants her to keep changing. He wants to see what he can do with her husks. He’s collecting them, he’s wearing them, and it’s really super weird and disturbing and creepy and it’s getting to that really dangerous place.”
“And Warren doesn’t know where she is and he can’t find her and he’s desperate to get ahold of her, so he goes to her mother’s house and then Sam shows up and starts kicking his ass. He’s like, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Screwing my sister in front of my mother (in Uncanny X-Men #440)! Who are you?’ And he can’t stop Sam from beating him up long enough to explain to him, *I’m looking for Paige right now and you need to stop doing this and help me.’ He finally gets to the point where he hears him, but he still doesn’t like Warren. So, they have to go off and find his sister and in the process of finding her, he sees that he has a hatred of rich guys who take advantage of poor people. He has allowed that emotion to sort of inform him that, ‘You don’t really love my sister, and you shamed her and you’re doing all of this stuff.’ And then when they finally find Paige and he sees the two of them together, he realizes, ‘Oh hell, they really do love each other.’ That was the story I wanted to get to eventually.”
“Another thing I was setting up were Stacy X winds up leaving and then, later on, she comes back in a way that nobody ever expects. There was going to be a Mr. Sinister storyline where he really does go Josef Mengele and he’s got a camp. It’s a hellhole. One of the things he does is to keep testing the mutants to see what their powers can do and how far he can push them. So, he’s got Warren staked out on the ground in the elements just to see how long he can survive without food in the open elements. And there’s this lizard woman that keeps coming to him at night to feed him and give him water to try to take care of him against Sinister’s wishes. And then as the series goes on, she winds up saving his life and we find out that it was Stacy X who had gone through a secondary mutation.”
Austen’s plans for Northstar and Havok
“Northstar WILL find true love,” Austen promised in Wizard X-Men Special 2003:.”It’s going to take him awhile, because he has to go through some changes to be ready for a serious relationship but stay tuned!”
However, after Austen’s run ended in 2004, Northstar would only appear sporadically in the X-books, so readers had to stay tuned all the way to Uncanny X-Men #508 in 2009 where writer Matt Fraction had Northstar rejoin the X-Men complete with a never-before-seen boyfriend in tow.
As for bringing in Havok who had been starring in a now cancelled Mutant X series set in an alternate universe, Chuck Austen told News@rama: “I wanted to get him back to our universe and have him and Polaris hook-up and have a baby. But what if it wasn’t THEIR baby? How could that change things? Of course, the plans have evolved a lot since then, and who knows how they’re going to play out.”
They sure did play out differently with the introduction of Nurse Annie and her son Carter and basically ended back at where Austen picked up for Havok and Polaris, leaving them as he found them for the next writer.
Chuck Austen’s run was considered controversial at the time because of the emphasis on soap opera over action. “There were some very strongly supported X-fan websites, and they would ask me to come and post things there and it was just dog pile,” Austen told the Greymalkin Lane podcast. “I got death threats. I got people threatening the lives of my children. It was grim. (…) And Chris Claremont used to refer to me, ‘Hey, you’re the most hated man in comics.’ I said, ‘Yeah, thanks. I know.’”
Sources:
Tom DeFalco: Comics Creators On X-Men, April 2006
Caleb Gerard: From Pencils to Plots – A Conversation with Chuck Austen, Comic World News, 2002
Greymalkin Lane the podcast: Interview with Chuck Austen, RedCircle, 28 October 2022
Richard Ho: X-tra X-tra!, Wizard X-Men Special, 2003
Christopher Lawrence: Bloody Good, Wizard X-Men Spectacular, 2001
Power of X-Men: Interview with X-Men Writer Chuck Austen, YouTube, 2023
Alex Segura Jr.: Austen Uncanny, News@rama, 2003
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