2. X-Men #-1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Carlos Pacheco and Art Thibert
Published by Marvel Comics
"I Had a Dream"
The Short Form: Xavier and Magneto meet up at the site of the concentration camp where Magneto was prisoner as a boy in order for Xavier to fruitlessly try and talk Magneto out of his Mutant vs. Human worldview.
The Cast:
* Professor X / Charles Xavier - MLK Jr. of the Mutant set
* Magneto / Erik 'Magnus' Lensherr - Malcolm X of the Mutant set
* Amelia Voght - Xavier's hot teleporting red head girlfriend
* Quicksilver / Pietro Maximoff - Arrogant mutant super speedster
* The Scarlet Witch / Wanda Maximoff - Crazy powerful chaos based mutant (and we do mean crazy)
The Long Form:
This is a better issue than the previous Flashback issue, because it's hooked into a much stronger central premise of the X-Men - Xavier and Magneto as former friends and leading mutant politicians and philosophers whose differing ideologies have broken their brotherhood and are leading their people into battle against each other. That's hard to totally screw up. Given how intrinsic this particular conflict is to the mythos of the X-Men at this point, and how stark the difference between the two men is, charting various points along their relationship is fodder for a lot of stories and comes with a greater amount of reader investment than Rachel Summers and Sanctity for example. Even non-fans know Xavier and Magneto, so there is a shorthand that allows for greater depth in a small package. Unfortunately, this is not that issue.
This issue is about as bare bones characterization and conflict as you can get - touching on a lot of areas without ever giving them nuance or a new spin. We've seen this conversation before, many times, where Xavier pleads on behalf of sanity and their old friendship for Magneto to abandon his crusade, only for Magneto to bitterly apologize about the need for conflict. We've also seen it done better. This feels less like a missing scene than a retread.
The concentration camp is used to try and give the story more weight and provide a parable for what Magneto could become - the phrase "a man who does not remember the sins of the past is destined to repeat them," is actually used as the end of the book, so subtlety and subtext is not the goal of this story. It takes a very skillful touch to integrate a real life tragedy like the Holocaust into a super-hero narrative and have it be compelling and meaningful and that is not the case here. This is a lot of exposition and posturing.
The most interesting aspect of the book is Amelia Voght's internal monologue about Xavier. The fact that she loves him but is also afraid of him, and has no problem saying so, is an interesting dynamic that really underscores why this relationship is effectively doomed from the start and how much Xavier's single minded philosophical goals will cost him in his personal life. It says something that his most successful (and I use that term very loosely) relationship was with an alien space princess and very long distance, and basically ended up destroying her empire too. His attempts at a solid earthbound relationship (and for a crippled bald man he's had a few shots) invariably fail and it's because Charles Xavier is not as fully developed a human being as he would like to be or think he is. His unyielding focus on his dream and intensity has cost him elements of his social skills that only become apparent in intimate relationships. Like most of us, the closer he gets to someone the more his flaws come out and it's important to realize that while Magneto is definitely the more aggressive and hostile of the two Xavier is far from a cuddly old man.
Who Should Read This: X-Men completists or HUGE fans of X-Men: First Class the movie, but really, there are better examples of this same story out there.
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