There’s an inherent tension in being a longtime obsessive comics fan and collector. Once the superhero universes evolved from each issue being considered a one-time, disposable, consequence-free storytelling opportunity to regular installments of an ongoing, never-ending saga, with a built-in audience that would keep coming back for more, a great deal was gained but a little bit was lost: the idea of the complete story. By their open-ended nature, superhero comics became a kind of narrative without a classic storytelling structure. I’m not the first or the last person to note this, but while you can encapsulate Batman as “young wealthy orphan declares war on crime” you also have to realize that he’s never going to win (or lose) the war, because that would be the ultimate triumph that signals it’s time to roll credits. So it goes for all superheroes, who battle for truth and justice in one form or another ad infinitum.
But taken at face value that would be really boring, too, so the aforementioned tension is acknowledging that there are stories within stories, which is pretty self-obvious, and also acknowledging that if the outer story is essentially infinite, the inner stories can be any length at all. The great leap forward in comics storytelling was the realization that if kids wanted to take in the whole Spider-Man story, and that meant they would show up in June with a quarter in hand for an issue where Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin, and show up in July with another quarter for another issue where Spider-Man fights Doctor Octopus, and show up in August with yet another quarter for yet another issue where, this time, Spider-Man fights a Skrull disguised as Aunt May just to keep things interesting, IF that were the case then logically it should also be true that the same kids would buy three consecutive issue of Spider-Man that told one long story about Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin, where Spider-Man tracks his foe down in June, fights him, loses, and regroups in July, then fights him again and finally prevails in August. And of course at some point in the July issue, Doctor Octopus would show up, claiming to be reformed, which would lay the groundwork for the next story-within-a-story that would start in September.
And as I’ve mentioned previously, Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics were replete with this approach to storytelling, with stories-within-stories-within-stories, which was thrilling to follow along with and elevated everything to an epic feel. The downside to this, however, is that if you were just trying to jump in on any given month, you might happen to get the beginning of a story that wouldn’t pay off for a few issues, but you were just as likely to find yourself in the middle of a couple of other subplots, or main plots. And yes, the house style was generally to write (or include editor’s notes)in such a way that a neophyte was brought up to speed on the broad strokes every issue, but even so there would be a feeling of missing a bit of the big picture, a few details which didn’t derail comprehension but would be awfully swell to have all the same.
In the 80’s, my personal golden age of comics, there really was no way of telling if a given issue of Spider-Man or Fantastic Four on the newsstands was the beginning of a storyline or the middle or the end or what. And over in X-Men, those distinctions were all but meaningless because every issue was the end of an A storyline, the continuation of B and C storylines, and the introduction of a D storyline. So you just had to take a deep breath and dive in and hope for the best.
Alternatively, you could devote your attention (or some of it, anyway) to some of Marvel’s side offerings, such as the limited series that popped up now and then. I’ve already talked about one such example in Squadron Supreme, but Marvel cranked them out pretty regularly, in what I’m sure was both a market-savvy means of addressing the exact dilemma I’ve laid out above as well as a strategy for keeping creators happy by allowing them to tell stories that didn’t fit in the ongoing books, and/or wouldn’t sustain a brand new ongoing. Whatever the motivation, as a kid it was nice to see that reassuring “#1 in a 6-issue limited series” banner on top of a cover, because you knew you could jump on and get a full story complete with satisfying resolution, without having to collect obsessively for years and years.
So here it is, one of my favorite Marvel limited series, one which really puts a bow on the last few TD posts I’ve been working my way through, because (a) it’s an X-Men adjacent title (b) it’s not branded as a What If…? but it definitely concerns alternate timelines, and (c) I picked up all four issues of it from one back issue longbox at a comic book show. I’m also reasonably sure that I only knew that this limited series existed because TD had a single issue, which I read in his room, at which point I was compelled to track down the entire set. And did I mention that the protagonist is one of my all-time favorite Marvel characters? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you MAGIK.
So let’s break down what this mini magnum opus is all about, starting with what I think is a safe assertion, namely that this is complicated even for Claremont’s X-Men. One member of the X-Men at the time was Colossus, who is a great character himself, one of my top ten. A Russian mutant with the gentle soul of a poet who can transform his body into super-strong, nigh-indestructible organic steel, Piotr Rasputin was my kind of power fantasy: a basically sweet guy you absolutely should not provoke because he will wreck you if necessary. At some point Claremont introduced Illyana Rasputin, Piotr’s petite blonde baby sister, who was too young to have any mutant powers (as those manifest at puberty in Marvel comics). At some point, a demonic entity named Belasco set his sights on the X-Men and battled them, and in one of these battles he abducted Illyana. Illyana came back right away, but had aged seven years (from about 8 to 15), thus hitting adolescence and developing mutant teleportation powers, plus she had a whole separate raft of occult powers including a Soul Sword, and a very badass attitude. She joined the New Mutants with the codename Magik.
Magik, the limited series, filled in the missing seven years. Belasco was revealed to be a sorcerer and ruler of the dimension of Limbo, where time has no meaning, and thus can be a means to time travel in the Marvel U. He needed Illyana because he was trapped in Libo and could permanently escape by performing some dark ritual involving corrupting her innocent soul and crystallizing fragments of it into a relic. Belasco had actually attacked the X-Men many times trying to get Illyana, because Limbo being outside of time allowed him to hit reset and have a do-over in a different timeline over infinite opportunities. Sometimes he failed completely, and on at least one occasion the X-Men succeeded in rescuing Illyana but got stuck in Limbo themselves. That timeline’s version of the X-Men suffered various fates in Limbo, with Nightcrawler becoming a lackey of Belasco, Wolverine and Colossus dying, Kitty Pryde becoming a half-feline ronin warrior called Cat and Storm learning white magic to oppose Belasco’s black magic. So just when Belasco thinks he has finally succeeded in getting his hands on Illyana, white-magic Storm and Cat come along and rescue her. They’re all still stuck in Limbo but can stay one step ahead of Belasco’s demon servants for a while. In that time, Storm teaches Illyana white magic and Cat teaches her sword combat. Eventually their luck runs out and Belasco defeats Storm and Cat and recaptures Illyana, and instructs her in black magic to corrupt her soul. He gets about sixty percent of the way there but then Illyana rebels and claims the Soul Sword and using a combination of her training from Cat and Storm and Belasco and her mutant powers, she prevails, banishes Belasco, and becomes the new ruler of Limbo. She goes back to the X-Mansion, using Limbo’s rules outside of time to reappear right when Belasco had abducted her, though she has aged in the interim. She’s also spent her formative years in a literal hellscape, hounded by demons, and been partially corrupted by black sorcery, so her personality is a lot more sardonic and dark (in other words, she’s a teenager now, rimshot).
So yeah, a relatively minor supporting character gets an epic heavy metal flavored sword and sorcery plus mutants origin story, and I. ATE. IT. UP. It ticked so many ridiculous boxes for me. The What-If-ified X-Men, sure, and the cosmic fantasy angle, absolutely, but not for nothing, I was a kid raised very Catholic, and I was at that age where anything about devils and demons and black magic was extremely enticing because it was so taboo. Again, to the extent that I was self-aware enough at 12 or 13 to value TD’s friendship, it was just as much because he loaned me Iron Maiden and Metallica cassettes that my father frowned upon as because he had an X-Men library and took me to comic shows. My parents never went full Satanic Panic on me, but I still got an illicit thrill from stories about the occult and anything else which was supposed to be off-limits as a bad influence.
I can’t remember which issue of Magik TD had in his room; it was either the first one or the last one. I put the cover to the first one up above, and here’s the cover to the fourth and final installment, which may also shed some light on why I quickly fell in love with Magik.
I mean, ahem, I literally was infatuted with Illyana Rasputin, because she was a superpowered occult Bad Girl. If Colossus was a version of myself that I wanted to embody - sweet and kind to a fault yet bulletproof - then Magik was the imaginary girlfriend I desperately needed as a counter-balance. She struggled with her own nature and against her worst instincts. She was a sorcerer queen of a mystical dimension with an army of demons at her command, but she also had to go to school and was trying to make a normal life for herself. She lost patience with her peers because they hadn’t been through what she had, and she could be dismissive of them, even cruel at times. Same for teachers, authority figures, pretty much everybody. Nobody understood her. She was a little bit dangerous, very capable of taking care of herself, mostly moody and melodramatic. Adolescent-me was utterly smitten, and in hindsight I can see that I expended a lamentable amount of time and energy pursuing and trying to hold onto relationships with young women who were cut from that cloth of ‘nasty until you get to know her, and honestly still kind of nasty even then’. (Luckily I eventually got that all out of my system and my wife is a genuinely good-hearted person to build a life with.) I don’t blame Magik for setting me down that path, for what it’s worth. I think she just encapsulated what was already inside me, the part of me that hated conflict and wasn’t assertive and was attracted to women who came across as fearless, whatever their other traumas and dramas.
Okay that got a little weirdly personal but it actually makes for an interesting and apt transition, because the truth is that eventually my middle school days ran out, I graduated eighth grade and before the following summer vacation was even over I was going to rehearsals for the high school marching band, and then I was studying and practicing and performing a lot, plus I got a non-imaginary girlfriend and comics kind of fell by the wayside for a bit. But at the same time they had their hooks deep in my brain, which meant it wouldn’t take much for the obsession to come roaring back. So we’ll skip ahead a little, and next post we’ll talk about a reintroduction of sorts in the magical 1990’s …
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