ArtemisGoldborough

Hero. I prefer him as a tragic hero. Unfortunately, most writers don't seem to know how to write him that way. Most of the time a heroic Magneto is too watered down. He's a very complex character but the time he was teaching the New Mutants and the events of the 2004 Excalibur title did not show this off well. Sometimes even a villian version of him is mishandled, the Grant Morrison take on him for example.

A lot of people seem to forget that Magneto is a genius. He is almost entirely self taught and has a great deal of knowedge on the subjects of engineering, genetics, and physics. Then there's all those insane things he did with those skills, especially in the sixties and seventies. I think his powers make him act kind of bi-polar. That and unresolved post traumatic stress are why I think he acts so crazy at times.

I'd love to see a guilt riddled and heroic version of him confront his problems even as most of the rest of the Marvel Universe is against him for all the bad stuff he's done. Even if he acts like a paragon of good, there is no real reason for anyone to believe him! His track record would speak against him. I'd have him work with an unlikely team of minor heroes and former villians, all the while coming into conflict with good guys and bad guys. The good guys trying to stop him. The bad guys being people he wants to stop. The irony, the fun, the drama, and the humor in all that could be so awesome!

This just hit me. Mystique is Graydon Creed's mother. She's also Nightcrawler's. Biologically speaking those two are half brothers! I have not read Marvel Comics much in years. Have any of stories in the comics brought this up? If so, I'd like to know which issues. If not, oh well. I just find the whole idea cool and kind of shocking. It's nothing new but definitely interesting.

Azael is cool. He's Nightcrawler's dad. He's someone Mystique probably both loves and hates. He's the leader of an organization that's trapped in another dimension therefore M Day probbaly never affected his people. Also Azael could be actually be demonic becauce of a deal with demons and chaos magic. One strong force of chaos magic on Azael's side and the Scarlet Witch's powers wouldn't affect him at all. If the Neyaphem ever got loose, they could be the largest group of mutants on Earth. They wouldn't have been before M Day but afterward? Definitely. They could amazing, horrifying but amazing. A threat so large that the villians and heroes have to work together to deal with them!

All the bibical stuff makes some people nervous but that's easily retconed. You just say Azael is deluded. That he's thousands of years old but only becaues time works different in another dimension. In fact being stuck unaging in a hellish dimension for thousands of years while only centuries passed in the normal world could be what drove him and his people to insantity. Azael could have born in medievel or rennaissance times. That would explain the Bible obsession. In that time period mutants would have been seen as demons, angels, or witchbreed.

The neyaphem are probbaly more dangerous and certainly more savage than the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. They're worse than Magneto's Acolytes They were born in a world where eye and tooth for a tooth was literal. They most likely wouldn't have a problem with crucifying or burning someone at a stake. They're bad guys as wicked and as barbaric as Apocalyspe, and though most wouldn't half be as strong, the sheer numbers would be a problem. Azael probably has a much larger number followers than the main universe Apocalyspe does. The exact numbers are unknown. There could well be over ten thousand of them! The numbers might be even larger than that. If the Neyaphem had been set loose in a version of the Age of Apocalype I think they would have taken over!

Then there's the Cheyarafim. They've got to be around somewhere in another dimension too. That doesn't mean they're good guys! Only that they oppose the Neyaphem. If the Neyaphem are chaos magic to the extreme then the Cheyarafim are a force of order magic in the opposite direction. If the Neyaphem get loose the Ceyarafim are bound to follow. Whoever Azael's greatest enemy in the Cheyarafim camp is, he's bound to be awesome and every bit as much trouble as Azael. That's if the writers handle it right. A major battle between those two groups with Archangel, the original Nightcrawler, and a returned from the dead Icarus caught in the middle is what should have happened in X Force: not a rehash of the Age of Apocalyspe and Dark Angel stuff. Waren shouldn't have been going all death, blue skin, and metal wings again.That's old news. Instead he should have under gone a mystical change to the bat wings ,chalk white skin, and red eyes, similar though not indentical in appearence to that of his counterpart, the Fallen, in the Mutant X reailty. His fallen like form could have been regarded as Neyaphem; this could have opened a whole bunch of new drama, especially if Waren could go back and forth between that and his more Cheyarafim like form and was regularly surrounded by both groups!

Apocalyspe is cool but not fresh, not new. No amount of reinventing is going to make him feel that way. A newer or less explored villian to rival Apocalypse is needed and Azael could easily be that villian.

If Bruce Wayne wasn't Batman, if the Park Row Tragedy never happened, who would he be? Feel free to come up with your own theories. Feel free to tell me what you think of mine.

I personally think he'd be a better businessman than Lex Luthor. To make it interesting you have to have him run the company. The only way he could do this smoothly is if both his parents both dead. Let's say his mother died of cancer when he was eleven. His dad died in a car accident when Bruce was twenty and away at college. This version of Bruce Wayne would be just as smart the Batman we all know just not as intensely driven unless it was for competitive reasons. Also his knowlege would be in places very different. Everything he knows is to further three things: his company, his own domineering ideas about helping others, and his personal amusment. I could easily see Superman hating Bruce almost as much as Lex Luthor. Lex and Bruce would be constantly trying to out do each other. Their companies would be richer and more powerful than in cannon because of this. In this timeline half of Superman's problems with Lex are the product of the Man of Steel geting caught in the middle of Lex and Bruce's atempts to out scheme each other.

What would make Bruce different from Lex? Unselfish motivations. It's not 'Me, me, me! I want to be powerful! People will bow to me!' that he's thinking. It's 'I do it all for the greater good to make things better. If I have all this wealth and power then I must do something good with it.' Bruce's parents raised well. Those strong morals Batman has, have to have come from somewhere. Without the same tragic background though this Bruce would at times almost corrupt because of too much wealth and the power that wealth brings.

The one thing Bruce would definitely have in common with Batman would be an understanding of psychology. Bruce would be extremely good at getting people to see things his way. He would even trick Superman. He would manipulate people and most would never know it until much much later if ever. The result is actually a scarier man than Lex! The result is a man so much the opposite of the dark knight, that Batman would love to punch his lights out!

Ironically Gotham City would be a somewhat safer place. The Waynes' murder was one of the first really major crimes in the fashionable neighborhood of Park Row. Without that murder there is no quick urban decay and no Crime Alley, or at least not as much of one. Without Batman there is no Joker and Selena Kyle never called herself Catwoman. If Bruce still went to the circus that fateful night then somehow he still would have taken Dick Grayson in. An almost Batman like intensity toward protecting innocents and loved ones combined with Wayne money and Bruce's manipulation skills would be then be used to stop Tony Zucco. But Bruce wouldn't stop there. Bruce would soon control or suppress all most all of the mob activity in the city. And the fact that power corrupts would definitetly be seen.

I've been thinking this off and on since I was about fifteen or sixteen somewhere around 2004 or 2005. This is my theory on Xorn. This theory was built from a mixture of the things that Morrison , Austin, and Claremont wrote around that time along with my own ideas. This is a plausible way to get a new villian and a new hero out of the Xorn character. It starts with a deceptively simple concept: Xorn was not Xorn. We have not yet seen Kuan-Yin Xorn in the comics.

The Xorn durring Morrison's run could never be Magneto. His powers were too different at first. Around the time he revealed himself as Magneto, the real Magneto was believed dead. I say Magneto really was dead. So was the real Kuan-Yin Xorn, possibly for many years. Someone or something else took over Xorn's indentity and powers then later switched to pretending to be Magneto.

The being almost has to be supernatural in origin. It's drawn to the echo engery of the recently dead especially those with powers such as mutants. It won't switch bodies unless it's current form gets damaged beyond repair or it finds a power of equal or greater strength. When it takes over an indentity, it sometimes gets so caught up in the role that it believes it's the person it's pretending to be. Powers like Magneto can make a person act bipolar, both Magneto and Polaris' actions in the comics have shown this. That combined with Magneto's dark memories and unresolved post traumatic stress drove the pretender crazy.

The memory copy is so complete that even a telepath would have trouble recognizing the truth. The telepath would have to have intimate knowlege of the real person's mind in order to realize it was dealing with a fake. Xaiver for example could not be easily tricked when it comes to his students and Magneto, what he said in Excalibur # 1 supports this.

The pretender bragged before dying it would come back. That bit of info combined with the coffin and Magneto being alive in Excailbur #1, gave me the idea that the pretender could only take over an indentity if the real person was dead. I jumped to the false conclusion that Magneto was going to confront the pretender in an issue of the Excalibur. I often have leaps of logic like that. I got so excited I started coming up with my own ideas about how things might work. The later issues of Excalibur proved me wrong but the new theories, the guesses on how the pretender works, remained in my mind. The shape changing and personality shift would not be instant but takes hours or days to complete. Only someone who died, had his identity stolen by the pretender, then came back to life, could recognize the pretender with certainty, and do so no matter what form it takes, and only if this person is aware of the pretender's existence.

The way I see it, the later collective stuff could even be explained with this. The pretender's abilty to take on the powers of dead mutants went haywire when the Scarlet Witch took away most of the mutant powers. The raw mutant engery floated near the pretender wherever it was. The pretender at this point was nuts and more than halfway convinced it was Xorn. The pretender absorbed the powers because it mistook them for being the echo engery left by a powerful dead mutant. Too much engery overloaded it and it became the Collective. At this point it became thoroughly convinced that it was Xorn.

The constant crisis storylines was getting old but the DCU was great. I always wanted to see something more personal. Instead of hundreds or thousands of characters, dozens or less, more crossovers between families and teams. With some of the more horrible things that happened toward the end of the DCU and the DCNU now being firmly in place, these kind of stories are impossible outside of fanfiction!.

I would love to see a Superman Family and Batman Family crossover. Robin and Superboy working together if the Robin is Daimian could be hilarous. Black Bat and Supergirl working together would be different.

A Team Arrow and Bat Family mini series would have been cool, with Tim Drake working with Mia Deardon in one issue, Damian stuck alone with Lian in one issue, Dick Grayson and Red Arrow in another issue, Jason Todd and Conner Hawke more arguring and fighting than working together to the point that a bad guy might even get away or capture them, the Black Canary along with Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown working well in another issue, and last but not least the original Batman Bruce Wayne and the original Green Arrow Oliver Queen teaming up.

All the former members of Young Justice accidentaly and temporarily reunited, working together with the younger members of the Justice Socitety the All-Star Squadron, would be awesome.

The Teen Titians or the former members of Young Justice working on a adventure in Gotham City, hanging out in the old Titan's Lair and driving Batman nuts, would be funny.

I would love to see Irey West, Damian Wayne, and Lian Harper working together as a new Young Justice, possibly joined by a revived and powered version of Donna Troy's kid Robert Long and a relevantly aged up version of Garth's kid Ceridian. With all the kids being so young not even teenagers, their worried parents or guardians the Flash, Batman, Red Arrow, Troia and Tempest would all be yelling at the kids and blaming each other. That would be very funny. All five original Teen Titans yelling at their kids for doing what they would have would be extremely ironic.

Alas I can only dream. These kinds of stories are just a wish list. In the DCU there is no Young Justice. The Superboy is a brand new character with very little in common with his counterpart except for surface details such as being a clone. Even before the reboot Lian was killed off. The original Teen Titians never hung out when they were thirteen at the Titans' Lair so is no Titans' Lair. Two or three of the original Titans don't even exist! No Donna Troy, no Wally West, and I'm not sure about Garth. Without Wally West there's no Irey West. Without Garth a.k.a. Tempest there is no Ceridian. Also the baby Ceridian was killed off before the reboot.