Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and thirty-first week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
As we've been doing it for some time now, one legend today, one tomorrow and one Sunday.
Let's begin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Rogue almost met Loki when she came out of the Siege Perilous, not Magneto!
STATUS:
True
As you may or may not know, around 1989, Chris Claremont started a year-long (perhaps a bit longer) storyline where the X-Men would be spread about the world, while a good chunk of them would have gone through the mystical Siege Perilous, which possibly shows you your heart's desire. So the X-Men went through various changes and then they were slowly pulled back together as a team again, just in time to launch a second X-Men title in 1991. Now obviously, when Claremont began this story, he did not have that in mind (he likely was thinking more of Uncanny X-Men #300 as his end game) but a major change happened along the way when Jim Lee both became the artist on Uncanny X_Men.
Lee quickly became a superstar and he soon co-plotted the series with Claremont, and their ideas for the series differed a bit. Lee wanted the classic X-Men villains, while Claremont was not as much into that idea.
This played into Uncanny X-Men #269, where Rogue (having gone through the Siege Perilous), dealt with the Carol Danvers side of her personality being split from her...
At the end, who was it but Magneto!!!
Jim Lee, though, later noted to Mark Salisbury in Artists on Comic Art that originally it was going to be LOKI!
When I came onto Uncanny X-Men I had a very strong sense of what X-Men stories should be. A lot of the stuff I wanted to do was to rehash or update stuff I had really liked as a kid, but Chris had done that maybe two or three times already. So there was a difference of opinion from the outset on what the stories should be. That's where the editor steps in, and you talk, and hopefully you compromise. One of the very first issues I did featured Rogue and Magneto, and she gets stranded on his island or something like that. Originally the villain was supposed to be Loki, I guess because Chris hadn't written many Loki stories. Now to me, Loki wasn't an X-Men villain and it didn't feel right, so we compromised and came back to Magneto. It was a case of Chris, who'd been on X-Men for some years, wanting to take the characters in very different directions, and me, a die-hard X-Men fan, just wanting to do the classic stuff. But it still worked. We worked out sound compromises and some really good stories came out of it.
And sure enough, Marvel Age #92 seems to bear that out...
Now, the famous Rogue/Magneto Savage Land plot did not begin in earnest until Uncanny X-Men #274...
So maybe the plan was to first do Loki and THEN bring in Magneto, but if not, can you imagine if that Savage Land arc never took place? Talk about a major change to X-Men history!
Thanks to Mark Salisbury and Jim Lee for the great information!
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Was the Brady Bunch’s Dog Replaced Mid-Episode Because Their Original Dog Was Killed?
Check back Saturday for part 2 of this week's legends!
And remember, if you have a legend that you're curious about, drop me a line at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com!