Xavier and Magneto: Together again... for the first time!
Originally Published September 1982
Professor X is still comatose, trapped in a vegetative state within his own mind as he is tormented by visions of alien monsters wreaking havoc in his psyche. It's... not fun, I don't think.
The X-Men are at a loss for what to do. Cyclops is taking it particularly badly, first deflecting his grief by taking Storm to task for their very public raid on the freaking Pentagon last week.
He's not wrong, but you know, they really really tried not to turn that one into a superhero free-for-all. But they did get those crucial files deleted, so while the Government may now have an even better reason to hate the X-Men, at least they don't know where to find them, so nyah.
Cyclops and Storm have words over whether Cyke should take back leadership of the X-Men from Storm due to her alleged incompetence. She helps him see that he's really just sublimating his frustration at possibly losing the major father figure in his life, after everyone else has already left him, which, considering he grew up a lonely orphan while his now-returned dad was off fighting his way out of slavery in space and he is still reeling from the loss of Jean, is... a lot to process, yeah. He has what I think you would call a breakthrough.
I know that for a long time it wasn't cool to say so, but we're all friends here: I really do enjoy the way these characters have human depth and baggage - annoying, frustrating, neverending baggage, but baggage that makes them feel more real and relatable and gives the story a soul and a reason beyond punching the Blob every month or whatever.
Meanwhile, inside the brain of Charles Xavier, it's Spring, "Twenty Years Ago," during his "Dress like Indiana Jones" world-travelling idle rich boy days.
Fresh from his trip to Cairo, where he did battle on the astral plane with one Amahl Farouk, Xavier has arrived in Haifa, Israel, to assist an old colleague Daniel Shomron, with some patients. Specifically, those dealing with psychological scarring due to their experiences in the Holocaust.
There, he meets a civilian volunteer who happens to have had some experience of his own with that:
That's right, this silver fox is none other than the X-Men's future greatest enemy, Magneto! That exploding sound you hear is your own mind! What?!?!
Xavier is introduced to his patient, a woman stuck in a catatonic state (not unlike our own present day Xavier) named Gabrielle Haller, who had been at Dachau in her childhood. Xavier agrees to work his magic, which from Daniel's perspective appears to simply be staring with creepy intensity into her eyes.
In the world of Gabrielle's mind, Xavier (in his buff, nude astral form) fights his way past Gabrielle's psychic barriers and into her memories, where she recalls the Nazi Officers at the concentration camp as being monstrous ogres (or Orcs, I'm not sure.) This culminates in her imagining herself being transformed into solid gold. What could this mean?
The result, of course:
A complete success as Gabrielle awakens. She is now free to live with her trauma just like the rest of us.
As Xavier, Daniel, and Magnus toast their success, they are overheard by the prying ears of a spy who is strangely excited to find that the Haller girl has awakened.
In the coming days, Xavier and Magnus re-acclimate Gabrielle to life among the living, while also occasionally engaging in purely hypothetical debates about whether Humans and so-called supposed Mutants can ever living side by side in peace - if the latter happen to exist, who's to say?
 |
| Just two bros, having a friendly casual chat. |
Meanwhile, Gaby and Charles strike up their own kind of relationship. The Prof knows that this isn't right - they should be focussing on wellness and neither of them believes they truly love each other, only that the course of care has given them what seems to emulate an intimate relationship, while he still regrets losing the previous love of his life, Moira. Still, Xavier rationalizes it to himself that the two both need each other for the time being, and what's wrong with grabbing a little happiness while the grabbing is good?
 |
| Wait, wasn't she in a coma half her life? |
Alas, the moment is interrupted, as so often happens, by a sudden attack from costumed terrorists, who blow up the hospital and grab Gaby.
One troop gets away. Before any further damage can be done, the terrorists' other metal aircraft suddenly comes apart at the seams, as if rent by forces unknown:
Xavier and Magnus interrogate one of the remaining attackers. He swears he's not going to talk, but Xavier has ways...
Admittedly badass.
They learn that the attack was carried out by an organization called Hydra (ever heard of it?) a new cartel that emerged out of the Third Reich. A few days later, our dynamic duo have tracked them far south to Kenya's Lake Rudolf.
We learn the group is being led by one Baron Strucker, whom Charles recognizes as one of the most-wanted Nazi war criminals around. Oddly, it's Magnus who advises caution, chiding him for overreacting like a lovesick schoolboy when he sees Gaby captive.
We learn that, during her time in the Camp, Gabrielle was conditioned hypnotically to become a living map to Hitler's hidden gold reserves, the process that drove her to catatonia. Now, it would appear, Xavier has handed over the keys to millions or perhaps billions of dollars worth of Gold bullion.
Xavier and Magnus launch an offensive using their powers - something they had not discussed previously, which makes you wonder exactly what they had planned when they got there in the first place.
Stucker pulls out his big weapon, the impressively-named Satan Claw - a big deal thingamajig from his later-in-life appearances as a villain for Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. But it's made of metal, so...
Yeah.
Xavier and Magnus get away with the girl and the gold. Unfortunately, the future Master of Magnetism declares that humankind cannot be trusted, their base instincts will always cause them to hate and destroy what they don't understand, and that means mutants like us, so they can never reach an understanding. He flies off with all the gold, much to Charles' likely consternation.
This probably explains why Magneto can fund unlimited attempts to overthrow the human race from lavish island or asteroid headquarters.
Thus remembering Gaby's inner strength and will to live, our Xavier summons everything he's got and emerges from his coma at last!
In celebration, Lilandra hosts the X-Men at a little shindig on her Royal Space Yacht. As she raises a toast to her friends - and as Wolverine, always the first one to clue in on these things, senses something that makes him edgy - Lilandra falls...
And who should burst into the room and claim responsibility for this?
That's right! You thought we were done with this gang? Not by a long shot!
Further Thoughts:
Only less than a year earlier, Magneto was revealed to have been a Holocaust survivor, and now not only is that being expanded on, we learn for the first time that he had crossed paths with Xavier himself. As modern readers, we are so accustomed to the idea of a Magneto and Xavier with a shared past that we can hardly imagine a time when this wasn't known to be the case, nor how jarring that would have been even given the earlier revelations about Magneto's origins.
Up until X-Men #150, Magneto was still the wild-eyed would-be dictator of mutantkind, an irredeemable terrorist villain who represented all that the X-Men didn't want from the world. Here, his goals and fears are elucidated clearly. We see what drove him to villainy, and we understand it, and the writing manages to get us, the reader, to stop just short of approving of it.
Knowing that Xavier had exchanged ideas with Magneto in their youth only glitches the past a little bit - although earlier scenes concerning Magneto are certainly played like the two have never met, it's not like it's ever explicitly stated and you can do a tiny bit of mental contortion to decide they simply decided never to reveal that to the X-Men because they didn't find it relevant. The best retcons fit neatly into what we know and don't know, like Darth Vader being Luke's father. (John Byrne hated that one, too.)
I would go so far as to say that by this point, virtually none of what was published prior to Giant-Size X-Men really even counts anymore except in broad strokes, thanks to Marvel's sliding scale of reference. The rest is fair game to ignore or rewrite as needed. This issue takes what could have been a tacky, clumsy, gimmicky reveal and makes it feel so natural it seems inevitable in hindsight, and manages to define the Magneto character for the rest of his days. Not bad for a day's work.
This is, of course, only one of the many things this issue has to accomplish in 22 pages. It also has to bear out the prompt of Xavier being stuck in his coma, mentally searching for the strength to survive, which it does in the character of Gabrielle Haller, our "in" to a romantic plot as well as an action-packed Indiana Jones style quest for Nazi gold. Lean, mean, efficient writing on display here.
Lastly, the cliffhanger takes us back to the still-technically-unresolved feud between Deathbird and Lilandra. We've had a few months to take a breather since the last time we visited that plot so it's only fair we go back for another round, hopefully to wrap things up once and for all.
One troop gets away. Before any further damage can be done, the terrorists' other metal aircraft suddenly comes apart at the seams, as if rent by forces unknown:
Xavier and Magnus interrogate one of the remaining attackers. He swears he's not going to talk, but Xavier has ways...
 |
| And not like, in a phony-baloney way like the Mentalist. |
Admittedly badass.
They learn that the attack was carried out by an organization called Hydra (ever heard of it?) a new cartel that emerged out of the Third Reich. A few days later, our dynamic duo have tracked them far south to Kenya's Lake Rudolf.
We learn the group is being led by one Baron Strucker, whom Charles recognizes as one of the most-wanted Nazi war criminals around. Oddly, it's Magnus who advises caution, chiding him for overreacting like a lovesick schoolboy when he sees Gaby captive.
We learn that, during her time in the Camp, Gabrielle was conditioned hypnotically to become a living map to Hitler's hidden gold reserves, the process that drove her to catatonia. Now, it would appear, Xavier has handed over the keys to millions or perhaps billions of dollars worth of Gold bullion.
Xavier and Magnus launch an offensive using their powers - something they had not discussed previously, which makes you wonder exactly what they had planned when they got there in the first place.
 |
| Sure you don't, Charles, you're just doing what you gotta do... |
Stucker pulls out his big weapon, the impressively-named Satan Claw - a big deal thingamajig from his later-in-life appearances as a villain for Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. But it's made of metal, so...
Yeah.
Xavier and Magnus get away with the girl and the gold. Unfortunately, the future Master of Magnetism declares that humankind cannot be trusted, their base instincts will always cause them to hate and destroy what they don't understand, and that means mutants like us, so they can never reach an understanding. He flies off with all the gold, much to Charles' likely consternation.
This probably explains why Magneto can fund unlimited attempts to overthrow the human race from lavish island or asteroid headquarters.
Thus remembering Gaby's inner strength and will to live, our Xavier summons everything he's got and emerges from his coma at last!
In celebration, Lilandra hosts the X-Men at a little shindig on her Royal Space Yacht. As she raises a toast to her friends - and as Wolverine, always the first one to clue in on these things, senses something that makes him edgy - Lilandra falls...
And who should burst into the room and claim responsibility for this?
That's right! You thought we were done with this gang? Not by a long shot!
Further Thoughts:
Only less than a year earlier, Magneto was revealed to have been a Holocaust survivor, and now not only is that being expanded on, we learn for the first time that he had crossed paths with Xavier himself. As modern readers, we are so accustomed to the idea of a Magneto and Xavier with a shared past that we can hardly imagine a time when this wasn't known to be the case, nor how jarring that would have been even given the earlier revelations about Magneto's origins.
Up until X-Men #150, Magneto was still the wild-eyed would-be dictator of mutantkind, an irredeemable terrorist villain who represented all that the X-Men didn't want from the world. Here, his goals and fears are elucidated clearly. We see what drove him to villainy, and we understand it, and the writing manages to get us, the reader, to stop just short of approving of it.
Knowing that Xavier had exchanged ideas with Magneto in their youth only glitches the past a little bit - although earlier scenes concerning Magneto are certainly played like the two have never met, it's not like it's ever explicitly stated and you can do a tiny bit of mental contortion to decide they simply decided never to reveal that to the X-Men because they didn't find it relevant. The best retcons fit neatly into what we know and don't know, like Darth Vader being Luke's father. (John Byrne hated that one, too.)
I would go so far as to say that by this point, virtually none of what was published prior to Giant-Size X-Men really even counts anymore except in broad strokes, thanks to Marvel's sliding scale of reference. The rest is fair game to ignore or rewrite as needed. This issue takes what could have been a tacky, clumsy, gimmicky reveal and makes it feel so natural it seems inevitable in hindsight, and manages to define the Magneto character for the rest of his days. Not bad for a day's work.
Lastly, the cliffhanger takes us back to the still-technically-unresolved feud between Deathbird and Lilandra. We've had a few months to take a breather since the last time we visited that plot so it's only fair we go back for another round, hopefully to wrap things up once and for all.
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