#Al Ewing

[vertigoartgore]

2014's Loki: Agent of Asgard Vol.1 #1 variant cover by Olivier Coipel & Marte Gracia.

[sinistermusings]

X-Men 35 (2024) by Gerry Duggan, Kieron Gillen, Al Ewing & Phil Noto

[rei-ismyname]

Resurrection of Magneto Highlights 1

RoM is a book that loses something in the highlight format as the big moments are truly earned and impactful. There's an ongoing narration, dialogue or soliloquy running through each issue tying everything together and to truly give context I'd have to annotate it. Lucky for us, Al Ewing and Luciano Vecchio are masters and every panel serves as a coda for Storm or Magneto from SWORD and X-Men Red. This is easily my longest Highlights yet, there's just so much to say.

I wish I dreamt about Magneto

Ororo has a dream of a full page splash - Magneto, Max, saying 'I was wrong' surrounded by five of his iconic helmets. 3 red ones, bloody and facing towards the world. 1 black, 1 white upright behind his back. It's been quite a while since Uranos the Undying tore his heart out on Judgement Day but it's good to see Ororo has some measure of peace and love on Arakko with Craig of NASA.

She's the deuteragonist of RoM so she chooses to follow her dream and seek Max in the afterlife. Ororo shows up at Adam Brashear/The Blue Marvel's underwater base and asks for help with exactly that. He lampshades how bozos like Reed would deem it impossible and leads her to a portal. He's in the middle of explaining how dangerous it is and requires... we don't hear because Storm takes a running leap and YOLOs into it. Tarn the Uncaring and a who's who of Marvel cosmology are there to greet her. Tarn is insulted that Ororo has come for the guy who exploded his head, but as above, so below - he loves to talk and she outwits him.

Ashake is often obliquely referred to but very rarely directly, so it's lovely to see her magical ancestor here to help. As Ororo pets her black cat, Ashake confirms this is a place of magic. Symbols and metaphors are powerful here - something Mags could use help with in his current state. It's also connected to the Kabbalistic tree of life, but I'm not very knowledgeable about that.

Two redrawn and recoloured keystone moments of Max and Ororo's relationship down the bottom.

She resolved to see this through and her thought carries her towards the Sphere of Judgement. Unexpectedly a bunch of Dominions bar her path, though luckily the two mutants are too small to truly be of interest to them. Still, a single mortal arriving in Overspace is significant and they prompt her to ask questions. The face of Dominions are shown but it's still fairy tale rules. The most important thing she learns is about Enigma, though she doesn't know it at the time.

The Sphere of Judgement is hostile, everything is inverted. Lightning is red, the river is lava, clouds are black, everything is broken. She notices this spot from her dream and the charred frames of Max's five helmets still sit in blood. Magneto has been here for months by choice, bypassing the Waiting Room Wanda built but refusing to move on. He believes he deserves this.

Finally she reaches Magneto weeping blood in front of a wall of names. Everyone he ever killed and he's counting every one, remembering their name. He's judging himself, punishing, and doesn't think he deserves to leave.

He shares his greatest shames, his most recent cruelties. Worst, the ones he convinced himself was necessary. He's overwhelmed by the red in his ledger and in this place of judgement lashes out, flinging names off the wall at Ororo while naming the person. What snaps him out of it is the mention that something happened to Charles, heh.

'The no-place of his heart' 👌

Max turns the judgement on Ororo but she rejects it, calling him out for extending Charles the grace he won't extend to himself plus a little hypocrisy. Magneto has always been prone to drama and that tendency can hurt as much as it heals.

That really gets him going, but he's judging himself more constructively now. Love, friendship, accountability. The things that are keeping some part of tethered to the living world. He pulls one more name down to say the name aloud before he sends it at Ororo - it's his - Max Eisenhardt. Still, he cries 'it's out of our hands.' He truly wants to give up but I think a part of him knows his story isn't done.

Ororo disagrees. Displaying why she's the only person who could assist in the resurrection of Magneto, she covers his eyes and remembers the rules of this place. The wall of the dead becomes its opposite - the wall of the living. Not those he killed but those he saved. It's enough to pull him out of punishing himself. Neither group should be forgotten but he can choose to save life rather than take it - to change.

Torturing yourself in a personal hell might appease some of those dead, but accepting responsibility to the living should be what comes after judgement. Suffering helps no one, and as he says to Logan as he's about to kill Charles much later - 'no more martyrs.' Part of why I enjoyed Magneto identifying Logan Behavior is because he himself is the king of it. Charles too. All three are prone to martyrdom but dying is easy. It's living that's difficult and worthwhile. Secluding yourself from the world, whether it's in the Sphere of Judgement, a mega prison, or with a pack of wolves - is senseless and selfish. Living is better.

Next time - what does that actually mean for both of them and how do they get out of this place? It's not as simple as turning a key. Choosing to live is hard work. Metatextually, change and rebirth requires a tour of all that he is, all that he's done. What's the point of killing a character and then bringing them back the same as they were? Comic books do it all the time, but Magneto's long history is a study of opposites and extremes. He, the writer and the reader all need to deconstruct Magneto so he can be reconstructed as a better person. With the benefit of hindsight we know he succeeds, but what does that actually look like for him? 60 years of his oversized influence on the world is a lot and it only gets better from here.

[evilhorse]

You got cojones, elf.

(X-Men #35)

[avengerscompound]

Loki

Immortal Thor (2023) #6

[nickfuryagentofsword]

Immortal Thor 17 (2024) by Al Ewing & Jan Bazaldua

Cover: Davi Go (variant)

[loki-core-the-variant]

Retro post from my Zucced fb page, Loki-Core: The Variant

[kryptonbabe]

"I love you, you stupid kid. Somebody had to"

From The Incredible Hulk #227 (1978) & Immortal Hulk #13 (2019)

[stevelieber]

Dang I love drawing this book.

The first issue of Al Ewing's and my Metamorpho series from DC Comics will be at your local comic book store around Christmas.

[vertigoartgore]

2019's Immortal Hulk Vol.1 #16 wraparound variant cover by artist Joe Bennett and inker Belardino Brabo. Source

A nice tribute to the work of the talented special make-up effects creator Rob Bottin (particularly on John Carpenter's The Thing).

[dbot456]

It should be illegal for Al Ewing to be as good a writer as he is

[oroontheheels]

How symbrock fans have been fed by Marvel regarding OTP content.

Mike Costa’s run (2016)

Donnie Cates’s run (2018)

El Ewing and Ram V run (2021)

[rei-ismyname]

Holy Shit, Magneto

I was going to title this post 'Don't fuck with Magneto' and make it a sequel of sorts to my 'Don't Fuck With Ororo' post from a while back, but people already know the Master of Magnetism is not to be fucked with. Or at least they should...

What do women call him?

However, as you might expect people keep fucking with Magneto to their detriment. Issue 4 of Resurrection of Magneto is one of my favourite examples of why this is a bad idea. He'd been, for lack of a better term, burning in hell. His good friend Storm convinced him that he deserved to live at great personal risk and he returned to life - renewed and questioning his relationship with violence.

Ahem, some ruminating on his old friend.

Immediately he, Storm and Blue Marvel raided an ORCHIS base to rescue the mutants within. As is so often the case, they had Magneto Protocols. These ones were particularly focused and cruel. This squad of shithead fascists deployed and goaded him into attacking them while shooting him with bullets. Usually a poor decision, but they'd set up a magnetic trap where if he used his powers on them it'd kill the several hundred hostages. The perfect trap, they thought. So did he at first, but then he realised that if he could neutralise the ORCHIS Magneto Squad at the speed of thought it wouldn't set the trap off and kill the mutant hostages.

He was right, and this is what it looked like for Magneto to annihilate them as quickly as possible.

Holy shit, Magneto

Five cruel fascists turned into floating spheres of blood and viscera, human bodies utterly eviscerated and dripping goo. I don't know about you but my jaw dropped when I first saw it. The particular cruelty of it is that he was resolved to treat life with more respect, to kill only if he had to. To protect life, not take it. That ORCHIS had this trap for him specifically, this forced decision to either die and allow his people to die or to kill these men. It was never a real decision - he was always going to kill these men, but only because they forced him to.

One also has to wonder how much he's been holding back all these years. Imagine if he did this to Logan instead of pulling out his adamantium skeleton.

[smashpages]

The Green Lantern Corps will join DC’s Absolute line in March of 2025, and writer Al Ewing will collaborate with artist Jahnoy Lindsay on Absolute Green Lantern featuring Jo Mullein and other members of the Green Lantern Corps.

Read more

[avengerscompound]

Immortal Thor (2023) #6

[evilhorse]

You are my rage—my justified anger in response to the monstrous crimes against me and mine.

(Resurrection of Magneto #3)