Ocean Doot wrote:
Hey Roger,
I was on another forum and we were talking about the whole crazy thing about this series having its original ending (Magneto goes back to being a bad guy) nixed at the last second. Someone brought up a question that I had no answer to and couldn't find one online ... The way he phrased it:
"... my understanding was that in the Shooter days, if one office wanted to make any major changes to a character from another family, they needed to get special permission to do so from that character's normal editor. So how did this mini even get off the ground, if it was going to perform such a sweeping change to Magneto? Obviously Claremont and/or Nocenti wouldn't have agreed to it. Did the Avengers folks just start producing the thing unilaterally?"
Is the first part true, and if so, I am curious as well. Why was the plot approved initially and then changed later? What happened in between?
Apologies if this is a controversial topic in any way. I'm just curious.
Well, in the first place, I wasn't planning on making any sweeping change in Magneto. Mind you, I thought the idea of the X-Men (and their readers) so easily believing that Magneto was "a good guy now" and accepted as their leader/teacher in Xavier's absence was at the very least unwise. But that had become the
status quo in the X-books, and it wasn't my place to monkey with it. I intended to just ignore it.
But then, the marketing folk decided that there should be an Avengers vs. X-Men miniseries (and a Fantastic Four vs. the Avengers) miniseries. And I was told that if I didn't write it, someone else would.
With that hanging over my head, I had to deal with the fact that a notorious international terrorist was in charge on the X-Men.
So, I had to come up with a way of allowing Magneto to go on doing what he was doing in the X-Men, without making the Avengers look foolish for letting him go.
I thought I had. I outlined the entire miniseries before I started, and got it approved. I wouldn't have even started on the project without that approval.
But then, after the final plot was written, everything was changed. And I never got an answer as to why.
So I passed on scripting the final issue.
If I'd known that I was soon going to be fired from the Avengers, I probably would have passed on the entire project.
