>"The Traitor" plot is started in 1991 with Bishops first appearance
>Isn't resolved until 1996 as being Onslaught (Xavier)
What are some other examples of plots that took way to long to be resolved?
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>"The Traitor" plot is started in 1991 with Bishops first appearance
The third Summers brother plot.
Does that even qualify? It was one cryptic off-hand comment, and that's it.
This idea was introduced when Portacio was plotter/artist on UXM, but was largely ignored by the writers for years after he left, outside of Bishop not trusting Gambit. But readers were obsessed with the idea, Wizard magazine was obsessed with it, X-Men letters pages at the time show how fans were spending a lot of time talking and speculating about an old plot from previous run, that the current creative teams didn't seem to care about at all.
Eventually the Onslaught story was used as a means to finally give it a resolution, but while we don't know what Portacio's plan would have been, Claremont has talked about an earlier plan to make Gambit a traitor. That plan was dropped before the Bishop storyline started, but people tended to conflate the two traitor plots into one, leading to people insisting Gambit really was meant to be the traitor and mistakenly thinking Marvel changed the plan "because he got too popular".
Fabian Nicieza meant for Adam-X the X-Treme to be the half-brother of Scott and Alex, and wrote stories in X-Men and X-Force setting this up, but editorial noticed Adam-X sucked and wouldn't let him finish the story and confirm him as their half-brother. An issue of Nicieza's Captain Marvel book implied it as much as he was allowed, but Adam-X was left in limbo for a long time after that, and the plot was picked up in the mid 2000s to give us a better new Summers brother in Vulcan.
More recently, Nicieza got to resolve his Adam-X plot and make him part of the family, but the Vulcan story forced him to amend the original plan, and make Adam-X grown in a lab using DNA from Scott and Alex's mother and from the Shi'Ar emperor.
Rather than dropped plots resolved by later writers, the really egregious ones are when the same writer stays on a book but takes years and years to resolve something and keeps stringing readers along.
>Rather than dropped plots resolved by later writers, the really egregious ones are when the same writer stays on a book but takes years and years to resolve something and keeps stringing readers along.
I feel like that's what's missing in a lot of comics. There's not really any LONG term writers or LONG term plans anymore. Subplots are all dropped like an anvil rather than being peppered through years of character development and intrigue.
It's mostly because the nature of the industry has changed. Back before the mid 90s if you were writing a big 2 ongoing book that had been running for decades, you could be reasonably sure you'd have that job for as long as you wanted it unless you fell out with your editor, crashed sales or some star talent didn't show up and ask for that book. Writers had the job security to be able to plot months or even years in advance and do slow-burn plots that took a long time to pay off. But even back then writers would just leave for whatever reason without resolving everything, or might just forget about one of their subplots.
In the modern industry, most books are plotted in 4-6 issues blocks, and the writers of lower tier titles often don't know until pretty late if the book is getting renewed for more issues, while higher-profile books get frequent relaunches and creative team changes to try and spike sales again. This all works against long term plotting, you just have to get in, tell that one story you want to tell, and hope you get another one afterwards, maybe set up a tease for another story in case you do get more issues to work with.
It's even worse for character development, which frequently resets back to a default portrayal when a new writer takes over.
Obviously things were better back in the good old days, but these are just some of the many problems in comics being a slowly dying industry.
#1-2 of X-Men Legends, it was around 2020, but was done in a way where it happened but nobody remembers it happened.
>But even back then writers would just leave for whatever reason without resolving everything, or might just forget about one of their subplots.
Well that's a problem of an ongoing narrative structure and likely will always be an issue. Thing is writers used to be more professional, or at least, competent enough to follow what was put in front of them. A new writer might not want to do the same exact thing as the old writer but he would at least realize some kind of direction.
>In the modern industry, most books are plotted in 4-6 issues blocks
And most of that is all decompressed to boot. When was the last time we had a team book that actually felt like a team that's been around together. I swear most of the time you see a new run launch they'll spend 3 issues setting up the board then, if you're lucky get a 2 issue fight at the end and the whole roster will be reset once again.
>More recently, Nicieza got to resolve his Adam-X plot and make him part of the family, but the Vulcan story forced him to amend the original plan, and make Adam-X grown in a lab using DNA from Scott and Alex's mother and from the Shi'Ar emperor.
So they finally canonized Adam-X as a Summers brother, huh. Took them long enough.
>we don't know what Portacio's plan would have been
Has anyone, like, asked him? He ain't dead. In fact it looks like he's still pretty attached to that time of his life.
Good question, I don't know if he's ever been asked about it.
A side note to Portacio's story, his future version of Gambit, "the Witness", ended up not actually being Gambit. A later character named the Witness was introduced in the 90s who was meant to become the old guy we saw in that story.
Depending on accounts, Claremont's original plan for Gambit was for him to be a traitor, and either a minion of Sinister, or Sinister himself in disguise. It's pretty obvious from some of his issues that readers were meant to notice Gambit was not trustworthy and was up to no good, but it's not clear if anyone else at Marvel knew what Claremont's plan for Gambit was, when he left Marvel, Gambit was in the hands of Jim Lee, who either didn't know Claremont's plan, or chose to drop it and gave him the Thieves Guild origin instead.
Fully agreed, but I don't know how you'd fix any of this now without stronger editorial forcing it to happen.
>Fully agreed, but I don't know how you'd fix any of this now without stronger editorial forcing it to happen.
I mean we need stronger editorial for a lot of reasons not just that but that would be a good start. But we really do need writers and staff who want to treat their ongoings like... well ongoings.
>But we really do need writers and staff who want to treat their ongoings like... well ongoings.
You'd need companies to actually commit to letting lower-tier titles lasting longer before they get cancelled, and you'd need the big 2 to break their addiction to relaunching books and moving talent around to different titles. With artists in particular they seem to not want anyone good to build up a serious run on one book, probably linked to their fear of creating a new generation of star artists who might then leave them like the Image founders. But the industry as a whole needs new star artists more than Marvel and DC need to keep artists from becoming stars.
It doesn't help that everything sells like shit now. During Shooter's reign as EiC, the sales minimum for a book to continue was 100k. Nowadays ASM can't even hit that. They can't afford to keep the lower-level books around for long.
Of course they sell like shit because they suck and the distribution model sucks, both of which are fixable.
I know there's a lot of reasons for it, lack newstands, pricing etc but it's really a kind of hilarious tragic when a reviled series from the 90s like say, Heroes Reborn, was still breaking 100k. And this was deemed cancellable.
Wasn't Gambit supposed to be Mr. Sinister in disguise?
I've heard everything from that to him being the 3rd Summers
OMD's going on 16 years now I think.
The traitor subplot was fine not being a major driving storyline.
Lifebringer Galactus
The traitor plotline had potential but unfortunately like a lot of things post-Claremont they didn’t really plan it nor execute it well.
I mean, the Clone Saga was stretched years too long.
What we think of as "The Clone Saga" is a two year period of Spider-Man comics, but only the first year was meant to be "The Clone Saga", ending with Peter retiring and Ben taking over from him. They backed down and brought Peter back, so the whole second year gets considered part of "The Clone Saga" when it was meant to be a new era.
What got stretched out was the period from Ben's return to him taking over, they claim this was all meant to happen over 6 months, but Marvel's marketing department forced them to stretch it out to a year because the books had been selling well, up until they tried to tell us we'd been reading about Spider-Man's clone for 20 years.
Actually the traitor plot got unresolved so it could be used to set up his character assassination during the Messiah trilogy by killing Xavier in his quest to try and kill Hope because he thought that her awakening is what would cause his future but the irony is that it was actually his actions in trying to stop it which created it and thus he was the traitor the whole time.
The X-traitor concept is vague enough that ANYONE who goes evil can be the traitor.
It was very explicitly resolve in Onslaught though. Like not even in a vague or ambiguous way. That got ignored so they could do a plot twist a decade later to make Bishop evil which ruined his character so much that he had to basically be put out of commission for years and brought back pretending it never happened.
Messiah Complex is an entirely separate traitor plot more than ten years later. The traitor Bishop was hunting back in the 90s was Onslaught, it was resolved with Bishop saving the X-Men from their destined deaths at the hands of the traitor. This doesn't prevent later unrelated traitor stories from happening.
Unfortunately, its not a separate traitor plot. Messiah Complex showed that the current post-Onslaught timeline still leads to Bishop's future. That wouldn't be the case, since saving the X-Men from Onslaught would radically change the timeline.
It means that the traitor that destroyed everything wasn't Xavier/Onslaught. So long as the current timeline keeps on being able to lead to Bishop's future, the traitor plot is unresolved, and makes the previous traitor plots red herrings.
The real traitor is Raven Darkholme and Irene Adler.
They are doing this shit because muh lesbian love.
It turns out all of the Dark futures marvel has are related to her two medling with every reset to stay together since Destiny like moira knows of her fricking past lives.
They should had made a plot where Destiny is in fact Mephisto's daughter or some shit because all marvel 616 futures ends up with Mephisto and TOBA winning.
All can be traced back to fricking Destiny meeting Mystique and having her to be her lover.
This makes sense on the long run.
All of the Krakoa shit and the X-men shit is now traced back to her 2 fricking over Moira.
And why none of the other 616 seers cant detect Destiny as one of them since Trask's son was as fricking Ulysses.
>in the late 2000s they really tried to memoryhole Onslaught and ignore that the specific traitor Bishop was hunting for had been dealt with over ten years earlier
This is just another reason why nobody should read X-Men after the 90s.
The traitor was responsible for his timeline which was resolved in Onslaught. In Messiah Complex he's hunting the traitor that causes his timeline. It's not multiple traitors, it's just ignoring a resolved plot point because they thought doing an ironic time loop where Bishop was the traitor the whole time was genius.
The xmen 12 storyline was first mentioned in 1987 I think, never resolved till 2000
It was one of Louise Simonson's ideas she mentioned in Master Mold stories during one issue of X-Factor and one issue of Power Pack in the 80s, she left Marvel in 1991. An X-Factor story the same year mentioned it, but after that it was forgotten by Marvel for years. The Flashback Month issue of UXM in 1997 was meant to be the start of Scott Lobdell building towards doing something with it, he got fired from the X-books later the same year and Joe Casey took the plot for his Cable run, with the intent of building towards resolving it at the end of the century, Marvel decided to turn it into a crossover event.
Originally the idea was that The 12 would be the leaders of the various mutant factions in the future, and Master Mold was trying to hunt them down in the present. Somewhere along the way it shifted to them being the 12 mutants destined to finally defeat Apocalypse. The event that finally resolved the plot revealed it was a false prophecy planted by Apocalypse himself to gather a group of mutants who would together power a celestial machine that would turn him into a god.
Like the X-Men traitor and the third Summers brother, it was one writer's plot that got forgotten for a long time after they were gone, but the fandom continued to be a lot more interested in than Marvel was.
Lobdell didn't get fired.
His plan after Operation: Zero Tolerance was the X-Men being a small group (Iceman, Cecilia Reyes, Marrow, Sabra, maybe a couple of others) with no mansion or Shi'ar tech having to deal with Magneto declaring all out war on humanity because of Bastion's actions. Harras told him no and because Excalibur was getting axed demanded that he add Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Kitty to the team.
So Lobdell basically treads water for a little bit but he was burned out as he'd been writing multiple books for about five or six years at that point and decided that was the last straw so he quit. Kelly and Seagle were brought in to replace him presumably because they had some name value (Kelly for Deadpool, Seagle for Sandman Mystery Theater) but still new enough as writers that they could be bossed around. Kelly and Seagle quit within a year because they were sick of editorial dictating stories to them and dramatically rewriting their scripts.
That whole late '90s period of the X-Men is a giant shit show, at least for the main two books. Some of the ancillary stuff like Faerber's Gen X and John Francis Moore's X-Force were decent though.
The late 90s was generally where I began to check out when I as younger. I've fallen back in and out since but I just never really had the same gusto for ongoings as I did before then. I do wish I stuck around for Tunderbolts though.
>The Twelve
Oh lord. Forget the traitor. Now there's one that was left on the table forever. I don't even remember who all the twelve were. Let's see
Xavier
Magneto
Cyclops
Havoc
Polaris
Probably Jean
Cable
And some villain who hasn't been relevant from since even before the Giant Size switch up.
IIRC it ended up being
>Xavier
>Cyclops
>Jean
>Iceman
>Polaris
>Sunfire
>Storm
>Cable
>Magneto
>Bishop
>Mikhail
>Living Monolith as a substitute for Havok
In some of these cases it's more like seething because something was completely 100% resolved and the morons pretended it wasn't and made a mess of everything.
>and made a mess of everything.
And let's be honest it was already a mess to start with it's like trying to put out a kitchen fire with grease.
The Onslaught story was neatly tying in an old plot from a previous writer and wrapping it up at the start of a new big event. The Dark Bishop saga was just a trainwreck from start to finish to the moment when they brought him back and the X-Men just agree to pretend it never happened.
Living Monolith was one
>itt X-fans are still seething about subplots that were eventually resolved over 20 years ago
>Technically OMD, SS, CS, BEYOND, etc etc
spiderman shit is fricked
It was really hard being a comic fan from then to..... now.
Gets blacked by bishop 30 years later
Ahura was given up to genetic council in 1988 and didn't get to his parents until 1993
forgot the page
part of me wonders how things would have went if they just went full clark kent and had him grow up with humans.
So why did it take so long for them to reveal Rogue's name? We knew pretty much all her history from puberty to present so it's not like her past was shrouded in much mystery. It's not like she was secretly some alternate version of someone else or some shit. Could they just never agree? Did they never think it up? After literal decades "Anna Marie" is pretty anti climactic.
Same reason it took forever for Wolverine's origin to be revealed: the mystery was part of the appeal. We actually didn't know all that much of Rogue's history beyond the very basics. We knew she was a runaway that Mystique took in and that her powers manifested when she was making out with a boy (Cody Robbins) and then the Ms. Marvel deal but that was it. Almost everything else was filled in by her mid-2000s solo series, including her name, which was just taken from the movies (Anna from Anna Paquin, Marie from her actual name in the films).
Like Wolverine it's a case where they probably should have never bothered because after 20 years the reveal was never going to be anything but a wet fart.
>Everything about James Howlett
Man, now there was a disappointing reveal if ever there was one. if you want another big issue it's hack modern writers trying to plant their stamp on the legacy toys. It's like the whole thing's a toy box and everyone was having fun till you leave the room and someone's little brother broke everyone's stuff and then you get yelled at for not sharing.
Kind of impressed with how they badly dropped the ball with Logan's past. That "I just remembered everything" moment followed by government stooges shitting their pants so badly that they kill themselves was such a good set-up. And then it was just all that bullshit with Dog and Daken and Romulus and wahtever.
Claremont's original intent was for Sabretooth to be his father kind of like how he wanted Mystique to also be Rogue's biological mother.
And his ORIGINAL original intent was for Wolverine to have been an actual wolverine turned into a human by the High Evolutionary.
I think people take the words "Original plan" too literally. When writers say their ORIGINAL PLAN was xyz they don't mean that's what they were actually going to do. They mean it was an idea that kicked around at some point but decided against for any number of reasons. So while he had all these origins in his head ready to go, the original intention was, most likely, to be purposely vague.
No that was Wein.
He wanted Mystique to be Rogue's biological father. She would've shape-shifted a functioning wiener and impregnated Destiny with it. Thankfully Shooter shot that down hard.
No he wanted Mystique to be Nightcrawler's father having impregnated Destiny while Mystique would be Rogue's mother making Rogue and Kurt half-siblings. IIRC he did make Mystique into Rogue's mother in X-Men Forever.
It really does demystify him, doesn't it? Before he was a badass loner who got up to god knows what with god knows how many enemies and friends out there to explore and... oh wait no he's just some pud.
the story i've heard is the whole reason they did finally reveal Wolverine's origin is that they didn't want the movies to do it first
It's somewhat comforting to know that the movies have always been at the core of the blame
Not really a mystery but I feel like they were setting up Polaris for something bigger than she ever really ended up being
Remember when Roma made it so the X-men couldn't be seen on TV? Whatever happened to that? I don't think they ever explained it away.
Wasn't there a Marvel Team Up story that wasn't explained for thirty issues? In MTU # 57, Spidey and Black Widow fight Silver Samurai, but for some reason find that he stole what appeared to be a worthless clay figurine. Fast forward to the MTU issue where the SNL cast guest stars and Silver Samurai tried to get back a ring that was accidentally sent to John Belushi. Fast forward to MTU #82-5, it turned out that the ring was a teleportation device that Samurai was holding for Viper. She used it to sneak onto the SHIELD Helicarrier and slowly take it over. I think that they eventually said that the teleportation ring was hidden in the figurine from thirty issues before.
wolverine and jubilee fling in uncanny. was it ever concluded?
He moved on to younger tastier asian teen sidekicks
There was never a fling, Jubilee initially had a crush on him but she eventually got over it by the time Wolverine lost his adamantium and their relationship evolved into a father/daughter one.
Kitty Pryde was revealed to be a "Neo" in Claremont's return during X-men 100, but then just disappeared and didn't come back till Colossus's death to cure the Legacy Virus and it was never spoken about again.
I spoke to Claremont at a con, and he said because Marvel hated the Neo idea everything was scraped.It got panned but Kitty was going to gain claws, like she did in X-Men Forever.
Another unresolved plot was Hannah Conover, who became the first-ever Brood Queen to resist the "Brood Empress" and she was frozen and left in cryosleep in Muir Island, to find a way to reverse the Brood transformation. This was during the Onslaught Saga time and not to far later Muri Island was destroyed and she was never mentioned again.
Oh, that reminds me. Remember when Cannonball was a Highlander.