Tim Seeley turns off his social media pages because a controversy erupts over how he portrayed Magik

So it looks like even a few years after Elon Musk bought Twitter and changed the name to X, there's still controversies bursting out there over comics, whether justified or not. And the latest one involves writer Tim Seeley and an X-Men story he wrote. But before we get to that, here's something I noticed written by Tom Brevoort at least a year ago about Magik from the X-Men franchise that requires pondering:

In the past, I haven’t liked Magik pretty much at all. But that doesn’t mean that the character doesn’t have fans, lots of them. And being in the position that I’m in now means that I can prevent her from being written in the manner that used to irritate me. So there’s no problem with using her.

He seems to have laid out quite a double-standard in which, on the one hand, he acts like a fictional character is a real person, a considerable problem still haunting comicdom till this day. On the other hand, he ostensibly admits, though not clearly, that it's the assigned writer who's guilty of whatever he thought "irritating" about Illyana Rasputin in the past. It was surely to be expected from somebody who hasn't been convincing in his dedication to the job he works in.

But that doesn't explain why Brevoort approved of the following story in focus, which leads us to what's come up on the web, as explained by Comic Book Movie. It's a story supposed to be set in a future alternate era, where Magik kills Maria Hill(!) and is killed by Nick Fury in turn, and goes to the depths of hell again, and:

Well, there are sexual undertones in the comic that imply the demons have sexually abused Magik. X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity #4 doesn't depict rape, but demeaning remarks are made about her body, and two of the hero's tormenters, Belasco and S'ym, were previously revealed to have abused Magik as a child.

When Magik arrives in Limbo, she's in her underwear, and as Darkchild, she thanks her abuser—in an admittedly sexualised pose—for "sating [her] pathetic needs." While some read that as a reference to sexual assault, Belasco is actually making her beg for food.

Sexual assault has frequently been used as a plot device for female characters in comics, so it's easy enough to understand the outrage. It may not have been the intention here, but the issue can be read in that way, and therein lies the problem.

The backlash was so vocal that writer Tim Seeley, who faced abuse and death threats (which is obviously unacceptable), has deactivated his X account and gone private on Instagram. On Bluesky, he wrote, "Welp...I had to finally deactivate twitter because that was just a touch too much death for me and the family. It was a sh*t 16 year run! F**k everybody!"

He may have erased that specific post too, and it wouldn't be shocking if the atmosphere wasn't so clean even there. First, let's be perfectly clear. Of course if anybody reacted that repulsively on social media about this story, it's offensive and doesn't help the cause of anybody who's allegedly revolted by how the story was written up. That said, even if this is supposed to be an alternate future story, it is insulting to the intellect how a character who'd once been built up is reverted back to a denigrating position, as though her status in the regular world had never been. And that only suggests these alternate future titles Marvel's been working on lately have little purpose beyond the settings.

Here's what The Gamer tells about the story:

Specifically, readers claim that the comic depicts Magik being sexually abused until she becomes a villain. This is perceived as a resurgence of the trend in which female characters are sexually assaulted for shock value and receive a disproportionate amount of violence, something Marvel is no stranger to.

While Marvel obviously isn't innocent of concocting tasteless stories alluding to sexual violence, we have DC to thank for really leading us to the sorry state mainstream comics suffered from 2 decades ago, when they published Identity Crisis, the miniseries that minimized sexual violence for the sake of leftist metaphors, and worst, minimized real life victims of sexual violence in the process. Such abominations are why we got to a point where the audience may not be ready for stories in which sexual violence of the worst kind is even alluded to. That aside, one more reason it probably shouldn't be surprising a story like this was approved by Brevoort is because, lest we forget, he was editor of Avengers at the time Brian Bendis mistreated Scarlet Witch in Disassembled. It certainly does make his claim he wants to prevent Magik from being written poorly very bizarre indeed.

Another writer at ComicBook also spoke about the subject, but there's traces in his piece of blurring the distinctions between fictional characters and their real life writers/editors:

Right now, the X-Men books are in the midst of “Age of Revelation”, an alternate universe story whose perception that has mixed, which seems like the watchword for the line since Brevoort took over. This story takes place ten years in the future, with many characters drastically changed. Magik, who has been Cyclops’s right-hand woman in X-Men, has become the Darkchylde again, and an Infinity comic, the books that Marvel puts on their Marvel Unlimited app, told the story of how she got there. However, this comic caused a huge uproar, one that sees a disturbing Marvel trope return, and we need to talk about it.

We may alright, but I'm not so sure the columnist himself is the most qualified for the job, as a certain part of the following suggests:

Marvel Infinity’s X-Men: Age of Revelation #4 revealed the fate of Magik after her death. She was sent back to Limbo, where she met her old demonic masters and they decided that they wanted her back as their weapon. So, the demons sexually assaulted her until she became their slave again. Now, it wasn’t shown on the page, but the book didn’t shy away from telling us what happened to her. It’s such a strange and disturbing choice to make in 2025; Magik has gotten more popular than ever, and to have her abused in such a way is honestly terrible.

I looked at the earlier article from March linked to in the paragraph, and the fellow veers into silly babbling about Magik being great because she's supposedly better than Dr. Strange. Umm, that all depends on how well written she is, and if she isn't, then her power levels don't add up to much of anything. He also says, "Take Doctor Strange’s powers away and he’s just a guy. Take Magik’s powers away and she’s still a formidable fighter." *Ahem*. Around 1989, there was a story in the 2nd volume's 10th issue where Stephen Strange wound up in a fight with Morbius over a misunderstanding, and the Living Vampire assaulted Stephen when he tried to initiate magic spells, cancelling out the incantations, but Stephen didn't back down. Rather, he took to using physical martial arts taught by butler Wong, and succeeded in defeating Morbius that way. What ComicBook's writer says erases that storytelling history. I don't know just now if Dr. Strange was originally established by creators Stan Lee/Steve Ditko as a physical combat practitioner, but by the late 80s, succeeding writers like Peter Gillis certainly seem to have made use of the possibilities. What's the columnist trying to prove with such a puff piece? Which ends with:

Magik was able to summon a massive demon to help her fight Wraith’s mech. As powerful as Doctor Strange is, he wouldn’t have been able to summon a powerful demon to do his bidding. Magik’s history can be quite convoluted, but she’s proven herself as Marvel’s best magic user, making her a unique weapon for the X-Men.

Sorry, but this too hilariously ignorant of the fact that it all depends on what even Lee thought made for a great story, and whether it was plausible enough within the boundaries of science fantasy Lee established in his time. I'm sure that writers with talent could come up with a great Iron Man story where Tony Stark built a giant Japanese-style mech and put it to use in battles against criminals armed with similar weapons, but let's remember that with bad apples like Joe Quesada and his successors being in charge of Marvel, the chances something that spectacular could work well is simply out of the question. If you want to defend Illyana Rasputin as a storytelling vehicle and condemn superfluous use of sexual violence as a storytelling tool, that's okay, but making her and Dr. Strange out to sound like real persons and reducing everything to a whole "my favorite character's better than yours" argument does nothing, and in fact runs the danger of encouraging abuse of the character considered "lesser" by the columnist.

Sure, it's awful if Magik was established as sexually abused by the demons in the new X-Men story; whatever abuse she underwent in the Bronze Age stories where she first appeared was enough. But, chances are the cybertrolls on X and other platforms who attacked Seeley weren't altruistic, nor were they actually against offensive use of a serious issue in an entertainment product; chances are high they were just looking for excuses to attack somebody else over something they otherwise have no issue with in real life, certainly if they never condemn cases like the following in Europe. If the attacks on Seeley were only written for the sake of "fun", it only makes clear no problems are being solved at all.

With that told, there doesn't seem to be much point to these alternate future storylines Marvel's currently turning out, and the hypocrisies surrounding the whole mess are stupefying.

Labels: bad editors, Doctor Strange, golden calf of death, history, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, Nick Fury, technology, violence, women of marvel, X-Men