X-Men Writer Leaves Social Media Platform Following Death Threats

Writer Tim Seeley has been working as a professional comic book creator for over two decades, doing work for every major comic book publisher (we recently interviewed Seeley about his Spawn Universe series, Bloodletter, which he created with Joe Illidge), and has always been very present on social media. However, recent death threats over the plotline of a recent X-Men comic book Seeley wrote has led to the creator deactivated his account on the social media platform, X.

He is still on the Bluesky social media platform, where 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 shit 16 year run! Fuck everybody!"

What was the X-Men comic book about?

Seeley wrote the latest X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity Comic #4 tie-in online-only comic book with artist Phillip Sevy, colorist Michael Bartolo, and letterer Clayon Cowles, that spotlighted how Illyana Rasputin, the mutant known as Magik, became Darkchylde in the dark future that is the centerpiece of the Age of Revelation crossover event.

We learned in the first Age of Revelation issue that Magik was killed on a mission soon after Doug Ramsey, now known as Revelation, rejoined the X-Men (as Ramsey wanted the X-Men to free Fabian Cortez so that Cortez could amplify Doug's abilities so that Revelation could take over more people's minds). In this online-only story, we see that after being killed, Illyana's soul returned to Limbo, where she was "reborn" as Darkchylde (who then took control of a city in the U.S.).

What were some of the critical reactions?

A number of fans took issue with the story on social media, feeling that the original origin of Magik was that Illyana Rasputin was trapped in Limbo as a little girl, and was abused for years until she was hardened into the magical warrior known as Magik. So for her to return to that situation, and seemingly be degraded again in death, and come back as the Darkchylde (and as we see above, she is crawling around in subservience, which also put some readers on edge) was too much for readers.

Criticizing a writer's choices for a story is obviously fair game, and the people who kept their criticisms to just criticisms are all fair play, but obviously, this being the internet, some people couldn't just leave it at that, and soon, people were posting things like "die" and "you need to kill yourself" and "Oh we gotta kill this man."

Obviously, no one is saying that the majority of the responses were like the ones cited above. Clearly, they were not. However, for many creators, "Only some of the people sent me death threats" is not as soothing of a position as you might think. Seeley is not retreating from social media entirely, so he has not run from the criticism. He simply removed himself from the one specific platform that he felt had too many death threats for his liking.

Source: Bleeding Cool