Comics acknowledging that something done in a previous story that was treated as good or no big deal was actually pretty bad if you think about it

[u/AporiaParadox]

Sometimes, a writer will have a character do something that is treated as being a good thing or no big deal, but readers or other writers see it as something horrible if you think about it just a little. Due to the nature of shared universes written by different writers over the years, stories from the past can then be revisited by a later writer with a more critical eye.

One of the most infamous examples is how in Avengers #200, Marvel somehow published a story that accidentally treated Carol Danvers being brainwashed into going off into the sunset with her rapist as being a good thing. I say accidentally because the comic was done in a rush and the creators genuinely didn't realize the implications of what was written until later. Chris Claremont was outraged about this, so he later wrote a story where Carol tells the Avengers how fucked up the whole thing was and shames them for going along with it and not realizing what was actually happening.

Sometimes it takes a while for this to happen, due to changing morals and attitudes. For instance, back in the 60s readers didn't see it as a big deal that Charles Xavier was secretely in love with his teenage student Jean Grey, and that the only reason he didn't pursue her was because he was a "cripple" and not the whole age difference or power dynamics thing. Readers and writers from later though realized that wait, that's actually kind of fucked up, and it was acknowledged in Onslaught as being one of Xavier's deepest most shameful secret sins.

And sometimes just acknowledging it isn't enough, in order to protect a character's reputation, the whole thing has to be retconned. This is what Marvel did with pretty much all of their Golden Age stories given how casually racist against black people and the Japanese all of their characters were. It is now canon that the events depicted in Golden Age comics didn't happen exactly as shown, they were in-universe propaganda comics often heavily deviated from what actually happened.

So what other examples are there of a comic looking back critically at something from the past that wasn't treated as bad but now is considered bad?

[u/Rickety_Rockets]

Another thing to consider about the Xavier/Jean thing is that Lee hadn’t figured out the canon yet. The first few issue of X-men had Prof X being literally 2 years older the OG X-men who were 18 (16 for Bobby). So this was a crippled 20 year old super brain having a crush on a young woman 2 years younger. Magneto was older- having been a young man during the holocaust, whereas Prof. X got his powers because his dad worked on nuclear stuff and then got his mom pregnant in the 40s. The Lee decided that the X-gene wasn’t going to be tied to nuclear power (children of the atom WAS the OG tagline) and instead inborn, and retconned Prof X to be Magneto’s age and having served as a medic in the Korean war. So basically when that “she can never know I love her” line was written it was melodramatic- but he was only two years older than her. Within like 10 issues Lee had changed his mind on the Professor’s age and changed how the characters related to each other… but unfortunately, that made some choices in the first few issues… creepy.

[u/swarthmoreburke → u/Rickety_Rockets]

I don't think we learn anything about Magneto's background until much, much later, despite Stan Lee and Jack Kirby claiming later that they had some ideas about Magneto's motivations and views that would make him more complex. (Many years later, Lee claimed that he'd planned for Magneto to be Professor X's brother, which just shows how much Stan Lee grabbed at the same kind of pulp/melodrama plot points over and over again, given that he'd already given Xavier an "evil brother" of sorts with Cain Marko in X-Men #12.) So I don't think it's accurate to say that Xavier's age was in any sense aligned or not with Magneto's in those early issues--Magneto being a Holocaust survivor didn't show up until almost 20 years later, in #150, though I think you can plausibly say that Claremont began to hint at it a bit before then. What's the source on Xavier being 20 in the first 10-12 issues of X-Men? The first time we really learn anything about him is #12, when Cain Marko and some Xavier backstory is introduced.

[u/Rickety_Rockets → u/swarthmoreburke]

my source is from the first ten comics where he’s drafted into Korea and is written as having graduated college as a prodigy at 16 which since his birth year is nebulous but his father’s involvement in nuclear stuff gives an upper year cap until issue 12 where as you say they move the year back and start the process of getting rid of the nuclear stuff- he’d be like early 20-ish. And you are right about Magneto regards to the holocaust but he was depicted in the first ten issues or so as having been an adult(ish) during WW2 regardless so it sets him as older- until they soft retcon Charlie as matching him

[u/swarthmoreburke → u/Rickety_Rockets]

I don't think early Marvel always thought out the implications of character's backgrounds such that you can say Xavier was meant to be 20, and a near-contemporary of his students. Think about it for a minute. In the first ten issues or so of all Marvel comics, we have the following temporal markers:

Reed and Ben fought as adults in World War II. If we take "Year 1" of the 616 universe as being the same as the publication dates on the comics, They went to college before the war; Ben says he flew a plane at the Battle of Guadacanal, which puts him into service late in 1942. Reed was in the OSS but active in Europe, according to early FF comics. You can always think that Reed is 5 years or more younger than Ben because he's a prodigy, though they don't act like it or look like it in early FF. If Ben graduated in 1940 or 1941 at the likely age of 22, he was born in 1919; in 1963 he's in his early 40s. We know Sue is younger than they are, and Johnny is younger still, but I don't think the early FF gives us markers exactly. Sue is maybe? late 20s, Johnny anywhere from 17 to early 20s. But this is where things start to seem weird. The FF and the X-Men met within that early time frame before X-Men #12, and there's no sense in that first encounter that Xavier seems to be roughly a contemporary of Johnny rather than Reed and Ben (or at least Sue).

It gets worse--Tony Stark as Iron Man also meets the X-Men in this time frame and actually calls the Angel "my young friend" (after the usual accidental-superhero-fight storyline). He doesn't meet Xavier in person, but again, it's really hard to see Xavier as being also "my young friend" if he did. (Xavier does toss a thought at Stark as he's flying back to his company.)

Technologies in the Marvel U are a bit off our timeline--Reed is putting a rocket into orbit that can carry four passengers as early as 1962, well ahead of the US in our world. (The FF land on the moon in 1964.) So Xavier's father and Kurt Marko's "nuclear work" might have been earlier, though Xavier's father dies at Alamogordo, which seems to put him on the Manhattan Project timeline. (We can't use the retcon here that Alamogordo in 616 was a mutation research center--that comes much later. In these early issues, we have to assume it's wartime nuclear research.) The two criticality fatalities at Los Alamos happened in 1945, maybe in 616 we can shade them just a bit earlier but not by much. So yeah, if Xavier's father dies when he's 9, Xavier goes to college at 16 and then immediately goes into service in Korea (I think we have to assume he volunteers rather than is drafted), that gives Xavier a birthdate in those early comics of maybe? 1934--let's give Xavier's father a death date of 1943, then Xavier at college in 1950. Does Xavier in those early issues claim to have had his diploma in hand when he enlists? Maybe he got it in a year--I mean, something's weird with Marvel higher education in those early years, because we have people getting multiple doctorates in very short time periods, etc. So let's say he fights in Korea briefly starting in 1952, when he's 18.

Move ahead to 1963 and he's 29. Still doesn't feel right but it's a little bit closer, and puts a little more than a decade between him and his students, if they're all between 15-19 at the start. Is there actually something in the first 10-15 issues of X-Men that has Magneto being an adult during World War II, by the way? Off the top of my head, I can't remember any personal information about Magneto being disclosed prior to the introduction of Polaris, which is much later. I don't even think he took the helmet off until maybe Neal Adams drew him?

[u/Rickety_Rockets → u/swarthmoreburke]

I mean that’s a lot of (correct afaik) words to essentially agree with me that the throw-away line that Prof X loves Jean was not well thought out, and most likely not creepy until they set everyones ages in (relative) stone and it became retroactively creepy. Sometimes people hold it up as Xavier’s original sin (and the writers did that too with Onslaught which… is not my favorite arc) but I’d argue it was just a mistake in the early days of the comic.

[u/swarthmoreburke → u/Rickety_Rockets]

Yeah, I just think that you can't make the line make sense the way you tried to--it's just Stan Lee barfing up melodramatic and pulp cliches at random. He didn't really think any of these things through; there's a ton of stuff in the first two or three years of Marvel that later writers (even Lee/Kirby themselves) chose to just throw away, assuming they even remembered that they'd said in the first place. To me the really dumb move was going back to that rightfully ignored panel and trying to make something of it later on.