This shit fucked me up. When I was a kid, I thought Magneto had actually fried a little girl's face. I freaking tore up the comic and tossed it behind our washing machine.
I didn't find out until years later that other people had the same impression, and they printed a letter in an x-factor comic saying the girl was meant to be a doombot. Even so, it still freaks me out looking at it. It's like PTSD.
Wyatt Powell
You can tell that's an ass-covering retcon.
Jose Martinez
How could she not have been a ferromagnetic robot? I'm not super familiar with Magneto's power set but I don't think he has the ability to melt an organic being's flesh.
Julian Sullivan
Magneto probably could barely wait that long to kill her.
Kayden Bailey
well he is a jew. Its weird that he didnt rape her before melting her face
Ayden King
Alright how's this? When I was a kid, I foolishly bought a Spawn TPB. I was like 8 or something. Well let's just say that this shit was too much for me. I read it all the way through without much problem but there more I think about it, the more uncomfortable it makes me. From what I remember, Spawn basically banished God and Lucifer from the universe. Leaving it basically the same but there's demons in the streets and other fucked shit like some little girl torturing a family hellraiser style. Featuring other things like a skinny Clown cutting off a woman's head, a lady picking at her skin till she's down to the muscle, the aforementioned Hellraiser dinner scene, and other stuff my 8 year old mind should not have seen.
I don't know what my dad or the cashier was thinking when they let me buy that. I don't know what happened to that volume. Probably got lost in storage and eaten by moths. Or I sold it. Who knows.
Nathan Gomez
Either Doom can make telepathic doombots, or Magneto activated One of Doom's energy gadgets in his hand and fried the girl's head
Ian Reed
I bought this comic when I was a kid. After reading it I kept clutching my throat in case it would be slit.
I also remember the Queen of Hearts who drilled people's hearts out.
David Turner
That shit is not real, OP, man up.
Julian Brown
I'm dead before dawn! I'm dead before dawn! I'm dead before dawn!
Scared the shit out of me as a kid.
Josiah Lee
...
William Powell
I'm not sure it's a retcon. The third picture seems to imply that Magneto realizes it isn't an actual little girl. He can sense metal after all.
He probably can. He has a hard on for blending science and magic.
Andrew Wood
That is clearly how John Byrne always draws Terminator-type robots. Metallo, the Vision without his skin, the villain from Next Men…
Gavin Johnson
Oh, you want TRAUMA? This issue broke my tiny ten year old brain. It denoted a switch between SF tropes to full-on body horror. Rom started off as The Day The Earth Stood Still meets Invaders From Mars, with Klaatu inside Gort, but gradually drifted into H. P. Lovecraft territory. With this issue, we got Romeo and Juliet as directed by Lucio Fulci. Eventually we got a Norman Rockwell painting despoiled by H. R. Giger, with the Clairton Massacre, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. Rumour has it that Bill Mantlo had some kind of nervous breakdown, and was turning in scripts like this as a consequence.
Joshua Rivera
Amazing inking here by British team Brian Akin and Ian Garvey. I dunno why they always worked as a team, but Akin and Garvey also did great work on the Transformers guides.
Nathan Diaz
I have no idea how this shit got past the Comic Code Authority. Maybe it was the general feeling of renaissance that was coming with Frank Miller's Daredevil and Heavy Metal magazine, that comics were reaching for a mature readership.
Logan Cox
Sal Buscema has his limitations, but here Akin and Garvey push it into gloriously lurid expressions of horror and rage, that make Mantlo's broad writing strokes work better than they ever did in The Hulk. It's almost visually at the level of Den here, all purple and gold and silver, the old Soviet base looking like Salvadore Dali and Steve Ditko had a one night stand.
Jackson Diaz
They actually made Starshine 1, with her chocolate-box head, look scary, an achievement in itself. Eventually they would replace this look with an Amazon Badass designed by Walt Simonson.
Rom goes Conan on Dr. Warlock here. Then just as quickly he's Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein. This is one image that stuck with me, Rom choking a wraith while it desperately shifted from one monstrous form to another.
I never could figure out if Rom and the civilians were dying from the radiation at the test site, or if Quasimodo had just done a crap job cloning their new bodies.
Mason Bennett
I had nightmares for weeks after seeing the episode Candlestick Jack episode
Ryan Wilson
How in the flying fuck could anyone be scared of some Scarecrow knock off wanna be named CandleJa
Joshua Lewis
Sheesh this ancient CandleJack meme is so lame. I've never li
Gabriel Murphy
Is there anything there indicating she's actually a telepath and Doom isn't bluffing about her being a mutant?
Jayden Moore
...
Ethan White
Except that it's apparent to anyone who can actually read and therefore understand Magneto's dialogue right after the face frying
Brody Harris
kek'd
try to imagine being an innocent child and reading these stories thinking children are untouchable. Then you get some random back-up story where a at-the-time-heroic Magneto calmly melts the skin of a little girl's face, and we get a close-up of it for several panels. And then it's never brought up again. This would be unheard of at the time, with the CCA and everything.