that-steve asked: I'm sure I'm not first but Magneto was reverted to infancy by Alpha then brought only to young adulthood by Erik The Red. Xavier lost his original body and was given a very much younger cloned body. They can always be contemporaries and still tied to World War II...
A lot of people have made some version of this same point. But you’re not thinking it through–this doesn’t solve anything.
The way Marvel Time works, it’s only been around 13-15 years since the Fantastic Four got their powers and the Marvel Universe was born. This is why Cyclops and Beast and Iceman aren’t 70 years old. And it’s a sliding situation–next year, it will still have been 13-15 years, and more and more accumulated history is crammed into that container that only grows very slightly over a long period of time.
So this means that X-MEN #1 happened, give-or-take, around 2001. And that means that, if Magneto was a child of let’s say 12 when he was in the Camps in WWI, then he was 67 years old when he first fought the X-Men and founded the brotherhood of Evil Mutants. And next year, he’ll have been 68. And the year after that, he’ll have been 69.
The problem is that his Auschwitz experiences are a fixed point in time, but his super villain career is a floating point in time that always moves forward along with the rest of Marvel history. So yeah, Magneto was reduced to infancy and then restored–but that happened well into his career as a villain. Very soon, he’ll have been a 90 year old man taking on those punk teenaged X-Men for the first time. And Professor X is already close to half Magneto’s age.
I always figured Magneto could be that old because he had mutant vitality and stuff. So, like Namor, he’s simply less affected by the passage of time.
Xavier was ridiculously young when the series started (given his apparent age at his father’s funeral, after the Alamagordo nuclear test, he shouldn’t have been old enough to enlist in the Korean War while it was still going on, and even if he squeaked in was under 30 as of X-MEN 1 in 1963. And we know his mutant powers came with enhanced vitality, so he could be a slow ager too.
It’s when you try to fit Wanda and Pietro in there that it becomes a problem – at one point, she claimed to remember WWII. But their link to Magneto seems to have been unbuckled…
Re: Wanda and Pietro
The 21st century revisions to the OHOTMU placed Wanda and Pietro’s birth in 1958, then had the High Evolutionary put them in suspended animation for a couple of decades before getting around to reviving them and presenting them to the Maximoffs to raise.
I’ve often wondered if there was a story I missed where this was revealed, or did the OHOTMU team invent that theory out of whole cloth?
