Comics question?

[newnumber6]

So I happened to be looking at some scans of the new X-Men Legacy book, to see, lo and behold, Chamber's back to the way he started out as.

Now, they've hinted he was a ticking time bomb for reverting back to that state before when he was all Apocalypse-faced, so maybe I just missed when the moment when he did, but we also just had the return of mutancy after AvsX, and it occurs to me, I've been out of the loop on new releases and so I don't really know an answer to a fairly basic question...

So let me put it to you:

After the restoration of mutants, did all the depowered mutants (those who are still alive, anyway) get their old powers back? Or was it just that new mutants started appearing? Or is it some halfassed combination of the two as any individual writers see fit (as was the case with how exactly depowerings worked when they happened, so maybe that's fitting)?

Comments

[angelophile.livejournal.com]

New mutants have just started appearing. Well, five did back in Generation Hope, but after the AVX event, apparently people have suddenly started mutating again. Something to do with the Phoenix force, seemingly, but I skipped over it myself.

But it's not a case of existing characters getting re-powered, as of yet. It's just that the vast majority of named characters depowered on M Day have been restored by one way or another, because a writer wanted to use them. Magneto was repowered by the High Evolutionary, I think, Polaris by something Apocalypsey, I think, Jubilee's a vampire, Rictor got his powers back via the Scarlet Witch, I believe, Wildchild and Feryl were just back to their mutant selves with little to no explanation, Dani Moonstar's got her Valkyrie powers back, I think, but not her mutant ones and so on.

Jono's back to his old self purely because Mike Carey preferred him that way (good man) and when he did a story where Legion warped reality to create an alternate bubble universe (Age of X), because it was an alt reality, Jono was back to his original look. When reality was restored, Carey did a handwavey thing where certain mutants who'd had their powers altered or restored in the alt universe retained them in 616 reality. Thus Jono back to his usual self.

So, basically, it's been writers desperately or lazily restoring powers of characters they wanted to use rather than write them without up until the recent AvX event where they've given themselves an excuse for mass repowerings or new mutants again.

It took Marvel slightly longer than I expected, but I guess editorial weren't under much pressure from their writers to repower, since they were all doing it on the sly anyway.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks for the summary. I always meant to, but never got around to reading Age of X... I knew there were some changes to characters that persisted but missed (or maybe was told and then subsequently completely forgot hearing about because I'd yet to see it in action, that's just as possible) Chamber being one of them. Good for him though, yeah.

I wouldn't be surprised if writers do start using the "mutants appearing again" to repower anybody they want to who hasn't already been... sort of say that they're now kind of like any other mutant before their powers spark, it just requires some kind of dramatic event to kick it up out of the dormant state.

[angelophile.livejournal.com]

Easy enough to miss Jono's repowering. Carey left Legacy shortly after that storyline and despite Chamber being on the roster of teaching staff at the new X-school, he's only ever appeared as occasional cameos since. Admittedly, one excellent cameo, but his appearances have usually been limited to throwaway jokes about him being overlooked by the rest of the mainstream X-men. It's only with a new writer coming on board that he's now, apparently, going to be in the spotlight more.

And, yep, it'd be silly for writers who want to use discarded depowered characters and want to write them with powers again to ignore the Phoenix thing. That's not how it's worked so far, that I've seen, but that and the Scarlet Witch apparently being good again give ready-made reasons for undoing M-Day for named characters.