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…
Magneto himself isn’t really too much of an issue. You have the possibility of mutant hyper vitality, he’s been de-aged and re-aged, he’s also spent a significant amount of time in zero G space environments and is known for messing around with genetic experimentation quite a bit. If Baron Zemo can hide out in south America taking Nazi drugs and practicing karate for 50 years and then go toe to toe with Captain America, I think we can cut Magneto the same amount of slack.
The problem is all the people he’s connected with, but even with most of them there are some easy outs. Professor X doesn’t exactly need to be in his physical prime when the X-Men start their adventures. If memory serves he was on his death bed in those early issues about as often as Aunt May, and I figure there are probably enough cloning shenanigans and alien healing technology in play to keep him in the game.
As for Wanda and Pietro, let us not forget that the High Evolutionary plays a large part in their origins. If I remember the story correctly, Magda was midwifed by the Cow Woman Bova. Magda died, and then the twins spent enough time on Mount Wundagore for Wanda to develop a profound mystical connection to the Elder God Chthon, and for the Hi-Ev himself to develop something of a fixation on their genetic makeup before Bova dropped both kids off with the Maximoffs and called it a day. In light of the passage of time however, lord knows how much time the twins spent on Mt. Wundagore as children. Knowing the Hi-Ev, they could have been put into suspended animation, aged, de-aged, re-aged, had their memories wiped… none of that is beyond his physical, intellectual or moral capability.
