I could be here all day listing the X-Men characters who have become fan favorites, but Illyana Rasputin / Magik has been something special. Her unique character design and her infectious energy, not only in the comics but in movies and games like Marvel Rivals, have earned her quite a lot of fans. The popularity of Rivals even led to her getting her first solo comic series in over twenty years, which became a smash success before ending rather suddenly this past September.
The fandom around Magik became impossible to ignore this week… because of a new comic that has courted a lot of controversy. Her role in the ongoing Age of Revelation event has already brought a lot of ups and downs: she was believed to have died in the X-Men’s raid on a SHIELD prison, but the demonic Darkchild side of her kept her alive and running a Severance-like corporate hell. This week’s X-Men: Age Of Revelation Marvel Infinity Comic #4, written by Tim Seeley with art by Philip Sevy, filled in some of the gaps of how Magik survived, showing her landing in Limbo and being taken over by Darkchild.
In the process, the issue showed Magik/Darkchild being subservient to the demons of Limbo. In one panel, she is literally begging on her hands and knees for a piece of discarded meat, telling her captors: “how grateful I am that you would sate my pathetic needs.” It’s not just that the pose she is drawn in could be interpreted as sexual (to the point where I don’t even feel comfortable embedding it here), it’s that the whole ordeal could be interpreted as Magik/Darkchild being sexually abused by the demons, just as she canonically was when she was stuck in Limbo a child.
Magik deserves better…
The comic has been met with a mountain of backlash in the days since. My personal favorite can be found in the replies to Marvel’s recent post about a completely unrelated series, Daredevil/Punisher: The Devil’s Trigger. None of the hundreds of comments are about the book itself, but rather the same reaction meme: Marvel Rivals‘ Magik in a nondescript room with the text “Address me”, asking the company to address the controversy.
Amid the spamming in comment sections, and the actual nuanced conversation around the issue, some of the outrage has gone to an unfortunate extreme. Seeley deactivated his Twitter account earlier this week, after some fans sent literal death threats against the creative team.
While the reactions themselves have gone into such different territories, there is a conversation that deserves to be had about how Magik is portrayed in X-Men: Age Of Revelation Marvel Infinity Comic #4. Like I said, many fans have inferred that Magik was sexually or otherwise physically abused during her time spent in Limbo as a child, which adds another layer of emotion to her actions in young adulthood and adulthood. It already is frustrating that she would be thrown back into that situation again, and that the Darkchild side of her would create a murky issue of consent and agency to her being subservient to the demons. The overly sexualized nature of that specific panel art, which became the cover image for the issue on the Marvel Unlimited app, doesn’t help either.
The whole thing also feels like salt in the wound given how Magik has been embraced and portrayed elsewhere. Marvel Rivals and even the New Mutants movie not only led to more people falling in love with the character, but prioritized her tenacity and coolness at every single turn. The same can be said for the aforementioned Magik solo series from Ashley Allen, German Peralta and Arthur Hesli, which was so embraced by fans that it often outsold the main X-Men books.
The news that that book was going to end after only ten issues surprised and hurt a lot of fans. Sure, the same creative team will be returning to Magik in 2026 with a miniseries co-starring her brother Colossus (a tired trick that Marvel has already pulled with its popular heroines), but she arguably deserved to a have a full-blown solo title for much longer than that. And in the interim, having Magik reduced down to a powerless abuse victim in X-Men: Age Of Revelation Marvel Infinity Comic #4 has just taken things into a messy turn.
X-Men group editor Tom Brevoort has made it abundantly clear in interviews and on his Substack that he is not a Magik fan, previously admitting in 2003 that he wished he could “drop a concrete block” on her head. At the time, he was trying to argue why he shouldn’t be editing Marvel’s X-Men titles… and decades later, now that he is in that role, his comments around her have only softened a little bit.
“In the past, I haven’t liked Magik pretty much at all,” Brevoort wrote in September of 2024. “But that doesn’t mean that the character doesn’t have fans, lots of them. And being in the position that I’m in now means that I can prevent her from being written in the manner that used to irritate me. So there’s no problem with using her.”
That sentiment, mixed with the wide and controversial inconsistency with how Magik has been portrayed lately, has just made fans of the character sad. There’s no telling exactly what the future holds for Magik, but one thing is abundantly clear… she deserves better than this.
(featured image: Marvel Comics)
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