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We've all noticed it. Characters not seeming quite like themselves in ways both large and small. Mutations coming-and-going without comment. Characters cycling through old costumes without explanation. Significant history being ignored or outright contradicted by writers and editors who should know better. The same events repeating, in slightly different ways. Books set in the same universe so disconnected they appearing to be happening in different timelines.

Most fans have chalked it up to incompetence on the part of writers, artists and editors. Or that they simply don't care enough to do any better. That they are doing things just to cater to nostalgia, or push an agenda. That who characters actually are and their history... it all just doesn't matter anymore.

We saw something else. We saw a pattern. And in that pattern we found a story...

Years of finding and putting together the clues! Years of theories and speculation!

It ALL comes together here in..!

The ConspiraXcy

(For Whom Eva Bell Tolls)

Early on in the issue, at the encouragement of Cyclops, Iceman goes from his initial 'snowman' form to the 'icy' form he will have variations of from then on...

Later in the issue, Hank and Bobby save someone... Only to be attacked by a mob for being mutants!

Hank decides Magneto was right, the humans aren't worth saving, and quits the X-Men in disgust!!!

He decides to use his mutant abilities as a wrestler, only to encounter another mutant with the same idea. Unus the Untouchable!

Unus decided he wants to join Magneto's Brotherhood. His attempts to prove himself worthy of that bring him afoul of the X-Men. Unus seems more than they can handle until Beast finally returns to the fold to save the day!

If Adult Beast managed to travel to the past of the Main-616 timeline, then of the group that will become known as the 'Time-Displaced 05', Young Iceman should already have his iceform... and yet Young Iceman arrives in the present as a black-eyed 'snowman'...

...and stays that way for a LONG time, until the Black Vortex event.

Later renouncing that power, he finally is changed into his ice-form, as a lasting consequence of the experience with the Vortex that everyone has in some form or other.

Young Iceman also mentions in All-New X-Men #8 that he had fought Unus the Untouchable(at least we hope that's what he meant).







So in the main-616 reality/timeline Iceman gained his iceform, Beast quit the X-Men in a huff, and then rejoined them to fight Unus the Untouchable.

In the reality/timeline of the 'TD05', Young Iceman didn't have his iceform, Beast was quitting the X-Men in a huff when brought to the future, yet young Iceman and presumably the rest of the X-Men had already somehow fought Unus. And after coming to the present, Young Iceman would not gain his Iceform for some time, and then only as a consequence of the Black Vortex.

Exactly the opposite of what it should be. That's not the last time you will be hearing that...

***

Uncanny X-Men (1963) Issue #1

While there are some jokes made about Iceman throwing snowballs at Magneto, largely based off the cover to the issue, fans know that Iceman was very much the MVP of that initial mission.



First Magneto takes control of one of the advanced Hunter missiles being tested, then he then destroys it. Magneto's next move is to force a launch of his own. The X-Men arrive, and Cyclops incapacitates himself blasting through Magneto's shield...



Magneto launches five missiles at the X-Men, who largely find themselves outmatched. Iceman manages to take out four of the missiles by himself...



Working together the other three manage to finish off the final missile, with Jean hurling it into the sea...



The four X-Men then move to engage Magneto, as the now-recovered Cyclops joins them. A shield hastily erected by Iceman saves the team, and the day is won as Magneto flees.


To recap, in the original main-616 version of Magneto's attack at Cape Citadel, there were only FIVE of those Hunter Missiles launched by Magneto at the X-Men. Cyclops NEVER took down ANY missiles, he was incapacitated. Angel tried to take ONE down and FAILED. Iceman then stepped up and took out FOUR of the missiles by HIMSELF. Using Angel for bait, Beast and Jean then teamed up to take out the last remaining ONE. Perhaps because it is so well known among fans, it's something that has remained remarkably faithful in the retelling over the years until...

X-Men Blue #32

X-Men Blue #32 generated a lot of discussion and controversy among fans, generally along the lines of how writer Cullen Bunn seemed to ignore thirty years of character development to reduce Magneto to his Silver Age state, a crazed villain. There were an assortment of theories as to why.

What seemed to go mostly unnoticed in the issue is a brief flashback to the battle from the time these X-Men first encountered Magneto...



Far from being incapacitated, while Beast and Angel are dodging missiles, THIS Cyclops is helping Iceman take out the missiles, and instead of dumping one missile in the sea, THIS Jean Grey dumps all of them. Exactly the opposite of how it had previously been depicted as happening.

It should be noted that some fans were suspicious when the TD05 first arrived from the past, asking Bendis: "Are they from an alternate reality or are they the original X-Men". "They are the original X-Men" was his response. It was repeated all around the internet that he said they were not from an alternate reality, when really he just said: "They are the original X-Men". Well, obviously they are the Original X-Men from somewhere...

One more thing... The original Main-616 Iceman always wore boots as part of his costume. It was often his only sign of a team uniform. Indeed, he didn't even get drawn with a belt with the 'X' on it like the rest of the team until Uncanny X-Men #39.



Yet Young TD05 Iceman arrived barefoot - and stayed that way.



When asked if Iceman just left the past in such a hurry that he forgot his shoes, or if it meant something, Bendis replied with a cagey: "Maybe...".

Exactly the opposite...

Initially, Eva seems only to freeze time locally, in what is labeled 'time-bubbles'.

It's an impressive feat, but she is later revealed to be capable of much more...

Beast notes there are growing anomalies with TD05 Jean Grey, her powers and their development...

One of the signs of this happening is things that were supposed to happen keep trying to happen in different ways. More on that in a bit...

The X-Men also keep fighting very advanced Sentinels who are sent to fight them by someone with intimate knowledge of the X-Men's future...

Uncanny X-Men (2013) Issue #17

While on a training mission in Tabula Rasa, Eva Bell briefly disappeared. When she reappeared, she had aged several years, from a teenager to a young woman.





Where she had gone was later revealed in a two-part story...

Uncanny X-Men Annual #1(2013)

During the events in Uncanny X-Men #17, Eva Bell finds herself dislodged in time.



Eva journeys first to the future where she briefly meets Jonathan Raven, aka Killraven, before being flung into the past(1875) where she encounters The Rawhide Kid in the Old West. From there she journeyed to the future again to the year 2099, encountering a future team of X-Men.

 They detect and find her using a a future version of Cerebro. It also identifies her mutant time-travel powers at "near Omega-level". She then is taken under the tutelage of the Sorcerer Supreme of that time... Illyana Rasputin. Illyana has had her own powers over time "removed", but she spends seven years helping train Eva to better control her own. During that time Eva marries and has a child...

Then Illyana's Sanctum is attacked... by the Beast!





Eva loses control of her powers and finds herself once again dislodged in time...

All-New X-Men Annual #1(2013)

Eva quickly finds herself face to face with... a dinosaur! She is rescued from her predicament by an unlikely savior... The sorceress Morgana Le Fey! Morgana quickly explains exactly where, or more accurately when, Eva finds herself. At The Dawn of Man(Fun fact: Google 'The Dawn of Man' and you will get a first page almost entirely of the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the monolith surrounded by primitive apes). The period is also known as 'prehistory'.

Morgana is basically imprisoned there in the past and wants Eva to help her get free. She also explains how the future with Eva's husband and child likely no longer exists. Eva doesn't fall for Morgana's manipulations, and conflict ensues... Eventually Eva prevails and then tries using her abilities to return home.

Eva is once more hurtling through time, desperate to get back to the future with her husband and child. She is careful not to stop or interact with anyone or anything...



until she arrives...



But she finds her husband and child are gone, as if they never were.



She rushes to the Sanctum Sanctorum for help from Illyana, but finds a very different Sorcerer Supreme...



Tony Stark!



She explains her predicament.



And finds Morgana's warning was all too true!



After warning Eva about the possibility of the changes she has already wrought to time, and explaining that any further attempt to fix things by her will likely make them worse, the future Tony Stark helps her get back to the time period from which she left.



With no one, except Celeste, the wiser.



No harm done, right? Sure, there's a different future with Tony Stark instead of Illyana as Sorcerer Supreme...

but that's not that big a deal. Everything else seems basically the same...

But did you notice when Eva was journeying to that future she passed through some times with familiar events and faces?

Including a familiar 'jeep'(actually a modified Spider-Mobile), traveling about the Wastelands...



And below it, the Spider-Woman and 'Old Man' Hawkeye of that timeline.



But that timeline is NOT part of the Eath-616 timeline. It's actually Earth-807128, better known as the timeline of... Old Man Logan!



In Wolverine #66, writer Mark Millar introduced a dark future world where the superheroes had been defeated by the supervillians, most of them killed. The America of Earth-807128 had been divided into territories, ruled over by the supervillains. The Red Skull named himself President of the United States. Logan no longer calls himself Wolverine and hasn't popped his claws or so much as raised his voice in fifty years. What happened to him is initially a mystery, but he admits that it broke him. Logan now lives with his wife Maureen and their children Scotty and Jade on a barren stretch of land in California, now part of the territory known as Hulkland. Needing money to pay rent to his landlords the Hulk Gang, Logan accepts a job from a near-blind Hawkeye to help him travel east and deliver a secret package.



Along the way they rescue Hawkeye's daughter Ashley Barton, who is also the granddaughter of Peter Parker - the original Spider-Man. Her mother Tonya is said to be the youngest of Peter's daughters.



Fans were both intrigued and outraged by what was apparently a possible future for the heroes and villains of the main Marvel universe, which would speak volumes about some of the characters people had known and loved for decades, some of it quite unfavorable. Engaging in incest, inbreeding and cannibalism might be considered okay for the 'heroes' of Marvel's Ultimate Universe(your mileage might vary on that one) but surely not for the long-established heroes of the main universe.

Mark Millar laid those fears to rest, explaining it was not a possible future of the Main-616 timeline, but rather another universe with a similar-but-different past, a similar-but-different present and a future all it's own. It was also a future fans had glimpsed before. Earth-807128, as it came to be classified, was first introduced in a story in Fantastic Four(Fantastic Four vol. 1 #558 August 2008) showing the Hooded Man(actually a future Logan/Wolverine) raising a child of the Hulk in a doomed timeline.

If anyone even noticed Old Man Hawkeye and Ashley Barton along with the modified Spider-Mobile in the Wastelands appearing in Eva Bell's journeys through time, they likely attributed it to yet ANOTHER mistake by Marvel's writers and editors. Of course, there is another... less incompetent... possibility. The other possibility is much more ominous... The only question is, did Eva Bell rewrite time and turn the Main-616 INTO Old Man Logan's timeline as a result or did her journey through time simple serve to reveal the change to observant readers.

Hmm...











The solicitation for Invincible Iron Man (2016) #600 teases:




"All this and a huge new villain arises!" In the story, Iron Man faces off against the Hood and Doctor Doom, hardly huge new villains arising, but at the end of the issue there was a strange thing, one that had fans very confused. A reprint of a few pages from All-New X-Men Annual #1(with slight edits and caption changes) showing Eva Bell's trip to the future.





We also know from her brief appearance in the now-infamous Uncanny X-Men #600 that she continued to rewrite time, because she had been in at least three different timelines talking about a "trial of Henry McCoy".





And there is this little nugget from Generations: The Iron - Iron Man And Ironheart #1



Showing that not only is Tony Stark still the Sorcerer Supreme in the future, meaning the timeline is still altered, but time-travel was outlawed after an unnamed woman completely messed-up the timestream. I wonder who that could be...

Of course, whatever timeline currently depicted as the main reality in Marvel's books, that timeline has been and continues to be further altered by a large amount of both additional time-travel and incursions from other realities. Not least of all the arrival of Old Man Logan himself...



Emerging from the events of Secret Wars, Old Man Logan arrived in the present. Initially thinking he was in his own past, before eventually assuming it was an alternate reality's past because of anomalies with events as he remembered them.



Eventually, In Old Man Logan #19, OML decides he needs to get back to HIS future






Illyana refuses to help, as do a long list of other heroes, which results in OML breaking a villain out of prison to help him...





Of course, being a villain, Asmodeus isn't entirely trustworthy...



Old Man Logan finds himself in his past, in the War of 1812!



The story continues for several issues in the 'Past Lives' arc. The Wolverine of the Main-616 tineline was born in the late 1800's, and if OML was old enough to be fighting in the War of 1812, that would mean he was born at least 100 years earlier than his main-616 counterpart. Many fans had previously believed that the divergent point between the main timeline and OML's was in recent years, now it was clearly at least as far back as the 1700's. As THIS thread shows, it was actually all the way back at the very Dawn of Man.

There are other anomalies, too. Canada didn't even exist as a country back in 1812.

More travels through time show events that seem much the same as the past of the Wolverine we know...



Others are similar but distinctly different. In OML's first encounter with the Hulk, the Hulk is retaining much of Banner's intellect and has come to Canada to try and cure the Wendigo. But in the main-616 timeline, Hulk was the dumb-savage version, and the woman who was the Wendigo's sister had lured the Hulk there with magic, hoping to transfer the Wendigo curse to Banner. She reasoned he already carried the curse of being the Hulk, what would it matter if he was a Wendigo as well.



Amadeus, meanwhile, has plans for OML's body...



And OML starts to realize he cannot change his past...



Only relive it...



Finally, he encounters the X-Men!



And gives Iceman a message on how to save him...



But what good would that do, fans wondered, as that Iceman was from Old Man Logan's past, not the past of the main-616 universe, but...



In Old Man Logan #20, the present-day adult-Iceman arrives to save the day. In case anyone thinks it's a strange coincidence, he mentions that he remembered what Logan told him in the past.



OML is saved...



And fans, well they mainly expressed bafflement at how writer Jeff Lemire could be so INCOMPETENT as to forget that he was writing OLM and not the original Wolverine, when he wrote that scene in the past with OML's Iceman and then had the current main-universe Iceman remember it and show up to save him. They are two completely different people, after all.

Or are they?!

Which brings us to perhaps the biggest piece of the 'ConspiraXcy' puzzle... Iceman!!!

More to come...