<sniff> Smell that? It's this issue going in the proverbial crapper.
After all of the build-up surrounding last issue, I must admit that my expectations were set rather high; odd, considering that I don't really have any expectations from this title at all. (With X-Treme I expected goodness, New I'm fairly neutral to, and Uncanny I expect is going to suck a big fat one.) Yet, when I finished this issue and felt a pang of disappointment, and even irritation, I realized that my bar for the title had been raised subconsciously.
Typically, it happens right before this issue, which is easily the worst installment of Morrison's entire run on the title.
What is it that makes the story so bad? The element that should, by rights, make it so good: Magneto's return. You'd expect that after such a painstaking deception, after lying low for so long under "the inscrutable mask of the simpering 'Xorn'," Magneto would be acting a little bit like ... well, a bit like Magneto.
Instead, we get a doddering, old, drug addicted fool who looks like he shouldn't be without his Life Alert, whose new team of super-villains consists of a floating brain in a bubble, a moron who gets off on fart jokes, a tramp whose power is projectile vomiting (both possessing and inducing) and a couple of terrifying fly-chicken babies.
On the plus side, at least Toad is back. Maybe he'll get hungry and eat said fly-chicken babies.
On the down side, Toad now sports a perm (yes, a perm) and has apparently developed the secondary mutation of actually talking, coherently, with a five-foot tongue dangling out of his mouth.
It doesn't stop there. I know that NuMarvel thinks that any sort of connection to any other title is akin to dining on kittens, but you know, another title just might want make mention of the fact that Magneto has kinda sorta utterly destroyed Manhattan. I mean, he sunk the Statue of Liberty. You'd think something like that might be noticed by Spider-Man, or the Avengers or something, since they live just down the road.
There is so very much wrong with this issue that it's well nigh impossible to find anything done right. Magneto is portrayed as little more than an insecure rock star, petulant that his audience isn't giving him the attention he feels he so rightly deserves. I mean, the Master of Magnetism leaves Toad -- TOAD!! -- to "work the crowd" while he walks off and takes a shot of Kick.
"Work the crowd." Is Magneto doing all of this because he is determined to never again see his people slaughtered, or is he doing it because he wants to see the crowd form a mosh pit?
Magneto was easily one of, if not the most engrossing character in the X-Universe. In one fell swoop, Morrison has reduced him to a one-dimensional megalomaniac. Perhaps even more so than the dreaded '90s, where at least he didn't come across like a freaking moron.
The idea of Magneto relying on Kick, the mutant power-heightening drug, isn't even original. Fabian Cortez, anyone? Been there, done that, and it was much more interesting then, too.
Setting aside my feelings on the character, and indeed on the X-Universe itself for a moment, I can see some intelligent writing in this issue. Morrison has turned Magneto into a parody of himself, spewing rhetoric that he himself barely understands. The crowd that Magneto preaches to could be said to represent today's society, interested not in what is said but only in impressive explosions and massive displays of power, easily swayed towards terrible acts of violence. Are these good ideas? Absolutely. Do they belong in this book? Absolutely not. At least, not with the characters chosen to play the part.
I've been saying this from the beginning. Morrison is a good writer, but he's not a good X-Men writer. He has excellent ideas, which he writes out and then shoves into place the X-Men character that most closely suits the needs of his story. The end result feels like a feeble attempt to affix the X-Men label to what would otherwise be an unrelated story. Think I'm exaggerating? Take pretty much any story in Grant Morrison's run and replace the X-Men characters with ones you just made up (but with similar powers where necessary), and see if the end result lacks anything. I'm doing it in my head as we speak, and not only am I not coming across anything that would be significantly impacted, the stories are actually sounding better once removed from the preconceived notions of the X-Men.
I'm sure the arbitrary, forced usage of the X-Universe works just fine for a reader who has no knowledge of, nor particular attachment to the characters in question, but for those of us with an actual emotional investment, it's a slap in the face. Magneto is a character with a history as rich as the franchise itself. I defy anybody to justify his portrayal in this issue as good character development.
My biggest hope is that this somehow turns out to be not what it seems. The entire issue, from beginning to end, felt "off". Something didn't feel quite right, and I'm hoping it goes beyond what I've said above. Perhaps Magneto isn't really the main villain here. Or, trite though it is, perhaps this is all a dream, or going on in Magneto's head, or ... or a tribe of psychic gerbils are rubbing their little paws together in The Habitrail O' Doom and wiggling their whiskers in silent, evil gerbil-laughter. I don't know. Something, anything, to make this not really be Magneto. I'm that desperate.
