Morrison's Magneto: Success or Failure?

[dianakingston]

While randomly trawling the Internet, I stumbled onto a blogger who's been analyzing Grant Morrison's run on "New X-Men". I can't seem to find the link now, but what got my attention at the time was a side remark he made during a review of one of the earlier issues: he considers Morrison's Magneto to be the great failure of the run, for obvious

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[dianakingston]

That wasn't new, though - Jean/Logan had been going on for ages, all the way back to pre-Dark Phoenix. Actually, there's an amusing anecdote where every time Marvel published a story that had them getting together, the universe exploded ("Age of Apocalypse", "What If Phoenix Loved Wolverine", etc.) :)

I don't think it had anything to do with controversy, though, because it wasn't nearly as obnoxious and loud and unsubtle as most Marvel shock tactics tended to be at the time (and still are, really).

There's an issue... I think it was right after the Imperial arc, where Morrison summed it up perfectly: Scott's having an impromptu therapy session with Emma (this is before the whole thing went askew and turned into an affair), and he basically tells her that whenever he thinks of his relationship with Jean, he always goes back to the Trial of the Phoenix, when they were fighting for their lives on the Moon. That was the peak moment, and he's been trying to recapture that ever since. It's metatextual in a way, because I don't think any writer after Claremont ever depicted Scott and Jean in such simple, uncomplicated terms.

Scott's catch phrase for most of NXM is "I can't make it feel like it used to", and he feels that's what Jean expects of him - whereas Emma has no expectations at all. I think that's why the whole affair storyline works for me; it just feels grounded in the characters' backstories.