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

Comments

[ian_karkull]

err.. sorry for the long post, I kind of got carried away on this one.

[dianakingston]

Don't be sorry, I love long posts

[ian_karkull]

Thanks for the positive reply, a reasobale debate is always enjoyable, even more so as those tend to get out of hand pretty quickly when it comes to comic book fandom. At the very least this topic got me thinking, and I went through the trouble of digging into my longboxes and rereading the last two story arcs of Morrisons New X-Men and stumbled across something astounding that I had previously overlooked/forgotten, just like everybody else apparently, as I've never heard it being mentioned in this debate before

[ian_karkull]

...During the entire Planet X storyline, he had been under the constant influence of Kick and therefore, a host to the Sublime bacteria, which have been subtly manipulating his actions. Upon rereading Magneto's dialogue and actions in Planet X, it became apparent to me (even without this knowledge), that he had gone insane. His motives and actions had stayed the same in principle, yet there was so much less reason, so much less careful planning behind it than usual. All he did was causing constant mayhem and slaughter on a grand scale, which would have inevitable lead to an all out war between himself (and by extension, all Mutantkind) and the US government, which is exactly what the Sublime had secretly planned all along. This would by no means fully redeem him from his initial motives (which are still very elitist and genocidal in nature, the Sublime only forced them to their logiacl, if extremely violent conclusions), it does, in hindsight, take the subject matter somewhat out of his hands, since he had been acting "under the

[ian_karkull]

That being said, the initial statement of Planet X still remains it's validity. Magneto's beliefs, if taken to their full, logical consequences are indeed an elitist, utterly racist creed and his behaviour in Planet X is merely reflecting this without the usual sympathetic sugar-coating. From his very first apperance in the X-comics, it is his firm belief, that, in order for *his people* to survive, those who are not like him have to perish. Had it not been for the moral and intellectual censorship that generally overshadows comic book writing, Magneto would have tried something like this far sooner than after 40yrs of publication history, as you've correctly pointed out. In fact, I believe that Morrison shares roughly the same views on the character as we do, since the reversal of the magnetic fields is indeed a plan that Magneto had devised about five years (in real time) earlier in an arc of (Uncanny, I believe) X-Men, which lead to his rulership over Genosha. Planet X rejects the idea that a threat of global genocide should be

[dianakingston]

Well, I can understand why Morrison's run is so controversial: for better or worse, it was Chris Claremont's vision that ran the X-Men for the better part of two decades. Ironically, for a book strongly tied to the themes of change and evolution, every writer that came after Claremont worked within his stylistic context. There had always been just the one way of telling X-Men stories, so Morrison's decision to not follow those rules was a jarring change. If it had been the process of gradual development, that'd be one thing, but Morrison pretty much dropped out of the sky and turned things on their head