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]

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 rewarded in any way and thus, a second attempt leads to his fair and just punishment, death. Other than that, it's of interesting note that Magneto, an alleged Holocaust survivor, would resort to exactly the same methods as his former torturors, as soon as he found himself in a position of power, that allowed him to take the whip into his own hands and administer the same, cruel, inhuman punishments, based on the same, prejudiced notions of racial superiority as he had had to endure. There is something to be learned about the nature of power and it's influence on the human condition from that story. Even though Magneto knows very well of the pain and suffering that come from assuming superiority about your fellow man/woman, he does not shy away from it once he reaches that level. Indeed the mechanisms with which he seeks to assume control are the very same he would have condemmed as a young boy (falsifying information, propaganda/midn control, public execution of (political) antagonists, ethnic cleansing). Therein lies the ironyof this character. For all he had to suffer from those phenomena, he can not see beyond his personal ("righteous") fury and recognize the pattern repeating itself. In the end, he is no better than the Nazis that executed his family or those that created the Sentinels to hunt him and his people down, since he, given the chance, would just act in the very same way. And for that, he deserves no pity. His doctrine, as Xavier points out, is one of ignorance and hatred and thus has no place in a (hopefully) enlightened future, the days of bloodthirsty conquerors such as him belong firmly into the past, for if mankind, in all it's beautiful variations is to evolve, it has to overcome those barriers first (this is a trope that is often repeated in Morrisons stories, like Invisibles or DC One Million and one of the reasons why I adore his writing).

[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.

Re: Magneto and Sublime, I hadn't actually forgotten about that, but I've always been undecided when it comes to interpreting that subplot. I mean, yes, it becomes clear by the end that Sublime has been responsible for everything - he supplied Cassandra Nova with the Nanosentinels (and perhaps even gave her a body to begin with), he created the U-Men, he sent Kid Omega off the rails, he corrupted the Special Class, etc. But "Here Comes Tomorrow" is really the only case where Sublime is shown to actually possess someone, as opposed to just influencing them - so the question becomes, who destroyed New York in "Planet X"? Was it Magneto being influenced by Sublime (and manifesting his own subconscious conscience as Xorn), or was it - as Dino Pollard of ComiXtreme suggests - Sublime performing as Magneto? Pollard mentions that there's an unquestionable Silver Age streak to Magneto's characterization; is this evidence of Sublime miscalculating, and playing the role of Magneto as though he truly were a Silver Age villain with cliche sayings and plans for world domination? (And, perhaps, this is the reason why no one recognizes Magneto, not the crowds and not the X-Men.) Or does Sublime's influence unlock an aspect of Magneto that had always been there? I think it can be read either way, but it's an interesting ambiguity in its own right. And one of my favorite lines in "Planet X" is "I am your inner star, Erik. I am the conscience you can never silence. I will never let you be." :)

But of course, whether it's one or the other, it makes no difference - Magneto had to die. Not just as a way of becoming a symbol again, but because as you say, he had become a freakish mirror of the monsters that destroyed his own family. Once the Holocaust context really came into play, the justifications for Magneto's actions were that he was desperate to prevent another genocide (which he felt was inevitable)... the irony being that he couldn't see any other way but to do just that, wipe out a species (or at the very least oppress them as harshly as he could).

As an aside, it's interesting that Magneto's death more-or-less coincided with the deaths of Doctor Doom (Waid's "Fantastic Four") and Red Skull (Brubaker's "Captain America"), and with the final (at the time) fall of the Kingpin (Bendis' "Daredevil"). While it's never been explicitly confirmed or denied, there seemed to be an unspoken policy at the time that the old-school villains, the ones who came up again and again and again, were to be set aside at long last. It says a lot about how far ahead Marvel was looking in those days... and the resurrection of each of those villains says more about how many steps back the company has taken since the current regime came to power.