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]

And still, Morrison managed to portray Jean not as a completely helpless, dependant, all too human being with far more power than she could handle, but rather as a benevolent goddess, that has come down to Earth, not because she felt guilty for being superior to every other being, but because her love, empathy and compassion for all things living was so endless, that she'd willingly sacrifice all that was hers from the point of her birth, just to see those she loved most to be happy again. This compassion ultimately made her stronger than Scott, for Jean, having battled her own demons and won, realized that Scott could not muster the strength to do the same and finally let him go. Once again, she sacrificed her own happines for those she cared most about. That's why she'll always be my hero(ine

[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