Regular readers, your long national nightmare is over.  The X-books are starting to emerge from the other side of the Secret Wars crossover.  X-Men ’92 is also finished, if you’re reading it in digital form.  First up, though, Magneto.  This final volume collects its Secret Wars tie-in arc, clocking in at a modest four issues, and apparently leading to the end of the series.

Participation in Secret Wars seems to have been mandatory for virtually all Marvel Universe titles – the exceptions being the quirkfests and, for some reason, Guardians Team-Up.  But there was at least a choice between doing a stand-in series set on Battleworld, or a “Last Days” tie-in in the margins of Secret Wars #1.

The vast majority of books opted for Battleworld.  Perhaps that’s because of the appeal of getting to go nuts and throw continuity out the window for a few months.  But perhaps it’s also because there’s only so much you can do with the “Last Days” format – not least because the plot of the main series dictates that the world will end and the heroes will not prevent it.  On one view, this makes the “Last Days” stories potentially rather weightless, although that’s not as a clear as it seems, since we also know that the Marvel Universe is back in October, presumably with a lot of characters awkwardly remembering things they did when they thought the world was about to end.

At any rate, there are seven “Last Days” books, and two of them (Loki and Silver Surfer) take the route of having their characters escape the destruction of the universe in another way.  And that works fine for Loki; it’s already a series about stories, so having its final issues take place against the backdrop of the collapse of the Marvel Universe turns out to be quite useful.  Black Widow, I gather, is basically doing a flashback arc.  Ms. Marvel went for the angle of the rookie superhero in the margins of her first big event, a story that could pretty much have been done just as easily with any Really Big Event.  Captain America & The Mighty Avengers, I haven’t read.

Then you have Magneto and Punisher, two books which actually seem well suited to a straightforward “Last Days” story.  What does the Punisher do when the world’s ending?  Probably the same as any other day: go and kill a few more criminals while he has the chance.  And then there’s Magneto, attempting to prevent the end of the world in what we all know is another exercise in futility.  (And knocking off another anti-mutant villain along the way, because hey, why pass up the opportunity.)

Magneto started off as a low-key, horror-leaning vigilante book, with the largely depowered Magneto hunting down the sort of anti-mutant forces that he could still avenge himself against.  It’s continually grown in scale over its run, and increasingly brought in more traditional Marvel Universe elements, leading to this logical end point – Magneto attempting to single handedly shut down a line-wide crossover.

Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s art has done a lot of the heavy lifting in keeping the tone consistent here; he’s good with epic scale, but the humanity of his characters remains a constant however big the plot gets.  Admittedly, when the final issue starts doing flashbacks to specific scenes in the Silver Age, it does sometimes feel as though the book might as well have gone the whole hog and embraced visual pastiche.  But Walta smoothes the gaps and helps to make these sequences feel like part of a seamless back story, instead of imports from a drastically different style.

This arc is basically a character piece, so the plot is pretty straightforward.  As a back-up plan, Namor has warned Magneto about the Incursions, figuring that he’s the sort of person willing to destroy another planet in order to save Earth.  And he’s right.  Magneto is.  Except Magneto’s solution to an invasion from another world is to try to temporarily power himself up to the point where he can defeat it singlehandedly.  He ropes in Polaris to help, which is set up at first to look like a touching reunion between father and daughter.  But that turns out to be a distant second to the main reason for calling her in: she’s got the same powers as him, and he can nick them to make himself stronger.

Cullen Bunn has touched on this theme before.  His Magneto is motivated partly by hatred for his oppressors, and partly by a genuine desire to help mutants, but he also considers himself a great man and a historical figure.  A big part of his self-image is tied up in the idea that the solutions revolve around him and him alone.  In a sense, he buys into his own status as a major character.  This is presumably why, although the closing pages do have Magneto reflecting on his life just as he dies, he thinks about it in terms of his legacy and how he will be remembered – an odd preoccupation for someone who’s got every reason to believe that in five minutes time there won’t be anyone left to remember him.

Magneto certainly rationalises that part of himself; he would claim that he’s protecting Lorna by sidelining her.  There’s a parallel of sorts with his aide Briar Raleigh, who by this point is established pretty clearly as having a masochistic fascination with Magneto.  She justifies her involvement with him by claiming that she’s helping to direct his rage and obsession against truly deserving targets; but ultimately she has the self-awareness to recognise that she’s indulging her own hang-ups.

On the other hand, he does genuinely want to save the world (why wouldn’t he?), and for all his ego, he’s also willing to sacrifice himself for it.  The closing pages appear to have him coming to the recognition that his tactics have ended up making matters worse for mutants, not better.  Which would point to an attempt to change going forward – except that these same issues also acknowledge his on-again-off-again attempts to be a nice guy in the past, and pretty much come to the conclusion that his demons will always drag him back to the same path.  So perhaps Bunn’s idea is more along the lines of a moment of lucidity.

 

We’ll find out, of course, because while this is the final issue of Magneto, he’s also going to be in the cast of Bunn’s Uncanny X-Men.  Despite the title, the roster makes that look decidedly like a villain book, and in that sense it looks set to be the continuation of this title.  Unfortunately, Uncanny X-Men isn’t getting Gabriel Walta, it’s getting Greg Land, who is both a huge step down in quality, and pretty comprehensively unsuited for the sort of character-based story that Bunn’s been doing on this book.  Mind you, Uncanny is also a team book of which Magneto is just one part; it’s unlikely ever to have the sort of close focus on him that we’ve had here.

As for Magneto, it goes down as one of the X-office’s successes of recent years, holding on to a strong identity and a clear vision of its character, while making the obligatory crossovers work to support its own stories.  If it doesn’t come to a clear plot resolution (and it doesn’t), it does at least build its themes to a grand conclusion.  As a 21-issue run, this has been well worth my time.