{"id":3061,"date":"2015-09-06T21:14:05","date_gmt":"2015-09-06T20:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3061"},"modified":"2015-09-06T21:14:05","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T20:14:05","slug":"magneto-vol-4-last-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3061","title":{"rendered":"Magneto vol 4 – “Last Days”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Regular readers, your long national nightmare is over. \u00a0The X-books are starting to emerge\u00a0from the other side of the\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> crossover. \u00a0X-Men ’92<\/em> is also finished, if you’re reading it in digital form. \u00a0First up, though,\u00a0Magneto<\/em>. \u00a0This\u00a0final volume collects\u00a0its\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> tie-in arc, clocking in at a modest four issues,\u00a0and apparently leading to the end of the series.<\/p>\n

Participation in\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>\u00a0seems to have been mandatory for virtually all Marvel Universe titles –\u00a0the exceptions being the quirkfests and, for some reason,\u00a0Guardians Team-Up<\/em>. \u00a0But there was at least a choice between doing a stand-in series set on\u00a0Battleworld, or a “Last Days” tie-in in the margins of\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> #1.<\/p>\n

The vast majority of\u00a0books opted for Battleworld. \u00a0Perhaps that’s because of the appeal of getting to go nuts\u00a0and throw continuity out the window for a few months. \u00a0But perhaps it’s also because\u00a0there’s only so much you can do with the “Last Days” format –\u00a0not least because the plot of the main series dictates that the world will end and the heroes will not prevent it. \u00a0On one view, this makes the “Last Days” stories potentially rather weightless, although\u00a0that’s not as a clear as it seems, since we also know that the\u00a0Marvel 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.<\/p>\n

At any rate,\u00a0there are seven “Last Days” books, and two of them\u00a0(Loki<\/em> and\u00a0Silver Surfer<\/em>) take the route of having their characters escape the destruction of the universe in another way. \u00a0And that\u00a0works fine for\u00a0Loki<\/em>; it’s\u00a0already a series\u00a0about stories,\u00a0so having\u00a0its final issues take place against the backdrop of the collapse of the Marvel Universe turns out to be quite useful. \u00a0Black Widow<\/em>, I gather, is basically doing a flashback arc. \u00a0Ms. Marvel<\/em> went for the\u00a0angle of the rookie superhero in the\u00a0margins of her first big event,\u00a0a story that could pretty much have been done just as easily with any Really Big Event. \u00a0Captain America & The Mighty Avengers<\/em>, I haven’t read.<\/p>\n

Then you have\u00a0Magneto<\/em> and\u00a0Punisher<\/em>, two books which\u00a0actually seem well suited to\u00a0a straightforward “Last Days” story. \u00a0What does the Punisher do\u00a0when the world’s\u00a0ending? \u00a0Probably the same as any other day: go and kill a few more criminals while he has the chance. \u00a0And then there’s Magneto, attempting to prevent the end of the world in what we all know is another exercise in futility. \u00a0(And knocking off another anti-mutant villain along the way, because hey, why pass up the opportunity.)<\/p>\n

Magneto<\/em>\u00a0started off as a\u00a0low-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. \u00a0It’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.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s art\u00a0has done a lot of the heavy lifting in keeping the tone consistent here;\u00a0he’s good with epic scale, but\u00a0the humanity of his characters remains a constant\u00a0however big the plot gets. \u00a0Admittedly,\u00a0when the final issue starts doing flashbacks to specific scenes in the Silver Age, it does\u00a0sometimes feel as though the book might as well have gone the whole hog and embraced visual pastiche. \u00a0But Walta smoothes\u00a0the gaps and\u00a0helps to make these sequences feel like part of\u00a0a seamless back story, instead of imports from\u00a0a drastically different style.<\/p>\n

This arc is basically a character piece, so the plot is pretty straightforward. \u00a0As a back-up plan, Namor has warned Magneto about the\u00a0Incursions, figuring that he’s the sort of person willing\u00a0to destroy\u00a0another planet in order to save Earth. \u00a0And he’s right. \u00a0Magneto is. \u00a0Except Magneto’s solution to an invasion\u00a0from another world is\u00a0to try to temporarily power\u00a0himself up to the point where he can defeat it singlehandedly. \u00a0He ropes in Polaris to help,\u00a0which is set up at first to look like a touching reunion between father and daughter. \u00a0But that turns out to be a distant second to the main reason\u00a0for\u00a0calling her in: she’s got the same powers as him, and he can nick them to make himself stronger.<\/p>\n

Cullen Bunn has touched on this theme before. \u00a0His 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. \u00a0A big part of his self-image is tied up in the idea that the solutions revolve around him and him alone. \u00a0In a sense, he buys into his own status as a major character.\u00a0\u00a0This 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\u00a0minutes time there won’t be anyone left to remember him.<\/p>\n

Magneto certainly rationalises that part of himself;\u00a0he would claim that he’s protecting Lorna by sidelining her. \u00a0There’s a parallel of sorts with his aide\u00a0Briar Raleigh, who\u00a0by this point is established pretty clearly as having a masochistic fascination with Magneto. \u00a0She justifies\u00a0her involvement with him by\u00a0claiming that she’s helping to\u00a0direct his rage and obsession against truly deserving targets; but\u00a0ultimately she has the self-awareness to recognise\u00a0that she’s indulging her own hang-ups.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, he does genuinely want to save the world (why wouldn’t he?), and\u00a0for all his ego, he’s also willing to sacrifice himself for it. \u00a0The closing pages\u00a0appear to have him coming to the recognition that his tactics have ended up making matters worse for mutants, not better. \u00a0Which would point to an attempt to change going forward – except that these same issues also acknowledge his\u00a0on-again-off-again attempts to be a nice guy in the past, and\u00a0pretty much come to the conclusion that his demons will\u00a0always\u00a0drag him back to the\u00a0same path. \u00a0So\u00a0perhaps Bunn’s idea is more along the lines of a moment of lucidity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We’ll find out, of course, because while this\u00a0is the final issue of\u00a0Magneto<\/em>,\u00a0he’s also going to be in the cast of Bunn’s\u00a0Uncanny X-Men. \u00a0<\/em>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\u00a0this title. \u00a0Unfortunately,\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em> 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\u00a0character-based story that Bunn’s been doing on this\u00a0book. \u00a0Mind you,\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> is also a team book of which Magneto is just one part;\u00a0it’s unlikely ever to have the\u00a0sort of close focus\u00a0on him that we’ve\u00a0had here.<\/p>\n

As for\u00a0Magneto<\/em>, it goes down as one of the\u00a0X-office’s successes of recent years,\u00a0holding on to a strong identity and a clear vision of its character, while making the obligatory crossovers work to support its own stories. \u00a0If it doesn’t come to a clear plot resolution (and it doesn’t), it does at least build its themes to a grand conclusion.\u00a0 As a 21-issue run, this has\u00a0been well worth my\u00a0time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Regular readers, your long national nightmare is over. \u00a0The X-books are starting to emerge\u00a0from the other side of the\u00a0Secret Wars crossover. \u00a0X-Men ’92 is also finished, if you’re reading it in digital form. \u00a0First up, though,\u00a0Magneto. \u00a0This\u00a0final volume collects\u00a0its\u00a0Secret Wars tie-in arc, clocking in at a modest four issues,\u00a0and apparently leading to the end of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3061"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3172,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3061\/revisions\/3172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}