Oh, so I thought I’d caught up, but it turns out this is a two parter. \u00a0I hadn’t noticed because it doesn’t really end, but issue #33 is “Surviving the Experience, part one”, so there you go.<\/p>\n
Not that this is a repeat of the recent\u00a0Weapon X<\/em> storyline which was given two names for no reason. \u00a0“Kings and Queens”\u00a0is<\/em> separate from what follows. \u00a0But it’s more of a piece of connective tissue between actual storylines, and an example of the way\u00a0Blue <\/em>and\u00a0Gold<\/em> both sometimes lapse into a more traditional subplot-juggling style of team book.<\/p>\n The point of these two issues is to establish a split between Magneto and the time-travelling teenage X-Men, so that Magneto can be inspired to go off on a jaunt of his own next issue. \u00a0And it’s really more of a Magneto story than anything else, with writer Cullen Bunn returning to some of the themes of his earlier\u00a0Magneto<\/em> solo series.<\/p>\n Part one kicks off with a flashback, revisiting the scene at the start of this run where Magneto let Jean Grey read his mind, and she saw something that convinced her that the X-Men should work with him. \u00a0This time we see what she saw, which is a scene of young Magneto in Auschwitz, interrupted by Hitzig showing up to give a speech. \u00a0Hitzig, you may recall, comes from the\u00a0Magneto<\/em> solo series; he’s a Nazi officer who was a relatively minor figure in young Magneto’s life but who Magneto sees as the personification of all his childhood fears.<\/p>\n Broadly speaking, Hitzig gives a little speech about how the darkness in Magneto will always return to the fore in the end. \u00a0But since we’re in Magneto’s mind, Hitzig is basically here to speak for his subconscious – and it’s interesting that he’s the character who Magneto puts forward as a quasi-spokesman to deal with Jean. \u00a0Bunn’s basic idea in the Magneto\u00a0<\/em>solo series was not only\u00a0that Magneto’s obsession with protecting his own people has turned him into an extremist in turn but that he’s very much aware of that fact. \u00a0The reason for the X-Men joining up with the Magneto, it turns out, is not that they thought he was on the right road, so much as that they wanted to be there to keep him under control when he inevitably snapped again.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that didn’t work out so well, because the X-Men were off appearing in a\u00a0Venom<\/em> crossover during the “Mothervine” arc. \u00a0So the big idea here is that after being backed into a corner, and forced to kill some of the Mothervine mutants in self-defence, Magneto has indeed snapped, and the X-Men weren’t there to deal with the problem. \u00a0On top of that, Magneto also had a trip to the future between issues #27 and #28, which is apparently what we’re going to see in “Surviving the Experience”, so it seems something traumatic happens to him there as well.<\/p>\n This means an issue of him smashing up Hellfire Club branches as he goes looking for the traitorous Emma Frost, the mutant who was on the other side. \u00a0(Havok gets off the hook because Magneto apparently accepts that he wasn’t in his right mind.)<\/p>\n Jorge Molina draws this very well in the first part, but there’s a definite sense that the story doesn’t hit quite the scale it needs to. \u00a0The idea that Magneto can’t handle being forced to kill the people he was trying to defend, that’s fair enough. \u00a0And the idea that he’d want to take it out on Emma works too. \u00a0But the story is trying very hard to present this as Magneto crossing some sort of line, and he’s really not doing anything all\u00a0that<\/em> drastic beyond a bit of property damage at bad guy clubs. \u00a0Even if you’re going solely by the teen X-Men’s frame of reference, this is still the Magneto who conquered a South American country and threatened to nuke it when he was losing the fight. \u00a0This doesn’t feel quite as shocking as the story clearly wants it to be. \u00a0Nor does it really fit with the way Magneto was acting in issue #28, where he seemed a bit more under control.<\/p>\n Part two, with Andr\u00e9s Genolet on art, is a bit more of an issue-long brawl. \u00a0Magneto has caught up with Emma, and the X-Men are trying to calm the situation, without much success. \u00a0The interesting bits are that, as well as being furious with Emma for betraying mutants, he’s angry that the X-Men weren’t there to keep him under control – if nothing else, this does offer some story justification for the decision to keep the X-Men out of their own book for a while. \u00a0Genolet’s art is a bit on the minimal side, but it’s helped by some strong emotion in his faces.<\/p>\n Still, it all just peters out. \u00a0The X-Men teleport Emma away, and Magneto just sort of calms down and decides to go and do something else instead. \u00a0There are some good ideas in here somewhere, but the story doesn’t seem to want them to come to a head just yet, and doesn’t have a particularly good way of kicking them into touch for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh, so I thought I’d caught up, but it turns out this is a two parter. \u00a0I hadn’t noticed because it doesn’t really end, but issue #33 is “Surviving the Experience, part one”, so there you go. Not that this is a repeat of the recent\u00a0Weapon X storyline which was given two names for no […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4246","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\/4246","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=4246"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4248,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4246\/revisions\/4248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}