{"id":4344,"date":"2018-10-16T21:56:15","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T20:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4344"},"modified":"2018-10-16T21:56:15","modified_gmt":"2018-10-16T20:56:15","slug":"x-men-black-magneto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4344","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: Black – Magneto"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-Men: Black<\/em> is… a series of random one-shots about villains, I guess? \u00a0There’s a serialised back-up strip, “Degeneration”, but the lead stories seem to have no connection with it, or to one another. \u00a0So I’ll take that at face value.<\/p>\n

“The Stars, Our Destination?” is a Magneto story written by Chris Claremont and pencilled by Dalibor Talaji\u0107. \u00a0And it’s always a slightly strange feeling when Chris Claremont makes one of his occasional reprise visits to the X-Men. \u00a0He wrote the team for sixteen years; his take on the X-Men is the one that elevated them to A-list status. \u00a0But you can’t really emulate the strengths of that run in a story like this, because so much of it was about building characters and storylines over time.<\/p>\n

Sensibly, then, this story doesn’t play particularly to any nostalgia angle. \u00a0Nor does it have much to do with current continuity, though it dutifully adopts the status quo that was established at the end of X-Men Blue<\/em> (so he’s living on Asteroid M with a new bunch of followers, and Briar Raleigh is hanging around).\u00a0\u00a0But the story is simply a straightforward restatement of the character.<\/p>\n

Magneto is visiting a small town, since he’s investigating a mutant detention centre that’s just been opened nearby. \u00a0He stops in at the family-run Gold Star Cafe, which he says it because the name caught his attention. \u00a0Presumably he had something more Star of David in mind, but in fact the family were thinking of the gold star on a US Army service flag (which represents a family member who died in action).<\/p>\n

Magneto gets to have a nice chat about all this with the teenage waitress, Kate, who’s pretty much your standard depiction of America’s positive side – patriotic, proud of her family history of sacrifice, appalled by the treatment of minorities, you get the idea. \u00a0The other customers are not so impressed by Magneto and Kate’s interest in mutants, being equally standard issue Trump voters, but for once this doesn’t devolve into a fight.<\/p>\n

This is not what you’d call a subtle scene – and there’s something a bit odd in the way that none of the customers in this tiny town act as if they have any prior relationship with Kate – but it does have one nice point. \u00a0We’ve reached the point where people can see the number tattoo on Magneto’s arm, recognise it for what it is, and simply don’t believe it to be genuine, because he’s manifestly too young. \u00a0Some of this story is decidedly on the nose, and it helps a lot that Claremont underplays this moment very nicely. \u00a0The art helps too; it’s a lived-in cafe, and a relatively innocuous, almost kindly take on Magneto who seems plausibly to be trying to rise above this, if only because he’s taken a liking to Kate and doesn’t want to smash up her caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n

That said, there’s some odd pacing here. \u00a0This opening scene takes eight pages, nearly half the story, and it doesn’t do a great deal to advance the plot. \u00a0The predictable ending for this story would be something like “Magneto smashes up the detention centre, and Kate sees him and is sad that he isn’t so nice after all”; we don’t get that, which is good, but it also means that the opening segment feels a bit detached from the rest.<\/p>\n

In due course, Magneto does indeed show up at the detention centre to smash it up, and spends a couple of pages in costume fighting the warden in her Sentinel-style armour. \u00a0The point of this scene, as it turns out, is for Magneto to recognise the warden as somebody pretty similar to him; she genuinely thinks he’s a monster, in her mind she’s heroically risking her life and doing what’s necessary to protect Her People, and \u00a0Magneto can recognise that as a mirror of how he feels about her. \u00a0It doesn’t provoke a crisis of confidence in him, though; just a vague regret coupled with a feeling that the onus is on her to back down first.<\/p>\n

The story wraps up with Magneto attempting to rescue the kids from the camp, only for them to tell him that they don’t\u00a0want<\/em> to go away and live in a mutant separatist community. \u00a0They want to be reunited with their parents. \u00a0This… kind of works in theory better than in practice. \u00a0In theory, there’s a good story in the idea of Magneto’s mutant separatism bumping up against the fact that all mutants have roots in communities and families that they don’t want to leave behind. \u00a0In practice, the kids don’t really feel like traumatised victims, so much as a Greek chorus acting as spokespersons for the moral, which seems to be that we should stay in the community and fight to make it better for the future, instead of isolating ourselves with our own kind. \u00a0This all leads to a suitably chastened Magneto giving the humans a speech about living up to American values, which… hmm.<\/p>\n

Even though these are meant to be villain one-shots, it’s a broadly sympathetic portrayal of Magneto, who is clearly more in the right than the ONE detention-centre guys are (and accepts the moral more than they do). \u00a0It comes a little strangely on the heels of\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>, which seemed to end by setting up a return to the traditional villain role, but it’s not especially out of line with the broader way that Magneto’s been written under Cullen Bunn.<\/p>\n

The story is a curious mix of the very heavy-handed with the comparatively subtle, but there’s more good than bad here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-Men: Black is… a series of random one-shots about villains, I guess? \u00a0There’s a serialised back-up strip, “Degeneration”, but the lead stories seem to have no connection with it, or to one another. \u00a0So I’ll take that at face value. “The Stars, Our Destination?” is a Magneto story written by Chris Claremont and pencilled by […]<\/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-4344","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\/4344","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=4344"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4346,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4344\/revisions\/4346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}