Rachel Getting Married

In 00s Hollywood, indie film has become a kind of genre, filled with quirky characters and a low key, absurdist humor. Think of Juno or Little Miss Sunshine, films that aren’t bad, but aren’t particularly challenging in any way. Two years ago, I wrote a post about the way that this shift in what is independent has had a catastrophic effect on American cinema. Much like the Bush administration has changed definitions of what conservative and liberal are, to the point that simply wanting to undo the most catastrophic “tax cuts” in the history of America is seen as class warfare, American cinema has to struggle with a marketplace where mainstream cinema has become so formulaic and lowest common denominator that it’s up to “indie cinema” to make the movies that would have been regular studio movies in the 30s or 70s.

That’s all a way of saying how refreshing it is to see a movie like Rachel Getting Married that manages to capture moments of life and sadness and joy in a way few films can. Most of the attention the film has gotten has been for Anne Hathaway’s lead performance, and she is great, but there’s a lot more to the movie than her. The movie recalls Robert Altman’s 70s films, like Nashville, which are more concerned with human behavior and using large events as a structural element to reveal the nuances of the various characters. I haven’t seen Altman’s A Wedding, but I’d imagine that film influenced what Demme does here.

The film’s best scenes for me were the moments where the event takes on a momentum of its own, and you look on, like a spectator at the actual event. The dancing in the tent segment at the wedding itself had this feel, the camera seemingly abandoning the narrative to instead capture an almost abstract take on the party. I loved the hip level shots of the guests dancing, and though the many, seemingly random musical performances came out of nowhere, they generally worked. I also loved the moment where Kim is trying to dance, but just can’t quite get into the music. She’s probably not used to being at a party without being drunk or high, and though she does her best, she just can’t ignore all the bad stuff in her head and get lost in the moment. But, just because she can’t doesn’t mean the people around her aren’t, Sidney and Rachel dancing in the center of the circle, or the random breakdancing sequence are both exuberant moments.

The film had to walk a difficult line of never straying too far into narrative histrionics, and also never getting too lost in simply showing what happens at a wedding. The rehearsal dinner sequence starts off with a lot of momentum and fun, but by the tenth speech, it starts to get a bit repetitive. Conversely, the loading the dishwasher sequence starts out great, capturing the energy when a large number of people spontaneously decide to do something and all get caught up in it. It reminded me a lot of big family dinners we used to have when I was a kid, if you could get 15 people all together to do something, it felt pretty cool. But, that scene lost it for me when the Ethan plate came out, it was a bit too on the nose,

That’s not to say all the Ethan stuff didn’t work. It was best when it remained under the surface, informing the jealousies and ill feeling of the family without being made explicit. I love the scene where Kim describes what happened at NA because it makes clear that sometimes it’s easier to tell strangers stuff about yourself than it is to reveal it to your family, the people you should ostensibly be closest to. I also like the conundrum that what happened with Ethan creates in Kim. It’s not like she started using to get over this trauma, his death is the legacy of her drug abuse, but at the same time, living with this guilt and trying to get clean is too much for her to handle. There’s no easy answers for her, and the film doesn’t try to provide them. In the end, Rachel and Kim don’t resolve their issues so much as agree to move on and try to live in the happy moments.

I really liked the look of the film. Here, I found the graininess and distinct visual quality of digital video more interesting than the clarity of 35mm. There was an immediacy to the photography that I rarely see. Particularly when blown up and viewed on 35, digital video can look amazing, and it did here.

I’ve seen people criticize the film for its cliché indie handheld camera. The film definitely had a lot of signifiers of realism, in films nothing says real like a character taking a piss. But, I think the camera did a great job of doing what shots in a film should do, direct our attention where it needs to go and use the visuals to reflect character emotional states, and be aesthetically interesting in their own right. These shots weren’t pretty portraits, but in context they worked great. I was particularly impressed by Kim’s lonely drive through the night.

It seems that film culture in America has split in two. Living in New York, the week’s big new releases aren’t the 3,000 screen Hollywood blockbuster, it’s the 3 screen indie movie that’s just coming out. Rachel hasn’t gone wide yet, but it’s what the film communities on the internet are talking about, hell, at this point I’m a couple of weeks behind talking about it. It’s unfortunate that it’s so tough for people to see movies like this when they come out, but I guess if more people did go to challenging movies in the theater, they’d get wider exposure.

Either way, it’s not up to this film to save cinema. What it is is a really well made, emotionally engaging film, and we can never get enough of those.

Batman: "The Club of Heroes" (#667-669)

There’s an ongoing debate in my mind over who’s the best comic book artist, Frank Quitely or JH Williams III. Reading something as great as All Star Superman or We3 makes me think that nobody could be better than Quitely. Then, I read Promethea or Seven Soldiers #1 and I find it hard to believe anyone could top Williams. But, it doesn’t have to be an either/or, they’re both amazing, and luckily, they’ve both done a lot of work with Grant Morrison lately. I’m still waiting for the previously mentioned Morrison/Williams creator owned series that’s likely still a ways off, but more recently, we got their three issue arc on Batman, a great story in its own right, but one that only adds to the fractured inconsistency of Morrison’s Batman run on the whole.

Reading Batman straight through is a schizophrenic experience. We jump from the Kubert stuff to a seemingly totally disconnected standalone tale with The Joker, back to regular continuity for a couple of issues, then it’s over to a similarly disconnected tale set in the future. Then, it’s over to this Williams stuff, which doesn’t seem to flow that logically out of the previous issues, then over to the Ra’s al Ghul crossover, and it’s not until Batman #672 that we’re back to the ‘normal’ storyline, with the three Batmen and all that. I’m on issue #673 now, a dazzling, brilliant issue, and it’s possible that all these disparate issues will come together in the RIP storyline, but for now, the rapidly swerving art styles and narrative focuses make it difficult to take away anything coherent from the run.

Still, as an essentially standalone story designed to reincorporate some 50s motifs and introduce the Black Glove, the “Club of Heroes” arc is great fun, with art like only Williams can do. Reading a Williams issue, you get the feeling that everyone else out there is lazy. He puts so much detail into every panel, using color and layout to help tell the story, and create something that’s aesthetically interesting on its own terms. He draws all the different heroes in a slightly different style, giving Batman a very monochromatic mysterious look, while El Gaucho has a slightly fuzzy European feel and Wingman has a very Image look. It’s a smaller scale version of the stylistic variations he used in Seven Soldiers #1, and it helps to make the characters distinct in a very short period of time.

The story picks up on a lot of the themes of Seven Soldiers, particularly its exploration of what it means to have been a hero and not to be one anymore, of this struggle to live up to the legend of a guy like Batman. One of Morrison’s central conceits in his run is the notion that its one guy who’s been through all the adventures that Batman has had in comics. So, for the Club of Heroes, Batman has ‘matured’ while they’ve stayed the same goofy people. The arc is told from their perspective, Batman is more of an absent father figure, the guy they all blame for their personal failures.

My major frustration with this arc is that it’s so thematically close to what Seven Soldiers did, but without as much of the relatable emotional feel. In Seven Soldiers #0, and in the minis, the attempt to be a hero is analogous to all of our attempts to do things in our life, to be better. The DCU and superhero milieu is used as a way to dramatize these essential conflicts, it functions as a meta comment on superhero comics, but also as a comment on life itself. Here, because the characters don’t get as much time to develop, it becomes more about wallowing in comic book history and while I do enjoy any time spent with Man-o-Bats, Morrison has done similar, better stuff in the past.

Much of Morrison’s Batman run has been about exploring the different aspects of Batman himself. The initial arc is about Batman trying to rediscover Bruce Wayne, then he has to deal with Damien, and after that the three Batmen. Here, Batman’s surrounded by a legion of imitators, but the only one who can actually match up to Batman is John Mayhew. The arc begins with Batman saying he’s always been interested in what super-wealthy men do when they get bored, obviously a question he’s got an interesting answer for himself. Mayhew is a twisted reflection of what Bruce Wayne could have become, as are pretty much all the motley crew we see here. If Batman loses his intensity and discipline, he could just as easily become one of these guys, struggling to keep up with the times.

While I do have some quibbles with the storyline, it’s a lot of fun, and the kind of book that makes you realize just how good a monthly comic can be. Reading All Star Superman makes it clear just how large the gap between what a comic can be and what most are is. Joss Whedon said that part of the reason he made “Once More With Feeling” was to show what a regular TV episode could be. And, reading an issue like All Star Superman #12, you realize how much can be told in 22 pages, how many concepts and ideas can be in there, how much emotion. If every comic was like All Star Superman, or these Batman issues, there’d be a lot more comics readers. There’s a lot of great moments in here, Man-o-Bats saving Raven Red from the tank of piranhas, Batman on his jetpack cutting across the page, the abstract watercolor pages that close each issue.

Like a lot of Morrison stories, this one is teeming with potential stories. I’d love to see more adventures with Beryl and Robin. Their teamup to save Raven Red is so much better than the lame Robin solo stories in Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul, and ties nicely back to Morrison’s JLA: Classified arc. He’s built his own corner of the DCU to mess around in, and the stories tie together nicely.


But, at this point, it’s hard for me to connect this story to the rest of the run. I respect and really like these issues, but it wasn’t until I read issue #673 that I found a Morrison Batman issue that I really loved. That issue was the kind of insane story that only Morrison can do, unhinged in a way he hasn’t been in a while. At that moment that Batmite appeared, everything changed, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. I’ve got all the single issue of RIP to date, so I should be able to catch up on them this weekend, and be ready for the big finale.

Batman: The Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul

With the release of ‘The Black Glove’ in hardcover, and the buzz surrounding RIP, I figured it was time to catch up on Morrison’s Batman run. That started with a reread of Batman and Son, then segued into a trip through the crossover, “The Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul,” a storyline that was justifiably ignored or panned by most of the comics world. Reading this hardcover is like tripping through a myriad of bad art and writing styles, all struggling to mold some decent ideas into a coherent narrative. Coming from Morrison and Peter Milligan, among others, it’s pretty disappointing. By no means is this their mythical collaboration “Bizarre Boys,” promised in the intro to the first Invisibles trade, instead it’s a bunch of workmanlike issues that don’t build to much.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the first Morrison Batman trade. I liked sections of the Damian storyline, the Joker prose story and the weird Bane Batman stuff, but for every good part, there was an underwhelming one. But, at least that felt like a Morrison book, this crossover has very few moments that capture his voice, and the spark that makes his work so special. With 52, it seemed like all the writers made each other up their game to try to keep up, here it’s like everyone’s sinking to the same weak level. It boggles the mind that the same guy who wrote something as brilliant as X-Force could write the Robin issues in this crossover. Morrison’s issues aren’t as outright bad, but they’re not particularly good either.

The biggest disappointment for me is the total mishandling of Damien. Morrison’s characterization there was one of the high points of his initial run of issues, managing to filter the petulant selfishness of a spoiled thirteen year old through the skillset and worldview of someone who’s been raised by a League of Assassins. Damien wouldn’t just throw a fit when he didn’t get what he wanted, he’d go out and kill someone. Here, Damien’s mannered way of speaking is replaced with a generic teen voice, which pretty much kills any interest I had in the character.

Also troubling is the rambling bad joke laden inner monologues that underlie both Robin and Nightwing. Is this the way these comics are always written? Maybe I’ve stuck to Morrison and other great books lately that I’ve got a skewed view, but seriously, aren’t comics better than this? The most interesting character dynamic is the love/hate relationship between Bruce and Talia, Talia’s ambiguity makes her the most interesting character here, but she gets too little time in the spotlight.

The most interesting moments for me were the Seven Soldiersesque reinvention of a group of three bad girl henchwomen. These characters are all past their prime and know it, but deliberately take on the role of henchwomen to Talia to try to get back in the game. That storyline doesn’t really go anywhere, but it has some interesting moments along the way.

The story is perhaps fundamentally flawed for me because I can’t take seriously a guy with the first name Ra’s. There must have been five or six panels with Batman shouting RA’S! and everyone took me out of the story pondering why this guy doesn’t have a more regular name. I suppose he is meant to be from far in the past, but still, the apostrophe in a character’s name always comes off as a bit ridiculous.

So, this story was pretty much a dud, and it seemingly had very few ties to the rest of Morrison’s run, so it would be pretty easily skippable should you choose to do so. Hopefully the Black Glove and RIP will treat me better.

Mad Men: 'Jet Set' (2x11)

Last night’s Mad Men takes the show in yet another strange direction with an initially confounding episode that has stuck in my head as one of the series’ best, and most ambitious episodes to date. While still great, the show had been dragging a bit for me since the Bobby Barrett arc ended, but this episode threw everything back into motion, and most importantly, provided a surreal series of set pieces that forced Don to look at himself and wonder about the kind of life that he has to live.

The entire band of European vagabonds plot had the bizarre internal logic of a 60s European art film, dealing as much in metaphor and subconscious experience as in any kind of surface narrative. I watched Pasolini’s Teorema a few weeks ago, and that film reminds me a lot of the way things happened here. Things just happen without much explanation or concern for the plausibility of events. Is it likely that this band of people would just approach Don and take him with them? In real life, probably not, but in the context of the show, it makes perfect sense.

They see a kindred spirit in Don, someone who’s restless and unwilling to accept the rules of society. These people have shaped themselves into the most glamorous, cool aesthetic they can imagine. The Viscount and Joy are invented personas, they’re living as the people they want to be instead of the people they actually are. They’re not actually rich, but they can squat at peoples’ houses and pretend to be. The act of doing something is what matters more than the truth of it. Don Draper isn’t real, but when Don lives that life, he becomes real. And, when he chooses not to live like Don Draper, that persona just crumbles and disappears. It plays a bit weird that Pete isn’t more disturbed at Don’s disappearance, and absence even from their flight home, but it serves to reinforce the fact that Don has slipped out of one life, and could just as easily slip out of this one.

One of the things I loved about the episode is the surreal, slightly disconnected feel that everything has. Don sees Betty in the bar, but it’s not Betty. Does he really want to be back with Betty, or is this just a manifestation of his guilt? I feel like at this point he thinks he has to get back with Betty, that she is so crucial to the self identity he has constructed, left alone he’ll crumble away. But, as we soon find out, that’s not exactly the case.

Joy’s name has obvious symbolic connotations. She could be seen as a devil, a temptress drawing Don away from responsibility and obligation into a hedonistic world of pleasure without consequences. But, the way the show plays it, there’s no moral judgment. Joy asks him why he doesn’t just do the things that would give him pleasure, if he wants to go to Palm Springs, there’s no reason that he shouldn’t. The objectification of Don in the episode is particularly interesting, Joy wants to use him for her own pleasure, and even her father notes how beautiful he is. He loses all control over his life, is totally feminized over the course of the episode. In the context of the cultural shifts of the 60s, Don experiences an idealized ‘free love’ world here, the promise of a utopian existence free from the arbitrarily imposed conventions society forces us all to conform to.

Back in New York, Kurt’s frank revelation that he’s a homosexual ties in to the new world Don goes to. We’ve watched Salvatore sublimate his true desires behind a sham marriage, and it’s shocking for him to see just how easy it is for someone to get whatever they want, as long as they’re not scared of the societal response. Kurt isn’t locked into the old world values that most of Sterling Cooper hangs on to, but Sal is, and he can’t even conceptualize giving in to his desires. It’s something that’s just not done.

On a totally different note, it’s notable the way that shows set in New York conceptualize California and vice versa. On Six Feet Under, New York was Claire’s escape at the end of the show, the promise of a cool place where she could grow up and pursue her art. Here, for New Yorkers, California is representative of a totally different set of values, a world where people spend all their time sitting around the pool, looking for movie stars. California’s image is inextricably tied in to the Hollywood studio system, a place that molded individuals into stars, changing names, background and inventing personal details to back up the image they had created. Norma Jean Baker becomes Marilyn Monroe, a troubled personal life becomes a perfect dream that everyone aspires to. But, with the studio system in decline, those personas crack. Marilyn is no longer a dream to aspire to, she’s a cautionary tale.

Last season, Don got high and found himself unable to fit in with the beatniks. Here, he doesn’t have that problem, perhaps he’s more at home with this old world idea of cool, or maybe it’s just that he’s changed. Cut off from Betty, he no longer feels the need to be the suburban family man. It’s only when he sees two kids that he’s reminded of his old life and has a moment of pause. But, that pause doesn’t last long, he’s soon back to having sex in a pool.

In the end, the entire episode is about Don tearing through the Don Draper persona and finding a piece of his self that he had left behind. Don Draper is a fiction suit he’s been wearing so long, it’s become real, but as he strips that suit off, he finds that something of who he was remains. Who is it he calls at the end, who would still know Dick Whitman? I don’t know, but the real significance is that he would invoke that name, reclaim the self he had left behind.

The episode reminded me a lot of similarly trippy explorations of self identity in The Sopranos’ Join the Club, and Kennedy and Heidi. It’s a kind of storytelling I love, taking place in a subconscious state of being, where the things that happen all comment on the mental state of our troubled protagonist. It’s a kind of storytelling that’s seen very rarely today. Most indie films stick to a tired ‘realist’ aesthetic, as if the greatest aspiration of cinema is to recreate the external existence we perceive with our eyes. The world is so much more than that, it’s a churning mess of feelings, thoughts and ideas all crossing over in our mind, moments from the past and present crossing and commenting on the things we’re presently experiencing. Mad Men is almost always a great show, but this episode went beyond just a great story, it’s great art. This is where the challenging art cinema of years past lives on, and because we’re connected to the characters in a way that we aren’t in most art films, it takes on added emotional significance. This is the best episode of the season to date.

Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle at the Apple Store

Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle at the Apple Store

Last weekend, I went to see Wong Kar-Wai give a talk about the use of music in his films at the Apple Store in Soho. I was surprised when they announced that Christopher Doyle would be there as well. WKW’s films are so impressionistic, so centered around the moment and emotion that I think it’s hard for him to talk about them in a way that’s particularly revelatory. It’s like talking about how beautiful a sunset is, you can’t really add anything to what the sunset is. The language barrier probably doesn’t help as well.

But, it’s still always fun to hear him speak. His process is very intuitive, very in the moment, and it sounds like he and Doyle had some crazy times on set. Doyle claimed that they were very guerilla with their style, just running around and shooting. The mythology of their relationship is that Doyle and WKW worked together the most on Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together, then drifted apart on In the Mood for Love. The frantic energy of those three films is largely about their in the moment capturing of city life, it’s very different than the more mannered approach of WKW’s more recent work.

I consider Fallen Angels the most well shot film of all time, full of shots that just burn themselves into your memory, and one of the examples they showed here was the final moments of the film, when “Only You” plays and the camera zooms along with a motorcycle then drifts off into a smoke filled sky. It’s a perfect fusion of visual and emotion. Doyle seemed like a crazed homeless man at times, it’s hard to connect him with the visuals he manages to capture, but I suppose that’s the paradox of art. David Lynch seems like a nice, normal guy, but his movies are crazy. I think it’s hard for some people to imagine a normal person making a movie as crazy as his stuff, but it makes sense to me. For me, making movies is about a journey through the subconscious, the process of writing is a matter of finding the ideas that stick in my brain, so strange things are always going to filter through to the stories, even if they don’t filter to the outside world.

I’m hoping that WKW and Doyle’s appearance here indicates Doyle’s return for the next WKW movie. My Blueberry Nights dragged a bit on the rewatch, it has great moments, but lacks the energy and life of the best WKW movies. I think he’s at a crossroads after 2046, which was a perfect summation of everything he’d done before. My Blueberry Nights added American actors and setting, but where will he go next? What will his next era of films be?

Either way, I’m eager to see Ashes of Time: Redux this weekend. I love the original, even after seeing it on the worst DVD I’ve ever watched. It needed to be restored, and will hopefully dazzle on the big screen. Expect a review after the screening.

New X-Men: Wrapping It Up

In his New X-Men pitch, Grant Morrison wrote about wanting to make the X-books accessible to new readers, while still respecting the continuity of the past, to make them post-human, sexy and stylish. His conception of the X-Men isn’t so much a superhero team as it is a model for evolution, both biologically, but also culturally. Not all these concepts pay off in every arc, nobody’s sexy in Kordey’s world, and the time spent with the Shiar has little to do with the way that mutants are building their own culture. But, taken as a whole, he fulfills most of his goals, and, most importantly, he makes it feel like these events matter, that the characters are real people who feel the weight of what they’ve been through, and will grow and change as a result of the events they’ve experienced.

That, more than anything else, is what makes this such a special run, it’s what makes his run feel definitive, while other writers’ feel like fanfic. The beauty of Claremont’s original run is that you could feel the characters evolving as he wrote them. Jean became one of the book’s most compelling characters, then died. Scott, the longest running X-man, left the team and got married. He’d still come back from time to time, but you got the sense that his life went on offscreen, and there was no doubt that Claremont would come up with new characters who were just as compelling. Think of the transition from the Mutant Massacre to Fall of the Mutants. Kitty and Kurt, two of Claremont’s finest characters, left the team, but Dazzler, Psylocke and Longshot ably replaced them. I don’t think those characters were as strong as Kitty or Kurt, but I liked the fact that the universe expanded, and characters moved off stage when their stories were done.

By the time of “X-Tinction Agenda,” everybody’s tending back towards normal, the corporate sanctioned team of X-Men was in place, with Jean and Scott at the head, the Professor overseeing everything from his wheelchair and Wolverine as the bad boy on the side. Morrison said that he read all the X-Men TPBs that were in print before starting work on the title, and most of what is in print from Claremont is the crossovers and the Dark Phoenix era stuff. He doesn’t seem to love Paul Smith era Claremont, or later Claremont in the way that I do, and it makes sense that most of the mythology he’d draw on would be from the Dark Phoenix era. You can fit the whole Scott/Maddy Pryor thing into Morrison’s conception of the character, but in some ways, it works better without him ever having been through that darker experience.

Anyway, writers after Claremont struggled to make an impact on the title. There’s very few new characters introduced after 1991 who made any sort of an impact in the X-Men world, and very little character evolution. You could easily jump from 1991’s X-Men #3 to New X-Men #114 without any trouble following what’s going on. I’ve read some mid 90s X-Men books, and generally speaking, you don’t get the sense that the characters are ever going to have meaningful change happen to them. Most of the writers who did try to change things were held back by Marvel, and even Claremont himself failed miserably to tell good stories.

Luckily, Morrison had the combination of his skill as a writer and the corporate leeway to tell the kind of stories he wanted to, to do a kind of self contained run on the title that could radically change things and leave up to the next writer to figure out what’s next. I’ve read a little bit of Joss Whedon’s X-Men, a full read is forthcoming, but I don’t really need any more after the end of “Here Comes Tomorrow.” That feels like a fine place for the X-Men narrative to end, in the same way that X-Men #3 did. Obviously their lives will go on and the stories will continue, but I don’t need anymore. Part of the reason I liked the early parts of Mike Carey’s X-Men is that he’s dealing with a totally different corner of the X-Men universe than Grant did, and I can appreciate that book on its own terms rather than as a continuation of New X-Men. But, still, that book doesn’t come close to what Morrison did.

I would agree with people who say that Morrison’s run is uneven. Reading the beginning, I was thinking that it wasn’t as good as I remember it. “E For Extinction” is very cool, but it feels largely conceptual. X-Men books should be messy and emotionally overwrought, not the perfectly sculpted cool of that first arc. “E For Extinction” is pretty close to flawless, it’s certainly the arc I’d give to someone who’d never read X-Men, but much like Claremont’s run, the deeper we go into the world and the characters, the more fascinating they become. The first year on the title is hit and miss for me, with the Quitely issues working great, and the Kordey fill ins really draining momentum. “Imperial” is the nadir of the run, from both a writing and artistic perspective, salvaged primarily by a fantastic last issue.

The second year expands the world and changes the focus from fighting for survival to building a new society. I love the three issue Fantomex arc, that to me is the epitome of sexy post human X-Men, while still working on a character and emotional level. The two Jean Paul Leon issues are also fantastic. The “Riot” storyline played a bit weaker than I remembered it. It’s still great in a lot of ways but could have been paced a little better. And, having seen the way Quitely art looks in All Star Superman, it’s clear how poorly it was finished here. The second year is where the dream comes to fruition, and subsequently starts to become undone. People will always rebel against even the most perfect world. The year culminates with another flawed, but at times brilliant storyline, “Murder at the Mansion.” That storyline doesn’t work so well conceptually, but on a character level, the Emma Frost stuff is as good as anything in the run.

The third year is where everything seems to fall apart. After the fun detour to “Assault on Weapon Plus,” Magneto takes control of the book and spins it upside down to “Planet X.” I wrote more about this storyline, and “Here Comes Tomorrow” than I did about the entire rest of the run. I think that’s a testament to just how huge both stories are, and how good a job they do of synthesizing all the themes that have come before. “Planet X” has its flaws, but there’s so much to think about, so much emotional engagement that I consider it easily one of the best stories in the run, and an important story in X-Men history. “E For Extinction” makes a lot more sense, but it doesn’t hit me in the way that “Planet X” does.

“Planet X” reminds me of the Doctor Who season finale from this year. It’s the kind of story I always wanted to read when I first found out about X-Men, and it feels almost unhealthy to get something that hits so many things that I want. Like those Doctor Who episodes, it’s frequently nonsensical, but I don’t care, I’d rather have the insane brilliance of the story than almost anything else.

And, reading it again, “Here Comes Tomorrow” was a revelation, an echo of “Planet X” that somehow manages to synthesize all the central concepts from the run into one fantastic final story. Morrison goes out on a high note, his motley crue of future X-Men torn apart, only to be saved by Phoenix.

New X-Men has a special pull for me, since it’s a combination of my favorite corporate comics property and my favorite comics writer. I can really enjoy Morrison’s work on JLA or Final Crisis, but I don’t have that childhood connection to these characters. I’m frequently at a loss when faced with a mass army of characters moving in and out of the work without identification, and if you’re not familiar with X-Men, I’m sure seeing Jamie Madrox or Bishop suddenly appear is pretty confusing. But, I know all those people, I’ve read hundreds of issues of X-books and I know the mythology he’s referring to. I’m as big a fan of the Claremont run as anyone, and this is the only run on the book I think is comparable to what Claremont accomplished.

Canceling a Show

I’m often baffled when a network will invest all the money to develop and advertise a new series, then cancel it after one episode. If you thought it was going to be that bad, why make it in the first place, and if you really believe in it, why would weak episode one numbers make you cancel the whole thing? If you’ve got more episodes made, at least give them a chance. After all, Seinfeld started out as a very low rated series, in today’s world, it would probably have been cancelled.

Ironically, as a viewer, I fall victim to that same one episode snap judgment I’m criticizing. I’ve been kind of backed up with TV to watch lately. At the start of the Fall season, I was planning, or at least thinking about, watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fringe, Sons of Anarchy, The Office, 30 Rock, Pushing Daisies, True Blood and Mad Men, along with catching on Pushing Daisies season one on DVD, and going through Berlin Alexanderplatz and the rest of Swingtown, Generation Kill and In Treatment I never watched over the summer. So, it’s just way too much stuff to watch in any kind of timely fashion, and with so many series, priorities become clear. I very rarely actively drop a show, Lost is probably the only show I’ve consciously said I’m not watching this any more too.

More frequently when I “cancel” a show, it happens due to a subconscious revelation of my lack of interest in the show. I’ll get a backlog of unwatched episodes, to the point that catching up would require a major time investment, and as the episodes stack up, I’ll eventually decide it’s not worth the time needed to catch up. That’s part of why I don’t like shows that launch with two hour premieres. The reason I gave up on 24 with season six was simply that I started four hours behind, and after a lackluster first couple of hours, I sat on the next couple of episodes, until there were nine aired, and I had no hope of catching up.

If I really like a show, I’ll invariably watch it right after it airs. True Blood, Mad Men or 30 Rock are all a must watch the night of. With The Wire, I would stay up until 3 or 4 AM to see the show when it first was added to the On Demand menu Sunday night. That level of interest is the greatest testament to the show’s quality, that absolute need to see the next episode.

But, what happens on the other end of the spectrum? I’ve got three episodes of Sons of Anarchy unwatched on the DVR. I liked the first episode, and was planning to watch more, but I never felt compelled to continue. There was always something a little better out there, and pretty soon it’ll reach the point where it takes a huge commitment to catch up. I watched the first episode of Fringe and thought, that’s ok, I’ll give it a couple more episodes. But, there’s always a cost to watching a show. The hour spent watching Fringe means I’m not able to catch up on a better show. It was a different landscape before TV on DVD, now Fringe not only has to compete against its timeslot, and other shows on TV today, it’s got to compete against every TV show ever made. Sure, Fringe may be ok, but is it going to top Berlin Alexanderplatz? I doubt it. It’s just not good enough to be worth my time, hence one episode was enough.

Right now, Sarah Connor is on the edge for me. I watched the first four episodes when they aired last year, and then “cancelled” the show due to lack of interest. I heard good things and caught up on season one in a couple of days on DVD. I’ve been watching season two as it goes, and realizing that the show has diminishing returns. It’s just not that good, and at one point do I cut it off? I’ve got one unwatched episode now, and rather than watch it, I’ve watched episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz two nights in a row. Will I watch that episode? At this point, I feel like I’m invested in Sarah Connor enough to keep going, but it doesn’t captivate me in the way that the best TV should. It’s in that nebulous gray zone right now where a really bad episode could kill the show forever, or a really good one could put it back to a must watch.

Ultimately, I think it’s good that we live in a world with so many viewing options. For a while there, I felt like I was nearing the end of series to watch, but there’s a lot of great new stuff airing, and still a lot in the past that I want to go through. I’m still planning on watching the rest of Farscape at some point, but that’s another show that swerved in and out of must watch status, ranging from episodes that made me watch the next one immediately to episodes that put me off the show for a couple of weeks. But, Fringe is gone forever, and Sarah Connor could soon follow it off into the darkness of cancellation. Maybe they’ll get better, I would have probably stopped watching The X-Files, Babylon 5 and Buffy after their first season if I didn’t know they’d get better, but in today’s world, most shows don’t get the luxury of time to grow. It’s make or break immediately.

The Stand

I read, and loved, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series a few years back. I’ve always been interested in works that combine fantasy elements with a real world setting. I think there’s a tendency to downplay the significance of events that happen in our world. People will accept an epic quest to save the world in The Lord of the Rings or a movie set in the past, but in movies set today, the best we can hope for is a quiet drama about a few peoples’ lives, or an action movie where a government is at stake. Even if it is about saving the world, it’s not presented that way. We devalue the significance of actions in our own world when in reality the things we do can be just as epic and important as any fantasy characters’ actions. So, I was pleased to pick up The Stand and find a story that started with the intention of doing a Lord of the Rings style epic in our world, using the iconography of the modern world to tell an epic story about a battle between the very forces of good and evil itself.

I was already familiar with some of the concepts in the story from The Dark Tower, where Randall Flagg appeared in various guises over the run of the story. Here in The Stand, he functions as one of two poles in the battle between good and evil. King has an uncanny ability to string huge stories together. This thousand page book just flies by, and he builds such a credible world that it really feels like the story could go on forever. There’s two major elements at work in the book, one is the story of the battle between good and evil, the other is the story of people rebuilding society following the catastrophic plague.

The good/evil battle works well enough, though some of it is bogged down by the sort of plot contrivances present in a lot of fantasy stories, namely the reliance on destiny and the hand of god to guide the story rather than character actions. Mother Abagail, despite being an interesting character, functions primarily as a literal deus ex machina, directing the characters and moving the story along to a place where it needs to go. Why does everyone come to Boulder? The story needs them there so that they can rebuild society, but there’s no particular reason, that’s where the dreams about Mother Abagail come in. Similarly, the conflict between Flagg and the Free Zone plays out almost entirely in dreams and visions, outside of Harold and Nadine bombing the town, there’s very little actual conforontation between the groups. And the end, The Stand itself,is slightly anticlimactic, but pretty much anything would be after 900 pages of buildup.

But, I think the intention is less a literal war than a metaphorical one. The actual battle is in the construction of the Free Zone versus Flagg’s Las Vegas. With the world wiped away, the survivors have the chance to build something totally different, and the conflict is whether humanity will choose a better path, or descend into a fascist state. We watch the democratic Free Zone arise, and understand how that world works, with an emphasis on freedom and people taking responsibility for themselves. The seven people on the council take on their responsibility reluctantly, and have no outright desire for power. In contrast, Flagg and his inner circle are all about getting power for themselves, ruling over the world and protecting their own self interest.

When Dayna goes over to Flagg’s society, we get an insight into the way they live. This world isn’t a den of evil, it’s mostly just regular people, unwittingly serving the force of conflict and destruction. I like that Flagg, though he is the embodiment of evil itself, isn’t played as an over the top evil guy. He can play nice, he can act human, and he sells people not with threats, but with promises of how he can help them. In the end, he is destroyed not by a people that betrays him, but by the Trashcan Man’s attempt to show how devoted he is. Flagg’s world is a viable alternative, it can work for some people, but it denies people freedom, he’s bringing back the strict regimentation of our world when people could move on to something different.

Ultimately, the message seems to be that there are some people who just enjoy doing evil, but most people who serve an evil master do so unconsciously. The everyday people in Las Vegas have no real idea what the Free Zone is, they don’t necessarily care about attacking it, but they go along with Flagg because he gives them security and purpose. He is the ultimate parent figure, with him around, nobody has any questions about what they should be doing. It’s a lot easier to govern as a fascist, the people in the Free Zone struggle to assert their authority because they don’t want to be oppressive, and yet, how do you stop people from doing things without oppressing them?

I’m used to film, where we’re lucky for a director to make a film every couple of years, and after doing a few films, most directors stop writing their own material and start doing other peoples’ scripts. That’s why I’m so amazed that King has so many stories to tell and continues to write one or more books pretty much every year. I suppose part of it is lifestyle, as a filmmaker, you need to work with actors, raise funding, and it’s tougher to branch out beyond traditional genres. But still, there’s so many stories and characters within this one book, it’s awe inspiring at times. I think there’s a lot of flaws with the book, ranging from his usual overemphasis on bodily functions, to the weak roles of women within the story, but on the whole, it’s a fantastic piece. By the end, when Tom Cullen comes along to find Stu, and they make it back to the Free Zone, it’s such a powerful feeling, of a journey completed.

For all the philosophical components of the story, what ultimately makes it work is those first 200 pages, which set up the characters and their worlds before the plague. I’m guessing the producers of Lost were inspired by that section of the book, and used it as the basis for their flashback structure. But, the difference is, reading the beginning of the book, I didn’t know where it was going to go, and those stories were just as interesting as people in the postapocalyptic world. I could have read a whole book about Frannie’s struggle with being pregnant, or Larry’s attempt to get clean. But, taking those strong character bases and putting them through the wringer of the plague makes the whole story stronger, so that instead of feeling like the entire purpose of the book, the plague becomes just something that happened to these people, the event to bring all the disparate people together to build a new world.

New X-Men: "Here Comes Tomorrow" (#151-154)

“Planet X” is on one level a story about how it’s impossible to truly change these corporate icon superhero characters. Morrison can spin the X-Men into a totally different world, one where they’re not even fighting people, they’re just trying to change the world. But, eventually, things will tend back towards the norm, if he didn’t do it, the writer after him would have had them fighting Magneto once again, back as a superhero team.

However, I think the amount of regression in “Planet X” can be a bit overemphasized by some fans. I’d argue it’s one last confrontation with the old paradigm, by defeating Magneto there, they’re proving once and for all that his way doesn’t work, and ensuring the continuation of a new paradigm. In the context of the story itself, the end of the arc isn’t telling us the X-Men are doomed to perpetually fight Magneto, it’s telling us that Magneto has been so utterly defeated he can never really threaten what Charles has built. The immediate follow up to Morrison’s X-Men may have been Joss Whedon putting them back in spandex and battling orcs, but in my mind, the motley team surrounding Xavier in that final panel goes on to change the world and keep things evolving.

But, there’s one last foe to battle, and that’s the destructive force of war itself, Sublime! The first time I read “Here Comes Tomorrow,” it soared over my head, much like Volume III of The Invisibles, I struggled to process everything that was happening, even as I loved the essence of the story, and the surreal-emotional finale. It reminds me a lot of what Morrison did with “Glitterdammerung!” at the end of The Invisibles, flinging us into a future world with different rules and strange happenings to provide an emotional closure and answer some lingering questions about the run as a whole. It’s a challenging arc, but on this reread, it’s one of, if not the, best arcs in the entire run.

New X-Men on the whole gets a lot of criticism for its artistic inconsistency. And, the first year or so on the book really is crippled by some awful Kordey fill ins that don’t mesh well at all with what Quitely was doing. But, from “Riot at Xavier’s” on, this book has a series of artists who perfectly complement what Grant is doing, and give each story its own unique feel. Obviously it would have been cool to see Quitely do the whole run, but I don’t know if even he could have topped the cumulative coolness of having a perfectly chosen artist for each story. It reminds me of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, where each track has a different superstar producer and a unique feel. Because everyone’s just coming in for one arc, they don’t get worn down, and Jiminez, Bachalo and Silvestri all produce career best art. I can’t say for sure, but I think the success of the rotating art teams on this book probably inspired the similar diversity of styles on Seven Soldiers. And, in each case, the artist gives the arc a distinct flavor that works really well.

Silverstri presided over some of Claremont’s best stories in the 80s, including the fantastic “Fall of the Mutants” crossover and the over the top insanity of “Inferno.” I liked his art on those issues, but he looks a lot better with today’s coloring and reprinting technologies. I really wish that Marvel would get their act together and get Claremont’s entire X-Men run out in omnibus format, I got the first volume a while back, and had no idea that the coloring on those issues was actually pretty good. It’s just the reproduction on the single issues was awful, and didn’t display the art to its best advantage. Here, Silverstri is tasked with building an entire world and introducing an entirely new cast. He does a fantastic job, giving everything a kind of dirty, reckless future feel. It’s alien in a way that very few other comics are. This may not be our future, but it’s definitely not the world today.

The story itself has a couple of functions. On one level, it’s just about Morrison doing his take on one of the quintessential X-Men riffs, the dystopian future that could be. Morrison’s a bit more ambitious than most writers of this kind of story, building a world that’s totally credible, and not just about killing off the characters we know. I love “Days of Future Past,” but it has produced a lot of bad stories in its wake. Morrison’s gang here is enjoyable enough that it transcends the shock value of a future story and becomes a valid world in its own right.

The other, more significant level of things is the final battle between the two essential forces that have been in conflict throughout the entire run, evolution and stagnation, the Phoenix force versus Sublime. Or you could view the entire thing as a Mulholland Dr./Bardo like passage to death, in which Jean constructs this entire world as a way of coming to terms with her own passage to death, to come to terms with Scott and Emma getting together. It all works equally well, and that’s part of the beauty of the storyline, it’s a frantic mess of ideas that leaves room for interpretation while still telling an entertaining surface level story.

We open 150 years in the future, where Tom Skylark is under attack from a band of genetically modified Nightcrawlers. I like the replacement of the traditional foes in this scenario, sentinels, with a genetic creation. It fits more with the X-Men world and ties in with the concept that underlies Sublime. Let me delve a bit deeper into Sublime first off, as much of the story hinges on it. The way I see it, evolution is about adaptation, organisms modifying themselves to survive better. The ultimate destiny of evolution would be to transcend death and live forever in peace. Sublime is the genetic death wish, the drive to destroy ourselves and perpetuate old conflicts.

Virtually all of the philosophy in Grant’s works can be traced back to The Invisibles. Sublime is the ‘war,’ the us vs. them posturing that makes King Mob or Sir Miles want to destroy his enemies. It’s the war that prevents us from evolving into something better. The counterpart of Sublime is the Phoenix Force, which is evolution incarnate, burning away that which doesn’t work and leaving something that’s stronger and better. The Phoenix force is the rescue mission, and the early part of Grant’s run is all about the Phoenix in ascendance, the X-Men transcending the wars that have doomed them in the past and becoming something new and better.

The latter part of the run, specifically the battles with Quentin Quire and Magneto are about sublime in ascendance, the tendency to destroy combating the positive growth of the Xavier institute. While Quentin Quire may have had some valid points, he’s motivated entirely by hate, by the desire to destroy humanity simply because they destroyed other mutants in Genosha. Taken to its extreme, this tendency will doom all life on Earth by creating a cycle of destruction that won’t end until everyone is destroyed. Here, we get the retcon that Kick contains Sublime, making it clear that Quentin Quire and Magneto weren’t exactly themselves, they were under the influence of this evolutionary death wish. You could view that as a way to excuse their actions, but I’d argue it functions more as a metaphor. The hate that made them want to destroy humanity is given a name in the form of Sublime, but really, all that kick is is the power that we get from anger and aggression.

The future X-Men in this story are notable for their diversity and their co-dependence on each other, the opposite of the solitary Beast and his mutinous, selfish assistants. Tom Skylark is in a symbiotic relationship with Rover, the sentinel who protects him. Tom is now the hunted minority, a solitary human in a world where almost all of humanity is extinct. Now, the sentinel that existed to kill mutants, a force of Sublime, is in service to Tom, a protector and creator. Apart, they’re each powerless, together they are a force to reckon with. The same is true of Cassandra and Martha. E.V.A. is also a symbiotic being, though her familiar, Fantomex, has died. The X-Men are now a robot, a human, a brain in a jar, a giant bird, an old woman and Wolverine. It’s a radically different vision of the team, a truly post-human bunch. They’re also pretty badass, as we see in the two page spread with all of them walking through a rainy night in issue #152.

Next, we jump over to the Beast in his castle for a rant about the nature of the new universe. Why did Morrison choose to have Beast become the leader of this evil movement in the future? Part of it is a desire to tie into traditional apocalyptic mythology, having everyone refer to the beast ties into book of Revelations stuff about the “number of the beast” and all that. It’s also a spin on the Dark Beast character from the 90s, a misbegotten concept who perhaps didn’t need to return. And, on some level, I think it’s just about giving every character in the run something to do, and making clear just how bad this future is.

From there, it’s over to the Cuckoos, who are connected to a giant version of Cerebra, three sages in this desolate future. They feel very much like characters out of Greek mythology spouting cryptic dialogue about a “terrible flaw at the heart of things.” They know that this world isn’t right, things went wrong back at the end of “Planet X,” and it continues here, awaiting Jean to heal it all at the end of the arc. Notably, the Cuckoos seem to exist outside of time, perceiving things like the reader does. They ask “How did this happen so quickly?” Wolverine takes it to mean the total dissolution of society in such a comparatively short time, but I feel like their consciousness flings forward direct from “Planet X” to here, in the same way that Jean’s does.

What is the flaw in the heart of the universe? It’s found 150 years earlier, back in the present of the rest of the run, where Scott’s guilt about what happened with Jean causes him to step away from running the school and set off a chain of events that will bring the universe down. While I really like the rest of Silvestri’s art, his Emma is awful. For one, it makes no sense to wear a giant fur coat and leave it open on her barely there outfit underneath. And, the way her face is drawn, she looks like either a porn star or a blowup doll.

But, that aside, I like the concept of this scene, and the way it’s repeated at the end of the arc. Scott has been consumed by guilt the entire run, he doesn’t want to be with Emma because he thinks it will somehow be betraying Jean. He’d rather walk away and abandon the kids, the next generation for his own self indulgent self loathing. How can the world be healed? It will take the intervention of Jean herself from far in the future.

The Phoenix Egg is the mcguffin for the first part of the story, allowing Morrison to build this world and indulge in a number of cool action sequences. E.V.A and Tito versus the bunch of nightcrawlers in #151 is awesome, as is the band of early 90s style characters versus Appolyon and hundreds of crawlers in #152. There’s a majestic beauty to the panel with Rover standing in the city, surrounded by crawlers, explosions all around him.

Cassandra Nova reappears, dressed in the same outfit she wore back at the very beginning of “E For Extinction.” As we find out later in this arc, Ernst is the rehabilitated version of Cassandra Nova, but her presence here implies that she might actually be a force for positive evolution. As Xavier says in the “New Worlds” arc, it took Cassandra to force him out of stasis and start really changing things instead of just accepting the world as it is. Obviously she did some pretty awful things, but on some level, she was a force for positive change. I guess Cassandra’s presence here is the ultimate testament to what the Phoenix can do, burning away the destructive parts of her personality and leaving only the positive force for change.

Cassandra asks the Cuckoos what they see in the future, and all that’s there is “Consuming fire. The judgment of the Phoenix.” But, this is not a bad thing. The destructive power of the Phoenix scares people, but in the end, it is a positive force for change. The Phoenix will remake this world and take away all the pain within it in favor of something better.

This raises the question of what it feels like to watch your world remade in favor of a better one. For all the sadness in this world, there are still some beautiful moments. Do they exist anywhere? This is not what the future is meant to be, but the moments still happened, the feelings were still felt. Jean does not so much eradicate this future, as spin the present in a different direction. Outside of time, this world exists, but in the forward progression that will be the rest of the present day characters’ lives, it is gone.

It’s kind of like hypertime. In this story, the HCT world is the river, the way that everything flows forward. What Jean does is redirect time at the source of Scott’s decision so that the HCT world is no longer the main river, it’s a branch that dries up 150 years in the future, sacrificed so that the main timeline, the river itself, can continue on a better path, far into the future.

The dark Shakesperean feel of the Beast storyline continues as he prepares to raise the Phoenix from the fire. I love how epic this is, the fiery cave like something out of Lord of the Rings, and Beast himself shouting these over the top words, begging the Phoenix to “Arise!” There’s a lot of similarities between him and Magneto in “Planet X,” reinforcing the idea that Magneto was under the possession of a force beyond his control. The Beast claims he has waited three billion years for this moment, to finally control the Phoenix. He has overseen the wars that have guided all life to this present moment, and if he should control the Phoenix, he would have possession of the ultimate weapon, a way to stop positive change and finally win this war of absolute ideas.

I love the representation of Jean in this arc, she exists first as an entity of pure energy, more Phoenix than human. She says “I was in the crown,” a reference to Keter, the peak of the Kaballah, a place of pure divinity. She has been pulled down from Keter to serve one final role on Earth and end this war once and for all.

One of the best things about this arc is how epic everything is. We move from the fiery pits of the Beast’s lair to Panafrika, where Phoenix battles a bug mutant and ignites nuclear blasts over the plains. It’s the kind of thing that only comics can do, and Morrison manages to give us this epic imagery without sacrificing the emotional content of the story. So many people make comics that just feel like storyboards to movie, what makes Morrison and Moore so much better than everyone else is that they understand intrinsically what only comics as a medium can do. In comics, this massive story “costs” the same as two people in a room talking. That’s not to say that two people in a room talking can’t be great, it’s just that when you can depict anything, it’s a bit frustrating that so many comics remain Earthbound, using the visual vocabulary of films rather than the imagnation.

Phoenix kills Bumbleboy, then ushers him into death in the same way that Xorn helped Quentin move on out of this world. When Xorn/Magneto did that, it first read as a beautiful moment, Xorn acting out of mercy to help Quentin leave behind the pain of this world an become something more. In retrospect, it becomes one of the major examples of Xorn’s malevolence, the Magneto lurking underneath. But, perhaps he truly was motivated by a desire to help. That was the good piece of Magneto, recognizing a kindred spirit in Quentin, and helping him pass into another world without pain. In the end, we see Quentin in the White Hot Room, part of the Phoenix Force, not consigned forever to Sublime.

Either way, the scene with Phoenix holding the skull is amazing. I love the way Silvestri draws the moment, and Phoenix saying “You were always here, waiting for yourself to arrive.” It seems that the White Hot Room is the place we all go where we die, the pure energy consciousness from which all humanity springs. In the worldview of The Invisibles, it’s the supercontext. To die is to be absorbed into the White Hot Room and reunite with the universal essence we lose touch with when we’re on this world. On Earth, we mistakenly believe that we are individual beings, in the White Hot Room, we’re once again reminded that we are all part of something larger, a singular organism that is growing and evolving together.

Apollyon and Beast have a relationship similar to Magneto and Esme in “Planet X.” Beast’s hubris prevents him from seeing both how frustrated Apollyon has become with him, and the inevitability of his failure. If Sublime is about the negative force of evolution, our tendency towards self destruction, it would make sense that he constantly sabotages himself. He believes he can control the Phoenix, but in the end, the Phoenix will burn him away. Even as she becomes more and more self aware, he only rages on about tying to stop these new lifeforms from multiplying, to stop them from becoming “immortal, unstoppable supermen.” If they were to reach that level of existence, he would lose power, to him the fight against mutants is the fight to protect himself.

Next up, the X-Men go into battle to save their whale ally. I particularly like the sentient whale saying “Help! They’ll mak’ tallow and soap o’ me!” Luckily the team roars into action. Cassandra says smething interesting here, describing a painting as “Like some sad memory of a future that never happened,” which perfectly describes the very story we’re reading. We also get the fun moment where Tito is excited about doing the fastball special. Tito is a next generation X-Man, still awed by the legacy of the original X-Men, including Beak. It’s funny to hear him say that he can never live up to the legacy of his great grandfather, Beak, both because of the ironic juxtaposition of the Beak we knew with the apparently legendary figure in the future and because it makes clear that for all Tito’s mutation, the lack of self confidence is a hard coded genetic trait.

From there, we see the sad fall of Rover, who is apparently jealous of the close relationship between Tom and E.V.A. Judging from their relationship here, it’s not verboten for humans and robots to have “intimate” relations, and it seems that Tom is making his play when Rover is torn apart by an army of ‘crawlers. Rover collapses into the sea in a haunting panel where his hand reaches out even as he sinks deeper into the depths. These characters have only been around for a couple of issues, but I still really care about them and that moment hits a real emotional note.

I love pretty much any story that involves a flashback to three billion years ago, which Morrison uses in issue #154 to explain the origin of Sublime. I’ve discussed the basic concept quite a bit already, what he’s saying here is that Sublime, the fighting itself, was the dominant species on the planet for three billion years, and it’s not until mutants that someone comes along who could transcend that paradigm and create a new world. That’s what the entire run is about, Xavier trying to find a better way to do things, a way that isn’t bound up in human prejudices and pettiness, that instead helps humanity evolve and create a new world. The Beast is devoted to stopping that from happening.

Despite the fact that their relationship is at the emotional core of the run, there’s precious few scenes where Scott and Jean are actually together. I think that done intentionally to sway out sympathies towards Scott and Emma getting together, and make it clear that Jean has moved on to post human interests. Jean is a lot closer to Logan throughout the story, from their kiss in the woods to their journey into the sun together. So, it makes sense that they’d be the last ones standing in the future, debating the future of mutantkind.

The Phoenix spouts the party line, that “Extinction is part of the cycle of natural growth and death.” Sublime made her believe that no species can last forever, but Wolverine proves the exception. He personally has evolved into “a potentially viable species,” and many other mutants have to. Logan then ties Sublime into everything that’s come before in the series, and the entire history of X-Men. The X-Men are designed to evolve, Sublime is the anti-evolution. While I love the concept of Sublime, and think it enhances the story and gives it a thematic cohesion, I won’t deny that it does kind of come out of nowhere here in the last storyline.

It’s retconned in nicely, but the connections between this Sublime and John Sublime from the U-Men storyline are shaky. If that story had given us a hint that Sublime was part of something larger, it would have made more sense, as it is, the groundwork is there, but you still have to do most of the work yourself. In that way, it works a lot like Magneto/Xorn. I think both revelations do work, and I’m glad the last two arcs happened as they did, but they could have been better integrated into what came before.

Jean and Logan’s conversation is interrupted when Cassandra plunges her plane into the head chakra of the Phoenix, to “unplug the crown.” It’s a glorious moment of metaphysical action. The crown is the entry point to the White Hot Room, where individual humanity transcends into the collective entity. But, to save the world, Logan needs to tap into Jean Grey herself. Only she knows how to heal the whole in time and prevent the world from ever going this way.

In one page, we see the history that led us to this moment. Scott is the anchor of the school, and without him or Emma or Jean, Hank couldn’t keep things under control. This page has two really important functions. One is to make it clear where the hole in time began. According to Logan, Magneto killed Jean as part of his service to Sublime, to eradicate the opposing force in a never ending war. The hole in time wasn’t Jean’s death, it was Scott walking away from the school, Jean now has to reverse that decision and heal things.

Equally significant is the revelation that Kick is Sublime in aerosol form. Sublime didn’t have the hold on mutants that it did on other species, the rise of mutants, and the impending death of humanity threatened to make Sublime irrelevant, to push him towards extinction. His first attack was the U-Men, an attempt to turn mutant and human against each other. When that didn’t work, Sublime took a more covert form, infiltrated Xavier’s with the drug, and used Quentin Quire and Magneto to attack Xavier. This is the last of those battles, the moment when Jean has to make a choice between giving into her human side, and holding onto Scott, or letting him go, and transcending with the Phoenix force into something more.

From here, everything spirals into chaos. Cassandra is ripped apart, and the Cuckoos self destruct rather than be absorbed into Cererbra. Here, it’s revealed that the Cuckoos were Weapon XIV. The Weapon Plus program was started by Sublime as a way of manufacturing mutant killers. It’s notable that three of the core of X-Men here, the Cuckoos, Wolverine and E.V.A. were created or modified by Weapon Plus. The force of Sublime may be powerful, but it can be overcome. The Cuckoos are the government traitor alluded to in “Assault on Weapon Plus,” but thanks to the training at Xavier’s School, they now fight for good. While the revelation that they are Weapon XIV is kind of out of nowhere, it makes the stakes clear. It’s Emma’s training that helps save them, and if she and Scott aren’t there to teach the next generation, mutants will be doomed.

Much like in the Magneto battle in “Planet X,” the Beast emerges and the X-Men gradually tear him apart. One of the high points here is Tom screaming at him “Why does there always have to be people like you?” The answer is the Sublime force, if they eradicate that, then maybe there can be a world without power mad tyrants bent on destruction. With Tom’s life at stake, Rover emerges out of the sea and flings the Beast to the ground. But, the Beast tears them all down. I love the moment at the end where E.V.A. is dying and sees Tom as Fantomex.

In the end, as before, it’s Jean and Logan left to end things. He tears at Beast, but Jean tells him “Don’t let Sublime contaminate you! Don’t fight!” The best way to destroy Sublime is to love it, to integrate it. It’s the same concept we saw with Jack and Sir Miles back in the end of Invisibles Voume I. Logan falls, but Jean is actualized. “Did you think you would live forever, little speck?” Against the power of the Phoenix, Sublime will fall. Life has grown and flourished in spite of Sublime, and now Jean tears him out and heals Beast. Henry returns for a moment and dies, along with everyone else in a mad rush. Appolyon tearing off his skin suit seems to come out of nowhere, but just adds to the manic mood. Much like “Planet X,” we leave the battle in media res and spin off to another world as Logan hands it off to Jean.

The White Hot Room is a concept I love, an extradimensional space within the M’Kraan Crystal where the Phoenixes of many worlds gather together to help move worlds forward. This scene echoes the end of the original Phoenix Saga, when Jean goes into the M’Kraan crystal to heal a rift and save the world. Morrison makes it a more emotional thing in his conception, the rift isn’t an abstract idea, it’s the pain that Scott feels, and the only way to save it is for Jean to send him a message and liberate him to move on with his life.

There’s a lot of reference to the dichotomy between her humanity and her godhood. She talks about losing her concentration when “Heart got stuck.” She needs to play one last role as Jean before passing into the collective. The X-Men are the “parents” of the world they live in, without them all that’s left is “A badly wounded orphan universe,” a world ravaged by Sublime. But, the Phoenix can heal that. Quentin Quire appears to tell her that healing the universe requires her to “water it with your heart’s blood.”

Quentin then speeds off into the cosmos, telling her they’ve met hundreds of time and “if it was me, I’d just let it die.” Is this referring to Quentin’s possession by Sublime, in that capacity, he and the Phoenix certainly have met hundreds of times, and it would make sense that he would abandon the world to die. However, if that’s the case, why is he wearing the Phoenix outfit? Perhaps he is the rehabilitated Sublime, now serving the cause of the Phoenix masters. Notably, he refers them as “they,” like he is not one of them. The way I took it, Jean is not outside the Phoenix force, she is part of it, she would refer to “them” as “we.” This Quentin does wear his Omega Gang hairstyle, perhaps he clings to that part of himself even in this collective space that is the White Hot Room.

In the end, Jean recognizes her duty. The only time we saw her enraged in the entire run was when she caught Scott and Emma together. She was fine with abandoning Scott for large chunks of the narrative, both of them knew they were drifting apart, but a part of her still felt possessive of him and couldn’t stand to see Emma with him. That was when she gave into Sublime, now she is confronted with that moment again. She could keep Scott and Emma apart, as she apparently did the first go round, to create this future. But, in the end, she has become part of the Phoenix Force, she understands the way that petty human jealousy can tear them apart, and she gives Scott her blessing, “Live, Scott,” and is echoed by the Phoenix Force, which empowers the orphaned universe and sets everyone off in a new direction. The old world, ruled by Sublime, is dead, there will be a new, better one now.

Speaking with Emma, Scott expresses sadness at the fact that nothing they do makes a difference. He sees only the conflict, not the progress. But, they are changing things, and without him, the entire world will crumble. This is where Jean comes in, giving him the power to not get bogged down in that despair, to choose a new path for himself. Now, when Emma asks Scott if he wants to inherit the Earth, he says “Yes.” He and Emma will be at the forefront, molding a new generation of mutant minds free from the influence of Sublime, to become something better. The run ends with Scott and Emma finally kissing for the first time in the real world, Scott is free of his guilt, able to pursue what he really wants without trying to cling to an image of himself that he has outgrown. For Emma, this moment indicates acceptance. To be loved by Scott, the ultimate boy scout, means that there must be something good in her. And, because she has so many flaws in her past, Scott doesn’t have to hide any of his own inadequacies or bad feelings. Together, they become something stronger, together they will build a better world.

In the end, this whole trip to the future is about this single moment, showing how much a single person can change the world. It’s about Jean coming to terms with her passage from this world, it’s about Scott and Emma learning to live and get out of the cycle of grief, it’s about the X-Men finally triumphing over the force of self destruction and paving the way for a new world. It’s about evolution.

And so ends the only run on X-Men since Claremont’s that really matters. I’ll be back shortly with a wrapup of the run as a whole, though this storyline functions as such a successful summation of the themes, there’s not that much more to discuss. But, despite having written 10,000 words on these past two storylines, I think there’s always a bit more there.

New X-Men: "Planet X": Part II (#148-150)

One of the interesting things about the arc is the way it positions Magneto’s revolution within the political climate of a post 9/11, Bush governed world. Magneto realizes that he needs a few soundbites rather than big speeches, The fickle nature of the populace is central to the arc, they don’t want real change, they just want to hold on to their comfortable lives. In that respect, it’s easy to sympathize with Magneto. In stories, a desire to maintain the status quo generally isn’t an admirable trait. People who just want to live their lives aren’t the ones we care about in a story where the stakes are global. Particularly because they remain largely off screen, the fickle populace acts essentially as a drain on the revolution. Magneto’s ideas fail because people don’t care enough to engage with them.

Or at least that’s how he views it. What Morrison would probably argue is that the kind of revolution Magneto poses was always flawed because it’s very much an Invisibles Volume I “Us vs. Them” showdown. It’s fingers fighting for control of the hand, that kind of thinking will never lead to real growth or change. Even if Magneto’s plan succeeded, he makes it clear that he’s going to keep humans around as a servant underclass, taking the jobs that mutants don’t want.

Perhaps the toughest scene to reconcile with previous presentations of Magneto is the opening of #149, where Magneto and the gang oversee the movement of humans into a crematorium. On one level, you can reduce any narrative inconsistencies to Magneto was on kick and insane, there anything goes. However, it’s more interesting to consider what Morrison does present, to not necessarily try to justify it with previous stories and instead accept it on the terms of what he’s presented in New X-Men. What Magneto is doing is presenting the extreme other side of what Xavier does, the kind of confrontational viewpoint that Quentin Quire also advocated. He’s powerful enough to destroy all existing social order, and pave the way for a world dominated by mutants, but his revolution gets tripped up every step of the way because it’s not practical for the real world. As Xavier makes clear at the end of the arc, what he stands for makes more sense as a t-shirt than as a real world practice.

That said, on a base level, much of the arc is about the basic insanity of Magneto’s viewpoints and the spiral into a nightmare world of a man with way too much power, and little relevance in today’s world. Magneto is George Bush, he is the American military-industrial complex, frustratingly one note in a world that’s infinitely more complex. I love the absurdity of Magneto smacking Beak to win the argument about whether a carrot can feel pain, and if it’s a fruit or vegetable.

After killing Basilisk because of a fart joke, Magneto has a falling out with Esme. She says “Are you waiting for them to stop you,” which functions on a number of levels. On the one hand, it’s a meta comment about the nature of superhero comics. Villains will always push things to the brink, but never pull the final trigger, always leaving the door open for the heroes to come in and save the day. Esme felt empowered by a Magneto who offered the chance to upend the status quo and become the ruler of a new mutant empire. As part of a hive mind, she’d be particularly interested in asserting her singular identity. Under Magneto’s wing, she drops the prim and proper Emma Frost inspired clothes she wore with the other Cuckoos for an Omega Gang inspired vamp outfit. She’s playing at the being the bad girl, wielding a whip just to add to the image.

But, she’s growing frustrated with Magneto. She’s from a younger, instant gratification generation, the kind of people who don’t have time for Magneto’s Shakespearean speeches. If he’s going to flip the world, just do it already. She doesn’t understand what the hold up is. Of course, she does recognize the self destructive streak in Magneto, he has everything he wants, and still he’s obsessed with showing up Charles and proving that his way is the right way.

This all leads up to the central scene of the arc, in which Magneto is confronted by Xorn, who appears to have gained his own consciousness as an entity separate from Magneto. It’s reinforced throughout the arc, the fact that people prefer Xorn to Magneto, and now Xorn shines through as Magneto’s conscience. You could argue that this Xorn is Xavier speaking to Magneto, but I prefer to think it’s the Xorn fiction suit reclaiming agency and saving the world. People who criticize the Xorn/Magneto twist harp on the narrative implausibiltities of it all, ignoring the rich allegorical layer. Xorn is the best in Magneto, the kick addled old man we see here is the worst. He says “I am your inner star, Erik. I will never let you be.” What’s doomed Magneto’s schemes in the past is his conscience, he’s never been able to be fully evil, to wipe out humans, because he has an innate decency. On some level, he is Xorn, and as reconfigured in this story, it’s that part of him that continually makes him lose when he battles the X-Men.

When Magneto speaks to Charles, he makes it sound like this entire assault on Manhattan is an attempt to prove that his way can work. As Xorn, he saw Xavier changing the world, making it a better place for mutants, and transcending the human/mutant conflict in a way that Magneto never could. Magneto wants to prove that he does have relevance, but in reality, Xavier took the best of Magneto’s ideas and applied it to X-Corps. Ernst sums it up when she says “Nobody likes what you’re doing, Magneto. It’s boring and old-fashioned. It’s all coming to an end and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.”

It all builds to issue #150. Claremont’s #150 was a major turning point in the redemption of Magneto, when he almost killed Kitty Pryde, he hit bottom and started down the path that would eventually lead to his rehabilitation around #200. Morrison’s #150 is a strange climax, an emotionally charged spiral towards insanity for all involved. Let me first note that Jiminez’s cover for this issue is one of my favorite comics covers ever, a singularly epic image, that’s nicely echoed by the beautiful image of the Phoenix that opens the issue.

Jiminez kills it again with the outré image of Wolverine reforming himself as he and Jean cross space to confront Magneto. Jean says “I had to die to come back, Logan. But I don’t know how long they’ll let me stay,” reinforcing the idea that it’s not really Magneto’s energy charge that kills her at the end of the issue, she’s always dead, this is just her fading ember doing one last cleansing duty in the universe.

The issue is structured as a series of assaults on Magneto, each destroying a little piece of him. Beak shows up and doesn’t even fight him, he just shouts “Xavier school is the best school,” a cutting refutation of the revolution Magneto is trying to create. It’s all about showing up Charles ideologically, and he can’t do that here. A more showy assault is Fantomex’s dive from E.V.A into the building, guns blazing, bullets screaming. I love Fantomex, and I’m glad that Grant brought him back here to spin through the air and spout catchy one liners like “You and whose knees?” I think Fantomex would have been a great fit in Seven Soldiers, he’s the kind of guy who, if written right, could headline a mindblowing ongoing series.

Again, it’s not so much the bullets that bother Magneto as it is Fantomex asking “Is everything you say a cliché?” Magneto in this storyline has old ideas, and with each passing moment, the X-Men prove him more and more irrelevant. Scott does this too when he tells Magneto how much he loved Xorn. Magneto constructed Xorn out of a piece of himself, a piece that he now claims to hate, but deep down knows may be better. But, he’s stuck in the old paradigm, he’s got to be the bad guy. He won’t evolve.

Next up, Esme turns on her mentor and assaults his mind. She talks about being inspired by Magneto as an idea, then getting gradually disappointed as she comes to know the real man, another pointed comment on how Magneto is more powerful as a symbol than as a person. He sends her earrings through her brain, killing her. The scene where Emma holds her dying body is particularly interesting. Emma talks about how proud she is, even as Esme rails against her. Esme is in a period of rebellion, she has to reject her parental figures to claim her own self identity, even as she follows much the same path that Emma did, latching on to a powerful man and trying to use her sexuality to make her way. When she speaks to Magneto, she even notes that he doesn’t look at the way she dresses, she wanted to be everything for him, but he was just an old man. Emma knows that rebellion, it’s the same rebellion she had. In the end, Emma has more in common with Esme than with the Cuckoos who blindly follow her.

This all leads to the frantic climax as Magneto struggles to prove that he is in fact Magneto. Wearing Xorn’s helmet to protect his scarred face, he finds that the people no longer believe he is who he says he is, and the X-Men are reacting against Xorn’s betrayal, not to Magneto’s attack. In the end, Magneto is beaten down, the populace he inspired from beyond the grave now rejects him and won’t even acknowledge him. I love the panel of him tearing off the Xorn mask, and screams “See you morons! I AM MAGNETO!” The Phoenix mocks him, asking “Is this the Magneto anyone knows? Is this what he looks like?” Identity is fluid, a construct. Magneto stands for certain things, he appears a certain way, beaten down, Magneto can no longer match up to the symbol who inspired people. The revolution has come to pass, and it’s failed miserably. He says that the Xorn mask is suffocating him, the identity that represents the best hope of what he can be has prevented him from achieving his goals. It is his conscience, tearing him down.

Xavier sums it all up when he says that “the worst thing you ever did was to come back, Erik.” Xavier has learned from his experiences, he wants to “put away the old dreams and manifestos,” and just listen to the new generation. That’s probably why he’s stepping down as head of the school, he got obsessed with his own new vision, and it backfired when he alienated people like Quentin Quire. There will always be forces in opposition with each other, that’s the way that change happens. What Xavier is saying is that his and Magneto’s ideological opposition did not breed positive change, it only reinforced their previous biases and locked them into ideological corners. Xavier saw the need to change and did so, Magneto can’t make that same adjustment, he has been rendered irrelevant in the face of a new group of X-Men. I particularly like that Xavier says all this while surrounded with a cast of new characters from Morrison’s run. Sure, Beast and Cyclops are there, but it’s the new faces who stand out, the universe has expanded, and the old villains don’t have the place they once had.

So, Magneto kills the Phoenix, and asks for death. It’s a strange set of beats, but the scene works for me. The entire arc has been pitched at this insane level and having Wolverine chop off his head in a single panel is as good a way to end it as any. We’ve already seen Wolverine acknowledge that is place in this world is to be a killer, in this case, it’s a mercy killing. In that sense, Wolverine is much like the Phoenix itself, he destroys things that don’t work, paving the way for people like Charles who can build things that do. A lot of the run has dealt with the fact that it takes a crisis to produce a change. Cassandra Nova provided the impetus for Xavier’s new vision of the world, and now Magneto’s insane assault on Manhattan gives Logan the excuse to kill him, and by extension prove that his ideology is a destructive dead end that doesn’t work anymore.

The story ends with Jean literally slipping away into white light as chaos continues to spin all around. After such an insane arc, it’s appropriate to go out with any sort easy denouement. The Cuckoos claim that “something’s gone wrong with the whole universe,” Scott screams for Xorn, Jean slips away and we jump 150 years into the future.

So, that’s Planet X. It’s an arc that has some issues, but it’s also thematically fascinating, hugely ambitious and beautifully drawn by Phil Jiminez. Is this the Magneto I knew and loved from Claremont’s run? Perhaps, you can make the leap, but I don’t necessarily view Morrison’s run as a direct continuation of what Claremont did. He has his own spins on the characters, drawing from their essence as defined by Claremont, but molding them into something that makes sense for his storytelling purposes. I can forgive the disparity between 80s Magneto and this Magneto because I think the story he tells gets to the core of the character in an interesting way.

I particularly love the way the arc begins by telling us that Xorn is a construct, a total fiction who’s just been playing us the whole time, and the arc ends with Xorn saving the day. Xorn makes Magneto doubt himself, he brings Magneto’s conscience back, and in the end, Xorn obscures Magneto. He makes it so that the populace doesn’t know who’s real anymore. The X-Men believe he’s Xorn, the people don’t know who he is, and by the end, it’s Magneto who’s not real. He’s just a face on a t-shirt, an abstract idea that’s tied to a man who can’t match up. And, in the end, Wolverine returns him to a pure idea state.

Next up is “Here Comes Tomorrow,” an arc I’ve only read once, and struggled with the first time. I’m eager to delve into it again and figure out exactly what is up with the most avant garde section of Morrison’s tenure.

New X-Men: "Planet X:" Part I (#146-148)

In “Planet X,” the series we’ve been reading for the past thirty issues is hijacked by an insane Magneto, and taken down to hell for the big action climax to top off the run. It’s a story that got a wildly mixed response when it was first coming out, and you can feel the controversy as you read. With some Morrison works, you get the sense that he’s moved on by the time he reaches the end of a long run on a book. This story had probably been in his head so long that he stopped worrying about specifics when it came time to put it on the page. It’s hypercompressed in the same way the Final Crisis is, skipping over some of the major beats, and frequently relying on the reader to fill in the gaps.

As such, it reads best not so much as a literal story, but as a psychogenic fugue, the chronicle of a drug addled insane man’s schizophrenic break with reality. The core of the storyline, the scene that makes it work for me, is when Xorn speaks to Magneto, the persona he created, the light he could have been, tearing down the realty of what he is. There’s a lot in here that doesn’t make sense, but so much of it is brilliant, I still love the storyline. It’s a lot like “Riot at Xavier’s” in that sense, on a narrative plausibility level, it doesn’t make much sense, but emotionally and conceptually, it’s brilliant.

The first issue was famous for breaking the internet in half with the Xorn/Magneto revelation. Even before that happens, we’re approaching the end, scenes spiraling faster and faster. Jean goes into space in one page, Xorn’s pitch the special class happens off panel, and by the end of the issue, the X-Men are all separated and out of commission.

This all sets up the revelation that Magneto was Xorn all along. I love this moment, though it can be tough to square this version of Magneto with the character from Claremont’s run. Before unmasking, he says that Charles had his chance and hasn’t been able to do much with it. This ties back to what happened during the riot, Magneto saw Quentin as a kindred spirit, and he was shut down by Xavier’s establishment. Back then, the Cuckoos said it was about in vs. out, and Magneto’s always been out. He has a martyr complex, and needs oppression to survive. When he talks about flipping the map, what he’s really talking about is the need to change the paradigm of the world so that the oppressed are now the ones with power, and the establishment is broken. Esme, the quintessential insider, is waiting for this to happen, waiting to be the queen of a new world, but Magneto never does it.

Morrison’s Magneto has a lot in common with his depiction of Lex Luthor. As a comment on the cyclical nature of superhero comics, he has them perpetually failing to ever upend the status quo. Perhaps they know deep down that their way isn’t the best way, and doom themselves to failure. That’s the idea posed later on, as the Special Class waits for Magneto to actually do something. In the context of this scene, Magneto is looking at Xavier’s failure to assert mutant dominance. Xavier has moved beyond Magneto’s us vs. them paradigm, and Magneto sees that as abandoning the war.

In issue #127, we saw Magneto through Xorn describe the tragedy of a mutant destroyed by human action. There, it was a sad story, Xorn lamenting that if he could save everyone, he would. That’s the core of Magneto’s motivation in this arc, through his Kick addled insanity, he thinks that he’s going to make the world safe for mutants. In his world, on “Planet X,” that mutant child would survive because he wouldn’t be subject to the human idea of normality. What Magneto fails to acknowledge is that the best way to move beyond the human idea of normal is to live like the world is the way it should be. Xavier’s idea in the mid section of the run is to create a school that’s so great, humans have no choice but to acknowledge his way works.

Magneto is a violent revolutionary, and this arc, like “Riot,” is largely about the way that violent revolutions are almost inevitably doomed to failure. Both Magneto and Quentin were motivated by rage, hopped up on kick, they used their powers to disrupt the status quo, without offering a plausible alternative for a new world. In issue #147, Magneto destroys Manhattan and plunges the entire world into chaos. The revolution happens and it’s successful, but he soon finds that even mutants aren’t ready to have their lives so disrupted in search of Magneto’s dream.

We first see the city at sunset, beautiful with the strange metal coils lacing through it. This is the last time it won’t look like a nightmare. Magneto has big plans for the city, he wants to build a mutant utopia, with the aid of his new Brotherhood, the Special Class. The question arises, why would he use the Special Class as his army? And, what was his pitch to them as Xorn that brought them all on board? I’m guessing he told them basically what he says here, that he’s going to flip the entire world, so that they can be the rulers and it’ll be a new mutant utopia. Spoken by Xorn, the zen master, that’s an appealing thought. So far, they haven’t gotten a real idea of what Magneto’s limitations are, and that’s why I can see Beak going along with things. He’s naïve about it, happy that someone would consider him worthwhile.

As I mentioned before, a critical component of the arc is the fact that nearly everyone he encounters actually preferred Xorn to Magneto. Ernst keeps asking what happened to Xorn, and it’s got to hurt Magneto to find out that people preferred this fake him to the real person. He claims that he was biding his time, setting things in motion while he was hiding as Xorn, but the question arises, why did he have to do that in the first place? Couldn’t he have just killed the X-Men with the nano-sentinels in their blood? Would it really have been so hard to find mutants to back his cause? Why go to these elaborate lengths to infiltrate Xavier’s Academy?

That question gets to the core of the arc, the schizophrenic nature of Magneto’s personality. He’s always been written in a way that fluctuates from hero to villain. Claremont’s run takes him from the over the top villain of the Lee/Kirby era to a nuanced character who Xavier trusts enough to leave in charge of the school. By the end of the run, Magneto has been forced back into the role of villain by editorial, though Claremont actually writes him as a guy who just wants to be left alone, but keeps getting dragged back into action. In X-Men #1-3, he’s a guy who’s struggling with a legacy of violence, who’s seen more as a symbol of revolution than as the actual person he is. That portrayal squares nicely with what we see here. So much of this arc is a meta comment on the way that comics franchises inevitably spiral back towards the status quo. Magneto has to be evil because that’s the platonic idea of X-Men that’s sold to the media. Because of that edict, Magneto is on this perpetual slide between reform and villainy, depending on how the writers and editorial see him at any moment.

The Xorn/Magneto dichotomy is a way to magnify his changing motivations and nature. Xorn is Magneto at the best he could be, using his powers in ways that aren’t destructive at all, but instead heal people. It’s notable that Magneto chooses to create a character who is utterly non-violent, much more so than even Xavier himself. He likely chose that persona because it’s the best way to remain under the radar. If he was more aggressive, people would suspect Xorn, but even when he kills Quentin Quire, they assume that Xorn is on a higher level and doing what needs to be done. As Xorn, Magneto is well liked, he’s accepted and treated well. It’s partially a performance, but on some level, I think Magneto gets so lost in the role, he believes it. Xorn is the person he could be if he gave up the old grudges and decided to live a better life.

But, in the end, the old Magneto shows through and he gives up the Xorn ruse, and tells the world, “Brother mutants. The great day has come.” He has “liberated” them, but it turns out they’re not so eager to be liberated. I think this story was written before the War in Iraq, but it feels very much like a comment on the hubris and inevitable failure that comes from deciding you need to “free” a people without any plan for what to do afterwards. Magneto defeats humanity and upends the governmental system in one day, but what then? The jokes about how distorted his voice is coming out of the speakers are great because they bring this grand scene down to a practical reality. No one has any clue what’s going on, and Magneto just monologues to salve his ego.

Throughout the story, Toad functions as a Shakespearean fool, constantly tearing down the illusions Magneto builds up about himself. I particularly like what he says “you’ve been declared dead so often…I just don’t think they know it’s really you.” That’s a critical concept in the final issue, where it turns out that the real Magneto is less ‘real,’ has less power than the fake Xorn. Most of the comedy in this issue comes from the fact that Magneto can’t live up to the legend built up around him in a world with “short attention spans and high expectations.” Revolution has become another commodity, and just like the real Che wouldn’t do it for people who wear his shirt, the real Magneto is a disappointment to people who saw him as an all purpose symbol of what mutankind can be.

This speech is also a comment on the fickle comics audience, who “want you the way you used to be. Or preferably better.” It’s the classic “the same, but different” demand for franchise stories. Either way, I really like this stuff because it ties into the theme of identity as a construct that’s been present throughout the entire run. The idea of Magneto is more powerful than the real person. Magneto is a symbol of mutantkind standing up for itself, fighting for a better world, but the actual Magneto is just a violent terrorist, ranting to a world that can’t hear him.



On the streets, the special class gets the first real idea of what Magneto’s plans are. Esme boasts that she’s “pushing the humans along my mind—the whip’s just for show.” She buys into Magneto’s dream, she wants to be like Emma, the White Queen ruling the world. Beak and the rest of the gang have their illusion about what they’re doing broken, this isn’t about creating a mutant utopia, it’s about punishing humanity for what they did to Magneto. It’s still about those old grudges, about us vs. them. Magneto’s revolution was one born out of rage, and after that initial rage is gone, all that’s left is violence, chaos and the promise that once they get through the ‘birth pangs,’ everything’s going to be so much better. It’s the way that most violent revolutions inevitably fail, if all you have is a hatred for the group in power, what happens when the group in power falls?

Magneto celebrates using Xavier’s “pacifist insititue” to train his soldiers, unaware that the Special Class does not buy into his doctrine. Magneto clings to these old ideas, he’s become a self absorbed old man, totally out of touch with the present day world.

Issue #148 features one of my favorite sequences in the entire run, Wolverine and Jean on the satellite, plunging into the sun together. I haven’t talked about Jiminez’s art on this arc yet, but I think he does a fantastic job. He has a huge amount of stuff to render, and I don’t think anyone else could make it the convincing big budget ending that he pulls off. And, as I’ve said before, Jiminez draws the best looking people in comics. In the “Morrison Manifesto,” Grant talks about wanting to make the X-Men sexy, to have a comic that the women who loved Hugh Jackman in the movie could pick up and get into. The sequence with Wolverine and Jean Grey getting progressively sweatier does that, two great looking people just sitting around, waiting to die. It’s some of the best Jiminez art on the run.

Jean says that the Phoenix isn’t like a god, it’s a force that “burns away what doesn’t work.” The Phoenix is evolution itself, the same engine that motivated Cassandra Nova, the challenge to the status quo that produces change. As the pages pass, we can see Wolverine and Jean getting progressively more run down, and as they move closer to death, more open with each other. I particularly love the moment where Wolverine tells her that they chose to make him a killer because of who he was, that Jean would hate the real him. But, it’s not the past that matter, it’s the present. She’s seen the good in him, she loves the man he’s become. “How could I ever hate you?”

This leads to the absolutely epic finale of the issue, where Logan stabs Jean to liberate the Phoenix force and save the universe. The way I see it, Jean essentially dies here, when she returns in issue #150, she’s a construct of the Phoenix, there for one last mission before being flung into the White Hot Room and the craziness of “Here Comes Tomorrow.” Jean is dying, and Logan senses that the only way to unleash the Phoenix Force, to unleash her full potential, is to kill her here. It pains him to do so because it confirms that all he’s good for is killing. But, by this point he seems to have come to terms with that part of himself. If he’s a killer, he can at least kill for the right reasons, and here, his killing gives life.

This leads to the startling series of panels where Wolverine and Jean walk into a sun. I know I’ve complained about X-Men in space stuff before, but this is brilliant, an undeniable high point of the run. It works because it’s so epic, the emotion of the scene is transposed into this astonishing rush of sunlight that tears them all to pieces. The pages themselves seem to be crackling with heat energy, the two figures gradually turning to fire, then nothingness. It feels like watching a sci-fi movie as a kid, when things are so much more epic. But, it’s grounded in adult emotion, it’s one of my favorite Morrison moments.