Once upon a time, fifth week events were used to fill entirely dead weeks in the schedule.  Nowadays, they're just a way of padding out the schedule unnecessarily.  This week, Marvel revive the What If? format, with a series of one-shots.

The X-books' contribution rejoices in the catchy title of What if... Magneto and Professor X Had Formed the X-Men Together?, although Why Bother? might have been more appropriate.  It's hard to know what this book is most in need of - a plot, a point or a clue.  The premise is perfectly straightforward but instead, we get... well, a baffling mess.  It's yet another piece of painful evidence of just how badly Chris Claremont has lost it, unfortunately.

Claremont can't seem to make up his mind quite what story he wants to tell here.  It's written as if it were the first issue in a putative series, with the X-Men being formed at the end and deliberately unresolved subplots.  But it's also set years after the divergence point and has a kind-of X-Men team already established, making the big formation scene meaningless. 

The story starts off perfectly sensibly by setting up the divergence point, taken as the flashback in Uncanny X-Men #161 where Magneto walked out on Xavier and never came back.  In this version, Magneto's talked into calming down, and remains with Xavier.  So far, so good.

Jump forward a few years and... well, Xavier's running a clinic.  The X-Men don't exist yet.  But Wolverine and Mystique are hanging around on the fringes... for some reason.  Shadowcat's there, and so is Lockheed - so have they been into space at some point to meet him, or is Claremont just not thinking this junk through at all?  Xavier can still walk.  The Beast seems to be a latent mutant, for no apparent reason.  Nobody ever got around to calling in Xavier to deal with Jean Grey, for reasons that are less than clear.  And if Xavier's been collecting mutant sidekicks in some sense, why did he never get around to looking for the founding X-Men?  It's all hopelessly fuzzy and poorly thought out.

Jean is finally brought to Xavier, a bunch of Sentinels show up for no particular reason, a fight ensues, Jean wakes up, the Sentinels lose, and Xavier spontaneously forms the X-Men for... some reason or other.  As for Magneto, he just hangs around and does nothing.

If there's meant to be a point to this issue, I'm damned if I can see it.  It does nothing with Magneto, garbles the issue with a ton of unrelated divergences, and ends up with a world which is different in loads of small ways which, together, aren't terribly meaningful. What if Magneto and Professor X had formed the X-Men together?  Well, it'd be broadly similar, except the comic would suck.

It's an incredibly poor effort, considering how easy it is to write a decent story around this concept.  It really ought to write itself.  I don't normally go in for "I could do better than that" reviews, but this book misses the point by such an enormous margin that I'll make an exception just to illustrate how easy it would be to make a better story out of the title concept.

Xavier and Magneto never do quite agree on the big issue.  But they put aside their differences to found an X-Men team based on the one thing they can agree on, namely helping mutants.  So you get a version of the X-Men who aren't really superheroes, more a bunch who show up and help mutants in danger, who can't control their powers.  Since Magneto isn't around to run a mutant terrorist organisation and generate terrible anti-mutant publicity, things go pretty well for a bit.  But eventually something like the Sentinels comes along, Xavier and Magneto can't agree how to deal with it, and the team tears itself apart.  That's your basic concept.  That's all you need to do.

From there, you've got tons of possible endings.  You could have an outright schism, where Magneto and Xavier both end up running rival teams claiming to be the X-Men (riffing off the multi-team set-up in the current books).  You could do the tragedy, where the X-Men's lack of a single vision proves their undoing, and they're so busy fighting among themselves that they get defeated - a world where Xavier and Magneto find common ground is one where Xavier compromised on his dream, after all.  You could have Magneto murder Xavier and seize control of the X-Men himself, turning them into a vehicle for his ideas.  You could do the reverse and have Wolverine eliminate Magneto, only to get kicked out of the team by a bunch of X-Men who don't realise what a favour he's done them.  I could go on.

I'm not making claims for any of these as great concepts.  On the contrary, these are blindingly obvious ideas which I knocked out in the course of a ten-minute bus ride while still reeling in disbelief from the sheer pointlessness of this comic.  That's my point - they're still simpler, more effective, and more directly connected to the title concept than anything to be found in this hugely misconceived issue.

Rating: D+

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