On the remote offchance that anyone reading this hasn't yet read New X-Men #146, be warned that I will be giving away the surprise ending.  Mind you, if you don't already know what it is, you probably don't care anyway.

Okay, this is the beginning of "Planet X", Grant Morrison's penultimate storyline.  It is gratifyingly insane.

Grant loves his Silver Age comics and his superheroes - even if the Silver Age stuff isn't entirely appropriate for the X-Men, whose early sixties material is a bit of an appendix to Lee and Kirby's more memorable creations.  Regardless, after two and a bit years on the book, painstakingly setting up all his dominos in a row, this is the point where he thinks about knocking them all down, but then decides to just blow them to smithereens instead.  It's all about the chaos, the revelations and the big explosions this time round, as Morrison goes for headlong chaos right off the bat.

Granted, there are bits where he overplays the superhero elements - Xavier's telepathic summons of "X-Men Emergency!" is just a little bit too tongue in cheek for page one, panel one.  And he does the old trick of backtracking on a cliffhanger, not once but twice, as it turns out that the Weapon Plus base was only kind of sort of blown up, not obliterated after all.  (Despite what the recap page says.)

But for the most part, the story's a great piece of high-speed chaos.  It helps that Phil Jimenez, a much more conventional superhero artist, is back on the title for this arc.  Naturally, it's beautiful work - even Dust's sandstorm, which can't be an artist's best friend, looks suitably kinetic and gritty.

The big reveal, however, is Xorn's unmasking as Magneto.  This is a fantastically written twist.  Nobody saw it coming, but when you go back and re-read the run, it becomes blindingly obvious how well planned it's been.  What's particularly impressive is the way Morrison has littered the series with clues that should have stared everyone in the face, but managed to put them in such a context that everyone read them completely differently.  For example, take Quentin Quire's death scene after the Riot storyline.  Xorn comes in, tells the novice supervillain that they have something in common, and then unmasks for his benefit.  Quire screams and dies.  Oh, and the scene also has Quire saying "What if the real enemy was inside all along?"  When you read it again, it's so obvious that you wonder how you could possibly have missed the idea that Xorn wasn't all he seemed.  Or the fact that Xorn only ever healed anyone in one issue, despite that ostensibly being his power.  Or the time he slaughtered a load of U-Men when he thought nobody was watching.

To have littered all those hints around, misdirected everyone into misreading them, and still produced entertaining stories along the way is genuinely impressive stuff.  And the reinterpretation of history clearly isn't going to end there, since this story also ascribes Magneto with responsibility for the Weapon Plus programme - which it seems was a hoax after all.  For that matter, just why does the Weapon Plus' programme's director share the same name as the founder of the U-Men (who's meant to be dead)?  There's a lot more explaining to come here, and the satisfaction of knowing that Morrison's run is going to stand up to multiple re-readings.

Okay, Magneto's plan has the hallmarks of being incredibly contrived - and yes, there's a definite element of self-parody in having him express disbelief that anyone could possibly have fallen for the "star in the head" thing.  Somehow, though, that doesn't really matter.  The sheer audacity of the stunt is impressive enough to carry it through.

This is how it should be done.  Textbook.

Rating: A+

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