After the bombshell ending of the previous issue, New X-Men #147 gives us an evening with Magneto.

This is a strange issue.  Magneto's on drugs himself, and boy does it show.  What we get is a strange hybrid - for the last few years, Magneto has been kept in the background as a legendary presence.  This issue simultaneously does all the usual power display routines, but also sets out to undermine the legend of Magneto by making him fallible.

Morrison's Magneto is somewhat clueless and frustrated when it comes to actually working the crowds.  To an extent, he's being played for laughs here.  It's a strange choice, and no doubt it's partially intended to reflect the fact that he's drugged.  All that said, Morrison may be moving too far in the direction of making his villain a figure of fun.  After all, wouldn't Magneto's crazily elaborate plan - which worked - have required him to display most of the skills he seems to be lacking this issue?

By the way, this is one of those stories where the villain takes over New York without any of the local heroes appearing to notice.  Personally, I'm not bothered by that at all - it's just the way of these things.  But a more legitimate criticism is that Morrison has structured this story in such a way that, having disposed of the New X-Men cast, Magneto is apparently deemed to have defeated the X-Men.  God knows that ignoring Chuck Austen's book is generally a good idea, but essentially readers are being invited to forget about half the team, which may be stretching goodwill a little bit too far.

It's an issue that's got problems, then.  For all that, I still find myself liking it.  It's not Magneto's finest hour, but there's something oddly compelling about giving the villain feet of clay at the moment of his triumph.  Magneto's grumpy old man routine, complaining about the short attention span of his crowd, is a neat mix of being genuinely funny and creepily out of place at the same time.  I think that's what Morrison was going for - a warped clash between Magneto's Silver Age villainy and very human failings, intended to come across as unsettling and blackly funny at the same time.  While the story may have overshot the mark, it does manage to create that sense of creeping weirdness.  I've had several people suggest to me that the entire story might be a dream scene - and this being Morrison, anything's possible.  But it says something about the detached tone of the whole story that people are responding to it in that way.

The other big selling point, of course, is Phil Jimenez' art.  Jimenez is an artist who can simultaneously do the big explosive stuff straight, and sell the subtler oddities of Morrison's writing. 

I'm not entirely sure about his redesign of Magneto's costume, which effectively adds a second cape in the guise of a large coat.  It's somewhat equivalent to the way the X-Men's uniforms have had the spandex stripped out in favour of normal clothes, but at the end of the day, the guy's wearing a metal helmet and a cape - he's still an old-school supervillain, strangely out of place in a modernised X-Men comic.

Still, in a way that odd style clash plays to the strengths of the story.  And Jimenez undoubtedly has the skill to place these bizarre characters in a real city, making the most ludicrous ideas seem tangible.  This is clearly Morrison's old school supervillain arc, and Jimenez is just the artist to do it.

A definite step down from the previous issue, and undeniably flawed, but still with plenty to recommend it.

Rating: B+

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