Over in New X-Men, Grant Morrison and Phil Jimenez pass the halfway mark in "Planet X."

"Planet X" is Morrison's big epic superhero story, and this is the issue where he tries to sell us on the idea that everything's hopeless and the heroes can't possibly win.  Of course, we all know they will - aside from anything else, Wolverine can't possibly be dead because he's got his own comic.  The point of these stories is really to leave you wondering how the hell Morrison's going to write his characters out of this mess.

There's two strands to this issue.  In New York, Magneto continues his world domination.  And on Asteroid M, Wolverine and Phoenix try to work out how to get off the base before it spirals into the sun.  Which seems a rather drastic measure on Magneto's part, but then we are dealing with Phoenix.  And yes, I know that's the Beast on the cover.  But he's not in the issue at all, so just ignore him.

So far as the Magneto parts of the story are concerned, it's mainly a development of what we saw last issue.  Once you adjust to the fact that Morrison is indeed writing Magneto as a raving lunatic - which, in fairness, he seems to be attributing to the drug use - his fantastically crazy ramblings do become strangely compelling.  Magneto's decided to have another stab at reversing the world's poles (which was why he had the upside down maps in the classroom).  Partly, he's doing it because he thinks it'll affect the way people think.  Partly, he just thinks it's a nice symbol.  As with a lot of Morrison's superhero work, it combines old school Silver Age lunacy with entirely modern Morrisonian lunacy, and somehow comes up with something that seems to make complete sense on its own terms.

Over in the other half of the story, Wolverine and Phoenix fail to come up with any way off the asteroid.  That means they get to spend the issue talking about all those character arcs from the Morrison issues that they never had time to deal with before.  Jean is also charged with the difficult task of trying to explain the Phoenix concept (or rather, Morrison's version of it).  Phoenix is difficult to explain at the best of times; it's probably going to become clearer in the climax of the story.  The whole imagery of a phoenix is about death and rebirth, of course.  Since this issue seems to satisfy the "death" requirement, my bet is that the next few issues will be showing us what Morrison's "rebirth" involves.

The issue does suffer a bit from the fact that it's trying to sell us on a threat to the lives of characters who are very plainly not going to die for very obvious reasons.  Equally, Magneto's clearly not going to remain in charge of New York.  It ticks all the intellectual boxes, but doesn't quite engage on a visceral level, since it's so obvious that the threat is somehow going to be averted.  That's a perennial problem with stories of this sort.

Even so, I'm utterly baffled and intrigued about how Morrison is going to write his way out of this corner.  Which is a very good thing.

Rating: B+

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