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New X-Men #149 is the penultimate
chapter of Planet X, and you might well wonder why it's been
titled "Phoenix in Darkness" given that she's not actually in
it until the final two pages.
Anyhow, Manhattan is still under Magneto's
control, and even without the X-Men around to stop him, things
are starting to collapse under their own weight.
Magneto's human resources skills - never exactly his strong
point - are at a particular low right now considering that
he's completely out of his head on drugs.
It's relentlessly dark stuff so far as the
art is concerned - complete with the obligatory heavy rain -
but Morrison's deadpan jokes give it a twist. Magneto's
increasingly frustrated that the kids listened to him more
when he was pretending to be Xorn, who has now started turning
up as a hallucinatory personality. But then, it's hardly
surprising that the kids won't listen to him - the more drugs
he takes, the more he turns into a two-dimensional Silver Age
supervillain.
And as a Silver Age villain, Magneto finds
himself totally unequipped to actually rule Manhattan once
he's captured it. As Beak points out, nobody's really in
charge at all - and if Magneto thinks he is, he's fooling
himself. Magneto wants to lay the groundwork for his new
and rather pointless world, but keeps finding himself
sidetracked into arguing about carrots with a humanoid
chicken. It's all going horribly wrong for the poor sod.
Meanwhile, as the genre demands, the heroes
(or some of them) finally turn up in preparation for the big
showdown. Okay, Fantomex is back, which is not
necessarily a good thing - Morrison may have fallen a little
too much in love with that particular character - but this is
the right time to be bringing the heroes back into the plot.
All of Morrison's storylines have been deliberately going over
the top with their chosen sub-genre, and this one is no
exception.
After a slightly rocky start - by his
standards, at least - this arc is hitting its stride.
And the end is in sight now, after all.
Rating: A-
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