16 may 1999

By turning the Massachusetts Academy back into a proper school, Jay Faerber has set himself an interesting problem for GENERATION X. The series is, after all, a superhero book. There must be villains and there must be fights. The catch is that Generation X don't really have a motivation to go out looking for fights, and if they keep getting attacked at the mansion, the other students are bound to notice in the end.

With this issue, Faerber turns the problem to his advantage by using Adrienne Frost as a justification - and quite why she'd want to pack them off to Madripoor to hunt down a sword is a plot in its own right, of course. Faerber seems to be playing her in a way similar to Emma Frost's personality when she was training the Hellions.

Jubilee volunteers the team's services to retrieve Adrienne's allegedly stolen sword after developing a hopeless crush on her hired hand Paladin. The real interest here lies in how they all react to this. Some of the team are delighted to get the chance to go out and beat up some villains. Skin and Synch are decidedly less certain about the whole thing. And M flatly refuses to go. As for Paladin, he's disturbingly unbothered by the entire concept of hurling teenagers into the line of fire.

Characterisation is Faerber's biggest strength, as always, but there's also some very successful action sequences here (helped in large part by the Dodsons' artwork, of course). He also gets to indulge himself by creating another group of villains for the team to fight, the Rising Sons. They're pitched about right for this group - a bit silly, not too threatening, but obviously capable of putting up a decent fight. Characters with the power to defy gravity using "special inline skates" are clearly off into the realms of camp, but that's no bad thing, especially when you've got art like Terry Dodson's.

Another good issue, then. The way this book has turned round in the last year should be a lesson to anybody who thinks books deserve to get canned purely because the current creative team isn't any good.

MAGNETO REX concludes on a somewhat unresolved note, though I suppose that's inevitable. The zealot Mutate #665, the villain created specially for this series, is handily dispatched, which kind of resolves the ongoing plot. But really, #665 was never the focus of the series.

Pruett seems in this series to have embarked on a brave attempt to rehabilitate Magneto as a villain, restoring him to his position as not a particularly nice person without trampling too heavily on his hero phase. It's not entirely successful, since at the end of the day Marvel are really just trying to turn the clock back fifteen years on the character's development, but Pruett does succeed in giving Magneto a vaguely coherent end-justifies-the-means philosophy.

Frustratingly, this mini has set up all sorts of interesting conflicts and relationships between Magneto's entourage, but hasn't done very much with them. Pruett can hardly be blamed for this, as presumably he's working to directions concerning the overall direction of this storyline, but it does mean that this mini doesn't read well as a self-contained story. While the self-contained element has come from Mutate #665, the real interest has been in the bits that this series is only setting up for Alan Davis.

Nonetheless, Pruett has done well here by rehabilitating what looked a deranged plot in the space of three issues. For all that it may not be a great mini in its own right, in the context of the ongoing plot it's carried out some vital medical work to Genoshan continuity, Magneto's character and the credibility of the whole concept of handing him a country to rule. And it's been an interesting read along the way, leaving subsequent writers with a lot to live up to in dealing with the new Genoshan cabinet - a potentially fascinating bunch of misfits who seem likely to kill one another at any moment if Magneto wasn't there to hold them together.

One final point. Does anybody at Marvel seriously believe that putting the words "The Senses-Shattering Conclusion!" on the front cover is anything other than deeply shit?

MUTANT X finally brings in the X-Men this issue. The creators and editors have pretty obviously regarded this as something the readers must be hanging on for; I'm not so sure. After all, it's not as if the X-Men have played much of a part in this story so far, other than to hang around in the Six's back story.

Still, Mackie fields an interesting team of X-Men, taking full advantage of the fact that we know how things went in the normal continuity. Magneto and a swashbuckling Nightcrawler are givens; Quicksilver in a full mask (leaving the possibility it might be somebody else entirely) is less obvious. More interesting are the three who suggest entire back stories just from throwaway lines. Rogue shows up, wearing Ms Marvel's costume and seemingly having absorbed Colossus's powers permanently. There's a big Hulk-like creature which is apparently Mystique.

And most interestingly, Polaris seems to think Magneto is her father. At least, it's interesting if you know Magneto (or rather, a Magneto robot) tried to pass himself off as her father back in the 1960s run of X-Men. Quite why she might believe the same thing here - and why Magneto wouldn't have broken the news to her - opens up all sorts of possibilities, and this is the sort of storytelling device that works well in alternate reality stories.

The actual story isn't really much cop. Basically Havok joins up with the X-Men in trying to fight the Goblin Queen, but they get beaten, so they run away. It's little more than an excuse to introduce the X-Men, and it could have done with a stronger plot. Nord's artwork also falters on a couple of occasions (his Quicksilver on the second last page is simply awful, and at times he seems uncertain whether Magneto is wearing a helmet or a hood), though for the most part his sketchy style works well.

Not a bad issue, though the creators seem to have thought it would be enough to shove the X-Men out there and not bother too greatly about what they actually did.