Ultimate X-Men reaches the midpoint of "Return of the King", which means a big fight with somewhat ropey plotting.

Magneto is planning to use a big lump of Kirbytech to reverse the Earth's polarity and thereby kill everything on the planet aside from his 500 mutants and their ark of animals.  Then he's going to repopulate the planet.  As evil masterplans go, it certainly has the merits of simplicity and ambition.

Millar's Magneto remains a bit of a one-dimensional ranter, and I'm still not convinced it's the best approach to the character.  While he does seem to share the mainstream Magneto's policy that a first strike is needed to ensure victory in a war which is inevitable anyway, it's played as largely a pretext for a bitter megalomaniac.  He's not a rounded a character, although Millar does give some entertaining self-indulgent excesses - his plan to keep a token humanity alive by breeding Naomi Klein in captivity is genuinely funny.

The problem is that he's so over the top that he isn't so successful when the story asks us to take him seriously.  David Finch's artwork helps by underplaying him a bit, but he can't stop the character erring towards the comically excessive.

That's not the big problem with this issue, though.  The problem is that Magneto's plot is stopped when Cyclops wakes up, summons the X-Men to him, and they arrive to sort things out.  For one thing, this requires the X-Men to get there at a pretty astonishing speed, which pushes credibility badly.  Either that or Cyclops' signal device was sending out a signal all along, in which case we have to explain an astonishing timing coincidence, an incredibly rapid recovery by Cyclops, and the failure of anyone in Magneto's citadel to spot the signal.

What strains the plot to breaking point is that Magneto's henchmen need to be shocking incompetent for this plot to work.  Cyclops, who ought to be fairly recognisable to the Brotherhood, was captured in the Savage Land, where we was clutching an X-Men insignia clasp.  The idea that they completely failed to recognise him is really a non-starter.  (What, they never even opened his eyes when they were treating him?)

One of those issues where Millar veers a little too far over the top, and the plot problems mount up as a result.

Rating: B-

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