This story gives us one of the big punch lines for Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. It starts with an emergency…
Picking up from last arc, Wolverine was in the Weapon Plus satellite when it exploded. Jean flies into space to collect his orbiting body. When she gets there, it turns out that Wolverine landed on Asteroid M–and it was no coincidence…
Meanwhile, on Earth at the school, Professor X finds Dust messing with the Cerebra mutant-finding machine, and Xorn tells the Professor that Dust has gone nuts.
After a brief (ahem) “dust up,” she regains her sanity and Xorn is able to contain her.
Basilisk gets the best line of the issue.
Xorn keeps dust in the bin and through dialogue–the most we’ve heard from Xorn since he was introduced–we see Xorn getting increasingly aggressive until he unmasks for the first time.
So here we get to the crux of this: Was Xorn really Magneto all along? And I’ll tell you the truth: I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone does. Xorn emerges as a unique character, different from Magneto, in later issues but here, in this story, I’m pretty sure he was supported to be Magneto all along.
What happens next in this story is…probably bad. Yeah, I’m gonna say it’s bad. But I’m also going to admit that I enjoyed reading it and it definitely kept me guessing because, well, it’s bananas. Magneto manages to recruit many of the New X-Men into his New Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. He begins executing humans in concentration camps–just like the Nazis did to his own parents.
He captures Professor X, strips him, and plops him into a clear tube (yay! I get to use my “tubes” tag, below!). On Asteroid M, Jean is afraid of dying so she gets into her bra and panties.
Cyclops tries to blow up Magneto’s face but for some reason a close range optical blast doesn’t do the trick.
Hm.
Annoyed at having his face burned, Maggie hits Scotty in the face with the Xorn mask.
Without his helmet, Magneto is susceptible to telepathy so one of the Cuckoo sisters tries to mind-zap him and he kills her by lobotomizing her with her own earrings.
Then Jean becomes Phoenix again, and is killed by Magneto and what appears to be his talking Xorn mask.
Then I’m not even gonna talk about the epilogue, which has us flash forward to 150 years where astronauts find the Phoenix Egg on the surface of the moon.
There’s even more jammed into this story and, like I said, it’s a fun read but much of it feels very out of character from the X-Men we had, at this point, come to know and understand.
I liked it at the time but in retrospect Xorn as Magneto and Morrison’s flat characterization of Magneto are both disappointing choices.
I can see that. I still love it–it’s one of the few big reveals in stories like this that genuinely surprised me AND was completely plausible.