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OK, first impressions of 149 (and first Barbelith post, though I've been stalking the boards forevah-evah, possibly since 2000, so if you feel a need to haze me or something, go right ahead):
The concentration camps: I'm queasy with them. They just seem a little bit fanfic to me, like the kind of thing a twelve-year-old writing Magneto on his favorite messageboard would go for: If he's supposed to be a Nazi analogue, why not have all the trappings? I agree to some extent with previous posts about how some of the gravitas has been taken out of Magneto; we could argue all day about whether or not that's a good thing, and Morrison's ideas here are intriguing, but it's been bred in me to the bone to connect a certain level of self-composure with Magneto that, frankly, I do miss. I do think he leans more towards genocidal maniac than wronged nobleman on the whole, but raving psychopath is going too far -- the chilling thing about his character is the core idea that you don't have to be crazy to want everyone around you dead.
"Are these words from the future?" Phoenix as Harlequinade? HOT. I want Xavier in a leather jacket and Mod t-shirt by page 13 of next issue AT THE LATEST.
The principal flaw with this arc, I think, has been the pacing and scene structure. One of Morrison's biggest stylistic quirks as a writer is his tendency to think that merely presenting an idea does all of that idea's work -- for example, the previously mentioned "He even wrote an article" quote -- to Morrison, just saying that sums it up, but to someone expecting traditional structures of rhetorical build and payoff, that's pretty poor. In this issue,
MINOR-LEVEL SPOILERS WHICH HAVEN'T BEEN DISCUSSED IN DETAIL BY THAT CRAZY NONGRAMMATICAL POST FROM EARLIER
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the basement scene contains an atmosphere and a few characters/conversations (the NYPD mutant liason, for example) that could've been sustained for a few issues. This hiding-out, guerilla-style, "us against a world gone mad" tone could've been played with beautifully for a lot longer; but Morrison is clearly satisfied with this being its only appearance. The basic rule of reading Morrison, I suppose, is that you've got to be willing to imagine things the way he would; when he throws you a little bone, if you want to get all the story's resonances and thematic echoes then you've got to build the kind of skeleton he'd build out of it. If you're used to seeing beautifully constructed skeletons with carefully wrought bone structure, the kind of writing the X-Men books "should" have (i.e. that's the kind of traditional writing most X-Men writers go for and don't achieve because, in point of fact, they're really awful writers), then you're S.O.L.
My personal theory for the disembodied Voice Of Xorn: The Phoenix force, starting to "burn away what doesn't work" in Magneto. Or it's just his personality breaking up under the drugs, but I like my idea better (which, from what I've gathered, should be the unofficial motto of all discussions of the X-Men).
Feel free to stone me off-board if I've gone over ideas covered a thousand times ad-nauseum... |
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