Magneto vol. 4: Last Days

How does Magneto deal with the Final Incursion that heralds “Secret Wars?”  By pulling lots of strings to become more powerful than he ever has in order to repel the other Earth and ensure that mutants live to see tomorrow.  Despite his good intentions, this is Magneto at his most self-aggrandizing and ruthless.  Oh, he wants to save the world all right.  Except that it’s all in service of the man trying to define how history will perceive him after all the other crimes and atrocities he has perpetrated over the years.  Then you have the means by which he acquires the power he needs to pull off the feat of repelling two worlds, and they are morally dubious at best.  Particularly with what happens to his daughter, Polaris.  For all of the lip service Magneto pays to being a bad dad after all these years, it just turns out to be convenient lie to justify his actions in the end.

It’s compelling stuff from writer Cullen Bunn.  He’s got a solid understanding of how Magneto’s mind works, which allows him to bring up some old continuity from the comics and use it to reinforce his points without bringing the narrative to a grinding halt.  As a result, the Master of Magnetism’s final moments feel both appropriate and inevitable.  It’s a good use of the “Last Days” setup, which is good because the scale and power-oriented nature of the story are at odds with the relatively grounded take on the character over the past three volumes.  Interestingly, guest artist Paul Davidson does a better job with depicting Magneto’s escalating power levels for the first three issues than regular artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta, who turns up for the final issue in otherwise fine form for the drama it’s presenting.  I would’ve liked to have seen Bunn do more with Magneto the vigilante and rebuilder of Genosha from the previous volumes, but sales and crossovers did not allow for that.  What we got for these twenty-one issues was still pretty entertaining on its own terms and something that bodes well for Bunn’s Magneto/villain-centric take on “Uncanny X-Men” in the near future.