New X-Men: Ultimate Collection Vol. 3
So this was, uh, not great. I know Morrison's run is praised high and low by X-Men and comic fans alike, and for awhile I would have joined that praise. However, I'm not going to do that now. Not today. This trade, I feel like, is the very epitome of "the third act went to shit." Assault on Weapon Plus was a fine arc, though I wasn't a fan of Bachalo's art. It was fine. A nice dip into Wolverine's history (even though we didn't actually learn anything), and some decent action. But then, well... Planet X is another story.
It's not good. Let's start off with the basics; Jimenez's art is bad. Like, just bad. It's stiff, and poor, and his faces are bad, it's just...it's not great. The dialogue just seems...look, I can only read Beak and Basilisk and crazy-ass Magneto dialogue for so long before I feel like I've just had a stroke. Now, the reveal of Magneto being Xorn is...well, it could have been cool, let's say that. So, Mags plan to completely reverse the world's poles is to, and I love this, drive humanity to extinction and "rewire" the mutant brain? How...what? I get that Magneto is crazy at this point, since he's been doing Kick for at least half a year, but what the hell? Why would he be doing Kick in the first place? Explicitly so he could pretend to be Xorn and infiltrate the Xavier Institute? What? Why? What?
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The Mags I know wouldn't have done that. He knows Cassie Nova did that, not humans. He could blame humans for the Sentinels existing, but considering Nova salvaged her own Master Mold factory out in the middle of the Amazon rain forest and built the most ghetto Sentinels ever, It's probably not a reasonable option. It's so baffling to me that Magneto would do Kick, just to imitate Xorn (which required him to construct a helmet capable of making his mind appear as if it were a star), a persona which was used to recruit the special ed. class into creating the shittiest army ever, in order to create "Planet X." Also, I'm glad EVERY OTHER SUPERHERO ON THE PLANET just ignored the X-Men and was somehow fooled by five phone call bomb threats by Magneto. And then they couldn't penetrate his shield, because Mags on Kick is broke as fuck, apparently. I'm also glad they feel the need to remind the reader that Xavier is naked in his tank. Pretty sure it got brought up at least three times. So then, we get near the end of the arc, and just as everything's snapping and falling apart, the X-Men appear to succeed...and then Magneto gives Jean (possessed by the Phoenix) a "planetary-sized stroke." What's that mean exactly? Jean dies.
So then we get to the Tomorrow arc, wherein we have what appears to be Dark Beast: The White Album playing Mister Sinister and creating a bunch of genetically cobbled together clones (Crawlers) chasing down the Phoenix Egg. Said Egg is protected by Hogarth and Vin Diesel as they run away from said Crawlers, are saved by EVA (because Fantomex is dead), and eventually Tito. Tito, Beak's grandchild. The Egg ends up stolen and then Mister Sini-I mean White Beast resurrects the Phoenix, uses her to murderhouse an entire bug colony whilst splicing himself with Phoenix DNA. He then causes all remaining mutants to kill each other, murders the last remaining Scottish whale, and then tries to kill everything else. The X-Men, consisting of Hogarth and Vin Diesel, EVA (the three of whom form a devastatingly impassioned love triangle), Tito (Beak's grandchild), Wolverine (healing factor = eternity), the Stepford Cuckoos (who I guess are still alive), Cassandra Nova (it's not explained very well), and Martha (also not explained very well). Logan reveals to Phoenix Jean that it's been Sublime the whole time, since Sublime was Kick, Beast did Kick, then Sublime Beast took over the world somehow. Jean puts Sublime in a box after removing it from Beast, and uses box to restore the universe, while a whole pantheon of Phoenixes watch her.
So yeah, I'm not sure on a lot of things. The final arc is better than the previous arcs because of Silvestri's art, but other than that it's just a very rushed, half-baked idea that, in true Morrison fashion, you either get it or you don't. Not much more than that. Sublime can apparently jack up a person's powers to the extreme, allowing them to single-handedly destabilize the world. Morrison's run was good for about two-thirds of it, and then it went completely nuts near the end. And making Sublime the mastermind behind everything, including Wolverine's creation, doesn't make any sense. And how everyone all of a sudden knows who Fantomex is. I may have missed something, but before the Planet X arc, the only X-Men who had met Fantomex were Scott, Logan, Jean, and Professor Xavier.
All in all, I enjoyed Morrison's run, and I think it's worth reading to anyone who wants to get in to X-Men or to any self-proclaimed X-Men fan. However, I think it completely crashes and burns near the end, and that's sad. I do plan on reading it again, and then maybe I'll "get it" better in the future than I have now. For now though, this particular volume was not good, and at the very least, Planet X sucks hard.
