Alright, big finish. I am running this page for a single reason:
And that is to make fun of someone who holds a pencil for a living doing such a bad job of drawing someone holding a pencil. I am petty, I suppose, but look at that. Sheesh. Well, anyway, Mikey is there, and he’s expelling all the energy he absorbed, and the President is urging Maria Hill to nuke Genosha, and here I must stop to wonder… what’s the deal with SHIELD? They’re often positioned as an international organization, but they’ve always answered to the US President. And that is a suitably self-absorbed portrayal of the US, I guess, but, like, for real, how can George W. Bush authorize the destruction of land he doesn’t own? Not that he wouldn’t, gleefully, and then paint about it 20 years later, but you know what I mean. Anyway, the Avengers are there, and sort of recapping at each other, which you don’t see much anymore. Carol says Genosha is a tomb, no one’s alive there, but Wolverine says there’s one person there, as he well knows from coming and beating him up in House of M 8.
Aw, jeez, how did I forget this particular twist? So… So in Grant Morrison’s X-Men, the team rescued a mutant named Xorn from some bad guys, and his rather absurd mutant power was he had a star in his brain, so he wore this special helmet to keep his head together. And then, years later, he was revealed to be Magneto in disguise, which was really silly and disappointing. And then Wolverine killed Magneto, but of course he wasn’t really dead, and then a different writer introduced Zorn, the brother of Xorn, who was, like, a totally real guy who Magneto took the place of, and now Xorn, who was real or not real or WHO REALLY CARES is the one driving the Collective energy cloud. The general absurdities around Xorn left many readers feeling burned by the whole thing and preferring to just get on with their lives, and now this happens. Well, anyway, as the Avengers react and try to decide what to do, the Collective raises Magneto an army of mutant zombies. Which is… something. So the Avenger start fightin’ the zombies, and Magneto is visibly not on board with any of this, and Sentry offers to throw him into the sun, which by now is a running gag in comics after he did it to Carnage.
Hard for me to imagine that was Cap’s reason for calling in Daisy to begin with. Seems out of character. But, then, this story is kind of a mess. So Sentry gets ahold of Magneto, who begs Sentry to kill him, saying they can’t let this happen to him, and then Daisy does her thing, maybe killing Magneto, maybe not, hard to tell, and then Iron Man makes a big blue ball.
So Bob flies the ball into the sun, and he watches as it percolates and stuff, and it’s honestly hard to tell what we’re meant to be seeing.
Iron Man tells Michael it wasn’t his fault, which Wolverine is super-keen on not agreeing with that. We quickly, like super quickly, learn Michael has retained some of the energy, SHIELD says they’re going to start training him, and Cage says maybe they just got a new superhero out of all this. And that hurried page is a breadcrumb trail to OMEGA FLIGHT, coming soon, written by Bendis’ good friend Michael Avon Oeming, revealing that two members of Alpha Flight didn’t die, and starring Michael there as the new Guardian. Yes. It’s Alpha Flight Disassembled. Whomp whomp.
Make a mental note of Hill saying “Did you ever see–?”
And that’s the unsatisfying end of that unsatisfying story. I love that last page acting like something profound was in Magneto’s book. He wrote one page! We saw him doing it! It happened 20 minutes ago! Well, anyway, there you go. A messy story with messy art and a messy non-resolution. Not New Avengers’ finest hour. But by the time this issue saw print, the whole Marvel Universe was onto something else, which we are now barreling toward at top speed. 6 posts away, in fact.