"I, Magneto".

The 150th issue of X-Men is a special, double-sized issue, as the cover states, and as you can feel just from picking it up. There is a lot going on here! The cover proclaims a battle between Cyclops and Magneto, and it looks like we will have something epic going on. The art team for this has even been expanded, adding Bob Wiacek to the usual team of Josef Rubinstein and Dave Cockrum.

The comic starts with Magneto, in hologram form, telling world leaders that they must cede all power to him or face destruction. Interestingly, the world leaders depicted are all real figures --- we see Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev and Margaret Thatcher all looking concerned as the holographic image of a man in magenta suit with a mauve cape declares that he is the only person who can bring about world peace and usher in a "golden age". While him and Cyclops (who ended up on the island through sheer coincidence) have a philosophical discussion, a Soviet submarine tries to launch a nuclear missile, only to be destroyed by Magneto. Magneto then destroys a city in Siberia in revenge.

So this is the first seven pages.

The X-Men have found Magneto's island, and infiltrate it, finding that he has a power damper of some sort that takes away their powers. Despite this, they still find Magneto's superweapon, a giant-pendulum like thing that somehow can create volcanoes and earthquakes anywhere in the world. Wolverine starts cutting away the supports of the device, while Storm finds a sleeping Magneto and debates whether it would be morally justified to kill him in his sleep. Magneto wakes in a rage, entraps everyone, including Professor X, and reassembles his device using magnetic power. He believes Storm dead, but she has actually escaped and...

...I sound like a middle schooler trying to recount a comic book to his parents, don't I? I apologize, I promise this will be important in a moment...

...after destroying the power-inhibitor, the X-Men attack Magneto, leading to a super powered battle royale, which is probably what we came here to see. He almost kills Kitty Pryde, and realizing how young she is, is suddenly reminded of what it was like to see his family die at Auschwitz.

Oh.

Magneto repents and flees, the X-Men all have a beach party, and Professor X says that they won the true victory by changing Magneto's perceptions. This particular arc has closed, but the repercussions of this issue, and Magneto eventually becoming the leader of the X-Men and New Mutants, would start here.

The most obvious and basic thing I have to say about this issue is the jarring contrast between the fun, but ridiculous comic book story of a group of superheroes infiltrating a supervillain's secret island fortress to destroy his superweapon---and the seriousness and solemnity of tying it in with a reference to the holocaust. I am not sure if this was the first reference to Magneto's background, but it seems to solidify that Magneto, originally just Doctor Doom in complimentary colors, had a much more serious backstory. But none of this detracts from the fact that this has a comic book plot, and what I recapped was just a fraction of the typical twists and turns that were presented before we got to the serious part. And of course, I can't really do justice to the art: Cyclops and Lee Forrester are dressed, for some reason, in harem boy and harem girl costumes with some type of nautical motif. In short, this issue has some of the things that people associate with Claremont's writing, such as sprawling plots and serious undertones---but it also has a typical, over-the-top comic book plot.

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