X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #1-5
Writer: Leah Williams
Artist: Lucas Werneck with David Messina (#3-4)
Colourist: Edgar Delgado
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller
Editor: Jake Thomas (#1-3) & Jordan White (#2-5)

I know, I know. The backlog is building up. This series finished ages ago. We’ll get through them.

So: Trial of Magneto came out at an odd time for the X-books, not quite in the post-Hickman era, but certainly transitioning there. In one sense, it’s an extra arc for X-Factor… but that book ended with a rushed cancellation, and in the end, X-Factor’s role in Trial of Magneto is mostly procedural. Perhaps that’s inherent in the concept. This isn’t really an X-Factor story. Maybe as originally conceived it had more to do with them – there’s a germ in the published version of a focus on Polaris as the Other Daughter. But at its core, it’s the Scarlet Witch’s story.

But then… why is it called Trial of Magneto? In fact, why is it called X-Men: Trial of Magneto, since it’s not really an X-Men story either? You can ask that too. But mainly: Magneto?

One obvious answer is that they didn’t want to spoil the plot – and the end of “Hellfire Gala” – by promoting it as a Scarlet Witch story. That’s doubtless part of it. The first issue was solicited with a modified version of the cover, to avoid showing her as the body. Still, though – the trial of Magneto? Is there a trial? He’s a suspect, sure, but she comes back from the dead halfway through the plot, so there’s never a trial. The final issue casts around to try to justify the title, but the whole thing reeks a bit of changed plans.

Let’s step back. What actually happens in this book? Wanda is found dead; X-Factor investigate, because that’s their job. The Quiet Council won’t resurrect her, but she effectively resurrects herself anyway (with the memories of an early point in her career) and shows up just as the Avengers have arrived to collect her body. Rachel and Jean show young Wanda all the appalling things she did later in her life. She goes crazy and a bunch of random kaiju attack the island. This is where you can feel things going off the rails. I suppose on some level it’s a parody of the sort of arbitrary nonsense Wanda has become associated with? If you’re feeling charitable?

Meanwhile, present day Wanda is in a weird limbo dimension, where she eventually confronts her older self. Old Wanda tells present day Wanda that she needs to stop feeling guilty for everything she’s done. She comes to terms with herself, or something, which fully restores her and makes the monsters vanish. Toad is sentenced to the Pit for Wanda’s murder, but in fact the whole thing was a scheme by Wanda and Magneto to create a magical link between Wanda and resurrection. This allows Wanda to magically add all the mutants of the past to Cerebro’s archives, clearing the way for their resurrection. And in that two-paragraph plot synopsis, I mentioned the title character once.

The art is fine; Werneck is more of a character artist, and while some of the earlier action sequences work, the kaiju sequences don’t have the scale and impact that was presumably intended. They feel a bit cursory, to be honest. But the limbo segments with Wanda are much better, particularly in the more dreamlike and abstract segments with spreading flowers. The modified data pages work well too, keeping the standard X-books format but with a sense of something a bit more mysterious going on. On the whole, Werneck does his job and sells the human side of it all.

Whether the story can really deliver on that is another matter. When you get down to it, it’s a lot of extended fight scenes in the real world – a lot – coupled with Wanda coming to terms with her past and forgiving herself. It’s obviously another attempt to rehab Wanda from “Avengers Disassembled”, and it’s not the first time. “Avengers Disassembled” was a bad story on its own merits – it’s barely a story at all, really, just a big action sequence – but its main legacy was to do immeasurable damage to Wanda, a character that people actually wanted to use. Writers have been trying to rehab her ever since. Maybe you could argue it opened the way to “Decimation”, but that wasn’t very good either. WandaVision doesn’t need “Avengers Disassembled”; it draws mainly on John Byrne’s Avengers West Coast stories, which didn’t do the character any favours either, but at least left her viable.

This story is obviously intended to draw a line under all that and declare Wanda officially rehabbed. There’s a certain logic to it – she atones for M-Day by allowing millions of earlier mutants to be resurrected. Maybe it’ll work this time. Let’s hope so. At any rate, the weight of a wider continuity agenda hangs heavily over this story, and it undercuts the efforts to persuade us we’re seeing something profound about magic, or even about Wanda.

There’s a big problem with the resurrection pay-off, too. The X-office seem to be under the impression that they’ve clearly established that Cerebro’s records only went back to Some Point After Giant-Size X-Men #1, which they absolutely haven’t. Quite the opposite, they’ve previously shown Vulcan with Petra and Sway, who both died before that point. Apparently that was a dialogue error – they were meant to be Vulcan hallucinating – and it’s just about possible to read the dialogue in X-Men #8 that way if you assume that by “you guys” Havok means whoever Vulcan was drinking with last night, rather than the two girls in the same panel as him. But the point is that the X-books had never established that the resurrection cut-off was that late, and they had very strongly implied that it went back at least as far as Giant-Size #1.

Hell, we’ve had the Changeling in at least one crowd scene, and he died in the Silver Age. But Petra and Sway were front and centre in a main title, and their whole thing is that they died off panel in Giant-Size #1. There’s literally nothing else to them. So… what we’re getting here is a revelation that the X-Men can now do something we all thought they could do already. And that’s just weird.

It’s not an awful miniseries, and hopefully it does manage to make Wanda’s rehab stick this time. But it’s underwhelming at best. It sets itself up to be something deeper and turns out to be mainly a continuity fix.