How he died: Much as he tried to top it with Here Comes Tomorrow, the Planet X storyline was the real close of Grant Morrison's time writing New X-Men. It's also the storyline which involved the most deaths of major characters, with the whole thing culminating in Magneto going insane, having his face exploded by an optic blast from Cyclops and then his head lopped off by Wolverine. Before all that, however, you need to understand how he brought the X-Men to their knees, first by sneaking into their inner sanctum under the guise of pacifist new mutant Xorn. Having played his trump card within Xavier's School, organising a rebellion of students that eventually lead to a full-scale mutant takeover of New York City, Magneto also managed to dispatch most of the main X-Men team with various distractions: Beast and Emma Frost were shot down whilst flying over an ocean, where they were stranded without communications; Cyclops is missing, presumed dead alongside Fantomex; and Wolverine and Jean Grey are stranded on Asteroid M, which hurtles towards the Sun and burns both of them to a crisp. How he came back: Logan can withstand a lot, but the actual power of the actual sun is asking a lot of that much-vaunted healing factor. Having killed Jean with his claws out of mercy, not wishing her to be cooked alive alongside him, he carries her body towards the inevitable, where we get a delightful multi-page sequence of the flesh being burnt right off of his adamantium ones until his skeleton is too being torn apart, until Jean's almost disembodied eyes suddenly jump open and everybody reading remembers she has some history with really powerful fire stuff in space. Thanks to some excellent timing the Phoenix Force within Jean is reawakened and she uses it to rescue Wolverine's head, which slowly rebuilds him as they fly across the cosmos and land back on Earth to deal with the Magneto situation which, frankly, everybody else is making a total hash of. High on the mutant drug Kick, which supposedly enhances your powers, the villain collapses after administering a fatal electric shock to Jean, only for Wolverine to then lop his head clean off. So it all works out in the end.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
