When comics storylines are planned, lots of things can change during the process and perhaps no comic makes that clearer than Trial of Magneto #3. The more of this story you read, the more obvious it becomes that this probably wasn’t conceived as an event comic, but rather just another storyline in the ill-fated X-Factor. And for that reason, this issue mostly feels like extra padding rather than a serving of the meatier plot elements the past two issues were providing.
As most fans hypothesized in the last issue, the Wanda that appeared was just the old backup Charles still had from Cerebro. Though, that almost raises more questions than answers, like why is the backup that old? Wanda’s mutant status was retconned away in 2014, so logically, anything pre-Axis would still be in her memory since mutantkind had believed her to be one of them at that point. But this Wanda doesn’t just think she’s still with Vision, she doesn’t remember her kids — or M-Day, apparently. Why was this the last backup he had?
Image: Marvel Comics
Aside from that weirdness, uh…monsters attack? And all the X-Men and the Avengers start going after the kaiju attacking the island. This is what I mean when I say 80% of this issue just didn’t need to exist; why are we wasting time with this when the plot is about solving Wanda’s murder and dealing with the newly-cloned Wanda? It feels like a lot of this issue just exists to take up a slot in the event’s allotted issues.
The ending pages give us the juiciest bit of content, touching on the “real” Wanda who is trapped in some chaos magic realm. These pages also reveal who killed her, and it is a twist no one saw coming.
X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #3 boasts beautiful artwork thanks to Lukas Werneck, who makes sure every page seems bursting with life. Unfortunately, issue #3 is definitely the weakest of the story thus far because of how it meanders around, making one wonder how much more concise this plot would be if it was just another X-Factor arc instead of this blown-out miniseries. But, what Trial of Magneto #3 does best is set up its next issue with that shocking reveal.
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