I swear I did not intend to do yet another piece related to the X-Men this week. I had something else in mind entirely. Unfortunately, the online discourse following the release of A.X.E. Judgment Day #1 by Kieron Gillen and Valerio Schiti this past week annoyed me to the point that I felt the need to address it. I will mark all spoiler discussions of that issue very clearly, so feel free to scroll past it to get to the meat of the discussion.
🚨🚨🚨Spoilers for A.X.E. Judgment Day #1 begin here🚨🚨🚨
The plot of this first issue of Marvel’s latest massive summer event is that the Eternals (led by the duplicitous Druig) have decided that their prime directive to prevent “excess deviation” extends to mutants. This essentially means that Druig views the current population explosion of mutants and their colonization of Mars as heretical and must be dealt with. To do so, Druig sends assassins to the mutant nation-state of Krakoa to kill the Five (mutants who when working together have the ability to resurrect any dead mutant) and sends his grandfather Uranos (an extremely powerful Eternal with an unquenchable bloodlust) to Mars to annihilate the mutant society of Arakko. For perspective, there are approximately 200,000 mutants living on Krakoa and 1,000,000 mutants living on Arakko. Druig’s assassins fail on Krakoa, but Uranos is extremely successful on Arakko. Though we don’t yet know the extent, the implication is he has successfully conducted a genocide that has resulted in the deaths of the majority of the 1,000,000 mutants living there. It also appears that Magneto is one of the casualties. Once news spreads, there is a depiction of humans ecstatically celebrating.
It’s meant to shock and disgust the reader; however, a certain segment of comic book fans had a much different reaction. These fans took to social media to say that committing genocide against mutants is good actually.
🚨🚨🚨Spoilers for A.X.E. Judgment Day #1 end here🚨🚨🚨
I’m not going to bother explaining to people that justifying genocide is bad. Anyone stating otherwise is either a troll or a Nazi, so there is no point in engaging with them (anyone who skipped the spoiler section is probably wondering what the hell happened to lead to this). Anyway, that genocide discussion spun off into a separate wave of people referring to Magneto as “Mutant Hitler.”
Beyond being in poor taste to compare a Jewish Holocaust survivor to Hitler, it’s also just completely inaccurate and betrays a total lack of understanding for the character. Also, the person equating Malcolm X to Hitler is making me lose my mind, but that’s a conversation for a different time. To truly understand the character and why so many readers gravitate towards him, you have to analyze the character through five distinct eras. Different writers have characterized him differently, but there has been a general understanding of how to portray him within those eras.
Silver Age Magneto (1963-1981)
The original portrayal of Magneto as written by Stan Lee was of a fairly cartoonish supervillain with schemes to achieve global domination. His reasoning for doing so is what separated him from other supervillains at the time: he wanted to create a world that was safe for all mutants where they could live without the fear of being persecuted for being different. There isn’t a whole lot to say about the early days of the character. He spends most of his time monologuing and coming up with needlessly circuitous schemes. It’s entertaining in that uniquely Silver Age way, but he’s fairly one-note.
Magneto’s Rehabilitation by Claremont (1981-1989)
It wasn’t until Claremont began writing the character that Magneto transformed into the fan favorite that he is today. Claremont sought to add additional layers to Magneto’s backstory that would help explain his motivation and make him more sympathetic to readers. That really started with Uncanny X-Men #148-150 (1981) written by Claremont with art by Dave Cockrum. In Uncanny X-Men #150, Magneto issues a demand to all nations of the world to dismantle their armaments to avoid a potential nuclear war. In response, a Soviet submarine fires ballistic missiles on Magneto’s position. He effortlessly causes them to fall harmlessly in the ocean, and then he proceeds to sink the submarine. All aboard are killed. This is easily the most violent act Magneto has taken on the page up to this point. Professor X does what he always does and sends the X-Men to bring down his old friend. In the ensuing battle, Kitty Pryde is seriously injured and Magneto believes he may have killed her. He is horrified upon learning she is a child (Xavier really shouldn’t be sending children off to fight supervillains), and he begins to talk about his own murdered child and then his own childhood spent in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It’s that new backstory that really humanizes him and helps explain why he goes to such lengths to protect his fellow mutants from bigotry and persecution. He has seen up close just how dire things can be when those in power scapegoat a minority group. That is followed up by the classic graphic novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills (1982) by Claremont and Brent Anderson. It’s the first story where Magneto allies himself with the X-Men to take on a bigoted televangelist named Reverend William Stryker and his anti-mutant death squad called The Purifiers.
The full rehabilitation of Magneto takes place in Uncanny X-Men #200 (1985) by Chris Claremont and John Romita, Jr. In that issue, a repentant Magneto stands trial for his crimes. During said trial, Magneto ends up saving the day when he fends off an attack by the Fenris twins (a couple of honest-to-goodness Nazis). Xavier is injured in the attack, so he is whisked away to outer space by his alien bird lady girlfriend to be healed (don’t ask). Before he departs, he asks Magneto to take over as headmaster of his school while he’s gone. Magneto promises to do so, and he spends the rest of the decade serving as headmaster of the Xavier Institute and leader of the New Mutants. At this point, Magneto had made the transition from villain to hero.
Magneto’s Return to Villainy (1989-2001)
While Claremont had intended for Magneto to be Xavier’s permanent replacement as hero and teacher of young mutants, Marvel editorial had other ideas. Following the events of “Inferno,” Magneto begins to drift back towards a more militant mindset. In New Mutants #75 (1989) by Louise Simonson and John Byrne, Magneto battles Sebastian Shaw and replaces him as leader of the Hellfire Club. His students quickly distance themselves from him, and his time as headmaster comes to an end. In X-Men #1 (1991) by Claremont and Jim Lee, Magneto has left Earth to live in solitude on his orbiting base called Asteroid M. Magneto has become something of a symbol for militant mutant liberation, and both devotees and antagonists continually make their way to Asteroid M to find him. During the course of X-Men #1-3 (1991) by Claremont and Lee, Magneto declares Asteroid M a sovereign state where all mutants are welcome to live in order to escape persecution. This is framed as being a villainous act, but it seems to me that this is a pretty understandable course of action. Someone should totally pick up those themes in today’s comics.
This essentially becomes every Magneto story for the rest of the decade. He establishes a mutant nation-state where all mutants can be safe (Asteroid M, Avalon, Genosha, etc.), humans see it as an act of war, and the X-Men end up getting involved and have to fight Magneto. This version of Magneto tends to be more ruthless than how he had previously been written, but he also makes a lot of sense. The dichotomy now established between Xavier and Magneto is that Xavier is an integrationist, and Magneto is what I would label a self-determinist and liberationist. He isn’t calling for genocide against humans or seeking to enslave them. He just wants a united mutant nation-state where all mutants are liberated from oppression, and he is willing to fight to the death to achieve it. As the 1990s ended, Magneto had become the head of state of Genosha (now an island nation with a mutant population).
Magneto as Counterculture Symbol (2001-2004)
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took over X-Men in 2001 and changed the title to New X-Men. Their first order of business? Reduce the number of mutants in the world. At this point in time, Magneto’s mutant island of Genosha had a population of over 16,000,000 mutants. The mutant race had never been so prosperous. That quickly changes in New X-Men #115 (2001) by Morrison and Quitely when the despicable Cassandra Nova launches an attack on Genosha with kaiju-sized Sentinels that kill over 16,000,000 mutants in a matter of hours. Magneto is seemingly one of the many victims.
Mutants are once again a tiny minority beset on all sides by numerous threats for the remainder of Morrison’s run. Following Magneto’s death in the Genoshan genocide, various mutant youths begin wearing shirts adorned with Magneto’s helmeted visage with the message “Magneto Was Right” written on them. This is first seen in New X-Men #135 (2003) by Morrison and Quitely where troublemaking student Quentin Quire is wearing one in Professor Xavier’s classroom. It’s meant to evoke the Che Guevara shirts worn in the real world. It has also become a clarion call for readers who view Magneto’s philosophy as preferable to Xavier’s (i.e. the right of self-determination for oppressed minority groups achieved by any means necessary as advocated by Magneto over Xavier’s integrationist message and preference to keep the peace above all else). Ultimately Magneto is revealed to be alive by the end of Morrison’s run, and he has become the genocidal megalomaniac that his critics accuse him of being. But even this is later undone when it is retconned to be a character named Xorn impersonating Magneto. It’s needlessly confusing and complicated, so don’t think too hard about it. I just know it’ll come up if I don’t address it.
Magneto in the Modern Era (2004-present)
It can be difficult to pigeonhole modern Magneto because so many different writers and artists have tackled the character in recent years. He joins the X-Men on Utopia (another mutant nation-state) during the “Nation X” storyline (2009-2010), he was a member of Cyclops’s X-Men team in Kieron Gillen’s Uncanny X-Men run (2011-2012) and Brian Michael Bendis’s Uncanny X-Men run (2013-2015), he was the leader of the X-Men in Cullen Bunn’s Uncanny X-Men run (2016-2017), and he was the mentor for the time displaced young X-Men in Bunn’s X-Men Blue run (2017-2018). The culmination of Magneto’s history is his current depiction in the Krakoan era that started with House of X (2019) by Jonathan Hickman and Pepe Larraz where he and Xavier found the mutant nation-state of Krakoa and sit upon its governing body, the Quiet Council. This new nation-state grants citizenship to all mutants including many of the X-Men’s enemies over the years. Xavier is fully behind this initiative and is the face of this new nation-state even more so than Magneto. So to reiterate, Xavier is now completely on board the exact strategy that Magneto has been espousing for over thirty years now. In other words, Xavier is basically admitting that Magneto was right.
Okay. Let’s recap. Magneto was a fairly generic supervillain in the 1960s and 1970s with silly schemes. He later became a much more sympathetic character in the 1980s when he was revealed to be a Holocaust survivor before taking over as headmaster of Xavier’s school. He then became a supervillain once again in the 1990s despite his “villainous plans” mostly being him wanting to create a nation-state for mutants where they would be safe from persecution. In the 2000s, he became a counterculture symbol following his apparent death in a horrific act of genocide. Now in modern comics his philosophy has been adopted by Xavier and most mutants around the globe. At no point has he committed any acts of genocide or called for the extermination of all mutants. He has in no way become “Mutant Hitler” or oppressed humanity. The only thing he’s guilty of is being right long before anyone realized it.