UNCANNY X-MEN #150: I, Magneto...

It's Magneto's big day!

Originally Published October 1981

We begin with... Magneto!

The X-Men's arch foe is appearing live via hologram to every world leader - from Reagan and Brezhnev down to the "lowliest dictator" to demand they eliminate all nuclear weapons and cede control of the entire planet to him, on the grounds that in their petty international squabbles, innocent mutant lives may be forfeit. He vaguely threatens that if he is opposed, those responsible will "not survive to regret it," which are usually hollow words from a comic book villain.

After his transmission, Magneto boasts to Cyclops - who has been his guest on his mysterious Bermuda Triangle Cthulhu-Themed Island Getaway Base for some time now, and whose optic blasts are being nullified by a power-dampener on the island - that this is no bluff, and that once he is in control he will use all the money that normally goes to military technology to build a new golden age. Personally I think that having the entire world united under a single autocratic mutant dictator might radically alter the economy, but one thing at a time.

The villain also takes a moment to ask about this Aleytys "Lee" Forrester woman, confused because the last time he checked Instagram, Cyclops and Jean Grey were #couplegoals. I'm not sure if any of you out there remember, but some time ago Jean Grey turned into the sun-eating cosmic demigoddess known as Dark Phoenix and sacrificed herself on the moon rather than risk losing control and destroying more planets.

Artist's rendering

Magneto offers his condolences, and when Cyclops balks that an evildoer like Magneto could ever feel anything about anything, Magneto snaps that he, too, has been through some things in his time.

Unfortunately before we can hear more of Magneto's tragic backstory, the scene is interrupted by some incoming ballistic missiles courtesy of a Russian submarine somewhere off the coast (impressive job finding the place.) Magneto, who had the foresight not to dampen his own powers, deflects them with ease and sets to work counterstriking the submarine, sinking it and killing the crew, probably the first time Magneto has successfully committed mass murder in the pages of this series.

Then, to take things a little further, Magneto turns his secret weapon on the small Soviet industrial centre of Varykino, causing a volcano to erupt from within the Earth's surface and destroying it. An editorial caption pointedly lets us know there was time for an evacuation, in case you were more worried about fictional Russians than Dark Phoenix's fictional alien victims - but still, that's not Very Keeno.

At sunset, Lee is left to ponder her place in all this, as a mere powerless human whose life may hang in the balance of powers she cannot fathom. She considers how she has never been hated blindly the way Magneto hates humans, and how that feels unfair, and gee, there may be something to lewrn from that. Cyclops joins her to declare that, even without his powers, even with Magneto seemingly having thought of everything, he still has to fight to stop it - what Magneto promises is hollow, a brief age that will only last as long as he does. Probably after he dies, Toad and Unus will be out there fighting for succession.

While they smooch it up, an aircraft is brought down over the water in the distant sky. And if it's a falling or exploding aircraft, the X-Men must be aboard!

In a fairly exciting tense scene (really!) the X-Men manage a water landing. Professor X loses contact, having been psychically monitoring the situation from afar on Peter Corbeau's boat. It seems the whole troupe has been out looking for Magneto, having divined that he must be up to something in last month's story, and also it would be nice if they found Cyclops too.

They've determined that Lee's ship (the trawler Arcadia) wrecked somewhere in the famed Bermuda Triangle, and intend to get there fast and take it slow.

Moira and Carol Danvers (aka former Avenger Ms. Marvel) are there too. To find out why Carol is not currently an Avenger, check out Avengers Annual #10 where I'm sure something of note occurs.

The X-Men are short one oxygen tank due to the crash. Fortunately, in his armoured form, Colossus doesn't need to breath (he just needs to worry about rust.)

Unfortuntely...

Right, that power dampening thing.

Peter almost drowns, but the team is able to get him to dry land, where Wolverine resuscitates him with CPR (cardio-pulmonary respiration) and Kitty administers mouth-to-mouth.

Studio Audience: Woooooooo!

The team runs into Cyclops, who explains about the power-dampener, but notes that all of them have other assets that have nothing to do with their powers: Cyclops (strategist), Storm (master thief), Sprite (computer whiz), Nightcrawler (acrobat), Wolverine (knives in his hands) and Colossus (artist). Lee may also be useful in some way too.

The plan is twofold. While the X-Men men destroy the machine that causes volcanoes to spontaneously appear, the X-Women are assigned to deprogram Magneto's computer where it seems likely all the inportant supervillain data is kept. Unfortunately, when they find the programming book...

Damn! That Magneto guy thinks of everything! Maybe he should rule the world.

The men's plan goes more smoothly, with the main hitch being the risk of falling off the thing.

Meanwhile, Storm finds her way to Magneto's bedroom...

Studio Audience: Woooooooo!

She finds a knife nearby and briefly considers killing him while he sleeps. She reflects on the one time she took a life to survive as a kid (that's a new one, I think) but swore never to do so again, even if the person were a genocidal terrorist who wants to kill the world with volcanoes.

Yeah, I have to make tough decisions at work sometimes too

Storm ultimately decides not to murder the sleeping man, and is flung out of a window for her troubles.

From there the fight is on, and Professor X of all people is first to join the fray, using his psychic powers from afar to try to subdue the megalomaniac.

And he's naked because...?

Unfortunately, though Magneto lacks Professor X's psychic powers, his own will proves to be shockingly powerful, plus with his control over metals, he can do this:

Check and mate!

With the X-Men powerless at his mercy, Magneto rebuilds his doomsday machine and prepares to execute his foes and take over the world. Luckily, Storm has landed in the control room of the machine that dampens powers.

The result?

With that, the fight is completely on as the X-Men throw everything they've got at their arch enemy.

Magneto gives as good as he gets, particularly using Storm's lightning bolts to his advantage by something-something-magnetosphere-absorbing-something-sciencey.

Didn't I just say that?

He also does the thing where he sends Colossus flying around the room because, you know, he's made of metal.

You love to see it

Amidst the chaos, Cyclops sends Kitty off to sabotage the computer by phasing through it (which we have long since established disrupts technology). Magneto is enraged to find his plans undone, and when she instinctively phases while he approaches, his stored electricity zaps through her, and thus...

Shockingly (hah), Magneto takes no pleasure in killing a young girl. Quite the opposite in fact - we see him overwhelmed by grief and remorse.

Briefly - really briefly, in only a few panels - Magneto reflects on how he once had a daughter, and a wife, Magda. When the daughter was murdered, Magneto unleashed his powers on the culprit but the sight of that terrified Magda so that she fled.

That, apparently, is the day he swore he would not rest until he could create a world where mutants could be safe and unafraid, using as much violence and intimidation as he had the power to bestow. Only now he realizes things have gotten a titch out of hand.

He also reveals that he survived Auschwitz (as you may have caught, he had earlier implied the rest of his family had not.)

 

Since there's no sport in beating on a man currently wracked by the horrors of his childhood experience in a concentration camp, the fight ends, and Magneto finally sees the error of his ways - that he had allowed his zeal to turn him into what he hated most. Magneto goes off to have a long think about what he has done, and what he must do next. As for Kitty, she survived, basically unharmed. Don't tell Magneto.

And thus, the long fight is over, and the X-Men are effectively victorious over their oldest foe. We end on a lighthearted note, basically the X-Men equivalent of an Archie Digest two-pager, which I love:

Further Thoughts:

Dare I say it? There's a lot going on here. After all, this is the double-sized "150th issue" and the book really does pull out all the stops to deliver a blockbuster. For all the times we saw Magneto square off against the X-Men in their earlier incarnation (usually undone by his own underlings' treachery or incompetence but an L is an L) the new X-Men have only met him a few times and the result of each of those encounters was never an unqualified victory for our heroes, so the idea of the Big Final Confrontation between the two sides is an appropriately big draw. And before that, the story is filled to the brim with action beats and suspenseful twists, to the point of straining credulity - so you get Piotr almost drowning, and Wolverine falling off the thing. The X-Men having to make due for a while without their powers was a good angle though.

It was a fine issue, and certainly an important one, but Importance does not equal Greatness, which is why this particular issue never makes lists of Best X-Men Comics ever (however, lots of really good unimportant ones don't either.)

We've seen Magneto plotting against mankind and/or the X-Men plenty of times before, but this one feels like a much bigger deal. Magneto's general screeds against the evils of humanity have been honed into some very specific grievances and tangible deliverables on what he intends to do about them. As nuclear tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were reaching a new apex, it was definitely on people's minds that we may have been on the brink of destruction. It's fitting that Magneto would have something to say about that, and that it would fit into his usual viewpoint of Mutant Isolationism. His take is right in that sweet spot between "He's kind of got a point here" and "He's a murderous psychopath who doesn't care who gets in his way."

But the most important thing is that this is the issue where we learn what makes Magneto tick. Until now he's been that mustache-twirling cartoon villain, a role he largely serves through this very issue while hints are dropped of deeper shades. In addition to the personal tragedy that befell his daughter, and the loss of his wife, we learn that Magneto was a victim of one of the largest atrocities in history. Comics' ability to identify any blank space in a character's history and fill it with something worthy of a story is both a gift, and a curse.

In a letter column from a few issues ago, which I didn't share, Claremont discussed the connection between the Days of Future Past storyline and the real-life concentration camps like Auschwitz, noting that as a former History Major he thought about the Holocaust on a daily basis. Magneto's Holocaust backstory has become an essential part of his character, but I wonder how scandalous it might have been at the time to tie one of your most major villains to a real world tragedy and try to gwt tbe audience to, like, feel for him, man. It is up to each of us to determine whether this connection is a cheap one that the comics medium could not hope to do justice by, or one that legitimizes comics as a medium where big ideas are discussed and played out along with the standard battles between superpowered foes.

Personally, I'm for it (with 40 years of hindsight saying that this is the way it is,) since it's all well and good for the X-Men to deal with hypothetical prejudice but it feels weak if the book itself does not address any real-world forms of persecution. This franchise, you must admit, are uniquely equipped to deal with the complex messaging of not all bad guys being so bad. At least under the pen of Claremont, the invocation of the Holocaust is done sensitively to underline the "Never Again" message at work, rather than scoring easy Misery Tourism points.

Later in this decade, Art Spigelman's Maus would be published, applying the same concept to "funny animal" comics, and be rightly heralded for its brilliance.

All this essentially renders Magneto retired as a villain. Once we have seen him weep for his lost daughter and wife, and reflect on his his family was eliminated in the gas chambers, it is hard to want to see him lock the X-Men up in brainwashing chairs and electrocute their guts until they think they're zoo animals or something, until Cyclops gets free and blasts him in the face.

To me, it gets a little dicey when you start revealing shocking tragedies in the background of every villain, so that we have a certain understanding of what drove them to enslave countries and murder millions, in attempts to get us, the reader, to understand why they were seduced by darkness. It can happen in reality, and does, but it is not the only thing that happens. After a few times, it's no longer novel and starts to just excuse bad behavior. In the real world, lots of bad people are simply bad - cruel, vain, greedy, dumb, whatever - and they revel in that, to where sympathetic backstory would make me change my opinion about them, whether it's Adolf Hitler or Osama Bin-Laden or Donald Trump. In reality lots of good people, or potentially good ones, are led astray by a lack of opportunities in everyday society. Usually they end up as accessories rather than masterminds, and they are the ones worthy of redemption. Outside of Magneto it gets harder and harder for me to believe in the narrative of "Oh I got so carried away I lost sight of my vision, which was actually good." At a certain level, most of the villains know what they are doing, and I worry that too many villains being depicted as going overboard in the pursuit of essentially Good Things deflates our real-world enthusiasm for doing good things. But maybe I'm just projecting.

But I also believe in redemption. That a person can change their ways and realize all the pain and misery they have caused and want to do better. That it's possible, if not probable, to atone. They just don't need to have a tragic backstory to set it in motion.