Magneto (Marvel Comics)

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2014, IGN ranked Magneto first on its list of the top 100 comic book villains. Six years earlier, Stan Lee, the writer who co-created him, said in an interview that he never thought of Magneto as a villain at all.

  Magneto is a Marvel Comics mutant who can generate and control magnetic fields. He debuted in The X-Men #1, cover-dated September 1963, written by Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby, as an enemy of the X-Men. In those first stories he saw mutants as a superior branch of humanity, which he called Homo superior. He wanted them to replace ordinary people as the dominant species, and he occasionally argued for human genocide.

  Decades later, he was running a school for young mutants and sometimes fighting beside the heroes he once attacked. How does a would-be conqueror become the most sympathetic figure in his own stories? What shaped the man behind the helmet? And why did the writers who guided him reach for real political leaders to explain him?

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• 2. Max Eisenhardt

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  Jakob Eisenhardt had been decorated as a soldier in the First World War, yet his middle-class German Jewish family found no safety at home. His son Max was born in the late 1920s. The family lived through the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and then through Kristallnacht. After that they fled to Poland, where the German invasion caught them and sent them to the Warsaw Ghetto.

  Max and his family escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, only to be betrayed and captured again. His mother, father, and sister were executed and buried in a mass grave. Max survived, possibly because his mutant powers had begun to manifest. He got out of the grave, was caught once more, and was sent to Auschwitz. There he was branded with the inmate number 214782 and became a Sonderkommando.

  Inside Auschwitz, Max met again a Romani girl named Magda, whom he had loved when he was younger. On the 7th of October 1944, during a revolt at the camp, the two escaped. After the war they settled in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, where Max took the name Magnus. They had a daughter named Anya.

  A mob, stirred up when Magnus's powers first showed, burned down the family home with Anya still inside. Magnus could not reach her, and in his rage his powers broke loose. He killed the mob and destroyed part of the city. Terrified, Magda left him. She later gave birth to the twins Pietro and Wanda, and then she died.

  Georg Odekirk, a Romanian forger, supplied the next disguise. Wanted by the authorities for what happened in Vinnytsia, and still searching for Magda, Magnus paid him to create the identity of Erik Lehnsherr, a Sinte. Erik moved to Israel and worked at a psychiatric hospital near Haifa, where Gabrielle Haller lived. There he befriended a man named Charles Xavier.

  The two men argued over what the rise of mutants would mean for humanity. Neither admitted that he was a mutant himself. They were forced to show their abilities when they faced Baron Strucker and Hydra. Erik then saw that his views and Xavier's could not coexist. He left, carrying a cache of hidden Nazi gold that would bankroll everything he did next.

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• 3. Makers and Meanings

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  The Uncanny X-Men #150, from August 1981, first gave Magneto a past as a Holocaust survivor. Because he hid behind a Sinto cover identity, some readers were unsure of his heritage. That confusion lasted until X-Men: Magneto Testament, a trade paperback by Greg Pak released in September 2008, confirmed his Jewish background. Pak built the book on accounts from Holocaust survivors.

  Jack Kirby described his own attitude toward villains in plain terms. "I saw my villains not as villains. I knew villains had to come from somewhere and they came from people. My villains were people that developed problems."

  Stan Lee revealed another detail in that 2008 interview. He had originally planned for Magneto to be the brother of Professor X, the nemesis he was set against.

  Chris Claremont, the writer who created Magneto's backstory, pointed to a real political figure. He said Menachem Begin inspired Magneto's development, just as David Ben-Gurion inspired Professor X. Claremont described Begin as someone "evolving through his life from a terrorist in 1947 to a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years later."

  Claremont also addressed a comparison that fans make online, with Magneto as Malcolm X and Xavier as Martin Luther King. He called it valid, but said that as an immigrant white man he found drawing it presumptuous. In the 1970s it also felt too raw, only a few years after the assassinations.

  His own connection ran through the Holocaust. "It was coming face to face with evil, and how do you respond to it? In Magneto's case it was violence begets violence. In Xavier's it was the constant attempt to find a better way." Later commentators went further and set Magneto beside Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League.

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• 4. From Conqueror to Headmaster

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  Cape Citadel, a United States military base, was the target of Magneto's first villainous act. He brought down its missiles, and Xavier's students, the X-Men, drove him off on their very first mission. He then built Asteroid M, an orbital base inside a hollowed-out asteroid, and gathered angry mutants into the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Among them, unknown to him at the time, were his own son and daughter, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

  In South America, he briefly conquered the nation of San Marco, hoping to make it a mutant homeland. The X-Men foiled him there too. Soon after, an alien called the Stranger, whom Magneto had mistaken for a powerful mutant, sealed him in a cocoon and carried him off to a laboratory world. The Brotherhood splintered, and the twins deserted him.

  The Savage Land Mutates came next, a group he created to fight alongside him. Alpha the Ultimate Mutant followed, an artificial humanoid he built from alien technology found near the core of the earth. Alpha rebelled and reduced him to infancy. At Muir Island, Professor Moira MacTaggert found that heavy use of his powers made him paranoid and irrational, and she altered his genetic code in the hope of preventing evil. The fix wore off whenever he used his powers.

  Kitty Pryde was the turning point. Magneto lashed out in anger and nearly killed her, then stopped when he saw that the X-Man he had attacked was a Jewish child. He realized that he had come to value his opponents' lives as little as the Nazis valued his people's. Professor X hoped the moment might change his old friend.

  The Beyonder, a nearly omnipotent alien, then pulled heroes and villains onto a planet called Battleworld. The characters were sorted by their desires, and Magneto landed with the heroes because he wanted to help mutants. Captain America spoke in his defense. The Wasp grew fond of him, though her knowledge of his past tempered it.

  After the conflict, Asteroid M was shattered by the alien Warlock, and Magneto fell into the Atlantic. A fishing trawler captain named Lee Forrester rescued him and took him to an island in the Bermuda Triangle where he had once held her captive. They became lovers. Soon he surrendered himself for trial, and a tribunal dismissed every charge from before his rebirth, treating that change as the death of the old Magneto.

  An attack by Fenris, the twin children of Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, interrupted the proceedings. Xavier, near death, asked Magneto to take over his school. Magneto agreed and posed as Michael Xavier, a cousin. His time as headmaster of the New Mutants went badly. He left Lee behind, and the Beyonder killed the students and revived them.

  With Storm, he joined the Hellfire Club as the White King after a massacre in the Morlock tunnels. Then he ousted Sebastian Shaw and claimed that his reformation had been a pretense. The New Mutants, already on their way out, declared themselves his enemies. In Acts of Vengeance he allied with Doctor Doom, the Wizard, the Mandarin, and the Red Skull.

  He confirmed that this Red Skull was the one who had served Adolf Hitler, and he entombed him alive. Later, in the Savage Land, Zaladane took Polaris's magnetic powers and then his own. Magneto reclaimed them and executed her himself. After that he gave up mentoring the New Mutants and embraced Xavier's belief in peaceful coexistence, a vow his next homeland would test.

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• 5. Avalon and Genosha

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  Fabian Cortez was the Acolyte who pushed Magneto to declare his rebuilt Asteroid M a homeland for mutantkind. Tired of constant strife, Magneto had retired to quiet seclusion there until a group of mutants called the Acolytes pledged their allegiance. He took nuclear missiles from a Soviet submarine he had destroyed earlier and aimed them at Earth from the asteroid. He also learned how Moira MacTaggert had altered his genes, kidnapped her, tortured her, and forced her to repeat the procedure on some X-Men.

  When the X-Men attacked to rescue her, the Soviets fired a particle beam satellite that destroyed the base, and the procedure wore off. Moira had long known her method could not hold, because a mutant's body returns to normal when it uses its powers. So Magneto's reformation had been genuine. Cortez, who had provoked all this to make Magneto a martyr, abandoned him. The Acolyte Chrome encased Magneto in a protective shell and died with the other Acolytes.

  The United Nations Security Council then voted to activate the Magneto Protocols, a satellite network in a lower orbit than Avalon that distorted Earth's magnetic field. Magneto answered with an electromagnetic pulse that destroyed the satellites and switched off every electric device on Earth within minutes. In the battle with the X-Men that followed, he ripped the adamantium from Wolverine's bones. Furious, Xavier wiped his friend's mind and left him comatose. The combined dark sides of the two men then formed Onslaught, an omnipotent being.

  Genosha, an island nation with no recognized government, came into his hands through the United Nations, manipulated by its mutant affairs officer Alda Huxley. Magneto had survived an attack by Astra, who cloned him, and then returned from hiding with a machine meant to amplify his powers. His clone, the amnesiac Joseph, sacrificed his life to restore the Earth to normal. On Genosha, Magneto won a brutal civil war against the former human rulers and welcomed mutants from around the world.

  Intending to declare war on humanity, he captured Professor X as a rallying symbol. A new X-Men team rescued Xavier, who psychically cut off Magneto's powers. Wolverine took his chance and crippled the depowered Magneto with serious injuries.

  Cassandra Nova Xavier, Xavier's long-lost twin sister, then sent an army of Sentinels against Genosha. Over 16 million mutants and humans died. The attack came just after Polaris learned that Magneto was her father. He apparently survived, living unnoticed in the ruins, and Xavier joined him there. Together they began to rebuild the island, and the friendship revived with it.

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• 6. Family Ties

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  The marriages of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch to Crystal and the Vision were fresh news when Magneto learned the pair were his children. He told them himself. He also discovered a granddaughter, Luna Maximoff, Quicksilver's human child. Magneto saw her as a bond to the human race he had rejected and reached out to his family. Angry that he had rejected them and their mother, they pushed him away.

  In the House of M storyline, the Scarlet Witch suffered a mental breakdown over the loss of her children and began warping reality to recreate them. Doctor Strange put her in a coma. Magneto heard her psychic cry for help on Genosha and opened a wormhole that carried her away before the Avengers could stop her. He allowed only Xavier to visit. When some heroes proposed killing Wanda, Quicksilver warned his father and persuaded her to warp reality into the House of M.

  In that world, Magneto ruled Genosha as the head of a vastly larger mutant population, and it became the most advanced country on Earth. Wolverine, who alone remembered the real world, gathered heroes whose memories Layla Miller restored. They attacked Magneto, who regained his own memory in the fight. Enraged that Quicksilver had done all this in his name, Magneto killed him.

  Wanda sensed her brother's death, brought him back, and spoke the words "No more mutants." Ninety-eight percent of the mutant population lost their powers, Magneto included. He was left a broken man.

  The Young Avengers set out to find the still-missing Scarlet Witch in the Children's Crusade storyline. Magneto learned that the heroes Wiccan and Speed were the reincarnations of Wanda's children. He sought them out because he wanted them to know him as their grandfather. When they found Quicksilver at Mount Wundagore, Quicksilver tried to kill his own father.

  A later curse, cast by a Wanda whose reality-warping inversion had turned her villainous, was meant to punish her blood relatives. Only Quicksilver reacted to it, and Wanda realized that Magneto was not their biological father.

  Secret Wars brought the most painful choice. As his borrowed power surged and began killing him, Magneto absorbed his daughter Polaris's powers. He told her it was his responsibility alone, that he could not let her die beside him, and that she still had something to offer the world.

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• 7. Utopia and Krakoa

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  Mount Tamalpais in Marin County was where Magneto went after Cyclops reprimanded him for acting on his own authority. He had offered to work with the X-Men on Utopia, the new mutant homeland built from the remnants of Asteroid M. He had helped defend it from attacking Predator X monsters. He had also worked with Namor and the Atlanteans to build a pillar that stopped the asteroid from sinking, which he later called New Atlantis.

  In a final bid to earn the X-Men's trust, he entered a deep meditative state and reversed the course of the Breakworld Metal Bullet, which held Kitty Pryde. He brought the bullet back to Earth and lowered her safely to the ground. The strain left him in a coma. He woke in time for the Nimrods' siege of Utopia, dismembering a squad of them with iron shards drawn from the core of Utopia.

  An earthquake bearing down on San Francisco showed another side of him. Magneto used his powers to stabilize the city's buildings, metal vehicles, and the shifting ground itself, and he saved many lives. Some in the city began to favor him. Others were reminded of how dangerous he could be.

  He was later returned to life with no memory of his apparent death, as part of All-New, All-Different Marvel. He gathered Archangel, M, Psylocke, and Sabretooth as his own X-Men to defend mutants at any cost. During Inhumans vs. X-Men, Psylocke killed him, honoring an agreement that she would do so if he ever returned to megalomania. Exodus found his body in the Savage Land, and Elixir healed him.

  In the 2017 Secret Empire storyline, Captain America, manipulated into acting as a Hydra Supreme, offered him a piece of land in the western United States for an independent mutant nation. Hydra took over, and New Tian formed somewhere in California. Magneto faked his own death and hid in Madripoor.

  On the island of Krakoa, working with Charles Xavier and Moira X, Magneto helped build a new sovereign mutant nation. As its ambassador he welcomed foreign delegates at the Jerusalem Habitat. He told them he knew some were plants, and added that they "have new gods now." During the Judgment Day storyline, Uranos struck him down on Arakko, though the wound proved not to be fatal.

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• 8. Powers and Reputation

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  A nuclear submarine of 30,000 tons, filled with sea water, is something Magneto has levitated from the ocean depths. He is classed as an Omega-level mutant. He controls magnetism, moves metals, and can lift non-metallic objects with electromagnetic fields or force fields. He has moved large asteroids several times, and his powers reach down to the atomic level. He has even produced a wormhole to teleport himself and others.

  His force fields can withstand the simultaneous detonation of multiple thermonuclear weapons, and they let him survive in deep space. He can turn invisible by warping visible light, and his baseline reaction time is 15 times faster than a normal human's. He flies using the electromagnetic energy that surrounds the Earth.

  X-Men #2 is the source for one long-running puzzle. Magneto often resists telepathic attack, and the comics offer several explanations. They credit technology in his helmet, an effect of his electromagnetic powers, hidden telepathic ability of his own, or sheer will. The helmet is the most common answer, built specially to keep Charles Xavier and other high-level telepaths out of his mind. In deep meditation he once shielded his thoughts so completely that Emma Frost could not read them.

  His mind is an arsenal of its own. He is a genius in genetics, particle physics, and engineering who has built space stations and devices that cause volcanoes and earthquakes. He once deciphered the unknown language of a lost civilization. He also reads microexpressions to sense fear or lies, a skill he calls "taking your enemy's measure."

  Critics have noticed. David Harth of CBR.com called him the "X-Men's most iconic villain" and wrote that tragedy had molded him into one of the best-developed Marvel villains. In 2019, IGN ranked him second in its "Top 25 Marvel Villains" list, and in 2006 Wizard Magazine placed him 17th among the greatest villains ever. His first ongoing series launched in 2014, written by Cullen Bunn, and Magneto #1 was the 19th best-selling comic of March 2014, according to Diamond Comic Distributors. Nerdist's Eric Diaz argued that he was the easiest classic villain to sell as a series because "on some level we all sympathize with him."

  His first screen appearance came in a 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, as a non-mutant called Dr. Magneto, voiced by Bernard Cowan. David Hemblen voiced him in X-Men: The Animated Series, which ran from 1992 to 1997. Ian McKellen has played him in films since X-Men in 2000, and Michael Fassbender has played a younger version since X-Men: First Class in 2011. The most recent animated version appears in X-Men '97, which began in 2024, voiced by Matthew Waterson.

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