One of Magneto’s most memorable acts of terrorism happened in the same issue that revealed his humanity.
At the end of Uncanny X-Men #150, the youngest member of the X-Men Kitty Pryde uses her phasing power’s ability to scramble technology to disrupt Magneto’s plans. When he realizes this, his fury comes down on the teenager, who in her terror is helpless against the powerful master of magnetism. The only thing that stops him is a sudden realization of just how young she is.
“What have I done?” he gasps, “…I swore that I would not rest ’til I had created a world where my kind — mutants — could live free and safe and unafraid. Where one sunch as you, little one could be happy. Instead, I have slain you.” The moment of personal revelation stops him cold. Dave Cockrum et. al’s lines render the man’s face in a way that we’ve perhaps never seen it before: distraught, concerned, paternal. The normal villainous madness replaced by real emotion.
The lines he speaks next are those that would come to define him: “I remember my own childhood — the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family to their death. As our lives were nothing to them, so human lives became nothing to me.” In that single panel, Magneto is reborn.
He begins X-Men #150 as an unambiguous villain, who holds the world hostage. He threatens that any forces that try to stop him will be retaliated against, and when a Soviet submarine is mobilized against him, he follows through on the threat. Magneto seizes the submersible in the water and deactivates it, and traps the crew to an underwater grave.
It isn’t the first act of terrorism that Magneto commits on the page. His early appearances are often acts of military aggression intended to acquire weapons or strategic resources for his own political pursuits. In X-Men #1 he attacks Cape Citadel with the intention to gain access to its depository of missiles for his fight against humanity. In his next appearance, X-Men #4, he hijacks a battleship and uses it to conquer a South American country, where he then harbors nuclear weaponry he intends to wield against the human race.
These early portrayals are clearly influenced by the anxieties and paranoia of times defined by the Cold War. The Bay of Pigs would have been in recent memory as these issues were produced and hit the stands. The idea of an enemy of the free world — from America’s perspective — taking over a Latin American country, harboring weapons, and holding the world hostage was in the zeitgeist.
Put it together, and it seems like Magneto was meant to be red in more than just costume, early on (which would make him sinking the Leningrad a deep betrayal, I suppose). From here, he drifts into stock villain territory — a powerful megalomaniac with an interesting powerset who creators can set against the Avengers or Thor when he isn’t needed for the X-Men. We don’t even really know he’s an old man until Neal Adams first draws his helmetless white hair and wrinkles in the 70s. When Claremont makes him a Holocaust survivor, it’s magic on the page.
Then the millennium turns, and Magneto finds himself sinking into the past. It didn’t happen all at once — the 90s did a number on him — but it’s still jarring. He’s thrown back to his roots as a red scare caricature, even depicted on a T-Shirt modeled after the infamous 1960 Alberto Korda Che Guevara picture printed on shirts across the world. Like with the Guerrillero Heroico, the “Magneto was right” logo is reduced, or elevated, to a reproducible image. At best an image — a symbol — that can represent something worthwhile that inspires us. At worst, an image that’s run through a machine until its meaning dries up, until it’s nothing but an empty meme, powerless except to self-reference and endlessly replicate.
The Real Deal
If we’re to discuss Magneto’s death in the aughts, one of the questions we have to ask if it was even him that died. New X-Men itself seems unsure of that answer, the identity, meaning, and existential existence of Magneto a central theme to Morrison’s 40 issue run.
Another question is where to start. The first time Magneto “dies” in New X-Men is in E for Extinction, when he’s presumed killed, one number among the sea of 16 million dead post Cassandra Nova’s sentinel attack. We’d be fools to believe it, of course, with no body or on panel drama to show the character out. Magneto is just too big to go without a word.
Yet he’s simply gone for 18 issues. The X-Men fight aliens, defeat Xavier’s twin sister, set up a global peacekeeping force, and not a word from the master of magnetism. Then, in New X-Men #132, we hear his final statement, supposedly recorded in the last moments of his life, booming out from a monument built on the graveyard that once was a nation: “Once, I was a mortal man. Now I am becoming memory, immortal. They must have thought they could silence us forever. Instead we have become magnetic. Unstoppable.”
The story now moves on again, this time having more convincingly laid the arch villain to rest. We still don’t believe it, of course. For 14 more issues we assume he’s behind the scenes, waiting to come back into the X-Men’s story at the most dramatic opportunity (drama, of course, being his secondary mutation). If there’s a reader in existence who predicted he was really the new addition to the team all along, I’d love to have a conversation with them. Xorn is as fleshed out a character as any in the book, with a distinct personality and background, a Chinese monk imprisoned for his mutation, who has the head of a star and the heart of a poet. That this is all Magneto’s artifice feels like a betrayal, a viceral twist of a knife in the reader’s gut.
Magneto’s entrance into the run is immediate, forceful, deranged, and violent. After neutralizing each of the X-Men, he twists the Brooklyn bridge into distorted loops, wrecks the landscape of NYC, and begins to round humans up to slaughter, all the while plotting out loud his genocidal, apocalyptic plans. The slogan “Magneto is right” was already narratively questioned as soon as it appeared, but at this point it’s absolutely mocked into pieces. Magneto is actually pretty damn evil and wrong, it seems.
What is not true, however, is that this came out of nowhere. Reading back at the series once you know, you can see the Xorn mask fraying at the edges before it breaks. Xorn takes as his charges the outcast mutants of the Xavier academy, a “Special Class” of the mentally disabled, traumatized, or otherwise socially different. It’s on a camping retreat with these students that we have our first definitive look at the Magneto under the Xorn mask. When a cult who harvests mutant body parts attacks the students, Xorn takes the kids to safety and goes back to deal with the assailents.
We don’t see what he does exactly, but we do see an eerie page of the aftermath, bodies strewn about, and a jeep on fire. When Xorn looks back at Angel with the glowing lifeless eyes of his helmet, he’s looking at us too, speaking to us, when he utters, “this will be our secret.”
Where Xorn ends and Magneto begins is at first obvious, marked by a stunning Phil Jiminez cliffhanger splash page in New X-Men #146 (this article’s feature image) where Magneto levitates the Xorn helmet to the side of him, revealing his distinct white haired window’s peak, a “Magneto was right” poster hung up in the background. However, the story could have then made a clean break between the personas, but chooses not to. Magneto takes the Xorn helmet with him to his tower of operations in NYC, and no one outside his cohort seems to believe he’s really Magneto at all.
In an almost comical series of scenes, Magneto attempts to speak down at his supporters and survivors of his onslaught, but no one can hear him, and those that do don’t believe him. Toad plays the Jester to his King Lear, undercutting the villain’s grandstanding with injections of reality, letting him know his authority isn’t resonating. Frustrated, Magneto begins to regroup, and Esme Cuckoo tells him how he can live up to the Magneto of everyone’s expectations by taking the drug Kick. When he does, he doubles down on his megalomania and genocidal ambitions, a performance of the great villain he’s supposed to be, the human inside him lost and buried.
Xorn begins to speak to him as a free floating voice, presumably a figment of his own imagination, but the voice gets a dialogue bubble as distinct as his own on the page, in reference to his head, which still exists as the helmet Magneto suspiciously kept nearby. In the subsequent climatic fight with the X-Men, Magneto wears various faces: his own iconic helmet, his bare face, and the Xorn helmet, switching them out rapidly from scene to scene.
Phil Jiminez doesn’t cast any of these faces the same way twice, sometimes portraying him as old, tired, and feeble, other times charged with omnipotent wrath. The Xorn helmet is equally malleable, either angelic or demonic, passive or accusing, depending on the shadows casted upon it. It’s all as if Magneto’s true identity is in flux leading up to his death.
It’s the Xorn helmet he wears as Wolverine deals the killing blow. His last words are “Make me immortal.” We don’t see Magneto’s face as he dies, but we do see Xorn’s, as the helmet plunks to the ground like a skipping stone on the surface of a lake. It then stares out at us one last time, self satisfied, mocking, as Cyclops holds a dying Jean Grey, and has to catch himself from calling for someone to get Xorn to heal her. A few pages previous, Phoenix read Magneto his rights — “Magneto? You don’t look anything like him. How can you be Magneto when Magneto is dead? Is this the Magneto anyone knows? Is this what he looks like?” — and so she’s the victim of his final revenge.
Was Phoenix’s proclamation a taunt, or the truth? Was this failing, desperate, sadistic figure truly Magneto at all? We know from interviews and their own writing that Morrison’s authorial intent was that this was the real Magneto, in the flesh, planned that way from the beginning. Even before Xorn was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, there was “Experiment X” as he was called in Morrison’s original outline pitch, always intended to be the X-Men’s original foe. Drug addled and demented notwithstanding, this was the same Magneto from 1963’s X-Men #1, and the same Magneto who lamented over Kitty Pryde in Uncanny X-Men #150.
Still, there was enough doubt left in Planet X — and enough offending characterization — that it was an easy fix for Marvel to say that it wasn’t him at all. The “real” Magneto thus is resurrected in the pages of Chris Claremont penned Excalibur vol. 3, when Xavier returns to Genosha with a coffin that contains the corpse of the imposter Xorn. For Claremont, who spent years retooling the character, it must have been cathartic to write his Magneto’s rebuttel to Morrison’s: “And they think me capable of such a thing? Do you think me capable of such a thing?”
Marvel asked if the real Magneto could please stand up, and Claremont answered. What exactly that other Magneto was, what Xorn really was and why he would impersonate the magnetic mutant, these questions were dragged out and semi-answered over disjointed storylines here and there, but never really satisfyingly addressed.
Shifting identity — imposters, pretenders, possession, brainwashing, amnesia — are staples to the comic book death and resurrection narrative. For a writer like Grant Morrison, whose work often plays with the nature of identity and reality, and an artist as proficient as Phil Jimenez, this imagery of identity is a deep feast of signs, symbols, and mysteries to unpack.
However Marvel may have wished, the Magneto of Planet X didn’t go away, but remained a black ink blot, an ugly bruise that could heal in time or fester. A bruise you probably shouldn’t poke, but that’s just all too tempting.
Marvel vs. Morrison
There was a time when Grant was actually excited to write the X-Men. Their original outline pitch to Marvel — the Morrison Manifesto — pops with enthusiasm about a fresh, exciting status quo for the book. And while they talk about making the franchise new (obviously) and relevant, they don’t go into the project with the intention to break or subvert it. They revere what came before, citing Claremont and Byrne as the template for what this run needed to be. In Supergods they talk about how with Frank Quitely they originally envisioned New X-Men to be a story about mutant society developing into its own culture against all adversity.
While elements of that direction remain, the enthusiasm Morrison had for the project didn’t. In their words, the experience became “more like a prison than a playground.”
Morrison’s time at Marvel is brief compared to their long stints at DC before and after. New X-Men is the predominate output of that time, only writing two limited series for the Marvel Knights imprint otherwise: Fantastic Four 1234, an interesting if muddled interpretation of Marvel’s first family, and Marvel Boy.
With Marvel Boy, Morrison’s first Marvel publication, we can right away feel an antagonistic posture against the company. The main villain of the series wears armor practically identical to that of the original gold Iron Man suit, and like a pathetic fanboy is desperately looking for a way to irradiate himself with cosmic energy so he can gain the powers of the Fantastic Four. The protagonist fights bland genetically engineered hybrid clones of Captain America and the Hulk and a living corporation that rapidly conquers the world through monopoly market share. It’s no wonder that the planned sequel — “Marvel Boy 2.0” — was canned before it got off the ground.
In Supergods, Morrison described Marvel Boy as a “quintessential superhero who would arrive with clockwork timing to embody the antiestablishment, anticorporate movement and the spirit of Naomi Klein’s No Logo…” Nov-Vharr absolutely despises the Earth culture of the 21st century, and makes it his mission to destroy the modern capatalist society of the year 2000 as we know it.
While his hatred of modern capitalist society is sympathetic, his own philosophy is also problematic, a self described “Zen Fascism”: “We imagined our hero’s creed as a strange, unthinkable, untranslatable mix of seeming opposites…We’d all seen what ray guns and flying saucers could do, but what if the alien had a belief system so seductive, so powerful and ultimately corrosive that it could destroy our own social structures?” Marvel Boy was something different, a hero who threatened the same status quo markers a villain would.
To Morrison, the stale corporatism of comics is why Magneto needs to be as garishly horrible as he is. In an interview with PopImage, they share that Planet X “was partially intended as a comment on the exhausted, circular nature of the X-Men’s ever-popular battle with Magneto and by extension, the equally cyclical nature of superhero franchise re-inventions.” Morrison comments that it wasn’t the first time Wolverine ran through a Magneto who’s gone too far; Scott Lobdell and Leinil Francis Yu depicted the same scene right before Grant’s run started.
Xorn was just one more turn of the clock before it reset to the start: “In my opinion, there really shoudn’t have been an actual Xorn — he had to be fake, that was the cruel point of him — and it should have been the genuine Magneto, frayed to the bare, stupid nerve and schizoid-conflicted as was in Planet X, not just some imposter.”
Morrison even admits that they went too far bending Magneto’s character in service of their vision, but doesn’t regret the end result, the “miasma of bleakness and futility” that they wanted to portray. While Marvel Boy was a “‘teenage hard on’ engine,” Planet X was fueled by “exhausted, world-weary, ‘middle-aged’ ennui.” Morrison wrote it admist intense grief, as their father and other loved ones passed away, but the writer’s own relationship with Marvel comics also fueled the pessimistic direction.
The experience of helming New X-Men “turned into a diary of my own growing distrust of a post-9/11 conformity culture that appeared to be in the process of greedily consuming the unusual and different.” In the early aughts, Marvel comic books could no longer play in fantastical escapist worlds, could rarely cross into strange, experimental territory. The stories needed to be “realistic” and grounded. A Marvel comic felt more comfortable in the present day Middle East than the future.
Morrison wanted to dream again, escape. They got tired of arguing with then president Bill Jemas about the direction of the Marvel Universe, and walked out the door with a fresh contract with DC not a second after they legally could.
Blame the Sun
“Zen Fascism” is coined in Marvel Boy, but it’s a fitting description for the Xorn / Magneto character, two seemingly opposite stances contained in one body, two cartoonish postures mashed together into an untenable whole. It’d be tempting to veer into a yingyang cliche here, the queer passivity of Xorn nestled against the penetrative force of Magneto, and Zen Fascism both is that cliche, as well as something unspeakably cryptic.
The scariest feature of Zen Fascism is that it can win you over before it destroys you. It’s the comforting sense of belonging to a movement that will ultimately kill everything around you. Just because something seems nice, it doesn’t mean it won’t one day snap at you with teeth. The political angels don’t have full claim to pleasing aesthetics, to poetry, to meditation or inner balance. Once the devil unmasks itself, it is sure to be violent, but before that it might not even be ugly.
“Magneto was right” begins its life as Zen Fascism, equal parts Koan and dog whistle. Morrison and Quitely could be said to have predicted the Incel movement by a few years, but then the secret of prediction is always found in the past. Riot at Xavier’s is about the cycle of bad ideas and good ones, and the way new generations resurface them both.
Quentin Quire is an introverted nerd before he learns his mother has died, that’s he’s adopted, and he doesn’t know how to properly work out his feelings for his female classmates. He’s a young man who looks to right wing ideologies to fill the emotional gaps inside him.
Kid Omega’s rebellion isn’t innovative or new despite his youth, but based on imagery from the past. Not just Magneto’s silhouette, but the hair cut and striped T-Shirt Quitely designs is based on a mutant menace depicted in a newspaper from the day he was born, rebooted but indistinct. Quentin doesn’t need to be something creative or different, its enough for him to give new life to imagery from the past, to strip his thoughts away in favor of a fashion without substance.
Quire’s transformation into “Kid Omega,” as well as many other aspects of New X-Men, clicks in place when you understand Morrison’s affinity for Iain Spence’s Sekhmet Hypothesis. Spence thought that human society can be interpreted in parallel to eleven year cycles of solar magnetic activity flooding our nervous systems. 11 years of harder, harsher, more “punk” aesthetics and thinking, followed by 11 years that are looser, fantastic, or psychedelic, and back and forth. Spence predicted an “imperial youth,” “Stormer” generation post 1999, and Morrison and Quitely give us Quentin, a troubled young mind riding the frequency of the bold new age.
Just as Quentin Quire began as a meditation on the insidiousness of political violence, that exploration of thought continues through Magneto. Xorn’s devolution into a tyrant is consistent with Morrison’s preoccupation with exploring the many forms fascism takes: whether young or old, atavistic or corporate, blunt or seductive. Even the drug Kick itself, that arguably drives Xorn mad, is a fascist entity, an expression of Sublime, a sentient bacteria whose only purpose is to reproduce itself across the globe.
It’s fitting then that the old guard eats its young, when Xorn opens his helmet and finishes Quire off. There’s a tragic fatalism to this act, just as there is throughout New X-Men. Mutants, as the next stage in evolution, could inspire positive potential, a new world and new way of thinking. Instead, they inspire xenophobia, fear of replacement, and visions of an apocalyptic future. Instead of cooperation, betrayal. Instead of revolution, genocide.
Make Me Immortal
Despite everything, “Magneto was right” is just too good of a phrase, and it was destined to become a real T-Shirt still readily available on any number of online stores, like its Che Guevara inspiration.
Like with Guevara, the image has taken on different meanings than the original, but while Che is a real revolutionary flattened to a fashion statement, Magneto was always a 2-dimensional representation on a page. So “Magneto was right” arguably gives the character new life, a “realness” most comic book characters can only dream of. The opposite trajectory of the Guerrillero Heroico.
Whenever signifier is removed from signified, there’s a risk of wasted revolutionary potential. In this day of social optics, there’s always a danger that people will focus more on fashionable aesthetics than direct action, more on inconsistent fads than taking lead from effective organizers in their community. Paulo Freire famously warned against slogans, preferring more methodical practice.
For a sign that always was a sign, never a person, though, any revolutionary potential is added value, and it isn’t completely implausible to imagine that value in practice. Today’s youth are as likely to bear Luffey’s pirate flag than Che Guevara at protests.
When “Magneto was right” was invoked in the years that followed New X-Men, it wasn’t in ironic detachment or right wing fervor, but rather as an argument against moderate politics that would promote racism and persecution as an acceptable status quo. In the years since Planet X, Magneto made the transition from villain to ally in a more permanent way than the years Claremont installed him as the academy’s headmaster.
Magneto is a character afforded a privelage not all comic characters have. He’s allowed to be complicated. As a Holocaust survivor and former terrorist, that complicatedness could easily muddle him, as Asher Elben examines in his Defector article The Judgement of Magneto. A rage filled Jewish man out to protect his people through violence and any means necessary could go very wrong in inept hands.
Nonetheless, he survives. Creators like Jonathan Hickman and Al Ewing only made him more sympathetic as we marched into our current decade (2021/2022 bringing us back to “punk” once again, if you’re keeping track). There’s barely a scar where Planet X‘s bruise once appeared.
Xorn died, but Magneto is immortal.
— Ben Rathbone is the creator of this site, and its only writer. Don’t find him anywhere.
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