Is Magneto evil?

[Nutcase65]

This ties into the same vein as the Doom thread. I was re-reading it and found a few references to maggie and though "this is a good question for him to" so what do you think.

Mags has switched sides many times for many reasons, he has helped and harmed many on many occasions

is he evil?

[dlw66]

I guess my first instinct (without doing any research) is to say that his desires for Homo superior to live unpersecuted lives is noble; that he feels he must commit genocide against Homo sapiens is certainly not -- the latter is evil incarnate.

I don't really (again, without doing any digging) see him as any kind of tragic character in the vein of Doom or Galactus.

EDIT: By the way, is the Holocaust backstory a retcon from the movie series or has that been in the comics? I've not read X-Men for around 15 years...

[balok]

Yeah, he's evil. Plotting genocide, even if you feel it's "the only way" is evil. It's ironic they gave him a Holocaust backstory in the X-Men films because as portrayed in the comics he and Hitler have much in common.

[Doctor Doom]

No, not even close to it. He's the most morally ambiguous villain in existence for either company and one of the most complex characters in comics.

The massive story arc over about 50 issues Claremont did to redeem him was phenomenal. There's a reason the best Magneto stories are those where he's sympathetic- Claremont, X-Men 1-3, etc- whereas those which portray him evilly are retconned, such as Planet X.

EDIT: By the way, is the Holocaust backstory a retcon from the movie series or has that been in the comics? I've not read X-Men for around 15 years...

Chris Claremont did it long before the movies. It's part of what makes him such a great character, really. Helped lead to his eventual trial, where he was found innocent.

I don't really (again, without doing any digging) see him as any kind of tragic character in the vein of Doom or Galactus.

Then you HAVE to read more Magneto stories. He has one of the most tragic backstories in comics. Parents and family slaughtered in the Holocaust, he was forced to help cart out the bodies of the dead and work to live. Finally carved out a new life with a wife, and a daughter after the war, when the actions of others caused him to be unable to save his daughter, who died in his arms. His subsequent rage made his wife flee, with her two unborn children. How can that be called anything BUT tragic? And of course, it shapes his views- he has seen how mankind treat people simply because they were born differently from the ruling classes, he knows where hatred and fear lead them and he is determined to never allow that to happen again. he is a character SHAPED wholly by tragedy.

Yeah, he's evil. Plotting genocide, even if you feel it's "the only way" is evil. It's ironic they gave him a Holocaust backstory in the X-Men films because as portrayed in the comics he and Hitler have much in common.

You clearly show you lack knowledge about Magneto, my friend. The holocaust has been his backstory for some time, and Magneto- when written competently, does NOT plot genocide. It's long established that his magnetic powers cause bouts of madness which he cannot control, which was basically used to retcon away all his typical silver age schemes. The only time he ever really had similarity to Hitler was in Morrison's "Planet X" and that was immediately retconned to not be Magneto at all.

Magneto does not want humanity wiped out. He just wants mutantkind to survive and prosper- and under his leadership on Genosha, it was doing so for a time until that dream was destroyed. He believes peaceful co existence is impossbile (or used to) because of the events that have shaped his life- and to be fair, humanity doesn't exactly refute that in their actions. That's the real Magneto. And that's the one it seems we will see in the Magneto film to be released 2009- or rather, as it seems it will be called, "X-Men Origins".

[dlw66]

docdoom said:

EDIT: By the way, is the Holocaust backstory a retcon from the movie series or has that been in the comics? I've not read X-Men for around 15 years...

Chris Claremont did it long before the movies. It's part of what makes him such a great character, really. Helped lead to his eventual trial, where he was found innocent.

If this is the story that ended in Uncanny #200, I have it but never read it. Even in my completist days I bought it but couldn't stand to read it because of the art by...


John Romita, Jr.!!!!!

Take that, Doom!

[balok]

docdoom said:

You clearly show you lack knowledge about Magneto, my friend. The holocaust has been his backstory for some time, and Magneto- when written competently, does NOT plot genocide. It's long established that his magnetic powers cause bouts of madness which he cannot control, which was basically used to retcon away all his typical silver age schemes. The only time he ever really had similarity to Hitler was in Morrison's "Planet X" and that was immediately retconned to not be Magneto at all.

Well, you're certainly right that I lack knowledge, because these two are facts of which I was unaware. Still, if his powers cause bouts of insanity, he may not be evil but he is certainly dangerous.

docdoom said:

Magneto does not want humanity wiped out. He just wants mutantkind to survive and prosper- and under his leadership on Genosha, it was doing so for a time until that dream was destroyed. He believes peaceful co existence is impossbile (or used to) because of the events that have shaped his life- and to be fair, humanity doesn't exactly refute that in their actions. That's the real Magneto. And that's the one it seems we will see in the Magneto film to be released 2009- or rather, as it seems it will be called, "X-Men Origins".

I recall a scheme or two where he sought the wholesale destruction of many people. I know for a fact that he wants ordinary humans relegated to a kind of second class citizen status; he's launched schemes intended to further that goal. And you can guess how ordinary humans would react to that idea: war.

So if you're right and he's not evil, he's still dangerous enough to warrant a shoot on sight order. With plastic bullets, of course. Because left alone he'll eventually start a global war.

I'll grant that I don't make must distinction between the evil and the insane who are dangerous. I'm sure that matters to therapists and students of the human psyche but it is of no consequence to their victims. And it is not possible to correct most forms of dangerous insanity permanently. Sometimes drugs can bring it under control - until the individual ceases to take their drugs (and most of them do, eventually), and then they're back to square one.

[sharkar]

docdoom said:

dlw66 said:

EDIT: By the way, is the Holocaust back story a retcon from the movie series or has that been in the comics? I've not read X-Men for around 15 years...

Chris Claremont did it long before the movies. It's part of what makes him such a great character, really...

Doom is absolutely correct, this has been part of Magneto's history for quite some time, since the 80s.

For those who may be interested, the Magneto Spotlight over at Uncanny X-Men Net has a good run-down of Magneto's chronology (I believe W opened a thread about this recently). Here is the link to the Magneto Spotlight:

www.uncannyxmen.net/db/spotlight/showquestion.asp?faq=10&fldAuto=130&page=2

There are also Spotlights on Quicksilver (recently added) and the Scarlet Witch (recently updated). A great resource IMO.

Leaving the developments in the X-books aside, a good example of Marvel's POV is shown in the first Secret Wars, when Magneto is at first paired with the heroes. And even when that does not work out, he doesn't join the villains- -which to me is a good illustration of Marvel's view of him, "morally ambiguous" as Doom said.


EDIT: And yes, dlw, I don't like looking at your new avatar either! Now that is evil...

[Shiryu]

Uhm, I'd say "at times".
His characterization has been changing wildly over the years. In the beginning he was a rather one dimensional evil character, then he became much more noble over the years, for example when he only tried to give mutants a safe place to live in, without affecting the outer world, and then again he alternated nobility and ruthlessness depending on the situation.

My favourite Magneto is the one from "God loves, man kills", and I wouldn't define him as evil. On the other side, attempting genocide doesn't make you a very nice guy either, so in conclusion I'd go for "prone to evil" if that makes any sense.

[dlw66]

Shiryu, you always make sense to me

[balok]

How about, determined to achieve his goals, and doesn't care what means he uses to get there. Since he has used evil means in the past and there's no real indication he has repudiated those methods, I'd say he trends evil - and would require the same careful watching and planning as does any evil individual.

Or to put it another way, it's much safer to plan around him behaving evilly and hope you're pleasantly surprised than the reverse. You can come to that conclusion from the history of his deeds without having to understand their philosophical underpinning.

[Doctor Doom]

shiryu said:

Uhm, I'd say "at times".
His characterization has been changing wildly over the years. In the beginning he was a rather one dimensional evil character, then he became much more noble over the years, for example when he only tried to give mutants a safe place to live in, without affecting the outer world, and then again he alternated nobility and ruthlessness depending on the situation.

As I say, it's been retconned so that the Magnetic powers drove him mad. So technically, while he is definitely dangerous... when he's acting under his own mind power, he's ruthless but inherently noble.

He's willing to go to more extreme lengths than the X-Men, but he certainly has his limits. For Magneto, killing is a last resort. He may be ready to do it a little more readily than the X-Men, due to the nature of his goals, but he's never (when under the power of his own mind) been someone who would kill indiscriminately, or without great regret.

[Shiryu]

Oops
Sorry Doom, I wasn't aware of it and I had obviously missed it when reading your post.

In which issues/period is he now considered mad then?

[Doctor Doom]

It's generally played hard and loose. It's pretty much fact that all his silver age schemes and all around 2-dimensional villainy were due to his powers driving him nuts. After that it becomes more complicated... pretty much anything Claremontian is the real Magneto (As it was him, IIRC, who established the madness retcon) and MOST stuff since then. Most of the crazy Magneto stuff after then was retconned anyway (Planet X, for example, when he decimated New York and marched people into ovens.) but it's really up to the reader. For example, I choose to believe that in "Eve of Destruction", he was going a bit crazy due to his powers, as his actions were pretty much unlike any seen elsewhere. Others may disagree, that's okay. You could just ignore that entire thing like Morrison and call Magneto, as he did "A mad, daft old terrorist thingy".

It's really a colossal argument among Marvel writers, the "Magneto evilists" and those, headed by Claremont, who favour a more sympathetic Magneto. It came to a head a few times- in "Acts of Vengeance", John Byrne wanted Magneto to return to being a ridiculous 2D villain, but Claremont strongly disagreed so Magneto was being written totally differently at the exact same time in two different books. In the end, Claremont prevailed and retconned out Byrne's Magneto. And there was HUGE internet controversy after Planet X a few years back, by Morrison- another Magneto evilist.

Interestingly, he's in a great place right now. However much I disagreed with other actions Bendis took in the story, House of M presented an excellent sympathetic Magneto (Though he was in it FAR too little) and since then, he's been written very well in "Son of M" and briefly in New Avengers. Now, of course, he'll be under the expert pen of Brubaker and apparantly Carey as well to build up to the big Uncanny 500 (Bet your ass on a giant Magneto return) and BOTH support sympathetic Magneto rather than evil Magneto, so that will be a nice victory for those of us who favour this Magneto, just as getting this Magneto in the X-Men Legends games, both x-men cartoons and the X-movies were.

...As you may be able to tell by now, Magnus is one of my very favourite characters in all comicdom.

[sharkar]

Eloquent and passionate post, Doom.

docdoom said:

... all around 2-dimensional villainy were due to his powers driving him nuts.

And actually this (incredible amounts of electromagnetism affecting brain/nervous system) could also explain Polaris' bout of madness a few years ago, though I think Austen ascribed that episode to her witnessing the Genoshan genocide.

docdoom said:

...House of M presented an excellent sympathetic Magneto (Though he was in it FAR too little) and since then, he's been written very well in "Son of M" and briefly in New Avengers.

I agree about HOM and SOM (I have not read NA except for a couple of issues). My favorite HOM segment was the FF crossover, which pitted Magneto and family against Doom (the character) and his family. Well-written and well-executed.

docdoom said:

...As you may be able to tell by now, Magnus is one of my very favourite characters in all comicdom.

Yes...I get the distinct impression you feel Magneto rocks!

[balok]

I'll make a general comment here about retcons. Yes, they've always been with us, and yes, sometimes you've got to reboot a character to fix a corner that a writer backed him into. But they should be the surgeon's scalpel and not the demolisher's maul.

I don't think it was necessary to retcon Magento and say that his powers made him nuts. He worked fine as a villain, and if his Silver Age schemes were over the top, so? A lot of stuff that happened in the Silver Age was over the top. Twenty years from now, people will be saying the same thing about books published now. We're already mocking foil and variant covers designed to sucker in foolish collectors, and that was only ten years ago.

If Marvel wanted a "noble, tragic" semi-villainous mutant leader it would have done better to devise a new one, rather than invalidate many of the old stories told about an existing one. Of course, most of the mutants they've created (relatively) recently - like Apocalypse and Mr. Sinister - are rather lame. But I'm sure they could devise an interesting character if they worked really hard at it. They have in the past.

[Doctor Doom]

I disagree. I think it worked very well with Magneto for a number of reasons. Firstly, let's remember he and Charles Xavier were old friends. Now, I don't think anyone will deny that the friction between those two, and their organizations, was effectively what shaped the X-Men universe. In order for that friendship to have existed, there must have been something good in Erik Magnus Lensherr which enabled he and Xavier to form their unlikely friendship. It's not like Prof X befriended a madman.

So what could cause this man, who was a very close friend to Charles Xavier, to turn into the sort of person who would contemplate waging war for the survival of species. What drove Magneto to become the extremist he is? How did he evolve, WHY did he evolve, what would make a man do these things? These are all huge questions which the holocaust background answers perfectly, while raising more thoughtful questions of it's own.

So since you already have this friendship established with Magneto, and since he's the X-Men's most famed and most bitter foe, why not use that potential to explain Magneto's origin while enhancing all the characters. And if that means retconning out those stories where he was a totally 2-dimensional genocidal psycho? Then so be it, because the new stories are both more interesting and greater in number.

That's my take on it.

Yes...I get the distinct impression you feel Magneto rocks!

Ya got me. You have an identity over there yourself?

[The Night Phantom]

balok said:

If Marvel wanted a "noble, tragic" semi-villainous mutant leader it would have done better to devise a new one, rather than invalidate many of the old stories told about an existing one. Of course, most of the mutants they've created (relatively) recently - like Apocalypse and Mr. Sinister - are rather lame. But I'm sure they could devise an interesting character if they worked really hard at it. They have in the past.

I generally agree with Balok’s comment above. Nevertheless, one of the attractive aspects of Magneto’s reformation was that he was an established villain, in both the readers’ and the characters’ eyes. It would be very, very difficult to get the same mileage out of some character you hadn’t heard of before. I suppose one tack would be to introduce a new recurring villain and then start the reformation—i.e., have him reform after a couple of years, not a couple of decades—but you still run the risk that the character won’t have built up that oomph that makes his transformation all the more fascinating. So, regardless of the actual results of reforming a character like Magneto, I can sympathize with the writer’s or editor’s desire to use an established villain for this type of storyline and characterization.

That said, I think the Marvel Universe in general and the X-Men and related properties in particular suffered quite a bit in losing Magneto as a reliably villainous villain. As a villain, when used as such and used well, he’s one of Marvel’s (heck, superherodom’s) best. At the time that Magneto began his reformation, the X-Men already had quite the rogues’ gallery, but still there really wasn’t anyone else with quite his level of threat and theatrics. Claremont continued to build up and/or introduce villains, but no one then or since has ever taken his place (not even Xorn ). In my view, the real problem with Magneto’s change to the white-hat side is the vacuum it created; if there had been another Magneto–Doom–Red Skull type already established as an X-Men villain or waiting in the wings, or if the reforming character were less established and/or lower-tier (cf. Rogue, Juggernaut), then Magneto’s new leaf wouldn’t be so problematic and controversial, even a couple of decades later.

[sharkar]

docdoom said:

sharkar said:

Yes...I get the distinct impression you feel Magneto rocks!

Ya got me. You have an identity over there yourself?

Not anymore. I used to post there (sporadically) but I had a couple of experiences that turned me off, specifically when a veteran poster there copied some of my chronology posts (from one board) and pasted them in his posts (on another board), with no attribution. He'd just type in a few introductory words of his own such as "Here's what happened in this issue..." and then there would be my post! And he clearly knew how to use the quote feature, since he'd used it frequently in his 2000+ posts. I stumbled upon this quite by accident, because there are so many boards there. I guess he thought I wouldn't notice, since I was an infrequent poster.

Anyway, I contacted one of the moderators there, and he said oh it must have been an oversight. But it really soured me on those forums so now I just lurk there, on the X-Men boards (which is not the board I'm referring to above). So I use it mostly to find out about what's going on in the X books...just as I use this one for info about Avengers current events! And I enjoy the camaraderie here; people respect one another here, even if things get passionate at times.

[Doctor Doom]

Sorry to hear about your experience, sharkar. I've seen similar things done on many a board and such post piracy is always irritating. And you're right, this board does have a great camaraderie in general. Less nutcases anyway.

Well, okay, no, we have the One True Nutcase. But less... y'know, insane people. I remember one CBR poster who tried to argue that Hulk was comparable to Jesus and that his actions in World War Hulk are like the book of revelations. Complete basketcase. And another infrequent lurker who spends all their posts bitterly ranting about how basically everything in existence is an evil plot by Mark Millar. (To do what I'm not sure.)

Actually, come to think of it, that last guy would probably fit in fien here....

No but seriously, okay, that's interesting. I find it strange that no one else here on CBR seems to be active on many other boards.

Ahem, but we should probably return to topic.