Magneto (cartoon character)
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Magneto is a cartoon character from the US publisher Marvel Comics . He is a super villain , who mostly appears as an opponent of the X-Men troop , but has elements of a tragic antihero . The figure was created by the authors Stan Lee and Jack Kirby . Magneto first appeared in the September 1963 comic X-Men # 1 .
The figure of Magneto
Magneto is a mutant that has the ability to create magnetic fields . In the Marvel Universe he is nicknamed "Master of Magnetism", who with his powers and a. Bend metal, shoot electromagnetic pulses , create force fields and fly through the air. He can also impose his will on people by controlling the iron in red blood cells and manipulating any electricity- based technology. Magneto also wears a bucket-shaped helmet that makes him immune to any kind of mind control, the superpower of his archenemy Professor X.
Magneto's real name is Max Eisenhardt . He is a German Jew who was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland with his family as part of the Holocaust during the Second World War . His family was murdered, but Eisenhardt managed to escape under the cover name "Magnus" with a Sinti girl named Magda. They settled in an Eastern European village and had a daughter named Anya, but when his magnetic powers first manifested, they were almost lynched by an angry mob. Anya was killed and Eisenhardt destroyed half the village in self-defense, so that Magda left him in fear. Without his knowledge, she gave birth to his twins , the witch Scarlet Witch and the super-fast Quicksilver , who were adopted after their death by a friendly Roma family named Maximoff. Eisenhardt bitterly fled to the newly founded state of Israel and assumed the cover identity of the Sinto-Polish refugee "Erik Lehnsherr". There he met the American mutant named Charles Xavier ( Professor X ), who initially became his best friend, but quickly became his archenemy. While the Holocaust victim Eisenhardt detested humanity as a “barbarian race”, Xavier, a staunch pacifist , believed in the peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants. Between them it came to a break, so that Magneto founded the mutant terror group Brotherhood of Evil Mutants , and Professor X in return the mutant hero team X-Men . Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver became Magneto's first recruits, unaware of their relatives.
Magneto is an avowed racist who is convinced of the superiority of the mutated " Homo Superior " and detests humanity as inferior " Homo Sapiens ". He is a constant archenemy of the X-Men and the Avengers . But when it comes to super villains with Nazi ideology (e.g. Red Skull ), Magneto also fights against their mutual opponent. In contrast to other super villains like Lex Luthor or the Joker , he does not act from base motives, but is always haunted by his nightmares about the Auschwitz concentration camp. When he almost killed the Jewish superhero Kitty Pryde in the fight against the X-Men , he was so traumatized that he fled immediately (1981). Since the relationship between Magneto, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver was established in 1983, Magneto's role as a tragic antihero has been increasingly emphasized, so that he switched sides for some time and even took over the X-Men in Professor X's absence. He also became ruler of the fictional state of Genosha . But since the 1990s, Magneto has mainly been reinterpreted as a super villain. In 2002, author Grant Morrison wrote a story in which Magneto, under the cover identity of a Chinese mutant named Xorn , ravaged New York City under the influence of the fictional drug Kick and became a mass murderer until he was killed by the X-Men himself. This storyline, published shortly after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , was reversed despite good reviews from Marvel Comics: It was established that it was not Magneto who pretended to be Xorn, but Xorn pretended to be he Magneto, and the real Magneto had never had anything to do with Morrison's story. In 2003 it was also revealed that the superhero Polaris , who also has magnetic powers, is his illegitimate daughter. In the four-part comic series Magneto (2014), Magneto is a bitter lonely man who is disappointed with the present and plagued by the past. Fatally he sums new lease on life by taking the perpetual hunt for mutants in the Marvel universe as an opportunity to vigilante justice to commit and to take bloody revenge on the responsible military, scientists and terrorists.
background
Magneto's first appearance was in X-Men # 1 (September 1963). According to IGN Entertainment , his initial strengths were not impressive and his motivations were weak. Under Chris Claremont in the early 1980s, his story as a survivor of the Holocaust was added. Claremont said, “This allowed me to transform him into a tragic figure who wanted to save his people. I had about 200 comics to see if he could rehabilitate like Menachem Begin , who was hunted as a terrorist by the British in 1945 and won the Nobel Prize in 1978. ” Commented on, Stan Lee , of Jewish descent ,“ I've never used Magneto for a villain held. He just wanted to attack the hypocrites and racists, protect his own people, and take revenge on the society that had betrayed him. Magneto was of course a danger, but I never thought he was a villain. ”In addition, Lee initially planned that Magneto would be Professor X's brother.
For a long time, neither the name nor the origin of Magneto were clear within the comics. In the comics of the 1960s and 1970s, his first name was "Magnus", an allusion to his magnetic powers, which was later changed to "Erik Lehnsherr". Under Claremont, his past as a Holocaust survivor was set out in the 1980s, although it was unclear whether he was a Sinto or a Jew. On the one hand, it was revealed that Magneto was a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz , which would mark him as a Jew, on the other hand, the comic X-Men Unlimited # 2 (1993) by Fabian Nicieza portrayed him as the Sinto "Erik Lehnsherr" from Gdańsk , Poland seemed plausible since his children Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver also belong to this ethnic group. But everything was reversed in 1998 in the comic X-Men (vol. 2) # 72 by Joe Kelly : Magneto killed the passport forger who had once created for him a false identity of the "Erik Lehnsherr". In 2008 the comic X-Men: Magneto Testament by Greg Pak was published , in which Pak told Magneto's childhood from 1939 to 1945. He referred to biographies of Holocaust survivors and the Holocaust comic Mouse - The Story of a Survivor by Art Spiegelman . Within the comics it was stated that Magneto was a German Jew named Max Eisenhardt, and that all the interpretations from earlier stories (as "Magnus" or as a Sinto of Polish descent with the name "Erik Lehnsherr") were all cover identities.
Often the rivalry between the militant Magneto and the pacifist Professor X is compared to the tense relationship between the two African-American civil rights activists Malcolm X and Martin Luther King , with IGN stating that Magneto is an "abused child who in turn beats other children" while Professor X had the privilege of a happy childhood. Because of Magneto's role as a Holocaust survivor and his Jewish origins, political interpretations on the subject of Israel are obvious. The Israeli Haaretz commented that Magneto represented the "extreme right in Israel" and compared him to the radical Zionist Meir Kahane and his brotherhood of mutants with the Jewish Defense League . The Algemeiner , an American-Jewish newspaper, stated that Magneto was “an extremely cool villain” and that many Israelis can sympathize with his fate as a Holocaust victim, but without coming to the same conclusions (destruction of all enemies). In addition, they pointed out that the battle cry of Magneto's brotherhood of “Never Forget!” (The slogan of Holocaust remembrance) became “Never again!” (The slogan of the JDL) in new interpretations. IGN named Magneto the greatest supervillain in comic history for his "complex, nuanced, heartbreaking, yet utterly vicious character."
Magneto has appeared regularly in all series that belong to the X-Men franchise since 1963 . So far the following solo titles have been released:
- Magneto (1993), 1 edition
- Magneto (1996-7), 4 issues
- Magneto (2011), 1 edition
- Magneto (2014), 4 issues
In other media
Magneto plays a central role in contemporary X-Men adaptations, be it animated television series , video games or the X-Men cinema series from 20th Century Fox . In the first three films X-Men (2000), X-Men 2 (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) Ian McKellen took over the role. To portray Magneto's role as an outsider, McKellen resorted to his own life experience, as he was "a homosexual man himself a mutant". Michael Fassbender took on this role in the film X-Men: First Decision (2011) . In X-Men: Future is Past (2014), which includes time travel , Fassbender played the young Magneto and McKellen played the older version. Fassbender slipped back into the role in X-Men: Apocalypse (2016).
The rock group Wings released a B-side called Magneto and Titanium Man on the single Venus and Mars in 1975 . A magneto drawing by Jack Kirby can be seen on the cover, and various references to the comic figure can be found in the text. The background was that the children of Wings lead singer Paul McCartney liked to read the X-Men comics, where Magneto often appeared.
See also
Web links
- Magneto in Marvel Database (English)
swell
- ↑ Magneto Was Right , popmatters.com
- ↑ a b Top 100 Comic Book Villains on IGN. Retrieved May 14, 2019 (American English, self-created title).
- ↑ a b X-Men: First Class' Magneto and the State of Israel: Friend or Foe? , The General
- ↑ a b Marvel Spotlight: Uncanny X-Men 500 Issues Celebration , p. 5-7
- ↑ X-Men mutant survives the Holocaust in new Marvel Comics miniseries , haaretz.com
- ↑ Xavier vs. Magneto: A Philosophical Debate , IGN.com
- ^ Magneto and the Jewish question , haaretz.com
- ^ Magneto (1993) , comicbookdb.com
- ^ Magneto (1996) , comicbookdb.com
- ^ Magneto (1996) , comicbookdb.com
- ^ Magneto (2014) # 1 , marvel.com
- ↑ Audio commentary on the DVD for X-Men (2000)
- ^ When Paul McCartney Met Jack Kirby