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X-Men: Magneto Testament 5 (March 2009)

Greg Pak/Carmine Di Giandomenico

The last issue. I honestly don't even know if I recommend this series or not. It's outstandingly good, incredibly accurate and faithful, but it's also a horrible experience, by design.

In this issue, the Sinti/Roma part of the camp is liquidated, though Magda survives: she does this not through Magneto's actions or through some story contrivance but through an extremely specific, true incident of a train being sent to Buchenwald and then back for complicated reasons. The details aren't worth going into here but the point is that once again Greg Pak has rooted this story very deeply in historical fact, and made young Magneto into a powerless bystander, disarming him and us.

There is, then, a sudden and desperate escape at the end, and Max and Magda get away, to live and to fight.

But this, again, is nothing but the pure historical fact. There was a Sonderkommando uprising in the camp, and the comic gives us the details. It is true - we think - that a handful of inmates really did escape this way, though many more died.

And so...yeah. The end.

This really is a comic unlike anything I've read before. I mean, I've read Maus, obviously, and you should too, and this isn't in Maus' league, but to do this in the context of an X-Men comic is stunning. This issue has an epilogue that tells the entirely true story of an artist who was an inmate in Auschwitz, Dina Babbitt, a story I won't go in to here but which is deeply important, and its inclusion here along with a reading list - an actual reading list! - is a further hallmark of how seriously this project was taken.

There is a lot else that could be said about this comic and how it fits into other comics, but it honestly feels absurd to look at this and go "hmmmm, how does Magneto's work in an Auschwitz crematorium inform his decision to work with the Blob?", because that's a question of a totally different moral and narrative universe. In that sense this arguably fails, strictly speaking, as an X-Men comic, but I'm deeply glad to have read it. Then again, I'm also pretty glad to be getting away from it and back to the stupid stuff next.

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X-Men: Magneto Testament 4 (February 2009)

Greg Pak/Carmine Di Giandomenico

This is likely the bleakest issue of a comic that Marvel has ever published. Not bleak in the Days of Future Past "omg they killed everyone and it's a super-dark post-apocalyptic future where everything's really awesome and bad", but bleak in the real sense. I don't even really want to talk about it very much on this stupid blog. It's about Auschwitz, it's extremely well-researched and written, and it too concedes at one point that it would be sort of obscene to keep using the medium of superhero comics to tell this story, and produces this double page in the middle of the issue instead.

That's it. That's the spread. This issue centres on Max becoming not just an inmate in Auschwitz but a member of the Sonderkommando which, for those who don't know, was the group of camp inmates tasked with clearing up around the machinery of mass death operated there. By doing this, some inmates were able to survive a few months, though most would ultimately also be killed, at least in part because they knew so much about what was going on at the camp. All of this is drawn precisely from history.

Max buries a diary in the camp, with his "testament" in it: this too happened, with an account buried by a Sonderkommando, Zalman Gradowski, who was later killed at the camp. Gradowski was also a member of the resistance network that existed among the Sonderkommando, the existence of which is one of the most breathtaking instances of human bravery in all of history, and the focus of the next and final issuem of this series.

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X-Men: Magneto Testament 3 (January 2009)

Greg Pak/Carmine Di Giandomenico

Testament's historical narrative takes us now to occupied Poland: first the Ghetto, and then deportation to the death camps.

The Eisenhardts briefly manage to escape being rounded up for deportation, and go on the run, and the comic teases you with the possibility of becoming some kind of adventure story, but barely a page later they are betrayed, caught and executed: all of them except for Max. This all closely follows the established canon of Magneto's backstory that we haven't yet read - it's soon to appear in Uncanny - but it massively de-emphasises any kind of agency or heroism. The comic here - as on one or two other occasions - does suggest, gently, indirectly, that Max has used his latent powers unconsciously.

But only barely, and not very meaningfully: his family are all still killed, he is flung in the pit with them.

He climbs out and tries to flee and is again caught a few days later, and at the end of this issue he arrives at Auschwitz. The relentlessness of this issue is remarkable: the horrible historical finality of the story and the way it keeps refusing to be what you imagine it might be, keeps refusing any kind of adventure or heroism, are really impressive (and disturbing).

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X-Men: Magneto Testament 2 (December 2008)

Greg Pak/Carmine Di Giandomenico

Testament continues its sober narration of an actual historical descent into hell, through the eyes of the young Magneto.

This issue covers the late 30s, up to the outbreak of war: Magneto's family flee to Poland shortly before that, only to find that war comes after them anyway. I did a long introductory post yesterday and there's not that much more to say here, but I should acknowledge Carmine Di Giandomenico's art in this series, which initially rubbed me the wrong way but grew on me as it went on, particularly alongside Matt Hollingsworth's colouring.

The pastel colours, the old cityscapes, it all has the feeling of a children's book, which seemed strange until the basic educational nature of this comic became clear, and then started to really work for me: it's almost a kind of fable, albeit an extremely real one.

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X-Men: Magneto Testament 1 (November 2008)

Greg Pak/Carmine Di Giandomenico

This is a difficult series to talk about.

X-Men: Magneto Testament (stupid punctuation is original, hereafter just Testament) was pitched as the definitive origin story of Magneto, and we're reading it now as part of our "Era 0" set of pre-1963 stories: it's set between 1933 and 1945, with the context and content that those dates imply.

We already know, from our read, a little about the experiences of Magneto/Erik Lehnsherr/Max Eisenhardt (the latter name is his true birth name, first revealed here) during the Holocaust: it first came up for us in Classic X-Men 12. It was first mentioned in an issue of the mainline story, 150, that we've not quite gotten to yet, but aside from those two mentions (and some stuff in another classic back-up, 19), there had been relatively little concrete detail on this. Indeed, for a long time there was some confusion about Magneto's Jewishness, given that he also spends a while pretending to be Sinti/Roma while looking for his wife Magda, whom he meets in this series and is herself Sinti/Roma.

Testament sets out to be an authoritative version of Magneto's origin, but what makes it remarkable is that it's not actually very interested in that story, or in the parts of that story that we would presume to be important. At no point in these five issues does Magneto consciously use a superpower, nor does he meet or hear of another superpowered person or mutant: nothing fantastical happens. Testament is instead an extremely meticulous, near-documentary account of the Holocaust.

That's entirely intentional, and that intent is on display in a note from the writer, Greg Pak, at the end of the first issue. This is a remarkable comic but obviously one that doesn't fit very neatly inside my "make dumb jokes about men in spandex" wheelhouse, so the next few posts will be a little heavy: but so is this comic, and so it should be.

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Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix 4 (September 1996)

Peter Milligan/John Paul Leon

This is the last and, to be honest, weakest issue of this series, which has surprised me with its great, atmospheric art but falls down when it has to deal with the essential silliness of Mr Sinister's whole...vibe.

This issue also goes heavily in on actual historical personages - Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Gladstone - and it doesn't really come off, feeling very clunky and heavy-handed with its historical references.

The whole thing loses a lot of what makes it feel special, and becomes a bit of a generic X-Men comic.

Oh also it turns out that a couple of minor characters were somehow Scott's, like, great-grandfather (or something) all along, which is silly.

The epoilogue at the end, while also going in on the historical figures in a way that feels awkward, reminds also just how good the art is, and that's a good place to leave it.

Next up: Magneto!

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Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix 3 (August 1996)

Peter Milligan/John Paul Leon

I said my piece about John Paul Leon's art last time, so I should probably talk at least a bit about the plot of this series, though it's far from the most interesting aspect.

At this point in the story, Nathaniel Essex has been offered unimaginable power by Apocalypse, and begged by Jean Grey to use his brains instead for good. He's intrigued by her - she is, to him, a forerunner of the ascendancy of mutants that he expects, but she's using her powers to help humanity, not eradicate them, hmmmmm - but tempted, of course, by Apocalypse. All it takes is a little family tragedy to push him the wrong way, when his dying wife curses him with an honestly pretty hilarious final word.

Apocalypse, meanwhile - in his guise as En Sabah Nur, imagined here disguising himself as a vaguely Oriental potentate (which I actually quite like in that it's exactly how various fraudsters would trick Victorian high society into believeing they were mediums and whatnot) - has gathered this era's Hellfire Club, who are always fun to see. This page is incredible.

And so Essex allows Apocalypse to put him into the Make Me Evil Machine, which is like Dark Jack Kirby's wet dream:

And Apocalypse goes off to kill Queen Victoria. We stan.

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Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix 2 (July 1996)

Peter Milligan/John Paul Leon

Wham. Cyclops time. This out-of-nowhere brilliant series continues, and again the plot isn't much of a muchness - it's one of those "back in time" stories where you know that of course they don't kill the baddies in the past because then what would the story in the present be? - but the art is killer.

The obvious comparison to John Paul Leon's art here is Mike Mignola, who had debuted Hellboy a couple of years before this: both of them, and a few other artists knocking around at the time, were disciples of Alex Toth, who had pioneered a similar dark, blocky styles in previous decades.

Leon's career is fragmented: he worked for Marvel, DC and others, doing a lot of covers, some limited series, seldom more than a few issues of anything at a time. He apparently worked heavily on the concepts and moodboards for Nolan's The Dark Knight, which by some measures would make him one of the most influential comic book artists of all time, albeit indirectly.

Sadly, his output was also interrupted by health issues, and in 2021 he died at the age of 49 of cancer, leaving behind many tributes: he was apparently wonderful to work with, as well as a brilliant artist.

I'm kind of ashamed I didn't know his art before this, and I'm going to seek more of it out (and, happily, we're soon going to read something else of his): you should do the same!

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Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix 1 (June 1996)

Peter Milligan/John Paul Leon

Okay, huge preamble coming. We continue our journey through what my reading guide calls "Era 0" with this four-issue series which, and I hate to beef with the reading guide, but, let me say it, I think it would have benefited from being read immediately after Rise of Apocalypse: that is to say, it continues with some of the same themes (and heavily features Apocalypse) and is set in 1859, which I think is probably a bit before Origin (at a guess that's 1870s/80s, though it's intentionally imprecise). The title of this series also, of course, implies that it follows on from some other Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix which, indeed, it does, but that series is set not in the past but in the future, so we're reading this now: there is a little tiny bit of framing device but it's basically unimportant to the story, which sees Jean and Scott sent back from the vague present of the 90s (spoilers for Jean being alive in some form then, I guess, but we learn nothing about exactly who she is/what version of herself she is, so it didn't bother me much) to witness the origin of a villain who we also haven't really met yet, except briefly in another couple of flashback stories in Classic X-Men: Mr Sinister, alias Nathaniel Essex: who, again, we haven't actually met yet in the early 80s "present day" of our X-Men read, but we are aware that he and Apocalypse are going to be a big deal in the 80s and 90s.

That was a lot of preamble, for which I'm sorry, but I put it all up front so that I can get on with discussing this book's real strength: the art.

Check it out.

Despite the massive preamble up above about what exactly this comic is and where it fits and how exactly we're sort of not ready to read it, it knocked my fucking socks off. Remember how bad the art was in Rise of Apocalypse, and how it made Apocalypse look ludicrous? No longer.

In fact, this one page is superior to everything contained in that godawful series.

Then Jean fucking Grey teleports into Westminster fucking Abbey from the fucking future.

This is fucking great.

The story here - you can glean it from these glimpses - is honestly blah. Nathaniel Essex, Victorian scientist, gets interested in the newfangled science of evolution but Goes Too Far, while Apocalypse wakes up in London looking for those who share his Uber-Darwinist Survival of the Muntant Fittest "Philosophy". Jean and Scott are hurled back in time to stop him. Whatever. But John Paul Leon's art is fucking incredible. I had never heard of this guy. Shame on me.

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Origin 6 (April 2002)

Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas & Joe Quesada/Andy Kubert

And so this series ends. Wolverine gets his nickname, and kicks some ass in a bareknuckle boxing tournament.

And the boy Dog - the one we were misdirected into thinking would become Wolverine - shows up again to hunt him down for revenge. There's a second misdirect here, in that you might think this is now Sabretooth.

Apparently the writers considered this and left it open, but it was never picked up and canonically this is just Some Fucking Guy - though, again, this fits in with the way the characters here prefigure Logan's later comrades and enemies. Then, of course, everything falls apart in various fights and misunderstandings, none of them very important. We learn on the last page that Rose's diary, which would have preserved this story, is destroyed by the cook scrounging through her things.

But of course, the story instead survives in this story, yadda yadda. This was...not bad? I don't know. I didn't love it, but honestly I had feared worse when I heard this would be the "definitive" Wolverine origin: it's fairly grounded, it doesn't involve, I don't know, Mr Sinister and Dr Doom cooking up a plan to steal him as a baby or something crazy. Instead it tells a self-contained story in an enjoyably different mode, although one with flaws of its own.

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Origin 5 (March 2002)

Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas & Joe Quesada/Andy Kubert

The penultimate issue of this series suffers from the same problems I talked about last time: the characters go round and round in circles, with more confrontations that don't lead anywhere definitive. The art continues to go hard, though.

This is also the moment where Logan becomes a weeb. Much damage was done in this one instant.

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Origin 4 (February 2002)

Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas & Joe Quesada/Andy Kubert

The latter three issues of this series all take place in the same British Columbia mining camp to which Rose and James/Logan/Wolverine have fled, and they all play out in more or less the same way. We've moved now, basically, from the secret of his "true" origin to a different kind of story, one about prefiguring the characters Logan will run into later in life.

The camp has a crude, fat, sadistic cook, for instance, who is a fore-echo of the Blob. It has, obviously, red-headed Rose, who calls forward to Jean Grey and Logan's feelings for her. And it has a level-headed, basically decent leader called Smitty, who precedes Scott.

This is all fine, although it seems to suggest that the big three archetypes that will define Logan's life going forward are Jean, Scott and...the Blob?! But as you can see from some of these panels, they already start to go around in circles with each other this issue, and we've two more to go.

I want to like this shift in tone and setting for this series, and aspects of it - for example, the fact that Wolverine's claws have not yet reappeared, and that nothing else fantastical happens - really do work, giving a kind of rootedness that these stories can lack. But at this point - and, spoilers, this is true for the next two issues too - it feels like pices being shuffled around a chessboard after one game has ended and before the next one has begun.

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Origin 3 (January 2002)

Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas & Joe Quesada/Andy Kubert

The thing about springing your big twist in issue 2 of your six-issue miniseries is that then you have to write four more issues.

The writers - all three of them - do not really seem to have thought of this, and after the WHAM of revelation last time this series never really picks itself up off the floor.

This isn't really a related point to my larger critique but this panel crystallises for me how much I dislike the typography in this book. We know it's the 19th century, people don't have to talk in...whatever this actually not-particularly-Victorian-looking typeface is, and it looks even sillier when colours and effects are applied to it. The art is still lovely, mind you.

Anyway. James and Rose get the hell out of dodge, ushered out of there by the family patriarch who doesn't want anything further to do with his grandson but at least permits him to flee. They make it to a mining camp in British Columbia, where James signs on for work using a false name. What false name?

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Origin 2 (December 2001)

Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas & Joe Quesada/Andy Kubert

As I understand it, the writing and release of this comic was quite a big deal.

Wolverine's origins had, until this point, been left intentionally unexplored beyond the gory fantasia of the incredible "Weapon X" storyline, which in the end (and to its credit) left a lot more unexplained than explained.

That had been in 1991, after the 80s had seen Wolverine explode into mega-popularity. Ten years after that, with Wolverine only getting bigger and bigger, Marvel concluded they needed to go back for a second look, back right to the beginning: doing so in part because the X-Men movies had started taking off and discussions about doing some Wolverine backstory in those were being had, and the comics guys felt they needed to get there first.

You can tell how important this was all considered by the fact that Joe Quesada, Marvel's then-editor-in-chief, is one of the writers on this: it was felt that it needed top-level editorial input and planning.

All that planning basically comes to a head in this issue, only the second of the series, but the one with the essential revelation. Our trio - sickly posh boy James, Rose the servant girl and Dog the semi-feral son of the abusive father Logan - have bust up into teenage unhappiness and a brutal showdown in the mansion, where James' father is killed by Logan. We all know what's coming.

Until...

...we don't.

This is a genuinely great twist. Everything has been pointing us in one direction: in retrospect, all a bit too obviously, but as you're reading it, it works. And then we realise that the reason the tragic family in the big spooky house are so tragic is that there's a terrible genetic secret. The reason soft little posh boy James isn't allowed to go out and play isn't his allergies. It's that he's the fucking Wolverine.

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Origin 1 (November 2001)

Paul Jenkins, Bill Jemas & Joe Quesada/Andy Kubert

What have we here, then?

This - the second series in our reading of so-called "Era 0", the stories set before the X-Men's 1963 debut - is Origin. It's sometimes referred to as Wolverine: The Origin, which is what it's about, but he's never called Wolverine in the text, and the entire six-issue series is a kind of dance around his identity and his genesis.

As you can tell, this series wants to hit different. It comes on strong with the Victoriana, above all through Andy Kubert's art (and Richard Isanove's colours, supporting it), going for something that's more Alice in Wonderland than X-Men.

My first hesitation with this ultimately kind of unsuccessful book, though, is that it just doesn't have a very sure touch with the period and the aesthetic. The date is carefully unspecified - we're somewhere in the late 19th century - but I'm pretty sure people didn't say "allergies" back then, for one thing. It's also pretty well known that the classic "teddy bear" didn't exist until after 1900, but here's sickly young James' room, absolutely full of them. This sounds like nitpicking but I think if you're trying to go big on the "woah, isn't this a whole different setting and tone" you actually have to get it right.

But anyway: red-headed Rose, poor sickly James, and half-feral Dog, son of Logan. We know where this is going, don't we?

Oh, and Logan, Dog's dad? He looks like this.

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Rise of Apocalypse 4 (January 1997)

Terry Kavanagh & James Felder/Adam Pollina & Anthony Williams

This looks like the work of some 5th rate erotic comics distributor that operated between 1994 and 2001 before going bust in a dispute about author royalties and Italian serialisation rights.

Also Apocalypse has a Joker mouth now, I guess.

Here's the worst double-page splash I've ever seen.

Here's the very last panels, still with their stupid parchment shape.

And then it ends. Not a moment to soon. That was a horrible experience, and we shall not speak of it again. Next up is...something else.

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Rise of Apocalypse 3 (December 1996)

Terry Kavanagh & James Felder/Adam Pollina

I feel I need to mention how garish and awful the wraparound covers for this series are too, so here's the one from this issue.

As for the insides, it somehow gets even worse.

So much worse. This is really just funny at this point.

This is also the issue where the creepiness about women, already evident, becomes overwhemling. Sue Storm is immediately captured and is going to be forced to be Rama Tut's bride, and the only other woman in the series, Nephri, is also relentlessly and boringlu sexualised.

Meanwhile, the art continues to be like a bad trip.

Or perhaps a Carry On movie?

Only one more issue of this.