#Pretend we're back in their pre dating era

[terezicaptor]

[keepsmagnetoaway]

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.