Teased yesterday and announced today at USA Today, it looks like Cullen Bunn and Gabriel Hernandez Walta will be telling the ongoing stories of the Master of Magnetism in “Magneto.” Apparently taking Erik Lensherr and putting him on his own away from Cyclops’ X-Men, the book is teased as a noir book that finds Magneto hunting down anti-mutant villains and dealing with them with his own particular brand of justice.
However, Magneto’s powers are still broken, so the book will also find him retraining himself to use his abilities along the way. So it seems like the book will be the anti-Kung Fu in a manner of speaking, which is an interesting enough premise to go on.
As Bunn says in the USA Today interview:
“We can sympathize with him even though he has been responsible for terrible crimes against humanity,” Bunn explains. “He walks such a fine line. He’s standing up for his people — the mutants. He refuses to let them suffer as he has seen others suffer. But he’s taken steps to protect mutants that can only be seen as evil. His ideals are often ‘good’ while his methods are not.”
What’s interesting, I think, is Walta’s take on Magneto, as visible in the images below. Magneto’s costume is already leaning towards an earlier era thanks to his redesign in “Uncanny X-Men,” but Walta’s illustrations of him in what I can only assume is his “Sam Spade outfit” (see below), Walta makes him look a touch frail. Lensherr is an older character, and his recent baldness in tribute of Bendis Xavier doesn’t help matters much, but Walta’s take — at least here in these character sketches , if not in the pages of the book itself — do actually make the idea of an older detective-esque Magneto seem a plausible enterprise.
Magneto’s solo series launches in March.
