With International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, we decided to take a look back at Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico’s 2008 miniseries “X-Men: Magneto Testament,” which retells the early years of the mutant supervillain with devastating historical accuracy. Despite the title, there is very little of the Marvel Universe: this is the almost true story of a Jewish teenager’s struggle to survive the horrors of Nazi Germany.
'Cover by Marko Djurdjevic
Written by Greg Pak
Art by Carmine Di Giandomenico
Colored by Matt Hollingsworth
Lettered by Dave & Nathalie Lanphear
Today, the whole world knows him as Magneto, the most radical champion of mutant rights that mankind has ever seen. But in 1935, he was just another schoolboy – who happened to be Jewish in Nazi Germany. The definitive origin story of one of Marvel’s greatest icons begins with a silver chain and a crush on a girl – and quickly turns into a harrowing struggle for survival against the inexorable machinery of Hitler’s Final Solution.
We meet Max Eisenhardt in 1935 helping his uncle and wizened father make jewellery. He’s absolutely unrecognizable as the imposing Praetorian figure we know and fear, just a wide-eyed boy besotted with Magda, the Romani girl working at his school as a groundskeeper with her mother. But it becomes clear something is wrong with this seemingly normal setting: his headmaster partakes in bullying him with his fellow students (“trash loves trash”), and proclaim his intelligence is just “degenerate cunning.”
Despite winning gold in a javelin contest, Max is unable to celebrate, as coming home, he witnesses his uncle being humiliated at a Nazi rally for being with a German woman, and is then expelled for “cheating.” As he leaves school, he sees his Jewish teacher Herr Kalb being assaulted by troops, and is then finds himself attacked by envious bullies. The comic is difficult to read, to say the least. The inevitable imagery of the death camps is one thing to stomach, but to witness genocide starting at a safe place like a school is deeply unsettling too.
The next two issues keep jumping through the years as Nazi Germany’s war on everyone else escalates. Max’s family flees to Poland, only be interred in the Warsaw ghetto after the German and Soviet invasion. They decide to flee, but are betrayed and executed by firing squad; Max survives, and he is found and placed on the train to Auschwitz, where as a Sonderkommando, he is forced to participate in the worst crime against humanity ever committed.
Until the murder of Max’s family, there are very little hints in the book that this boy will actually become Marvel’s master of magnetism. In keeping with the slavishly historical tone of the comic, his newfound ability to sway bullets, which enables him to survive, could just as well be a miraculous stroke of luck. Similarly, it’s possible Max’s prowess with a javelin at school is the result of his burgeoning power over metal, but if so, it’s very subtle.
It’s clear Greg Pak did not want to show Max discovering when he could wreak a terrible revenge on humanity; he wanted to explore the roots of Magneto’s extremism by taking the reader to Hell with him. Time and again it’s demonstrated Max was instructed by his father and his teacher to not fight back, as violence would beget retribution, and that everything would be fine; yet they are still murdered by genocidal thugs. His father is constantly sold out by supposed allies, so it’s only natural Max would come to believe that you cannot believe people are inherently good, and that he would kill to prevent that from ever happening again.
At one point in Auschwitz, Max observes the Allied bombers flying overhead and neglecting to help. It brought to mind the X-Men: Evolution episode “Operation: Rebirth,” where Captain America and Wolverine are depicted rescuing the young Magneto from a concentration camp, which was quite crass in retrospect. Here, young Max looks to the skies and knows no one is coming, because in reality no one came to aid those dying in the camps, or those who rose up in Warsaw, and likewise the Marvel Universe will not come to relieve the distressed reader.
Continued belowCarmine Di Giandomenico’s beautiful artwork, with its gnarled figures and large, melancholy eyes, adds to the sense that this is not a superhero comic. He also takes great pains to not be gratuitous when portraying the humiliating final moments of Holocaust victims, lending them a dignity they were denied in reality. Though the comic does not present events in black-and-white like “Maus” or Schindler’s List, colorist Matt Hollingsworth brilliantly complements the somber art by desaturating the colors gradually as the story continues and the Nazis’ persecution intensifies (the second issue even ends with the Sun setting as the Germans invade Poland, and the entire third issue seems to take place at night).
The comic becomes more and more monochromatic until it finally fades to black in an unforgettable two-page spread, as if the artists have put down their tools and refused to illustrate these unimaginable atrocities. In these black panels, Max writes about how for two years, he witnessed thousands of men, women and children being marched to their deaths, and how he would move their bodies, extract any gold teeth, and then load them for cremation. As he implores the reader to never let this happen again, the light glows back into view as Max realizes he is cremating Herr Kalb. It is perhaps the most gut-wrenching sequence of comics I have ever read.
Dave and Nathalie Lanphear’s lettering on this series was absolutely sublime, from the stark captions that inform us of historical events and dates that you can almost hear being typed, to the gray outlines and letters used whenever anyone whispers, and the aforementioned plea for remembrance that Max that anxiously scribbled on a scrap of paper. Sound effects are used sparingly for shocking moments of violence, which adds to the jarring effect they have on the reader.
The comic ends in September 1948 with Max recovering the plea he wrote from the ruins of Auschwitz, with the narration once more intoning the reader to never let this happen again. The word “testament” can be translated as being someone’s will, but can also refer, as in the Bible, to an agreement. Marvel hope that by reading this comic, you will remember and promise to fight against the cowardly, evil forces of discrimination and racial persecution wherever you see them.
Aware of how significant a work “X-Men: Magneto Testament” is in their canon, the trade paperback includes Pak’s exhaustive historical research, a teachers’ guide, and the story of survivor and artist Dina Babbitt. This moving series is well and truly worth a place in any school, public library, or fan’s collection: it could just be the best comic Marvel has ever published.
