Magneto (2014) #1

Magneto (2014) #1 by Cullen Bunn and Art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta

First off, The Paolo Rivera cover isn’t my favorite, but it’s still beautifully done especially considering the symbolism of the barbed wire forming magneto’s helmet. A 4/5.

I’ve never really been too much of a fan of Magneto, especially as a solo character, but for some reason I always try to pick up his various solo series out of curiosity. I read the Magneto: Not a Hero miniseries from 2011 and thought it was alright. Now, coming out of the recent events of Uncanny X-men (vol.3) we see a much weaker magneto altered by the events of AvX now operating on his own (very violently) against anti-mutant groups. At the current time, Magneto is much less powerful. I really enjoy this sort of Magneto more, the one who has to use strategy and clever tricks to escape (similar to the prison scene in the X-2 movie). This isn’t the Magneto who can haplessly fly around and shoot magnet energy beams like in the 90’s.

Anyway, Magneto is now living between hotels and is following a lead on various mutant murders. A man who has been jailed after surrendering. The entire comic revolves around the idea of killing someone without even thinking about it, and that’s a really deep theme that is often not considered by these sort of villains. One really interesting shot is how we see magneto entering the jail with all the metal objects being highlighted, so you can see how exactly how he’s about to screw everyone up before it happens. When he reaches the man’s cell, he finds out that it was actually a cyborg-omega-sentinel or whatever. He smashes it and decides to find the source of the problem himself.

Cullen Bunn said he was trying to go with a dark sort of noir feel to this series and it’s really refreshing. We see a darker reflection of this man known by many names, a man who feels guilt for what he’s done, but is still relentlessly committed to doing what he set out to do. The narration and dialogue is spot-on and the art is very well handled as well! The series is highly violent and dark, but not so overblown that it becomes a problem. You do kind of need to have read Uncanny X-men to get what happened before, but moving forward the series is paving its own path.

I honestly have no problem saying that this series is one of the stand out hits of the year (like Daredevil was before). I’m rating this issue as a 10/10, I really enjoyed it.

Edit: Wanted to add that I started reading Mighty Avengers (the Infinity run) and think it's alright. The art on the book is pretty good, but I want to wait until around after issue #3 or so after it leaves Infinity tie-in status to actually review it. So far, the issues are fairly good, easily within the 6-7.5 range (issue 2 was a bit worse than the first).