10 Comic Book Deaths That Angered The World
3. Magneto
The X-Men's arch nemesis ever since the team's first appearance in Issue 1, Magneto, master of magnetism, had a fully formed manifesto right from the outset. 'The Human race no longer deserves dominion over the planet earth!' he cried, 'the day of the mutants is upon us!' Magneto was always the violent separatist to Charles Xaviers peaceful integrationist.
In 1963, when the first issue of X-Men hit the stands, the civil rights movement in America was just starting to hot up. Just a few months earlier, Martin Luther King had written his famous letter from Birmingham Jail and just one year before that, the enrolment of a black student at the university of Mississippi had caused so many riots that President Kennedy had to call in over 5,000 troops. All of these incidents, along with the rise of the hippy antiestablishment counter-culture, influenced X-Men creators Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and, like the best sci-fi/fantasy/superfiction, the X-Men strip reflected the tumultuous times in which it was written.
Eventually, writer Chris Claremont had softened the character, imbuing him with the soul of a poet, a deep sense of honour and an artful, hard-edged masculinity that broke the character down along jagged new lines. Claremont did a wonderful job re-positioning Magneto as a tortured, layered and endearingly Human character who had a great deal of reasoning and bitter justification behind his fanatically anti-Human stance. In Claremont's hands, Magneto was shown to have grown up during the Holocaust, surviving the horror of Nazi death camps and seeing Human bigotry at its absolute ugliest. So, when Magneto founded The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, you can be assured that he wanted the word evil used in inverted commas. He was obviously being facetious. Maybe. However, writer Grant Morrison's controversial (yet still very good) New X-Men series returned Magneto to first principles, as a genocidal mutant death machine intent on world domination. The character's apparent death occurred in the first issue of the series, but his legacy was alluded to throughout Morrison's run, especially in the ubiquitous presence of Che Guevara-esque Magneto Was Right t-shirts that populated Xavier's school.
When Magneto revealed that he wasn't actually dead and had, in fact, been masquerading as the X-Man Xorn, the fans were baffled. When that same character, high on super-drugs, tore through New York City and rendered it asunder, they were furious. The tragic events of 9/11 were still fresh in the mind of America and the image of Magneto, mutant terrorist extraordinaire, ripping the Statue of Liberty in two and marching Humans towards death camps was a little too on the nose for many readers. At the end of the Planet X story arc, the younger mutant generation rejected Magneto and Charles Xavier once again had the last word. This led an embittered Magneto to murder Jean Grey in cold blood, which prompted Wolverine, in turn, to behead the behelmeted bastard. The fans were outraged. Marvel editors eagerly began dismantling any/all lingering effects of the story and retconning everything about it the minute Grant had handed in his notice and returned, once more, to the welcoming bosom of DC Comics.