Erik Lehnsherr
Few Marvel villains — and occasional heroes — have proven as enduring, as morally complex, or as electrifying on the page as Erik Lehnsherr, the Master of Magnetism himself, who first menaced the fledgling mutant team in The X-Men #4 back in 1964, conjured into existence by the legendary partnership of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at the very dawn of the Silver Age. Over an extraordinary six-decade span, he has haunted and shaped the pages of The Uncanny X-Men and beyond, racking up some 830 catalog appearances and 35 key issues that any serious collector will recognize as essential reading. He moves through Marvel's mutant universe in rarefied company — Cyclops, Wolverine, Ororo Munroe — and his membership in the X-Men themselves speaks to a character whose allegiances and convictions have never been simple. If you want to understand the beating heart of the X-Men saga, Erik Lehnsherr is absolutely where you start.
Trivia
- Magneto stands among the first major Marvel villains to be retconned as a Holocaust survivor, a distinction that lent him a rare historical gravitas setting him apart from virtually every other Silver Age antagonist of the era.kids.kiddle.co
- For a stretch of Marvel continuity, Erik Lehnsherr was treated as a fabricated identity rather than a genuine birth name, a detail that later stories and editorial statements only further complicated — leaving collectors to debate whether it was ever meant as a cover or a legitimate alias.kids.kiddle.co
- Chris Claremont has written more of Erik Lehnsherr's comics than any other writer in our catalog — 81 issues.