This page is about the 2014 comic series, for tropes about the character of Magneto, please see his character page.
Still the Master of Magnetism.
"Because it is not your powers that give you the strength to fight, but your conviction"
— Magneto, Magneto vol. 3 #9
Once the deadliest, most feared mutant mastermind on the planet, Magneto is no longer the man he once was. After falling in with Cyclops and the X-Men, Eric Lehnsherr became just one more pawn in another man’s war. But now, determined to fight the war for mutantkind’s survival on his own terms, Magneto sets out to regain what he’s lost…and show the world exactly why it should tremble at the sound of his name. Magneto will safeguard the future of the mutant race by hunting down each and every threat that would see his kind extinguished—and bloody his hands that they may never be a threat again.
Launched in March 2014, the Magneto solo-series follows after the events of Uncanny X-Men (2013) #16 and picks up after a Time Skip, where Magneto is one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most wanted and doing what he can to protect the mutant race by crossing lines others won't.
This 2014 series provides examples of:
- Anti-Hero: Magneto has no qualms about maiming, torturing, or killing anyone if he believes it will in some way keep innocent mutants safe.
- An Arm and a Leg: Magneto chops off Scalphunters arms and legs, leaving him a quadraplegic, while he's tracking down and killing the Marauder clones.
- Artistic License – Biology:
- That cyborg can talk without lungs.
- That former member of Friends of Humanity must have a incredibly thick neck for it to remain intact while impaled by several sign poles.
- Ascended Fangirl: Briar to Magneto.
- Badass Longcoat: Magneto sports a black trenchcoat when he needs to hide his suit.
- Big Bad: Red Skull turns out to behind most of the anti-mutant operations in the first 12 issues, as part of the AXIS event.
- Blatant Lies: After so many false promises of mercy, Max and Magda simply aren't buying Hitzig's offer of no punishment for those who surrender.
- Bloodier and Gorier: Compared to most other X-Men comics. Magneto is shown graphically murdering others with various metal implements in nearly every issue.
- Blood Sport: Magneto uncovers a Hong Kong underground fight club that kidnaps mutants and forces them to fight against the vicious Predator X, a genetically engineered monster that instinctively hunts anything with the X-Gene. Magneto kills it, breaks up the fight ring, then pumps the organizer full of Mutant Growth Hormone and leaves him in the Predators pen.
- Call-Back: When Magneto demands a stronger batch of MGH, Jeremy thinks he can do it by mixing in Hypercortisone D, aka Kick, which was central in Grant Morrison's run.
- Category Traitor: Briar jokes that she is this for funding a community of traumatized mutants on Genosha. In reality, SHIELD doesn't mind that she supports mutant concentration camp survivors, but they do have a tiny problem with her hiding a terrorist. At any rate, that's the joke that gets her laid.
- Combat Pragmatist: Because he can't go toe-to-toe with most others due to his broken powers, he straight up ambushes and kills without fanfare.
- Continuity Nod: Briar's highlight reel contains, among other, unspecified rampages, newspaper clippings from the time Magneto sank a Russian submarine, as well as video from the time he ripped the metal out of Wolverine's skeleton.
- Distinction Without a Difference: Briar asks Arclight whether the reason she is jealous is that she is with Magneto, or that Magneto is with her.
- Doomed by Canon: The Last Days tie-in focuses on Magneto trying to destroy the Ultimate Marvel Earth before it can collide with Earth-616. Anyone who has read the first issue of Secret Wars (2015) knows this is futile, since the two worlds end up colliding anyway.
- Fan Disservice: Magneto's emotional breakdown is this to Briar in-universe.
- Fantastic Drug: Mutant Growth Hormone. Magento takes it himself, but he had it made using his own blood.
- Final Solution: Red Skull's plans for mutants. He's also extended it to Inhumans as well.
- Flashback: Many of these throughout the series. Most are to Magneto's childhood in the Warsaw ghetto and in Auschwitz, but two are to Utopia (Logan has killed someone for him, seemingly as a favor) and Rio de Janeiro (where he exhumes the body). As shown in Uncanny X-Force, the body belonged to Herr Hitzig.
- Foregone Conclusion: The Last Days tie-in focuses on Magneto trying to destroy the Ultimate Marvel Earth before it can collide with Earth-616. Anyone who has read the first issue of Secret Wars (2015) knows this is futile, since the two worlds end up colliding anyway.
- Freudian Excuse: The S-Men, Minzee in particular, lost their homes and family due to Magneto or mutant actions.
- Heel–Face Brainwashing: Magneto does this to a bunch of clones of the Marauders.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Amy, who realizes it is the only realistic way to stop Hitzig.
- Magneto himself in the final issue.
- Human Resources: The super-power drug Mutant Growth Hormone can only be synthesized from the blood of mutants.
- Hypocrite:
- Briar averts this with the girls she meets at the fair by not calling them out on their wounds being self-inflicted instead of Magneto-inflicted. She defends it by saying that if they want to delude themselves that Magneto hurt them personally, well, that's kind of what the rest of them do.
- Magneto looks like this when he complains that SHIELD couldn't be bothered to help Genosha during or after the sentinel attack, not many pages after his recollection of mercy-killing several survivors, but the reason he did that could easily be that he knew no help would come.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
- Magneto kills a man by tearing out his fillings and "replacing" them with street signs.
- Magneto used rusty nails to deal with a bunch of armed men. No one got out with a few all over.
- Improvised Weapon: A paperclip proves surprisingly versatile.
- It's Personal:
- Minzee lost his family due to the Acolytes attacking him while being led by Magneto years ago. When they meet again he wants blood.
- Subverted with the Magneto fanclub that Briar frequents. It's full of people who were injured in one of Magneto's rampages, and they all want to take it personally, but it is very rare that Magneto gives individual lessons to people who aren't actively going after mutants.
- Just in Time: Magneto doesn't know it, but he kills Amy mere seconds before the hallucination that feeds off her power kills Briar.
- Meaningful Name:
- Agent Haines. "Haine" is French for "hate".
- "Hitzig" means "heated" in German. The guy was in charge of the ovens at Auschwitz.
- Briar is a good, foreshadowing name for someone who lives to be a thorn in Magneto's side.
- Meaningful Rename: Magneto introduces himself as Max to Samuel. Unlike Mr. Sullivan (the alias he uses at the motel), Max is his birthname, notwithstandinding that people tend to call him Mags. Samuel's camp of homeless people reminds him of his life in Krakow, Poland, where he lived before taken to Auschwitz.
- Mercy Kill: Magneto does this every few issues. It's part of his Moral Grey.
- The homeless man who was made into a mutant-killing cyborg.
- The man in the flashback on Genosha whose body was crushed under debris. And the other wounded who came to Magneto for help.
- Played with with Amy. It's not that she particularly wants to die, it is just that she understand that it is the only realistic way to keep people safe.
- Never Hurt an Innocent: Averted. We get a look into a past incident during one of Magneto's rampages, and meet with a victim who decides to work with Magneto so that this trope goes into effect.
- Never My Fault: Briar, possibly jokingly, accuses Eric of turning her into a race traitor, as though she hasn't been following him around demanding a chance to help him.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The mutant fighting ring in Hong Kong has, in Magneto's own words, animals that are genetically engineered mutant killers with impenetrable metal skin, and yetMagneto: These fools are using them for sport.
- No Body Left Behind: Magneto's body turns to ashes as his power overloads in the final issue.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Samuel just gave Magneto soup while under an alias because he seemed down on his luck. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents have the authorities kick the people there off the land and are trying to bring him in for questioning when he clearly doesn't know a thing.
- No-Nonsense Nemesis: Magneto doesn't play around. No second chances, no warnings, nothing.
- Nothing Personal: At a Magneto-con, Briar acknowledges that all the Magneto fans have probably convinced themselves, to some degree, that his collaterally damaging them was in some way personal. Even the ones who are faking their injuries.
- Notice This: A comic book example. Metal objects are shown in a distinctive shade of blue in each scene, so as to show what weapons Magneto can potentially use.
- Paint It Black: Magneto has switched from his White costume to a Black one to mark his change in mindset.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Red Skull, the S-Men, the Purifiers...
- Power Incontinence:
- When Magneto was doused with the Phoenix Force's Flame he had his power altered and fluctuated. He gets around this by using MGH made of his own genetic material. However, in Uncanny X-Men (2013) it is revealed that it was nanobots.
- Amy, the mutant who Magneto met during Axis in Red Skull's camp, had her powers fall out of her control and made Hitzig who haunted Magneto's mind real. To stop it, he had to put her down.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Upon meeting two girls in the Genosha concentration camp and learning that they don't want to be saved because they're afraid of being caught again and punished, Magneto gives them a dressing-down informing them how cowardly they are.
- Rooting for the Empire: In-universe, there's apparently a signifigant subculture dedicated to idolizing supervillains. Magneto alone has a large fanclub of human fans who even display scars they've gotten from his rampages with pride.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: All Magneto's efforts were for nothing, as he realized in the end.
- Stalker with a Crush: Briar Raleigh would be this for Magneto. To be exact, Magneto crushed her leg with her car during a rampage that had nothing to do with her, and she developed a crush on him because she realized she found all that raw power sexy. It's implied that this was her BDSM "awakening".
- Unwilling Roboticisation: A vagrant is made into a cheap knock-off of an Omega Sentinel and forced to kill mutants. He's put down by Magneto.
- Villainous Rescue: When the combined forces of the X-Men and the Avengers are falling before a gang of hero-hunting Sentinels, Magneto puts together a team of A-list villains (and the Hobgoblin) to fly to the rescue. And it is glorious.
