Magneto 1

I’ve read a few one-offs lately where the purpose of their existence is unclear. I am imagining editors deciding they want, say, a Magneto one-shot and handing the job to someone, ignoring their protests that they have zero ideas as to what to do with one issue with that character.

Chaykin recounts Magneto’s first visit to America, just before the X-Men appeared. He gets his costume, he chats to a woman who is apparently some kind of mutant (I couldn’t work out what her mutation was supposed to be – perhaps others would recognise the character?) and has a very brief fight with a monster which turns up so as to give us a fight scene. Actually I’m wrong about the brevity: the encounter with the generic monster spreads out to five and a half pages, despite there being exactly one movement in it, and that an obvious and predictable one. Magneto also pontificates quite a lot in rather self-satisfied tones.

The art is extremely casual in appearance, loose and even scrappy in places, almost as if shot from pencils in parts of some panels. Magneto grins a lot, as if happy and relaxed, which doesn’t fit the character or a lot of the words terribly well – can Chaykin ever resist making a character a charmer? The woman he spends much of the comic with is horribly drawn in some shots, as if she has put on a couple of stone since the last panel, or as if Chaykin has no idea how a face is put together.

But the prevailing impression is of emptiness – it’s slow, almost nothing happens, most pages are very sparse in word and image, and it seems utterly idea-free. I had thought that this moment before he became a word-class supervillain might show us something pivotal, something that made him go public, that decided him that it could only be war between humans and mutants, that spurred him into the attack where he encountered the X-Men, or at least something with an emotional impact on him. Why set a story back then if you have nothing detectable to say about a key period in a major figure’s life?

Basically, are editors under so much pressure to churn out comics that they pay no attention to their content, that they don’t even ask what the point of a story is? And that when it is delivered and is as vacuous and free of interest or excitement as this, they still give it the go-ahead?