Magneto is often <a href="https://comicvibe.com/only-one-marvel-show-can-be-considered-the-worst-and-its-not-she/” title=”Only one Marvel show can be considered the worst (and it's NOT She”>considered the best X-Men villain and there’s a lot to that. He was introduced alongside the group, meant to be their villainous opposite; where they wanted peace and co-existence between humans and mutants, Magneto wanted nothing more than to enslave humanity. In his early years, he was basically racist Doctor Doom but all of that would change when writer Chris Claremont came to the X-Men. Claremont created the villain’s origin, revealing that Magnus wasn’t just some monster who hated humans, but a survivor of the Holocaust out to make sure what happened to the Jewish people didn’t happen to mutants. The character has grown so much over the years and has spent the last decade as a member of the team.
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Magneto is an amazing villain, one who proved to be more than met the eye once a competent writer with vision got their hands on him (sorry Stan Lee fans). However, he hasn’t been the team’s best villain in a long time, and I’m not just saying that because he’s been a hero for a while. Back in the ’80s, Claremont was introducing numerous characters, including some of the best X-Men villains ever. Since he was going to make Magneto an ally of the team, they needed a new main baddie, giving birth to the greatest villain in the team’s history – Mystique.
Mystique Slotted Perfectly Into Magneto’s Spot in the ’80s
Mystique would first appear in Ms. Marvel #16, fighting Carol Danvers a few times while Claremont wrote the book. He would move on to greater success with the X-Men and started to bring in other mutants he had created writing non-X-books. Mystique would first appear at the head of the Brotherhood of Evil mutants in the classic “Days of Future Past”, joined by Destiny, Avalanche, Pyro, and Blob, creating a new version of the team that would last the ’80s in an attempt to kill racist Senator Robert Kelly. This was the first indication that she was going to become the main villain of the book in the decade of excess.
Back in the day, Magneto had founded the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, so putting Mystique in that place was definitely Claremont trying to say something about the future of the character. ’80s Uncanny X-Men was a book that went in many different directions, with the team often going to space and other dimensions, battling all kinds of enemies. However, Mystique was always there. She brought Rogue to the dance in Avengers Annual #10, giving her a relationship to the team that paralleled that of Xavier and Magneto in some ways (mainly because of closeness). Later, it would be revealed that she was one of the parents of Nightcrawler, yet another tie to the group. With her precognitive wife Destiny at her side, she was constantly working to create her own power base, with the X-Men often standing in her way.
Where Magneto was something of a mad dog attacking humanity, Mystique was more of a manipulator. She wanted to make sure that the mutant race survived and gained power, but was more willing to work with the powers that be as long as it allowed her to prosper as well. She took the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, a group founded to kill humans, to the government, offering their services and becoming the Freedom Force, with Crimson Commando, Stonewall, Super-Sabre and Spiral joining the group. Claremont built her into the team’s greatest villain of the 1980s. I mean technically, Claremont’s greatest villain of the ’80s was racism, but if you had to pick an actual character, it would be Mystique.
Creators who came after him didn’t treat Mystique nearly as well. The ’90s really didn’t have her do anything special; Destiny had been killed, so she started teaming more with Sabretooth, had a short dalliance with Forge, and would be a member of X-Factor for a time. Claremont’s return saw her try to kill Robert April again and in the ’00s, she’d get a series that established she worked for Xavier as a secret agent and would pretend to be new mutant Foxx to show Rogue that Gambit was terrible.
She took something of a backseat post-House of M, working with Sinister and the Marauders before going away again for a long time. She returned to prominence in the Krakoa Era, acting as one of the leaders of the mutant nation. She resurrected Destiny and the two became an awesome power couple once again. She was an agent of chaos on the island and her stories are some of the best of the era. She got a miniseries that saw her become a withered husk of herself then returned in X-Men: The Hellfire Murder #1, establishing the Hellfire Brotherhood, back where she belongs at the head of a major villain team. Claremont needed someone to replace Magneto and Mystique was able to do so perfectly, becoming the best villain the X-Men face over the decades.
Mystique Will Always Be One of the X-Men’s Greatest Legends
Chris Claremont gave the X-Men numerous success stories, making characters like Wolverine, Jean Grey, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, and many others into superstars. They became such big stars that they often overshadow some of the others, including Mystique. She’s been so important for so long that it’s easy to overlook just how great she really is. She’s not exactly a complex character, just an evil shapeshifting manipulator, but she’s such an interesting antagonist that she was able to become the group’s greatest enemy during their ’80s period of massive growth.
She has a lot of competition for that title, but if you look at her history, it’s plain to see she’s the one. Mystique has been a part of some of the best stories of the last 46 years and is one of many load-bearing characters in X-Men history, her powers giving her a long enough life to meet some of the older X-characters like Wolverine and Mister Sinister. She has her fingers in numerous pies, with a web of relationships that stretches across the Marvel Universe. We all love bad guys like Magneto or Apocalypse, but it’s time to admit that the true greatest X-Men villain is Mystique.
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