Magneto is one of the greatest characters in the Marvel Universe, and it’s not even close. He started his existence as the X-Men‘s chief antagonist, his mutant supremacist beliefs contrasting with the peaceful goals of the team. He started out as a Doom rip-off (like numerous Stan Lee-created villains back then) and was a cool, if simplistic, villain. Eventually, the X-Men lost their popularity and he was adrift, but would make his grand reappearance in the early stages of the Chris Claremont run with the group. It’s Claremont in the ’80s who gave him his Holocaust origin and started the process of making him an ally of the X-Men. He even joined the team before returning to villainy in the ’90s. He’d end up back with the group in 2010 and has been a member ever since.
Videos by ComicBook.com
He’s one of the most powerful mutants around, but that doesn’t mean that he’s unstoppable. Magneto has been a victim of the reaper many times over the decades, always returning to face the forces of human racism again. In fact, it happened so much that it was joked that resurrection was his secondary mutation. Magneto has died a lot and came back, always returning to the fight for his people
10) Trying to Destroy the Orchis Forge
The Krakoa Era changed the X-Men fundamentally, creating a mutant society on the living island. Magneto was one of the early leaders of the nation, having spent years setting it up in secret with Xavier and Moira MacTaggert. The humans weren’t idle either and activated the Orchis Initiative, a group meant to destroy the mutant threat. They created the Orchis Forge around the sun, which allowed to create powerful new Sentinels in an effort to create a Nimrod unit. The X-Men attacked the Forge in House of X #4 and were able to destroy its Mother Mold, but the station remained. After Nimrod was created, the X-Men tried to destroy it from afar with their mutant powers, with Magneto attempting to use his abilities to push it into the sun from the Earth. However, this proved impossible for him and he died numerous times of brain aneurysms. He was resurrected by the Five every time.
9) The Fight Against the Creator
The original run of the X-Men lasted for 66 issues. The team was never all that popular compared to the Avengers and the Fantastic Four and they found themselves on the chopping block. Marvel put Roy Thomas and Neal Adams on the book for a six issue run that is looked back on as one of the best moments in the team’s history, Thomas and Adams nailing the group right before they faded away. At this point, Magneto was in the Savage Land and decided that he was going to create an army using a machine that created mutates from the people who lived down there, even fooling Ka-Zar into joining him. The X-Men came to stop him in issues #62-63, and ended up facing off against his forces, defeating them, before going after the machine. They destroyed that too and Magneto seemingly died in the flames. However, he’d show up later in Fantastic Four #102, revealing that he fell through the floor before he actually died.
The rivalry between the X-Men and the Avengers started back in the Silver Age, with the two teams clashing and then working together in the Mighty Marvel Manner several times. During one of those occasions, the two teams ended up fighting Magneto and Toad, who tried to lure both teams to their deaths by holding Angel hostage. Of course, the two teams were able to win the fight and the villains did their best to escape. As their plane was flying away, Magneto reached out with his powers to grab a hold of it and as he was trying to get in the plane, Toad stepped on his hands and he fell to his doom. Someone had to forget that Magneto flew for this to make sense, but it’s also a huge moment in the history of Toad and Mags’s relationship. The mutant master of magnetism had been abusing the other mutant for ages, so this was him getting revenge for years of terrible treatment. It was revealed that he had survived by using his power to tunnel down to the Savage Land, fooling everyone once again.
7) Last Days
Magneto joined the X-Men in 2010, mostly staying on the straight and narrow even since. He ended up joining Cyclops’s revolution after Avengers vs. X-Men and continued his fight against humanity. He eventually got his own solo ongoing series, which dug deep into the character and his life. However, the end of the world was afoot. The Final Incursion would see him come up with a desperate plan to save the Earth. He told his daughter Polaris that he was going to use his powers to destroy the oncoming alternate Earth, tapping into the electromagnetic energy that permeated the planet. However, this proved to be more than his powers could handle. He did his best to save the day, but was consumed when the final two Earths smashed into each other. This was right before’s 2015’s Secret Wars, when the multiverse would get a soft reboot. Magneto was brought back to life, along with everyone else who died in the story (most people don’t remember that Cyclops also died as well in Secret Wars; this will play into things later).
6) SF Is for Sentinel Fist
New X-Men was an amazing run, with writer Grant Morrison taking the building blocks of decades of X-Men stories – the Phoenix, Sentinels, Weapon X, the school, Magneto, the dystopian future story – and remixing them. They started off with a bang that killed sixteen million mutants, when Cassandra Nova sent three Mega-Sentinels to Genosha, which had become a mutant country under the control of Magneto. However, the mutant master of magnetism was not in a good place. He had just lost a battle to the X-Men that ended with his powers getting even more burned out than they already were (something that started with “The Magneto War” and only got worse, forcing him to sometimes piggy back off Polaris’s powers), so he was unable to stop the massive Sentinel fist from slamming into his tower in Hammer Bay. It was later revealed that he survived the attack, but I’m not sure if it was ever established as to how. He just showed up again on Genosha in Excalibur (Vol. 3) in 2004. (I dropped that book before the first year ended, so I don’t remember if they ever established how he survived).
5) Psylocke Kills Magneto
Remember how I said that Cyclops died in Secret Wars and no one remembers it? It gets dumber (although to be fair, X-Men comics from about 2013 to 2019 were all kinds of dumb, so this wasn’t an outlier or anything). After the multiverse was rearranged and ‘Clops came back, he ended dying of M-Pox immediately, leading to the X-Men/Inhumans conflict. Magneto wanted to pay homage to the man he came to respect more than anyone in the Utopia Era and started his own X-Men team, one that would tackle threats with extreme prejudice. Psylocke was his co-lead on the team, but she eventually learned that he had re-established ties with the Hellfire Club. The two had a confrontation that turned violent and the telepathic ninja was able to get the better of the mutant master of magnetism. She mortally wounded him with her katana and then used her mental powers to put him out of his misery. However, Exodus and Elixir were close by and they were able to resurrect him.
4) The Destruction of Asteroid M
The ’90s were all about the X-Men, with the team reaching their greatest level of success thanks to X-Men (Vol. 2) #1, which sold eight million copies. The book’s first three issues were one of the best Claremont-written Magneto stories ever, as he returned to the fight against humanity after years of being an X-Men ally. The Acolytes formed around him, but he didn’t know there was something rotten in Denmark. Acolyte Fabian Cortez was an Upstart, member of a group of young mutants who were out to kill the old guard and take their places. He betrayed Magneto and the Acolytes, allowing a SHIELD laser satellite to fire at Asteroid M. Magnus knew the blast was coming and made sure to get the X-Men off Asteroid M before it was hit. It exploded and ended up crashing to the Earth. It was revealed later that the Acolytes sacrificed their lives to save him, yet another example of Magneto “dying” and being revealed to have lived.
3) Nimrod and the Omega Sentinel Ended Him and Xavier
Jonathan Hickman’s Krakoa Era event books were amazing, with Inferno closing out his time writing the X-Men. This four-issue story had a lot going on, but the long and short of it is that Mystique tricked everyone into resurrecting Destiny, which was against the rules of Krakoa established by Moira MacTaggert, with Magneto and Xavier decided to let Emma Frost in on Moira’s secret to salvage the situation. Moira was already planning some shenanigans and left Krakoa as a fugitive with Mystique and Destiny on her tail, trying to escape them at an Orchis facility. Mags and the prof thought she was captured by Orchis (Mystique had cut off the arm that Magneto was using to track her and it was left at one of their bases). The two went to retrieve her and ended up in battle against Nimrod and Omega Sentinel. It was one of the most awesome fights in the entire Krakoa Era, but in the end Magnus and Charles were both killed. They were both resurrected on Krakoa, but the revelation of their secret saw much of their power taken away from them, which led to Mags leaving Krakoa for Arakko.
2) Losing His (Xorneto) Head
There are some people out there who would say that this one doesn’t count as a Magneto death, but I don’t really listen to those people. “Planet X” was the penultimate story of Morrison’s run, with Xorn revealing himself to be Magneto. He had been setting the X-Men up the whole time and tore through them, then took over Manhattan with the help of his allies and the Xavier Institute Special Class. The X-Men were able to survive his traps and ended up fighting against him. This led to Jean Grey’s death at his hands, who was trying to talk him down. Logan went berserk and cut Mags’s head off. Morrison left the X-books four issues after this story and Marvel retconned their entire run, making it so that Xorn was always Magneto. However, the whole point of their story was that those who hate become as bad as the people they hate and that Magneto was never as admirable as people thought, a broken man twisted by hate and revenge. I still count this as a Magneto story, because that’s the way that Morrison wrote it.
1) Heart Attack
After Inferno, Magneto ended up on Arakko, where he, Storm, Sunspot, and Arakkii the Fisher King formed the Brotherhood to protect the people of the mutant planet. When the war between the Krakoans and the Eternals started, Druig sent Uranos, the grandfather of Thanos, to attack the martial Arakkii for one hour. Magneto decided to tackle the Eternal all by himself and learned that even control of one of the four fundamental forces of the universe couldn’t make a dent in the power of Thanos’s grandsire. Uranos ended up tearing out his heart. However, that didn’t actually kill him; he was able to create a magnetic energy based heart, allowing him to keep his blood pumping for a short time, with Storm helping loan him electromagnetic energy to keep it all going. Together, the two of them were able to get their revenge against him. While they couldn’t kill him, they were able to hurt him very badly and Magneto died. However, he wasn’t raised by Krakoa resurrection this time. Storm had to venture into the Elysian Fields, the home of dead mutant souls created by Scarlet Witch, and retrieve him. He was given a new body and returned to the fight against Orchis (don’t ask why his new body developed resurrection sickness after this; the X-Men comics are kind of nonsense right now, unless we’re talking about Uncanny).
What’s your favorite Magneto death? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
7 Ways Marvel Made Magneto Better Over the Years
