While the X-Men were an allegory of the civil rights movement from the get go, I’m quite certain at the time Magneto was just intended as a villain.
I mean… his terrorist group was called “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, and some of the members were definitely of the moustache twirling puppy kicking kind, including Magneto himself, at first…
Yeah, mainstream comic book villains didn’t start getting more nuanced until the seventies and especially the eighties, possibly as a consequence of the comics code, which included “crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal”, and didn’t allow “sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior” until 1971 (and which also hilariously led to zombies being called “zuvembies” in Marvel during the seventies, as that simple change was apparently enough to make them kosher), which publishers didn’t start mostly ignoring untill the mid eighties (though most didn’t officially fully abandon it until the noughties or early twenty-tens).
While the X-Men were an allegory of the civil rights movement from the get go, I’m quite certain at the time Magneto was just intended as a villain.
I mean… his terrorist group was called “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, and some of the members were definitely of the moustache twirling puppy kicking kind, including Magneto himself, at first…
It was the 60s. That doesn’t surprise me.
Yeah, mainstream comic book villains didn’t start getting more nuanced until the seventies and especially the eighties, possibly as a consequence of the comics code, which included “crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal”, and didn’t allow “sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior” until 1971 (and which also hilariously led to zombies being called “zuvembies” in Marvel during the seventies, as that simple change was apparently enough to make them kosher), which publishers didn’t start mostly ignoring untill the mid eighties (though most didn’t officially fully abandon it until the noughties or early twenty-tens).