The purple and red are gone — Magneto is going chrome.
A freshly unveiled variant cover from Alessandro Cappuccio depicts the Master of Magnetism with a beard, sealed inside white-and-chrome armor and lifting a stockpile of metal spheres with his powers. Standing at his back are Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, flanking the man once known as their father, who has rarely looked more lethal.
The reason for the armor: every mutant on Earth is about to be hunted. For once, Magneto isn’t the cause.
The imprint that turns the X-Men into a horror story
Marvel’s Midnight imprint debuts on October 7, introducing an entirely separate continuity that fuses classic superheroes with classic monsters and dark horror themes. Midnight: X-Men is the work of Jonathan Hickman, Matteo Della Fonte, Matt Hollingsworth and Cory Petit, and it throws homo superior into an all-out fight for survival against an army of vampires.
Where Magneto slots into that war, Cappuccio’s cover is the first genuine hint.
Everyone’s picking a side, and some of them have fangs
Several factions are at war across the series. One is the mutant X-Men under Cyclops. Another is the “empyres” — mutants transformed into vampires who nonetheless keep their distance from the established armies of the undead.
Leadership of the empyres appears to fall to Storm, and variant covers hint that Iceman and Gambit have joined their ranks too.
Cyclops has picked up a new title of his own — “Cyclops: Vampire Hunter” — and fights for survival alongside Nightcrawler. Read that aloud and it sounds absurd. It also sounds precisely like what a horror-tinged X-Men line ought to deliver.
Among the handful of characters Marvel’s promotional art doesn’t render as a vampire is Magneto. Armored head to toe with his family beside him, the framing hints he might amount to a faction unto himself — a group certain continuities have called the “House of M.”
The villain who kept getting rewritten
When Magneto first appeared in 1963, he was a textbook power-mad supervillain cut from the same cloth as Loki or the Red Skull. Subsequent stories rebuilt him into something far more sympathetic and complex, a man driven by a tragic past to turn his back on humanity and champion mutant supremacy.
He has spent decades since as more of an ally to the X-Men than a foe, having recognized his mistakes and the need to close ranks against bigger dangers.
Even so, nothing prepared him for what mutantkind is about to face.
The family problem nobody has explained yet
This is the part of the cover that doesn’t add up. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were long assumed to be Magneto’s children — an assumption discarded in 2014, when Scarlet Witch’s magic exposed the absence of any biological tie between him and the twins.
Neither of them is even a mutant. Both are genetically altered humans who owe their abilities to the High Evolutionary’s experiments. In a war drawn along species lines, seeing Pietro and Wanda at Magneto’s side is a real head-scratcher.
Does Midnight: X-Men take place in a reality where the truth never came out? Or does something else push the twins into an alliance with their “father” against vampires and empyres? Scarlet Witch’s costume looks to have darkened in color, possibly a sign that the conflict between vampires and empyres has thrown the rules of magic into disarray.
Why Hickman writing this matters
Morally murky characters and sprawling multi-faction conflicts are Hickman’s signature — it’s the register he works in. Readers should count on Magneto playing a central part in this reworking of X-Men lore instead of a walk-on in someone else’s war.
Being an Omega-level mutant with almost total command of magnetism, he’s likely to be a driving force in the story. Picture a downpour of metal-tipped stakes. Then picture the fallout if either undead faction wins him over.
Midnight: X-Men #1 hits shelves October 7.