To now, Greg Pak has earned my respect as the creator of the Incredible Hercules book, starring the wonderful Amadeus Cho, and as the creator of what may be the two best Hulk events ever: Planet Hulk and World War Hulk. He’s proven that he can be genuinely funn and can do box-office smash action books.
Now, he takes a sharp turn into a very serious, very tragic story and gets it completely right.
Magneto: Testament is a powerful, well-researched story about the childhood of Max Eisenhardt–the child who would grow up to be Magneto.
It begins with a domestic scene, a simple scene of a family in their home. The serenity and sweetness does not last.
A German Jewish boy during the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, Eisenhardt sees his father humiliated in the streets for having slept with a German woman.
We watch as Germany evolves through their loss in the 1936 Olympics to the ethnic purge of Kristallnacht. Max is then taken to the camps, where is father is killed.
Pak shows the reader how this experience convinced Max that he would never let something like this happen again–no matter how extreme he needed to be to stop it.
Magneto never uses his powers. This is emphatically not a superhero book. It is a human tale that gives the title character a level of depth of empathy that has only been hinted at in the past.
English (US) · 