Magneto #3

Magneto is another title in the All-New Marvel NOW! series I've been gushing about this year. It has a The X-Files vibe to it, as Magneto, a.k.a. Holocaust survivor Max Eisenhardt (the character played by Michael Fassbender in the movies), drifts through a desolate America (accurately portrayed as a post-Great Recession fallout zone) ruthlessly rooting out plots to murder Mutants.

The art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta is perfect. It casts the mind's eye back to early Underground comix at the same time appearing sharp and fresh. Cullen Bunn is a journeyman writer who scripts a disciplined narrative.

What I take away from Magneto is that it is a story aimed at my generational cohort: middle-aged white men on their way to senior citizenry, alone and embittered -- that the world didn't align with the expectations of their bountiful youth. The Tea Party archetype.

I live in a neighborhood that attracts aspiring, educated young adults, the generational cohort I was a member of when I first landed here. At that time the neighborhood was more bohemian. But a steady current of gentrification razed the last Hippie house more than 15-years ago and has priced all the artsy types out as high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums have shot up along Broadway. Now, rather than the hard-partying Grunge rocker, it is the young professional with the well-scrubbed look of entitlement that populates the community.

I'm not complaining. The neighborhood is much more quiet today, despite the increased density, than it was a decade ago when Friday- and Saturday-night bacchanals were a common occurrence. I'm slightly out of place though because of my gray beard; I am something of an anachronism, like a dinosaur walking about in the age of mammals.

And that is part of the beauty that Bunn and Hernandez Walta (Javier Fernandez Barranco, who provides the art for several issues, as well) bring to Magneto -- a feeling of being out of place and out of one's time.

Below you will find scans of the cover to Magneto #3, art by Declan Shalvey, as well as ten interior pages, art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta; colors by Jordie Bellaire. Cullen Bunn has Magneto tracking down a secret government lab creating human-Sentinel cyborgs. Magneto, the Mutant master of magnetism, takes care of the deceptively attractive female scientist (who resembles the young professional women in my neighborhood) by inserting two paper clips under the skin of her arm.