Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?
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Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero?
I have.
Magneto.
And I liked him before I ever really knew him.
I was a boy when I saw Stan Lee being interviewed on television. I couldn’t tell you the program now. I couldn’t repeat the interview. Memory rarely keeps things that neatly.
But I remember what stopped me.
He was talking about the X-Men.
Professor X, he explained, could be seen as closer to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Magneto was closer to Malcolm X.
That was it.
I needed to know more.
Until then, comic books had mostly been what comic books are supposed to be when you’re a kid.
Heroes.
Villains.
Costumes.
Powers.
Good guys trying to stop bad guys from doing bad things.
But suddenly someone was telling me there were ideas underneath those costumes.
History underneath those battles.
That a fight between two men with extraordinary powers could really be an argument about how people survive in a world that fears them.
That interview made me an X-Men fan.
More importantly, it helped make me a serious comic-book reader.
And when I began reading Magneto, I found something much more complicated than the villain I expected.
He frightened people.
He threatened people.
Sometimes he did terrible things while convincing himself they were necessary.
I understood that.
But I also understood something else.
Magneto believed his people were in danger.
And he had decided they would never be helpless again.
That mattered to me.
Because underneath the helmet, the powers, and all that anger was memory.
Magneto remembered what happened when people decided another group was different.
He remembered what happened when different became dangerous.
And he knew what could happen when dangerous became something people believed needed to be eliminated.
So when Professor X looked at humanity and saw the possibility of coexistence, Magneto looked at the same humanity and saw evidence.
That doesn’t make Magneto right.
I think that distinction matters.
Understanding someone’s anger isn’t the same as approving of what they do with it.
Magneto could become the very thing he claimed to be fighting. Protection could become domination. Fear could become hatred. The determination to keep his people safe could become permission to hurt someone else’s.
But even then, I could never dismiss him.
Because I understood the question underneath his anger.
What if they come for us again?
Professor X believed humanity could become better.
Magneto wasn’t willing to bet his people’s survival on it.
One offered hope.
The other carried memory.
I know people have discussed the Professor X and Dr. King, Magneto and Malcolm X comparisons for years. I also know those comparisons can become too simple. Dr. King was more complicated than the peaceful dreamer we sometimes reduce him to, and Malcolm X was far more complicated than the angry counterweight history sometimes makes him out to be.
Real men don’t fit neatly inside comic-book metaphors.
But as a boy, I didn’t know all of that yet.
I only knew someone had opened a door.
Comic books could be about more than heroes defeating villains.
They could ask questions.
About prejudice.
About power.
About identity.
About what people owe one another.
About whether peace requires trust, and what happens when history has given you very little reason to trust.
I started reading differently after that.
Maybe I started looking at villains differently, too.
Because the most interesting villains aren’t necessarily the ones who make us wonder how someone could become so evil.
Sometimes they are the ones who make us uncomfortable because somewhere beneath everything they have become, there is something we recognize.
A wound.
A memory.
A fear.
Maybe even a truth.
Magneto never made me want the villain to win.
He did something more important.
He made me understand why the villain believed he should.
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