Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Israel News

Comic Explores Shoah

Though the Shoah seems out of place amid the bright colors, tights and capes of comic books, graphic novels have a long history of depicting the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman started writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” in 1972, and the mutant known as Wolverine was given a history in the Polish extermination camp Sobibor. Last week, in Philadelphia, Marvel Comics announced that Greg Pak, best known for writing such characters as Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk, would be penning a new miniseries in September called “Magneto: Testament.”

The miniseries, according to Pak, “follows a Jewish boy and his family through Germany and Poland from 1935 to 1945.” The character is probably best known as the magnetism-controlling supervillain played by Ian McKellen in the X-Men films. In fact, though Magneto was created in 1963, it wasn’t until the mid-’80s that writer Chris Claremont gave him sympathetic origins as a Jewish child during the Holocaust.

To prepare for the admittedly difficult task of telling a Holocaust story in a comic book, Pak has read multiple survivor narratives and histories of the Third Reich and the Final Solution, watched documentaries, and gone back to graphic novels like “Maus.” The Magneto of “Testament,” Pak emphasized, will be not a tragic anti-hero (the Forward once compared him to Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Israeli activist) but a “three-dimensional human being.”

“This isn’t a fantasy about a costumed superhero changing the course of history,” Pak told The Shmooze. “This is the story of a Jewish boy and his family struggling to survive.”

“Part of the goal of this story is to explore religious identity, and history, through fiction,” said Warren Simmons, “Testament” editor. “I’d say [Magneto] is one of the single richest and most intriguing characters in our medium. I think to Jewish kids, he’s a very important, complex character. I know that he was to me.”

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.