As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been really getting into X-Men comics lately. I’ve also been listening to the podcast Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men at work. The hosts of said podcast waxed euphoric about the second X-Men Unlimited one-shot, entitled Point Blank (written by Fabian Nicieza, pencilied by Jan Duursema) in one of their episodes and I decided to read it myself.
Point Blank is told from the point of view of Adrian Eiskalt (as I was typing this I realized “Eiskalt” is German for ice cold…comics, am I right?) a former East German soldier who seeks revenge against Magneto (who is supposedly dead at this point in the comics, but pretty much nobody in-universe buys that) for killing his brother in the aftermath of a big ol’ battle.
Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that the comic explores Magneto as a complicated character, and both his and Adrian’s grief over their tragic pasts. 1Speaking of which, this issue was supposed to tie together Magneto’s backstory: here it’s stated that Magneto was named Erik Lensherr and was of Romani descent. Both of these facts would be retconned away later and Magneto is now canonically Jewish as he had been implied to be up until this comic. Apparently, the editorial staff was afraid that having a Jewish villain would seem anti-Semitic, which calls into question why having a Romani villain wouldn’t be racist in a different direction, but uh….it’s a great comic otherwise. It’s a very mediative, self-contained story, and it’s easily available through digital outlets.