Gold Rush!

I grew up a Marvel fan for the most part and what I knew of the Marvel Universe like everyone else was found in their countless comics produced over decades. Then at last I wearied of the chase and the comic universe the MU had become was not recognizable. Many years before Marvel had at long last found success in the movie theaters with series like Blade and The X-Men, and later the Avengers cycle. As I drifted farther and farther from the comics the movies became the centerpiece of what I know as the Marvel Universe. And in that cinematic universe much is made of the uber villain Magneto and his beginnings as a waif who loses nearly everything in the monstrous death camps of the Nazis. The films have made an empathetic character out of the villain if not at all times a sympathetic one. That began in this comic. 

Written by Chris Claremont and drawn by the late Dave Cockrum, this X-Men story finds the team in the middle of one of their never ending sagas while inside the mind of Professor Xavier a different battle is going on. We see in his memories a time twenty years before when he was helping Holocaust survivors come to terms with the suffering they'd endured. He meets a man named Magnus and slowly they learn that they both are mutants. The arrival of an up and coming Hydra causes them to fight together to save a young woman who holds the secret of vast gold reserves in her war scarred psyche. It's a good tale, not a great one, but making Magnus a survivor of Auschwitz utterly transform a villain who to that time was largely a cruel enigma. 

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