I have to say that I was reasonably disappointed by this graphic novel. Like many collections, I was first drawn in by the cover art, here by Marko Djurdjevic, on the dust jacket. Filled with pale whites, blacks and blood reds, these cover illustrations are works of art that tell the story of the Holocaust and a young Magneto much more ably than the text and art within its pages. Said story tells the tale of a young Max Eisenhardt, our fledgling mutant dictator, and his journey from middle echelon society Germany to his fleeing the Nazis to Poland to his subsequent capture and forced labor in the Auschwitz detention camp.

Artist Carmine Di Giandomenico provides the illustrations and while he easily and fluidly displays tone and mood, he seems to falter when it comes to portraits. Even before the Auschwitz shaved heads and uniforms, the characters often need beards or radically different clothing to stand out. I honestly did a double take when, in a two panel of Max giving his love Magda an affectionate look, I thought that Max had instantaneously grown a pony tail and chopped it off in the very next second because the characters looked so similar.

Clearly, the WW II and Holocaust setting is a sensitive one and is not something that writer, Greg Pak, has taken lightly. However, what starts out as an origin story of a popular comic book villain somewhere becomes muddled in the Holocaust history lesson that this graphic novel soon becomes. This does not seem to be unintentional, as at the end of the issues there exists an appendix teaching guide. I am all for getting kids to learn the truth about the atrocities committed upon the Jewish people, but I simply can’t stand behind tacking on a few spontaneous moments of superhuman ability to sell a story about the Holocaust. To me this cheapens not only the history that people still living today have been through, but also the experience of the devout comic book reader itching to find something telling in this story about a canon favorite (I will let you be the judge of which transgression is more serious). To be honest, it also seemed to cast Max as the everyman (his powers never manifest themselves in the same dramatic way that the 2000 film “X-Men” showed them to) which seemed to say that if you gave any Holocaust survivor superpowers he would become a raving lunatic.

Much more interesting was a short story in the appendix of the graphic novel of a young girl who painted a mural of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” for the children in Auschwitz who was then forced to do portraits for Nazi officers and their families. Apparently, the woman survived the death camp and found her paintings on display at the Auschwitz Museum and they are neglecting to give them back to her. You can tell that Marvel is proud of their ability to tell this woman’s story and Stan Lee even provides an afterword, but they would have been better suited to make this black and white, five page work the main event and put the Magneto story on the back burner. In the end, in a world that already has its “Maus,” I don’t believe anyone will be wowed by Marvel’s take on the holocaust.