This is "How Can I Explain?", which is a feature spotlighting inexplicable comic book plots.

A little over a month ago, I did a Drawing Crazy Patterns about Magneto's history of coming up with some ridiculously powerful machines. A few people wrote in to ask me at the time how, exactly, was Magneto so good at this stuff and, well, it's really a great question, right?

Check out some of the things that Magneto got up to during this period!

In X-Men #18 (by Stan Lee, Werner Roth and Dick Ayers), we learn that Magneto has built a machine that can use the energy from Warren Worthington's parents to create new mutants!

Thinks about that. The dude is essentially coming up with a program that could create not only life itself, but specifically mutant life, just based off of the energy from two otherwise ordinary human beings, with the only thing powering the machine being the fact that the Worthingtons apparently have within them the capacity to create the X-Gene in another person. That's insane. That's, like High Evolutionary type stuff. That's like Doctor Frankenstein level stuff.

Of course, the crazy thing is that is probably not even the most amazing thing that Magneto was able to pull off. Less than 50 issues later, in X-Men #62 (by Roy Thomas, Neal Adams and Tom Palmer), Magneto discovers a dead Angel in the Savage Land and puts him into a machine that can actually bring dead people back to life! Yes, forget LIKE Doctor Frankenstein level stuff, Magneto is OUTRIGHT doing Frankenstein level stuff here!

The sheer insanity of that level of science sort of downplays the fact that Magneto has also used his technology and genetics know how to actually turn non-mutants throughout the Savage Land into sort of mutants (mutates)...

This is a guy who knows enough about genetics that he can actually mutate human beings and turn them into powerful mutates! He practically created his own race of people!

Later, he comes across an ancient language in Defenders #15 (by Len Wein, Sal Buscema and Klaus Janson) that I believe is connected to the Deviants (the ugly version of the Eternals) and Magneto, of course, can read ANCIENT LANGUAGES...

He then uses the information that he learned from the ancient alien technology to grow his own super-powerful mutant (although, since we already saw him basically do that in X-Men #18, it is a bit less impressive. I guess the idea is that this mutant is more powerful than the other ones that he was growing in X-Men #18?)...

The Defenders try to stop him but they fail and he does, in fact, create Alpha, the Ultimate Mutant!

That backfires spectacularly for him when Alpha turns on him and reverts Magneto to infancy, but hey, the fact that he created him is amazing enough!

Okay, so that's the thing - if Magneto is such an amazing geneticist, we must have seen him get some crazy good schooling, right?

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We actually have seen most of Magneto's history, from his tragic early years in a concentration camp during World War II (which we learned from Classic X-Men #19 by Chris Claremont and John Bolton)...

to his escape...

We see him work odd jobs while he gets married and has a kid. They travel to the Soviet Union in the hopes of Magnus studying in the university, but instead, he has to take a menial job and a corrupt Communist won't even pay him a fair wage. So he scares him with his power and that backfires, as the people then set fire to Magnus' home, killing his daughter...

He retaliates and kills all of them, leaving his wife disgusted by him (she is also pregnant with twins)...

We next see Magnus when he is volunteering with survivors of the Holocaust in a flashback in Uncanny X-Men #161 (by Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Bob Wiacek) and he meets Charles Xavier...

Charles has actually had a lot of schooling, so when he is called a genetics expert, that makes sense.

He and Charles help fight some Nazis, but they split over their purposes, with Magnus taking some Nazi gold and going off to use his powers to hunt Nazis...

We see him hunting them later on in Classic X-Men #12 (by Claremont and Bolton)...

We also see that he has learned that Charles has become a teacher and it sure doesn't seem like Magnus has had any extra schooling...

He then is compelled to officially become a supervillain after he is attacked while on his Nazi-hunting mission...

Then, of course, he was Magneto and he fought the X-Men.

So when did he have time to become a world class geneticist? It's not a big deal, of course, but it is still pretty funny how he just pull GENETICS STUDY out of nowhere.

If anyone else has a suggestion for an inexplicable plot point, write me at brianc@cbr.com!