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Which is how it should have stayed.

One of the things I came to appreciate, as a reader, was how DIFFERENT Magneto was from Doom.

Doom's history we knew in quite intimate detail. We'd "met" his father. We knew about his mother. We'd seen his first love (slipped magically into scenes where she had not been before, rather like the Jack Black character on that episode of COMMUNITY). We understood him to have his own kind of tortured nobility, his own set of rules, which might be messed up, but to which he could be depended upon to adhere. Doom, in a really twisted way, was someone we could trust.

Magneto, on the other hand, was a cipher. We knew nothing of his background, his upbringing, his ethnic heritage. We knew nothing of his family, mother, father, wife, children. And there was no question of him being "noble" in any way. He was the complete opposite of Charles Xavier, even more than Doom was the opposite of Reed Richards. He was, in a nutshell, a complete and unabashed son of a bitch.

And I really liked that! I liked very much that Marvel villains were not the cardboard cutouts I had grown used to at DC. They had depth, they had motives (beyond Kill The Hero. But Magneto -- there was no shading to him. He wanted to enslave humankind -- and there was always that sense that having done so, he would set about enslaving the rest of homo superior, too!

Having recently read the entire original X-Men run, I totally agree.

Magneto was truly evil from the start--not a freedom fighter by any stretch. His goal was to RULE. He treated his "allies" as mere tools. He sought to impose his will upon humans and mutants alike.

Magneto was the quintessential X-Men foe because his goals were the polar opposite of theirs. We didn't need to know anything more about him than that. He was the sort of mutant the X-Men were created to stop. That's all that mattered.

While Doom and other Marvel villains were fleshed out in some detail, Magneto represented those villains who come out of nowhere and are just plain evil. The how and why is not important.

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Astonishing the number of people I have seen invoke abused child syndrome to explain this -- the abused child grows up to become himself abusive. Sure, it happens. But move that into the environment of a comic book -- especially as the backstory on a mass-murdering supervillain -- and it becomes the worst kind of insulting psychobabble.

Lee and Kirby -- both Jewish -- knew exactly what they wanted to say with that neo-Nazi imagery. In was instant and unmistakable shorthand for "This guy is the worst kind of bad."

Count Dracula was always portrayed as being noble in his own way as well, and he's murdered a lot more folks than Doctor Doom ever did.