Fantastical literatures have often been used as a vehicle for cultures to alleviate their anxieties, exorcise their demons, and kill their own ghosts. These fantastical means of collective therapy can take many shapes, some of which can end up being decidedly contradictory. One such example is the long-standing supervillain-turned-sometime-antihero Magneto, of Marvel Comics’ X-Men family of comics. Over the more than fifty years since his first appearance, Magneto has served as a dual threat to American empire: on the one hand, he has been an opponent of US hegemony and a thorn in its side by threatening its imperial power in myriad inventive ways; on the other, he has claimed the mantle of emperor for himself on several occasions, in ways literal and figurative. This paper looks at the many ways in which writers, artists, and editors have imagined Magneto as either a threat to empire or as himself posing the threat of imperial submission on the US. It will argue that, although these stories are very different from each other in form and content, the central figure of Magneto has remained much the same: he has served as an embodiment of various of the United States’ Others, the fears of whom his inevitable defeats have served to alleviate and the claims of whom his genocidal lunacy has served to discredit outright, allowing readers to not consider them too deeply.