‘Magneto And Titanium Man’: the Paul McCartney song inspired by Marvel Comics
While the characters and storylines that make up the glorious mess of the Marvel Comics Universe have colonised multiplexes for two and a half decades, the actual comics themselves have taken something of a backseat. It wasn’t too long ago that the books themselves weren’t just selling by the bucketload; they also had a kitschy sort of cool that they definitely didn’t have today. Coincidently enough, pretty much exactly the same kind of cool that someone they inspired in the 1970s has today, Sir Paul McCartney.
Now, for our readers in the US, there’s a slight cultural translation to be done here. In the States, many folks of Macca’s age would have grown up with the golden age of Marvel Comics. In my green and pleasant land, though, they weren’t quite as accessible. Sure, they were there if you knew where to look, but most of the time, you wouldn’t find them in your local corner shop or grocery store the way you would in America.
Instead, we had our own thriving comics press like The Beano and The Dandy. These were more built around innocent childhood hi-jinks and comedy than the superhero dramatics of American comics. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that British audiences cottoned on to what was going on in superhero comics on a more mainstream level, but for Paul McCartney, his enlightenment came the previous decade.
In the book Paul McCartney: In His Own Words by Paul Gambaccini, he recounts how he discovered Marvel Comics while on holiday in Jamaica. He says: “We’d go into the supermarket every Saturday. When they got a new stock of comics in. I didn’t use to read comics from 11 onwards, I thought I’d grown out of them, but I came back to them a couple of years ago. The drawings are great. I think you’ll find that in 20 years time, some of the guys drawing them were little Picassos. I think it’s very clever how they do it. I love the names, I love the whole comic book thing.”
Discovering these characters inspired him, and in true Macca fashion, he spun a charming narrative song out of them. Throwing Magneto, one of Marvel’s most iconic villains, together with Titanium Man. Which is thematically appropriate, I guess. Together, along with Iron Man villain Crimson Dynamo, they accompany Paul to investigate whether a lady acquaintance of theirs is actually committing the band robbery on the main street they heard she would. To their horror, they find she’s “a five-star criminal, breaking the code!”
While anorak man-children like me can poke holes in the characterisation of our beloved icons (The Master Of Magnetism bothering himself with a simple bank robbery?!), it’s a piece of silly fluff made with all the love in the world for the medium that inspired it. There’s a reason it became the B-Side to the Venus & Mars single and was often performed live on tour at the time. This didn’t go unnoticed by Marvel, who paid tribute to Ol’ Thumbs Aloft in a truly wonderful fashion.
When Wings played the LA Forum, Magneto co-creator Jack Kirby attended with his Beatlemaniac daughter Sue Kirby. The pair were given front-row seats to the show and backstage passes for afterwards. When Kirby and McCartney met, the Marvel legend presented Paul with a line drawing of Magneto with Wings in his clutches, Macca front and centre in a fetching top hat. The image can be seen here and is a fitting end to a truly heartwarming tale.
