For this week’s Single Awareness, I wanted to use the one rare theatrical release as a chance to explore a theme. In honor of The New Mutants (2020), the patron saint of “coming soon, but not really,” I have decided to dive into the world of songs by legitimate musicians about comic book characters. There is something enjoyable about parsing through things like Snoop Dogg sampling the Batman theme, or how The Traits made the psych-pop “Nobody Love The Hulk” and realizing that celebrities are indeed like us. They enjoy these oddball characters that exist in print for generations to bond over. They’re superheroes that bring us hope, and now they get to pay their respects with their own silly ditty.
Next to Adam McKay randomly (and I mean randomly) referencing Galactus in Vice (2018), I didn’t expect to find Paul McCartney on the list of people who actually put in some effort to make an original song about three bad brothers you know so well. Yes, the man who revolutionized rock and pop music for the rest of time at one point wrote a song about, of all characters, “Magneto & Titanium Man” and The Crimson Dynamo. Why the third guy didn’t fit in the title doesn’t make sense. Then again, I’m sure one of his publishers spoke up and suggested that it was too far on the ridiculous side of the coin. Despite being a billionaire at the time, he realized that the poor Crimson Dynamo would sink his career… and nobody wants that.
Yes, McCartney out-whackied Ringo Starr on this one. Whereas his former bandmates had taken up collaborating with Cheech & Chong, Macca was onto Marvel Comics. There must have been something in the air, knowing that The Beatles song “Rocky Raccoon” was only a few years off from becoming a superhero (rebranded as Rocket Raccoon). Why else would his new band Wings get on board with this crazy idea?
While there’s little information available on the song, the album it appears on is a bit of an interesting case. Following the success of their album “Band on the Run,” McCartney decided to make a friendlier album. The big song (and likely only one you know) was “Listen to What the Man Says.” Elsewhere on the album was “Crossroads Theme,” a cover of a theme song for the British TV show of the same name.
According to Songfacts, the album was trying to go in a different direction. It’s not necessarily one that inspires a lot of hope for those who want to blame Starr for all of The Beatles’ dumber songs:
After it was released, and uncredited quote by a Wings associate who probably wanted to keep his job, said "McCartney can make albums like Band On The Run anytime he wants to. Venus And Mars is what he's actually into, though. He likes writing songs for his kids."
That’s an admirable trait, actually. Every artist who has been around long enough likely has a family and it’s clear that they want to produce music to play for their kids. That is admirable on McCartney’s behalf, especially since it backs the idea that comic books are for kids to find escapism and find joy in the heroes taking down bad guys.
As a personal reminder, I want everyone to know that this is before the uprise of writers like Alan Moore and Frank Marshall who decided that Batman needed to be, and this is a real word, “bummerific.” Batman could still be fun. The Hulk could just be a guy painted green. Captain America could throw his motorcycle onto a fence and have it stay. Things were simpler then, and it’s important when trying to figure out why oh why McCartney did this.
Okay, some of it begins to make sense when you break down the origins of each character. Magneto is easily the most recognizable of the two, having appeared as an X-Men baddie for decades now, serving as the evil opponent to Professor X, able to bend steel with his mind and use levitation to get you in a chokehold. He’s so powerful that he can make Michael Fassbender look like Ian McKellen in under 10 years (fun fact: The Roots played this song when Fassbender appeared on The Tonight Show when promoting X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)).
The other two characters may be a bit more difficult to pin down. The Crimson Dynamo appeared in Iron Man 2 (2010) as a bad guy who flew around in a metal suit. Titanium Man is also from Iron Man mythology, also flying around in metal suits. They’re also both from Russia, which should help explain how generic of bad guys they actually are. To quote John Travolta: “It’s like looking in a mirror except…not”. They’re like the good guys in every conceivable way, except they have Russian ties that were a no-go during the 1970s due to the fact that America was in the middle of a Cold War. Magneto was from Germany, so that’s only slightly more subtle.
Of course, this is all ridiculous stuff meant to make kids feel safe during a dangerous time. Much like how Captain America got people out to defend the country, these were blatant archetypes meant to symbolize the awfulness of other countries having nuclear weapons. We were going to defeat them at all costs.
Which makes it adorable that “Magneto & Titanium” man is a song about a middling robbery. The story goes that McCartney discovers that his girlfriend, a police officer, may be being brainwashed to perform a bank robbery. You best believe that Wings want to send those guys back to the U.S.S.R. where they belong. With a funky beat, things kick into gear and the song begins its journey that has an earnest level of goofiness that makes you buy into this story. It’s the type of work that makes you believe that McCartney secretly wanted to make a concept album around these characters. Could you imagine if he made The Who’s “Quadrophenia,” but about getting his girlfriend back? It would’ve been so big that he not only became the greatest musician in history, but it likely would’ve been a more significant plot point in Yesterday (2019).
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To be fair, “Venus and Mars” was not well-received for reasons like this. It wasn’t the serious follow-up that fans were expecting. Sure the musicianship was tight, the lyrics managing to tell an engaging story. It’s just weird by today’s standards because McCartney has literally written hundreds of more popular songs, all of which have been more scrutinized than this. I wish there were more scholarly essays about “Magneto & Titanium Man,” finding these red strings connecting to reveal something more personal about McCartney. I’m sure even “Wild Honey Pie” has been given 10,000 words that explain a mundane moment of his childhood.
On the one hand, I admire McCartney for writing this random song. I imagine him back in 2000, sitting in a theater for X-Men (2000) and crying as he saw his hero come to life. Deep down he may have been disappointed that he didn’t hear the song over the credits, but he probably liked that line about electrocuted toads. He’d go home, talk to Linda, and for weeks she’d be saying “Shut up with that electrocuted toad already, Paul. You won’t make it to 64 if you don’t shut up.”
Though to the credit of Wings in 1975, they were proud of this song. When they performed it live, they would unfurl a banner that showed the three supervillains standing triumphantly over the band. In all honesty, the live performance of the song is much better than the record because it manages to capture an energy and excitement, a crowd of people dorking out about this mundane robbery, living in the rare moment where McCartney could genuinely be called a nerd. As he clapped along, you clapped with him, realizing that he finally understood the common man again. It was a long and winding road, but with the help of Magneto, he reached our doors.
Even if this song has zero legacy, there is one more piece to this puzzle. When Stan Lee died in 2018, McCartney decided to write a tribute to a fallen icon. The man who created a bevy of pop culture ephemera was gone and all we had were these amazing characters that enriched our lives. Given that McCartney wrote that song, he owes a small amount of credit to Lee. After all, he made Magneto, The Crimson Dynamo, and Titanium Man. Without him, this song would not exist.
McCartney wrote:
“I was lucky enough to meet him. He came over to my office and we sat around for a while chatting about comic books and my admiration for his work. Actually he was suggesting making a superhero who would wield a Hofner bass guitar. The guitar would have super powers and we spent some time imaging what those could be. He had a great sense of humour and I must say the idea of becoming a guitar wielding superhero in one of his comic books was very appealing.”
Of course, McCartney would say that it was very appealing. It was his chance to be given immortality in a comic book. He could sit there, imagining one day that there would be a section at Guitar World where guitars explored with rays and lights, making the world understand the power of music. He’d show up to a display randomly and smile, knowing that he had a small connection to Mr. Lee. He made that real.
But that’s the fun thing about this story. It’s all so ridiculous and at the end of the day, it’s fun to imagine McCartney finally being open about his silly, trivial interests. I can’t tell you why he likes Titanium Man. He frankly sounds like a boring guy. There has to be something there that gave him hope, an eagerness to keep exploring in his imagination. That is what comic books can do, and I bet he’s secretly sad that he didn’t write “Nobody Loves The Hulk” instead. Still, it’s nice to know that he isn’t just a serious man. He is something much more complicated, and that has only played out in his favor over the decades.
I’d love to imagine that McCartney has a whole treasure trove of these oddities somewhere in his vault. I bet he penned a song about The Crazy Quilt only to have Linda tell him that it was too “out there” for his fans. He cries at night over that song, wishing the world could see his silly side again. For now, we have this one moment where things were different when bad guys could brainwash his girlfriend into being evil. Maybe that’s the whole story. Maybe Linda is under Magneto’s control and nobody but McCartney knows it. It’s hard to say. Maybe this song is much more sentimental than we think.
It’s hard to say, but I can only imagine a time when this song was on the radio. It is, after all, listed as a single. It’s likely that it was played on a double bill with Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” showing a duality in how these characters are seen. It’s fun to remember a time when comic books felt more inconsequential. Maybe The New Mutants will return us to those times. Disney is sure treating it like that.
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