The X-Axis: State of the Nation
It’s been a while.
This, of course, is a happy side effect of Marvel deciding to have two line-wide break points in 2015 – at the start and end of Secret Wars – giving nice long breaks where everything’s in mid-storyline and I can put my feet up and recharge. Because the current relaunch has rolled out so slowly, we should get back to a more regular schedule from here on – Uncanny X-Men launched this week, just as Extraordinary X-Men is about to finish its first arc. Soon we’ll be back to five regular X-books – Uncanny, All-New, Extraordinary, Wolverine and Old Man Logan.
That’s still taking us back to the levels of 1989. For better or worse, after a long period of treading water, it does feel like the X-Men are entering a new phase of their history – one that’s going to be based around adjusting to reduced circumstances in more ways than one.
I’ll talk about the individual books as we get to them, but let’s look at the bigger picture. The line-wide angle for mutants after Secret Wars is that the Terrigen Mists are apparently going to wipe out mutants by poisoning and sterilising them, so the mutants are all being driven into retreat, and, oh yes, everyone hates mutants again, like they did before and pretty much every year since 1963, but this time extra-specially so. Meanwhile, the Inhumans are in the ascendancy instead, and I guess by implication we’re meant to take it that Marvel’s typical bigot on the street isn’t so bothered about them, given how especially fired up he apparently is about mutants right now.
I say this is the line-wide edict. Actually, thus far, only Extraordinary and Uncanny are really working with it (and both are making it the core of their series). All-New X-Men and All-New Wolverine are… yeah, pretty much ignoring it. But Marvel as a whole are big on it. It’s being used in Uncanny Avengers (which, no, I still don’t regard as an X-book), and New Avengers (where Sunspot’s a regular character), and even Squirrel Girl has gone to the trouble of dodging it by making her Not A Mutant After All.
So Marvel are really quite keen on it. Why might that be?
Obviously, it’s not because it’s a good idea. Because it isn’t, for a variety of reasons, of which more in a bit. No, we are in the sodden drizzle of corporate synergy here.
Now, to be clear, I don’t subscribe to any sort of conspiracy theory that Marvel are trying to kill the X-books, or some such thing. If you’re trying to kill an imprint, you don’t put the likes of Brian Bendis on it, or Mark Bagley, or Humberto Ramos, or even Greg Land. Nor is it quite as simple as saying that Isaac Perlmutter, who hates all that is good and fluffy, hates everything where Fox have the film rights. Yes, he axed Fantastic Four, but that book wasn’t selling. Do you see him dialling back on Deadpool comics? No, me neither.
It’s a subtler issue. All else being equal, Marvel quite understandably see more value in the properties where they can co-ordinate across media, and the X-Men don’t fall into that category. And since they like the mutant concept but can’t use it in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they’re trying to plug the Inhumans into that gap, and that, due to the aforementioned corporate synergy, leads to the Marvel Universe Inhumans being repositioned similarly, which, well, kind of shoulders the X-Men aside and forces them into a different role.
There’s a looming problem here, which Marvel is kind of hoping will go away.
The looming problem is that we’re a couple of years into this whole Inhumans push now, and the comics-buying public remains stubbornly unmoved. On the most recent sales charts, for November, Uncanny Inhumans #2 limped in at number 59 (estimated sales 41K), compared to Extraordinary X-Men #2 at 24 (estimated sales around 65K). Not exactly great sales by X-Men standards, but even less of a market endorsement for the Inhumans. Marvel must know it, but it’s not putting them off. The philosophy seems to be: you can take a horse to water, and if the bastard won’t drink, you shove a feeding tube down its throat until it learns.
Please note, though, that the fact that Marvel are sticking doggedly by an idea that the public isn’t initially going for is not, in itself, a bad thing. On the contrary. The Marvel and DC Universes are both gerontocracies, dominated by superannuated properties which have stubbornly refused to move aside and make room for new ideas. The X-Men have no right to exist, and a strong case could be made that in a truly healthy market, the book would have ended in 1988 or so and been replaced by something entirely different. It’s long overdue, you could argue, for Marvel to start pushing some different concepts at the expense of the old guard – as they’ve been doing with Guardians of the Galaxy or Ms Marvel.
But Inhumans isn’t a new concept; it’s an equally elderly one which has never been able to carry a series, and is now being clunkily re-tooled into a cross between the X-Men and Game of Thrones in order to dovetail with Agents of SHIELD. So we find ourselves in an awkward mess where the Inhumans (who aren’t very popular) are trying to be the X-Men (which they were never designed to be), forcing the X-Men (who used to be very popular but that was a while back now) to find a new role for themselves.
It occurs to me that there are two obvious thought processes that might have led to the current direction. One is “If the Inhumans are going to be the X-Men, let’s make the X-Men the Inhumans!” So the X-Men take the mutants off to become a hidden race in their own little haven. There’s a certain poetic appeal to that, though there’s also a big practical problem, which is that the classic Inhumans formula isn’t all that popular. The other is that they’re trying to be meta and play off the idea that the readers know (or at least think they know) that the X-Men are being shouldered aside by the Inhumans, by making that into the plot.
Either way (or neither), that’s where we are. The X-Men are going to be Inhumans Classic for the foreseeable future. Is it going to work – at least as a short-to-medium term idea until Marvel bow to the inevitable and get the Inhumans out of their system.
As a concept, it certainly makes the heart sink. It’s not just the fact that being the Inhumans never really worked for the Inhumans either, or the fact that you can see the editorial strings – in fact, not only can you see the strings, they’re practically bedecked with fairy lights. It’s also been clumsily set up. The Terrigen Mists were released back in 2013, which makes it far too late to suddenly declare them a threat to mutants. And the whole idea that sterilisation means there will be no more mutants simply doesn’t make any sense under the ground rules of the series. Why wouldn’t existing mutants continue to manifest at puberty for 13 years to come? Why aren’t new mutants being born to regular humans, just like always?
It’s also far too similar to the “no more mutants” storyline that came out of House of M, which was a few years back now, but by no means outside the statute of limitations for repeating a story in which (i) mutants face extinction, and (ii) the remaining ones all end up living together in a little haven. And it’s not like the previous storyline was even any good – in fact, it was chronically bad until people like Mike Carey came on and starting trying to wrangle it into coherence. The concept of mutants as a small band on the verge of extinction isn’t really very interesting; it breaks most of the central metaphors that give the book its appeal. (This, again, is a long and complicated topic for another day.)
But the oddity of the X-books launched so far is that while the concept is pretty bad, the execution thus far is reasonably good. If we politely turn a blind eye to the art on Uncanny X-Men for the moment, the X-books have a very strong line-up of talent right now, and the books are making an effort to avoid some of the pitfalls of recent years, keep the tone light (except in Uncanny, which is the X-Force book, so fair enough), and extend an olive branch of goodwill to sceptical long-time readers.
So there’s a conscious effort to bring out some familiar concepts and villains to establish continuity with the past. All-New X-Men turns out to be a cheerful teen hero road trip book which pretty much couldn’t care less about the Terrigen stuff so far. It’s a neat little thing, which reminds me of the Moore/Pollina X-Force stories from the 90s, and that’s a pleasant surprise. All-New Wolverine, with X-23 as the new lead, has lightened her up too – if anything, a bit too quickly, but hey, a post-moping X-23 is certainly a more enticing prospect to read about. Uncanny, well, that’s where we’re going to town on the darkness, but it’s a book fronted by Magneto and in some ways carrying on from his solo series, so what do you expect. And Extraordinary is, you know, the actual X-Men, actually doing something about the problem.
This is important, because it’s where both Bendis and the “No More Mutants” arc went wrong – in giving the actual core X-Men nothing to do, even when something dramatic came up that plainly needed solved. This time round, there’s a sense that the X-Men are really looking for a solution and that maybe they’ll find one. Unexpectedly, Lemire’s stories, for all that they have to work with the dodgy premise, and despite a couple of questionable elements that I’ll come to in future posts, have the sense of the X-Men as a family on the ropes. They’re closer to the spirit of Claremont than anything we’ve had in ages. There’s something about the feel of the book that I really like, even when there’s a lot of more concrete things that look dodgy.
I still don’t like the direction but, and very much to my surprise, I’m pretty pleased thus far with the opening shots from the relaunched books. So far, it’s overcoming my antipathy to the Inhumans. How sustainable that’s going to be, well, that could be another matter. They’ve persuaded me, or at least got me to consider the possibility, that this can be made to work – or worked around – for a year or two. The line looks healthier than I expected, even if that comes with a big asterisk and a footnote reading “despite the central premise”, which is a hell of a caveat.
But they’ve persuaded me to give it some time. As the books start wrapping up arcs over the coming weeks, we’ll see how this pans out.
I will again use my Inhumans = Roman Reigns analogy.
Both ideas from above pushed down fans’ throats who as of now dont really want it.
But with the Inhumans, people can vote with their wallets. Since marvel is really an IP loss leaders for the Mouse, it prob would take catastrophic sales for them to totally pull the plug.
I wouldn’t rule catastrophic sales out, to be honest. And it’s not as if the book actually needs to be successful for a movie to work. Look at Big Hero 6.
I’m reading five Marvel titles right now (including All New X-Men and New Avengers), where a few months ago I was reading one and thinking of dropping that. So the line must be doing something right. Mind you, I’m not paying any more attention to What Cyclops Did or the ∞ Is For Extinction thing than I absolutely need to.
By the way, was there actually a story published in which Cyclops attacked the Inhumans and died, and I missed it? Or was that supposed to happen in UXM #600 and for some reason didn’t? I have to admit I’m feeling a little left out.
That’s in the eight month time jump after Secret Wars, but they seem to be implying that they’ll get to it soon.
> Soon we’ll be back to five regular X-books – Uncanny, All-New, Extraordinary, Wolverine and Old Man Logan.
Six – an X-Men ’92 ongoing is coming (hence the “1992” variant cover month, most of which don’t feature designs used in 1992. Hell, the Captain Marvel one is based on a design from 2003!). Plus the odd mini, like Deadpool/Cable: Split Second [I gave in and read the digital version out of impatience and was disappointed. The ending was downright incoherent.]
X-Men ’92 is out of continuity, so it doesn’t count for my purposes.
It’s still part of the line. You wouldn’t count Spider-Gwen and Web Warriors as ongoing Spider-books?
To be fair, the characters of Spider-Gwen and Web Warriors both have the distinction of having crossed into the regular Marvel U in a non-Secret Wars capacity. The Web Warriors all first appeared in the main Spider-Man book, and Spider-Gwen’s established Spider-Woman as a mentor. X-men ’92 isn’t that close, yet.
And now I’m debating someone else’s subjective comic book categorization. This may not be a productive use of a Friday night.
David, the Cyclops thing is deliberately unrevealed at present. A lot of the books talk about it, but never say what it is. Not a bad marketing ploy, actually.
I actually did enjoy the original premise for the Inhumans. I never found them sympathetic enough to work as an A-list series, but an intriguing concept to throw out as a C-list book every decade or so.
I can’t say I’ve been enjoying the new concept for the Inhumans.
I’m currently reading Uncanny Inhumans, and it’s decent. It doesn’t have the feel of a book that will draw in readers. It still seems like a C-list series, but not as interesting as the old status quo.
I think Marvel will find people growing less interested in the Inhumans by the month. I think readers who at least liked the old Inhumans will be like me, and not enjoy the changes as much. Meanwhile, I don’t see why new readers would want to rush to buy these new Inhumans books.
As I said, Uncanny Inhumans is fine, but it’s certainly not one of the best written or most creative comics at Marvel.
If Mike Carey were still here, then the premise probably wouldn’t have been so dodgy.
And true- for all we know, this status quo could be like Superior Spider-Man: here to last a year or two before things were restored to pre-Secret Wars levels.
The concept of mutants as a small band on the verge of extinction isn’t really very interesting; it breaks most of the central metaphors that give the book its appeal. (This, again, is a long and complicated topic for another day.)
Isn’t this exactly the long and complicated topis for today? If the current set-up breaks the key aspects of the X-Men, isn’t that “The State of the X-line”?
Maybe a sequel column is in order.
Ditched the x-books (except ANW) after ex-x 1. The whole central premise sucks and we just finished up with No More Mutants. Who gives a fuck about the Inhumans. Piss off, marvel.
“…it breaks most of the central metaphors that give the book its appeal.”
Those metaphors were garbage anyway, regardless of how well they worked. X-Men comics always painted human beings who feared the implications of random people being assigned superpowers as irrational bigots. The idea that ordinary, powerless people might actually have good reason to be afraid of this sort of thing was inadmissable. If mutants as depicted in the MU existed in the real world, damn right I’d want them identified and preferrably isolated. And the existence of a group of good-natured mutants like the X-Men doing good deeds would do nothing to convince me that I have nothing to be concerned about.
The X-Men almost never worked as a metaphor because of that very reason.
The metaphor is for real world misplaced, exaggerated, or outright irrational fears.
Marvel tries to create those same kinds of situations with mutants, but Marvel-style mutants are an undeniable very real danger. Marvel can write stories about unwarranted hatred, such as an [insert mostly useless power] mutant getting lynched. But in the end, that story is being told in a universe where hundreds of mutants have the ability to single-handedly cause catastrophic destruction. Some can do it on a whim. Some can do it *unintentionally*. And new ones can develop anywhere at anytime. You could wake up to find your family are now puddles of goo because some 13-year old kid on the other side of the world happened to come into his powers and had a nightmare.
Heck, Marvel has already repeatedly shown mutants developing or revealing new abilities, so even mutants with known nearly useless powers aren’t “safe”. After all, that guy who can currently only change the color of his skin might one day start projecting a 50 meter radius death field.
That’s the same reason a lot of people said Civil War didn’t work as any sort of real-world analogy.
The same line of thinking could reasonably be applied to any superheroes, and not just mutants.
I think that the issue being raised is about “mutants as the next stage in human evolution” rather than “mutants as repressed minority”.
The “repressed minority” metaphor is still readily being used with the new direction.
The metaphor works in the Marvel Universe because the general public of the 616 seems to treat all the other thousands of artificially super-powered individuals without the same amount of hatred, despite the number of times they’ve demolished entire city blocks. Or cities, for that matter.
The humans of the MU draw the same arbitrary distinctions between them and mutants that the people of our universe do based on race, religion, sexuality, etc.
A Muslim with a bomb is dangerous. Should we condemn all Muslims? A black man with a gun is dangerous. Do we justly fear all black men with or without guns?
The fact that a mutant’s danger is in his biology, not in the technology he has access to is irrelevant. It’s character that counts, not the possibility of danger.
I think that it does work at the level of metaphor, yes. I just think that certain things need to be taken as given in a superhero universe and not thought in to too deeply.
Bigots in our world feel justified in their thinking as well.
They feel that gay people are going to lead to the breakdown of society.
They feel that a person of a different race is going to destroy their own culture.
People who don’t share those prejudices may be confused and say, “That’s not an actual threat”. Yet, to those who think that way, gay people or other minorities are a very real threat.
Perhaps the metaphor works best when you have mutants like Magneto or Avalanche who could actually destroy civilization.
Meanwhile, humanity in the Marvel Universe hates a mutant who has really big eyes and wants to see them in a concentration camp just because of their being born different.
Isn’t it too easy to just paint anti-mutant bigots as paranoid psychos? Isn’t it better when you can argue that anti-mutant bigotry might almost seem sensible?
Without even realizing it, I made a point about how anti-mutant prejudice works well as a metaphor for persecuted minorities.
It’s very true that people like Iron Man are judged by their actions, unlike mutants.
Even though Iron Man’s vigilantism has destroyed cities, he’s still seen as a hero by most.
Isn’t it very true that a white man with a gun may be treated differently than a black man with a gun? Both could potentially use that power wrongly, but bigotry will see one as threatening. Very apt for how the Marvel Universe is portrayed.
“A Muslim with a bomb is dangerous”
ANYONE with a bomb is dangerous. It’s a fucking bomb! The only thing a Muslim is absolutely guaranteed to be dangerous with that most non-Muslims aren’t is a bottle of either perfume or cologne. They don’t seem to realize or care that it’s possible to apply less than half a bottle of scent to your body at a time. God help you if you ever get trapped in an elevator with a Muslim on his or her way out to a dinner date.
Sorry, but my family on my father’s side is entirely Muslim (except my half-brother who is an atheist like myself. Although he wears too much cologne as well. It’s a cultural thing) and I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but it’s not the same thing. A person has to make a conscious choice to acquire a bomb or a gun. In the Marvel Universe, nature hands out mutant powers indiscriminantly. That is VERY relevant, and my being fearful of this sort of thing is neither irrational nor does it have anything to do with bigotry.
Ideally, I’d prefer that no one (of any background) could get their hands on a bomb or a gun and I sure as hell don’t want to live in a world where people could choose to have superpowers much less acquire them spontaneously.
I don’t know. You’re sort of saying that being born with a gun on your hand is more dangerous than having to acquire a gun.
In the Marvel Universe, a person can be born with powers or they can get powers, either by accident or invention. Cyclops is born with a certain power. Peter Parker gets his powers by accident. Tony Stark creates his own powers.
I get that you’d rather see a world without guns.
Yet, in the Marvel Universe, Iron Man is cheered. The X-Men are feared and hated. Iron Man can do just as much damage as Cyclops though.
I think it shows by Marvel logic that mutants do work as a metaphor for persecuted minorities.
What if Iceman just wants to make pretty ice sculptures with his power? He has no interest in being a vigilante or breaking the law.
Because he is born as a mutant, however, humanity will immediately hate him.
If Tony Stark invents a machine to make beautiful ice sculptures for everyone, no one will think he’s a menace.
In the Marvel Universe, Nature hands out genius indiscriminately as well. Reed Richards is a super-genius interested in exploring the nature of reality. Victor Von Doom is a super-genius interested in ruling others.
I get that the analogy isn’t perfect. A gay person can’t hurt anyone in any way differently than any other person. Some mutants have powers that can destroy a city.
That’s why I think you can’t over think things in a comic book universe too much.
“I don’t know. You’re sort of saying that being born with a gun on your hand is more dangerous than having to acquire a gun.”
Yep, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
You said Fantastic Four was axed because it wasn’t selling but it was still out-selling Inhumans, which has maintained multiple books on the market. Interesting…
“The only thing a Muslim is absolutely guaranteed to be dangerous with that most non-Muslims aren’t is a bottle of either perfume or cologne. They don’t seem to realize or care that it’s possible to apply less than half a bottle of scent to your body at a time. God help you if you ever get trapped in an elevator with a Muslim on his or her way out to a dinner date.”
Speaking of bigoted stereotypes…
I’m going to take that comment as self-deprecating but I think we’re in danger of getting sidetracked here.
On the wider point, I wrote about why this sort of story breaks the metaphor back when the No More Mutants thing happened, but it may be worth revisiting it in a future post. For present purposes, suffice to say that I think the imperfections of the metaphor are (or can be) a positive strength, but I’d need to expand at some length on why that is; and that I take the metaphor itself more broadly than some commenters here.
“I’m going to take that comment as self-deprecating”
Yes it was, thank you. I was being tongue-in-cheek about my family’s culture but I suppose I should have anticipated this would sail over the head of someone or another. But, anywho, back on point…
I just wish the X-Books would challenge the metaphor. A peaceful, ice-sculpting mutant wouldn’t invalidate the dangers in not knowing who is or who isn’t a mutant nor not knowing who can do what. The X-Men want peaceful coexistence, but only on their terms. They oppose registration. They get exasperated when humans judge mutantkind based on the actions of a few bad ones. Meanwhile their whole coexistence strategy relies on humans judging mutantkind based on what THEY do.
ANYONE with a bomb is dangerous. It’s a fucking bomb!
That’s exactly my point. ANYONE can be dangerous. Whether that danger is something you’re born with or something you acquire is, IMO, irrelevant. The character of the individual is the basis for judgment, not the potential for violence.
The actual distinction is that the person with the bomb or gun has revealed some evidence of his or her character by taking affirmative, intentional steps to make him or herself a danger; wheres the mutant has offered no such evidence of his or her character simply by virtue of being born a mutant.
Historically in America black men have been vilified as dangers to society. Even now the governor of Maine is bloviating about black men selling drugs and impregnating white girls. These racist stereotypes are based on the potential danger that very few members of the group pose; but the problem with stereotypes is you judge people by involuntary group membership, rather than by their own character.
Of course, the same is true of our contemporary discourse on Muslims. At any given moment, some Muslim may commit an act of violence, but it’s unjust to judge all Muslims as a danger based on the potential for violence.
Mutant continue to work as a metaphor on that level. You have to judge each person based on their character as people, not their potential for violence. The mutant metaphor for minority discimination and oppression works perfectly fine.
Where the metaphor actually breaks down is with the X-Men themselves because they are an extra-legal militia conducting acts of great violence, murder and terror all across the globe. Back in the innocent eighties, it was easy to chalk that up to the genre requirements, along with costumes, code names and x-jets. It was easy to excuse because the X-Men only fought in self-defense, or against aliens and demons, and they “didn’t kill.” The trappings of heroism allowed the implications of vigilantism to be glossed by the writers and readers. These days, where every hero is morally murky, it’s harder to get around these problems.
Meanwhile their whole coexistence strategy relies on humans judging mutantkind based on what THEY do.
I think this is a misreading, at least in terms of what Claremont was writing.
It’s not that they want ALL mutants judged by the good actions of the X-Men. It’s that they want each mutant judged by his or her own actions; judged as individuals by the content of their character, not as members of a group. The actions fo the X-Men were held up as examples to demonstrate that you can’t assume all mutants are Magneto. They were not held up to say that there are no villains.
On the other hand, your comment about registration actually has me rethinking the position I’ve held on this matter for 20+ years. Since I feel strongly that in America we need obligatory firearm registration, and criminal and civil liability by the registered owner for harms done with their firearms, I’m wondering whether I would extend that to mutants.
Of course, a mutant would already be criminally and civilly liable for harms done with their own intentional or reckless use of their powers, just like everyone else. But say there was technology that could track damage done by a mutant by his or her “energy signature.” Registration would be a powerful investigative tool, right? Like a DNA database.
Of course, in America we don’t keep a DNA database of everyone just in case they commit a crime. That would offend our notions of liberty. Mutant registration is similar; unless you’ve proven yourself to have he character for violence or unlawfulness, you are entitled to be free from government intrusion.
It’s distinguishable from guns on the level of voluntariness. Someone who elects to own a gun, IMO, forfeits a modest degree of liberty, and should be required to register. In contrast, a mutant has no elected his or her powers, and therefore has not voluntarily forfeited any liberty.
I’m reasoning on the fly here. I’m not rally sure where I fall on this issue (as pertains to mutants; I’m quite persuaded as pertains to guns).
I’ve often wanted to read and then write the story of Mark Henning, PR consultant. His mutant power is just to make things appear a tiny bit better, so he’s great at his job.
And his biggest misery? That the X-Men and the Brotherhood have some of the most photogenic young people in the world, a set of terrible hard luck stories, and are under attack by guys like Bolivar Track and Senator Kelley, who have all the appeal of Cholera.
Take the Days of Future Past film. Peter Dinklage seems untrustworthy enough when he’s not dissecting war veterans and you have a Holocaust survivor and a girl whose power is being able to look like an adorable traumatised Jennifer Lawrence. She starts crying about how the horrible man carved up her friends while he’s stoically comforted by a upper-class New York set, and the Sentinel program is buried for 20 years.
But no, Magneto, you should absolutely *shoot* her. How could that possibly backfire?
“Yes it was, thank you. I was being tongue-in-cheek about my family’s culture but I suppose I should have anticipated this would sail over the head of someone or another. But, anywho, back on point…”
Shitty examples usually do fly over most people’s heads.
“You said Fantastic Four was axed because it wasn’t selling but it was still out-selling Inhumans”
Out of curiosity, by how much?
I’d really prefer that we don’t get into a slanging match over that comment, and we leave it there for now.
On Inhumans/FF, I don’t have the figures to hand but the obvious difference is that Inhumans is being pushed as a likely movie property by Marvel themselves. But the commercial logic is bound to assert itself at some point unless sales pick up.
There’s currently too much real-world discussion about rejecting Syrian refugees (or any Muslims) from certain countries because of their religion and the actions of other people of that religion to say this metaphor doesn’t work.
And besides that, it doesn’t have to be an exact one-to-one match on every level to work as a metaphor. That’s why they’re metaphors.
Also, wasn’t the “oppressed minority” metaphor at its height when a) the number of mutants was relatively small to begin with and b) those mutants hadn’t been powered up to insane levels. I’m thinking of Claremont’s original run here. Even counting up all the known mutants in 1983 probably netted you fewer than “the 198” that later defined the mutant population.
And the only mutants with really vast power sets were Jean (who suffered and died because of how she abused her powers) and villains the X-Men were fighting to contain (e.g., Magneto, Proteus).
It’s possible I’m being selective with my examples here, so correct me if I’m wrong. But the metaphor seems more reasonable when the X-Men characters had weaker powers that exhausted them if they were used for too long. Storm could summon a blizzard, sure, but then she’d be wiped out for a while after. Even Cyclops and Havok were not nearly as powerful as they became in later stories.
My point, I suppose, is that mutants were a lot more human during the time when Claremont was making his big statement about oppressed minorities, so maybe the metaphor fit better back then. Also, maybe the metaphor is broken today for more than one reason. I’d say that having a lot more mutants running around with oversized power sets is probably a better cause for alarm than when “hated and feared” was a real central theme of the X-Men books.
I think where the metaphor really comes into interesting strain is that it would actually work a lot better if mutants didn’t have to exist in a superhero universe. Then it would be a lot easier to have noncombat, nonthreatening mutants without constantly having writers to upgrade them or write them out.
It’d also reduce the amount of mutant-on-mutant violence, which is a questionable way to go if you ever want them to mirror real repressed groups. Between the Legacy Virus, the Morlock Massacre, Cassandra Nova, and Scarlet Witch, the biggest threat to mutants is frequently other mutants.
*oppressed groups, not repressed groups. Although if Cyclops is involved…
@Thom,
I do think you’re right that during the heyday of Claremont 1.0, most mutants were generally more comparable to a guy-with-a-gun, or at worst, a guy-with-a-conventional-bomb. In contrast, many now are more like a guy-with-a-nuclear-arsenal, which does change the equation a bit.
I’ve seen people repeatedly refer to the Inhumans’ current status quo as a mash-up of Game Of Thrones and X-Men, but I somehow feel like the comics themselves don’t do enough with either idea. The Game Of Thrones idea seems really appealing – imagine the Utopia-era X-Men being one of only half a dozen mutant nations that have vastly different relationships with the public, for example – but it’s never really come to the fore in the book, which has characters doing fairly boring, typical things.
The X-Men are every outsider finding a way to express themselves and being accepted by a family of such outsiders. The Inhumans are really an ancient race that has managed to preserve its ways by shutting the world out. Ideally, an Inhumans book would reflect less of X-Men’s Civil Rights era bravura and focus more on, say, China’s transition from a communist to a capitalist nation in the 20th century and how that’s going to effect the shape of the world in the future. It should be a book about America’s fear of foreign nations encroaching on its borders and affecting its culture, not a book about Black Bolt fighting Kang… right?
Maybe it’s difficult to do that, though, without making the Inhumans themselves feel like villains or genuine threats to American culture.
I still mourn for the Matt Fraction Inhuman book we lost. Fraction’s work at Marvel wasn’t always amazing, but it was always interesting. And perhaps Inhuman would have been the perfect place for him to really explore the premise of Utopia that he introduced in X-Men, but in a way that wasn’t him being pushed around by editorial linewide re-direction every few months.
A Muslim walking into an airport with a bomb will probably be arrested. Is that oppression of all Muslims with bombs?
Does that black man with a gun in his hand have the proper government registrations and permits to hold that gun in his hand? If not, he faces various legal repercussions. Even if he has the paperwork that lets him carry that gun, then he can still face legal repercussions for walking into a bank or a school while holding that gun in his hand, unless he has additional government authorizations that allow him to do so. Is that oppression of all black men with guns?
There, I’ve now made a point about how anti-mutant prejudice doesn’t work well as a metaphor for persecuted minorities. At least as long as you believe persecuted minorities shouldn’t face mandatory government registration and regulation, be denied access to various areas without government authorization, face the risk of government imprisonment and/or execution, and the like.
Except this assumes that the parallel needs to be exact, which is very debatable. But more on that in a future post.
The difference is that the person with the gun or the bomb has chosen to arm themselves with a gun or a bomb; that affirmative action is a behavior that can and should be regulated in a variety of manners.
The mutant has taken no affirmative action suggesting aggression or violence.
If government wants to regulate mutants with registration or whatever, that will inevitably infringe the liberty innocent people.
I’ve really enjoyed all three new X-Men books, but that might be because I’m not used to reading an X-Men comic and expecting things like story momentum, speaking roles for all members of the cast, dialogue with more voices than the back of a high school football field’s bleachers, and the potential for things that happen in the first act to be credibly resolved or at least referenced in the third.
We’ll see how I feel once the honeymoon period ends and these scripts can be compared to other comics with at least a perfunctory level of craft.
So… let me get this straight — you think X-Men should have been canceled 3 years before you started reading it?
I was reading the X-books before 1991.
And even if he was saying that the X-Books should have been cancelled before he started reading them, so what?
You don’t need to have been born before 1965 to know that when the Fonzz jumped over the shark…well…
I think the big problem with the X-books (and the broader MU in general, actually) is that it doesn’t feel organic anymore. Maybe I’m getting old and jaded, or maybe This is actually the case, but it feels like everything is perpetually in Big Event mode, but actually just moving in circles.
I think in a lot of ways, the comics are a victim of their own success. In the first Claremont era (similar to Lee on Spidey), we were in new territory. The comics were a huge success because they were dynamic and unpredictable. As the characters became “iconic,” and as Marvel tried to draw in New readers from other media, they wanted to keep everything recognizable, but the result of that was that growth ceased. Compare the evolution of the X-Men from Uncanny #94-#280 vs everything from 1991 to present. With a few exceptions, it all just feels tired and repetitive.
Lots of interesting comments on Mutants working as a metaphor. My own thoughts are that mutants can work as a metaphor for oppressed minorities but that’s hindered by being part of the Marvel Universe and how its past misuse.
It is rational for people to fear people who have dangerous abilities they might not be able to control. That said, currently there are people who are not able to control our own human abilities.
While a parent in the X-verse might fear for their child’s safety if going to school knowing that one of their classmate’s might manifest an aggressive ability they cannot control, there have been enough school shootings that you might argue parents should be concerned about classmates with psychiatric conditions (which is relatively common). Likewise, rape and grooming are relatively common. Stronger and more powerful people do hurt others.
Granted, we enter a different situation when it comes to mutants who can destroy entire cities (especially from the position of government) but that’s not an essential part of the metaphor and if such creatures are relatively rare and the catastrophes less so, it should not hinder the metaphor.
Another aspect that should work is the way in which mutants – as a group – challenge existing privileged groups. If you’ve invested in oil, then you should probably be scared if suddendly there are people who can teleport or produce, clean renewable energy at high levels. If you’ve spent billions on developing military technology that’s made obsolete by a single mutant enemy soldier, then you’re in a bad position. If you lose your job as a labourer because there’s a mutant with superspeed who can do the job of your whole crew in the fraction of the time and cost, then you might feel you have good reason to be pissed off at mutants.
Mutants as a group have the potential to rock the boat in the same way that the equal rights movement for black people in the US did during the 60s – but on a larger scale.
Just a thought but, how would the NRA feel about mutants?
NRA loves mutants
On the issue of registration, one of the points that’s rarely made strongly enough these days in the comics is that many mutants have non-violent powers. Applying registration to all mutants – including healers and other passive powers – is seen as dangerous generalisation. Also, within continuity, the battle against the Mutant Registration Act was in the context of the revelations of Days of Future Past – a story with clear parallels with the Holocaust.
On Uncanny Inhumans, I bought the first couple of comics and they were totally wrong for what Marvel appear to be trying to do. Rather than bring in new readers, they are embedded in previous continuity and really difficult to get into if, like me, you know very little about the Inhumans outside of the interface with the X-Men or Avengers. A missing son, Inhumans history – bleurgh.