Fallen Angels #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and the page numbers go by the digital edition.
COVER / PAGE 1. Pin-up art of Psylocke and Cable. Is it just me, or is Psylocke’s left arm bent at a very strange angle?
PAGES 2-3. X-23 recruits Cable, Husk and Bling! as her squad.
Cable has been in this book all along; he’s a bit shaken by his encounter with the wraith thing from the previous issue, but mainly he wants to stop Apoth from “ending all difference”, which he considers genocidal. Despite this being the penultimate issue, however, he’s joined by two characters we haven’t seen before in this book.
Husk. This is the first time we’ve seen Paige Guthrie since she was killed and resurrected during House of X. She’s a weird character to use in this book. Psylocke and X-23 are here because they don’t really function well as part of Krakoan society; Cable is a bit of an outsider too, given his very different background and recent arrival in this timeline. But Husk has always been a very enthusiastic team player, even during her periods of instability. She seems to be here because she understands Krakoa’s policy to be that mutants no longer take action against threats that only affect humans, and she’s not comfortable with that.
Bling!. This is the first time we’ve seen Bling! in the Krakoa era; she was last seen in Age of X-Man: NextGen. Before that, she was a main character in the last run of Generation X. Roxy Washington was created by Peter Milligan and Salvador Larroca, and debuted in X-Men #171 (2005); she’s supposed to be the daughter of two famous rappers, but nobody’s ever really done anything with that. Bling! isn’t exactly an obvious fit for this book either; she’s a recognisable face who’s hung around on the fringes of the X-Men for over a decade with relatively few chances to take centre stage. The only reason she gives for joining the group is that she doesn’t trust Krakoa – she gives no reason why not. Maybe we’ll get to it. The common theme here seems to be not so much an inability to fit in on Krakoa, but a distrust of the place and its attitude (in a population which mostly seems to be suspiciously on board with the whole radical agenda).
“We’re not X-Force. We’re unofficial.” An obvious question is why the Apoth affair has to be dealt with by an unofficial team. Presumably the official Krakoan line is that they leave it to the humans and the other superhero teams to deal with threats to humans. Most likely, this is partly a matter of the X-Men choosing their priorities, and the Quiet Council not wanting rogue Krakoan vigilantes screwing up their diplomatic policies. Still, there’s no obvious reason why the X-Men wouldn’t at least pass on a warning about Apoth to the Avengers or the Fantastic Four (and while he may not be a threat to the mutants on Krakoa, due to their technological isolation, he’s still a threat to mutants living in the wider world).
PAGES 4-5. Recap and credits. This is “Sensei” by Bryan Hill and Szymon Kuranski.
PAGES 6-7. X-23 reports back to Psylocke.
Psylocke’s vision. For whatever reason, X-23 has apparently waited until now to discuss with Psylocke the vision that she had at the end of the previous issue. According to Psylocke, her vision was of some sort of opposite of Apoth (or maybe the side of him that disapproves of his actions) which is trying to give her a chance to defeat him. She largely declines to try and make sense of it beyond that.
Psylocke brings up the topic of God, and then says that as a child, she would have called the vision “kami”. In other words, it’s something that would have been venerated in Shinto, presumably the religion that she was raised in. So she seems to be comparing her vision to a religious experience, though she may simply mean that it’s the sort of thing she would have interpreted that way in the past – but Apoth has also been keen to draw religious parallels.
PAGES 8-12. Mr Sinister gives Psylocke a device which can track Apoth when he’s nearby.
According to Sinister, the Overclock devices contain a gateway through which Apoth can access users’ minds, and he has allowed Psylocke to reverse the process. He claims that this has to be tested through some insanely dangerous and incredibly painful test, which Psylocke signs up for without hesitation – either because she doesn’t believe him or she has something of a death wish. Either way, it does work, and she sees Apoth and the wraith causing rioting in Dubai. Asked why she’s bothering with any of this, Psylocke makes a cryptic comment that her conscience is driven by her new sense of purpose.
PAGE 13. Flashback. Kwannon’s teacher invites Kwannon to kill her as a final lesson.
The teacher’s role is complete, and her death is partly intended to cement Kwannon as a killer. Going back to the butterfly motif, this is presented as Kwannon’s metaphorical emergence from the chrysalis.
PAGES 14-15. Data page. An extract from the teacher’s journals, making the same basic point: she’s raised Kwannon to make her into a killer for the Hand.
“I am the reflection of Bishamon.” Bishamon is a Japanese war god, though usually presented as a noble and heroic protector figure.
PAGES 16-17. Psylocke considers approaching Captain Britain, but doesn’t.
Psylocke indicates here that she can still feel Betsy and will “forgive” her once they are finally separate. Obviously part of the idea here is Psylocke’s resentment at the idea that she’s very closely similar to the woman who she sees as having stolen her identity; it undermines her sense of individuality, even though she seems to realise that she can’t really hold any of this against Betsy, who had no hand in it.
PAGES 18-22. X-23 trains with the team, and Psylocke introduces her to the team.
“She always this dramatic?” The problem is that Psylocke’s tone is the tone of the whole series.
“My daddy died in a coal mine.” EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is wrong, at least if you take it literally – Paige’s father died of black lung (pneumoconiosis). That was established back in Marvel Graphic Novel #4, the first appearance of her big brother Sam. Somebody may be confusing it with the mine collapse which takes place in that story (but which befell Sam, not the father).
PAGES 23-24. Magneto approves of Psylocke’s mission and gives her a jet plane.
“When I was a boy in the camps…” Magneto is implicitly comparing his own traumatic childhood to Psylocke’s as a formative event. He sticks to the official line that the Krakoans have no interest in saving humanity for itself, but given what we know about the significance of posthumanity in House of X and X-Men, he probably has wider reasons for approving of Psylocke going after a rogue AI.
Magneto appears to have been keeping a fully functional hi tech jet buried under Krakoan soil, where there isn’t supposed to be regular technology. The Krakoan authorities must surely know about this; Krakoa itself would notice.
PAGE 25. Apoth prepares to face Psylocke and co.
Basic set-up.
PAGES 26-27. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: APOTH.
For the life of me I can’t understand who this book is for. For that matter I can’t understand why Revanche (still not calling her Psylocke) is being pushed as a central character. What exactly is her appeal?
I really wish they would have used Secret Wars to clean up awkward continuity instead of adding to it with Old Man Logan’s and Miles Morales but not really with no clear backstory.
Psylocke could have just been reconnected to have always been an actual Asian woman, problem solved.
Now we have a Betsy that’s not recognizable in look or personality and this weird knock off Psylocke.
Trying to retcon Betsy as having been Asian all along would never, ever have worked. It’s not the sort of retcon which sticks, nor “fixes” things because of the real world history involved. (Not to mention, you would also have to retcon her twin brother for good measure)
As for why revert Betsy to white and push Kwannon? There have been suggestions that it’s largely because of the whole C.B. Cebulski (current Marvel EiC)-as-“Akira Yoshida” thing making Betsy-as-Asian-Psylocke too close to the mark; but there’s also been more general backlashes against giving Asian parts to whites in recent years.
Either way, a white woman “cosplaying” as Asian is now sufficiently far away from the zeitgeist of acceptability that it’s not surprising it’s been reversed at some point. And they “need” to push Kwannon to show that they’re not just fixing it by removing Asians from the X-Men.
What real world history?
I agree that trying to make her Asian off the bat would be messy as she has a backstory that involves a half mad brother and all that. But their approach is not any better. Psylocke, the name, is tied to Betsy’s history and the key stories she has been in. Like Remender’s.
I sense that they want to do a passing of the torch from Betsy to Kwannon and clean it up that way but putting her in a D grade book was not the answer. She also has had zero interactions with the high profile X-Men. If Marvel seriously wanted to do this, she needed to be given high profile exposure in one of the main titles in order to cement the new status quo. This book is bad and the execution is terrible.
And if stereotypes are such a big issue, this book is just as bad. The asian ninja raised as a killer plot has been done to death and most certainly a worn out trope (done badly in this book on top of that).
Adrian> What real world history?
The fact that she started out as a white woman who was “yellowwashed” in-story. In-continuity retcons don’t remove that context.
“My daddy died in a coal mine.”
According to Uncanny X-Men’s classic “She Lies With Angels” by Chuck Austen, Husk’s daddy actually died by slow poisoning by the evil Cabot family, not black lung. Saying he died in a mine is not technically a retcon, but god, I hate that story.
As probably the one person in the universe who was excited about this book when it was first announced, I feel I am uniquely qualified to answer the question of who this book might have been meant to appeal to, at least based on the solicitations.
I don’t think Kwannon as a character has any inherent appeal because, despite her brief appearance in a handful of issues nearly 30 years ago, she’s basically a new character. Given how much of a blank slate she is, though, I was rather hoping the creative team would take the opportunity to just reinvent her from the ground up and give her a unique, vibrant personality.
Had they done that, this book would essentially have been for me, and this is where it gets very personal.
I grew up Asian in a very small community where my family were the first non-whites. This was decades ago, and the attitudes were very different, so it’s difficult to describe what that was like in a way people will believe.
I wasn’t just bullied as a child. I was physically assaulted daily, not just by the students but by the faculty as well. Teachers would routinely tell the other kids that I was inherently evil and had no soul (religious community) and call me racial slurs in class instead of by my name.
This experience, I think, is what made me gravitate toward the X-Men at that age, and I particularly liked Psylocke, yes, because of her race. She was a good-guy Asian who wasn’t an annoying kid like I read Jubilee to be and who wasn’t an asshole like Sunfire.
So imagine my heartbreak when a few issues in, I learn that Psylocke was never Asian, but really a white person who took the body of an Asian person and led a more virtuous life with it because that Asian, like all other Asians in that storyline, was a soulless maniac who goes around murdering people while rambling about barbaric Asian codes of honor. Because Asians are fucking terrible.
I understand everyone’s bemusement and, for some, resentment at Kwannon getting this push to replace Betsy as the one true Psylocke (I love Betsy), but I legit have been waiting for this to happen for over 20 years. For me, it was like this weird decades-old vendetta, justice finally being served!
…and then Kwannon is depicted as a soulless maniac who goes around murdering people while rambling about barbaric Asian codes of honor because Asians are fucking terrible.
Oh, well. Maybe in another 30 years…
I know editorial work isn’t what it used to be, but it’s almost hard to believe this art is getting published.
@bloodred cookie
Her appeal is getting to keep the Psylocke look’n’feel around.
Very popular in other media beyond comics.
@Dmitri
That’s a really nice post. It makes really clear the way in which you’ve encountered and perceived the Psylocke character and Marvel’s treatment of her over the years. I think that like lots of elements of this new status quo, the intent in the relaunch is very good, and the execution leaves a lot to be desired. If they had a character for Kwannon beyond Elektra meets Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, they could have done a great deal with this relaunch, like you said.
Hopefully whoever gets the character next will retcon the retcon, making Kwannon into a more vibrant and interesting character. Maybe all these boring, cliched memories she keeps experiencing throughout the series could be memories implanted in her head by Apoth or Xavier or something, and then she could develop a more unique and engaging personality once she was free of them. It would be nice to see something made of the character besides a collection of tropes. Somehow, in spite of these issues, she’s still a blank slate, I feel––I guess because it’s hard to take anything this comic is doing very seriously. Each piece of it feels so substandard, and inadequate.
Coming at it from the point of view of someone who loved the original Fallen Angels series, this really isn’t the kind of follow–up I was hoping for, for sure. I’d like it if they were able to take it back to the drawing board and start again, with a new, better creative team and a more engaging tone and take. I’ve started zoning out every time the book goes into a flashback or manifests some useless data page.
Here’s a question for anybody here: what would be a better premise for this Fallen Angles book? Say you had to use the characters we have in this issue, or maybe 2 or three more or less. A new premise, with Psylocke a central character who editorial told you that you had to launch, and essentially put over for the readers––a blank slate for which you had to develop a personality. What would be cool to do with it?
@Alan L
I haven’t actually read Fallen Angels (why am I here you ask? Well, I care so little about it that I might as well read spoilers whilst I’m at work), but I had thoughts on how I’d do this book so:
As I understand it, the high concept for this book was ‘the mutants who don’t feel at home in Krakoa’, so I’d lean into that. Each character would have a different reason for feeling ill at ease:
Psylocke: She’s only just gotten her body back, she doesn’t know who she really is anymore and now she’s on this lovey-dovey island where everything is wonderful all the time. This freaks her out.
Cable: He’s someone who was raised in war that has to survive now that he’s on the winning side of the war (okay, maybe mutants aren’t *actually* winning just yet but you could say his knowledge of the future means he can see how things are going).
X-23: Sure, she was beginning to integrate herself into society better, but Krakoa is too much, too soon.
Husk: A bit trickier. My initial thought is to have her feel weird after being resurrected, but I dunno if that’d gel with Hickman’s grand vision or not.
Bling!: She always saw herself as an outsider, and now everyone’s all together she feels the need to rebel against that to keep her sense of help. (I don’t know Bling! much at all, so forgive me if this is hilariously wild of the mark.)
Basically, it’s an impromptu support group for those who don’t buy into the cult. You can have them go out into the world and beat people up for the action (and also it’s them giving themselves something to do and an excuse to get away from Krakoa), but mostly it’s people getting together and being like ‘this is weird, right? We don’t really belong here.’
…or something. I threw that together in ten minutes, but it’s a book I’d read.
The main problem with that is it doesn’t really fit the name Fallen Angels, but you could have Magneto show up in the first issue and say something like ‘we’re trying to make you angels and you would turn your back on that?’, and then they name themselves that as a screw you?
I don’t think any significant number of people cared even a little bit about Psylocke’s race-swap. I think it was only ever vaguely problematic, and it was her status quo for the vast majority of her publication history.
Further, there’s something odd to me about the fact that they’re bending over backwards to keep this character design alive when it’s basically a one piece bathing suit and Betsy was rarely even drawn looking identifiably Japanese.
Making Betsy white again was pointless in my estimation. Duplicating her like this is worse than pointless. I still don’t understand who any of this serves other than Akira Yoshida.
@ Alan L
This would be my pitch. Since Marvel really wants to have thier cake and eat it as concerns Psylocke (and who can blame them, since visually she’s probably thier most prominent Asian Character) I would have Revanche begin experiencing flashbacks to Betsy’s life, and begin to wonder what parts of her are really hers and which parts are Betsy’s. This would make for an interesting character arc in it’s own right, and create a logical bridge for why she’s still going by Psylocke.
As for the rest of the cast, why not take the idea that they don’t buy into mutant Utopia and run with it? Have them go on the offensive and begin actively looking into what’s going on. The series could even lead into the cast becoming active opponents of the mutant State, hence them being ‘fallen Angels’ . Psylocke’s history, cable’s mistrust for authority, and Husks mental state would all make fine motivations. Bling is enough of a blank slate that she could be added to the cast without too much justification. As for X23… I’ll be honest I got nothing. She’s always been such a team player that this book isn’t really a great fit for her. Maybe she’d be the one tasked with bringing the angels in?
Also Art. It doesn’t have to be great, it just should be better. I’d even settle for just a little more color.
@Allan M: You’re right. I’ll get that changed.
This series has been such a mess. The art is terrible. While I don’t have a problem with wanting to keep a version of Psylocke around, they have found nothing interesting to do with the character except retread an “am I more than the monster they made me?!?!” story. Haven’t we already told this story a dozen times with Elektra?
The biggest problem though is the treatment of X-23. Recent writers have done so much to develop her into an interesting character, and this completely undoes all of that to make her just another stock character. I don’t even have an issue with her being suspect of Krakoa. Why not use her to examine more of Krakoan culture. Does she have any anxiety about being a “real” mutant becuase she’s a clone? How does Krakoa even treat clones? Why not use Gabby as her reason for joining the team, as Gabby doesn’t seem like the type who would just jet off to live on a weird island with a bunch of strangers.
These ideas are cool. I feel like most of us could right this ship if tasked with it. A pity that they are so committed to a story that is so antiseptic and cliched.
My own approach would be a bit like Bloodred Cookie’s approach, focusing on the world outside of Krakoa. This could be the book in which you start to explain what’s happening in the outside world, and how other people are dealing with the arrival of a mutant nation on the political stage––how geopolitics affects local places, what the drugs from Krakoa are doing in the populace––I think you could explore all kinds of things, which would in turn emphasize and deepen the Fallen Angels feelings of alienation from the Krakoan society. They’re out there helping people, solving problems, maybe even trying to avoid the Krakoan mutants, and they’re learning dangerous secrets that the Krakoans don’t want them to know (didn’t one of the books mention that Krakoa has to eat a mutant a year to survive? there could be lots of fodder for this). I’d keep the characters as they are, perhaps, but I’d work with Kwannon and X-23 a little.
I would make Kwannon be a a figure whose awesome assassin training hardly prepares her for life in the outside world. I think it would be fun to play up the hubris of this character wanting to lead a group of outcasts when her skills were all invested in killing for a big organization. I think it would be fun to keep all those allegedly “badass” flashbacks to her training in the story, but have the story around those flashbacks be one that challenges Kwannon to show compassion, to solve problems with solutions that go beyond violence, etc. So every time she has one of these flashbacks, the path it leads her on produces no good result. I think it could be a chance to mock the whole idea of these Elektra–style assassins, and have Kwannon ultimately be someone who has to learn to be a compassionate individual, to process her alienation not in terms of violence, but in terms of something productive. She could be guided in that by X-23, who relates to her as a trained killer, but also as someone who has made a more successful transition into normal life than Kwannon has. Honestly, you could even keep some of Kwannon’s horrible dialogue so long as X-23 came off a little more savvy and a little less impressed by what Kwannon was saying. There could be irony in Kwannon coming on strong as the leader, acting like she’s teaching X-23 a thing or two, when X-23 is the one helping Kwannon cope with all the stuff going on around her. And there is irony already in the idea that Kwannon and X-23 are both people who have been in the shadow of a more dominating and socially accepted X-man. I think that was supposed to be in this series––X-23 says something about living in Logan’s shadow, though that should really all be in the past at this point––but the series blows that theme in the first issue and doesn’t develop it. If these characters are really dropouts from Krakoa, they out to still be dealing with how they separate themselves from the krakoans and how they make something meaningful for themselves. The focus could be more on the Fallen Angels trying to drop out of Krakoan life, except that they keep getting caught up in the need for various superheroics in the regular, non–krakoan world. None of that would be necessarily bad to me.
Apart from the surprisingly poor level of craft in this comic, I think the biggest problem with it might be that the villain, Apoth, is totally worthless. It would be nice if there wasn’t really any overarching villain, but that the societies the fallen angles want or don’t want to be part of just can’t really fit their needs. If might be fun to find a few different characters who would really feel out of place on Krakoa, not just random ones like Husk and Cable.
@Alan L
Thank you for the kind words.
I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s pitches. Here’s mine.
Like Alex Hill, I would lean in on the “mutants who don’t feel at home on Krakoa” thing, but, since Hickman and co. seem to want the characters to buy into the notion that it’s heaven at this stage in the story, I would make it more about characters who feel like they don’t belong in heaven, hence the title Fallen Angels.
Psylocke: The central character most directly embodying the themes of low self-esteem. She actually does feel like Betsy led a better life with her body, and that’s eating at her. Like in the actual comic, she’s avoiding Betsy like the plague, but out of shame rather than resentment. So her arc would be about overcoming her Betsy-phobia, not by becoming more like Betsy as she first sets out to do (which is why she takes on the name Psylocke) but by finding the best version of herself, as it were.
Cable: The one who hides his self-loathing in utilitarianism. I would lean in on what it means that he was able to kill another largely heroic version of himself without a second thought. The idea would be that he accepts nothing less than perfection from himself, otherwise he views himself as a failure. I view this attitude as the product of being raised as a messiah of sorts with the pressure to save the word and what that does to a teenage brain.
Bling: Admittedly, the only thing that stands out to me about Bling is that she’s often depicted as having a crush on some authority figure or other? So I’d reveal that, despite having grown up with a silver spoon in her mouth, she is very much the victim of parental neglect, which has made her a bit of a co-dependent type. She gets a crush on Psylocke because that’s what she does, and her arc would be about coming to terms with why she keeps doing that and maybe confronting her parents.
Husk: I’d revert her to her Type A student persona from the original Generation X. Is it because her mind was restored from a very early backup? Is it a byproduct of the resurrection process? Paige spends most of the book trying to cheer people up and empower them with gee-willikers can-do platitudes, and her arc will be about learning to listen instead of forcing self-love on others, and admitting that she’s being like that because she doesn’t want to deal with her own shame after going crazy and joining the Hellfire Academy.
X-23: The voice of reason (who doesn’t usually voice her reasons). As someone who’s fought against outside programming her whole life, she feels more at ease around people struggling with their identity than with the unquestioning converts of Krakoa. It’s not that she doesn’t think she deserves heaven so much as she finds purgatory to be her comfort zone.
Together, they go around looking for trouble, all in the guise of protecting Krakoa when really they just want an excuse to be far away from it.
I started my comment above before seeing Alan L’s post just above, so that’s why the “timing” is all off.
All of these ideas are better than what we’ve seen from this book (I love the idea of them having a negative self-image that keeps them from enjoying paradise). Most of our ideas are just tweaks one degree this way or that way from what is actually there on the page.
So I wonder where the editing is on this title? Why isn’t there anyone saying, this should be better? The book should be faster moving, it should have better art, of course, but it should have more to do with the other books, for instance, and with the Dawn of X premise. The characters should have motivations that make more sense and are less pretentious. The story shouldn’t be cribbed directly from Ghost in the Shell, but should maybe come out of the contrast between Krakoa and the world around it. These are all things I feel that an editor ought to be pushing for. But maybe the author isn’t capable of delivering any of these improvements, as well. I don’t know. I feel like any of our tweaks would improve the book by a lot, and give us something more to invest in.
As Joe Dante has said (paraphrased) from when he was a critic before he was a movie maker: No one sets out to make a bad product. Everyone’s putting their all into it. It’s just… sometimes you end up with Plan Nine From Outer Space, you know?
This book doesn’t work for me. It’s a combination of a lot of things, and I don’t want to rag on anything in particular, but there’s probably a reason why the sixth issue will be the last.
Out of the initial Dawn of X lineup, this book was probably intended to be the contrast. X-Men is the world-builder book. Marauders is the free-wheeling book. New Mutants is the fun book. Excalibur is the zippy book. X-Force is the serious book. Fallen Angels is the dark book. Everything had a different flavor, but not everyone likes dark chocolate, right? It’s just how it goes, sometimes. That’s not editorial’s fault, or the writer’s or the artist’s, it just didn’t snap together in a way that “works.”
Having said all of that… I would have gone in a different direction. If pushing Kwannon was the point, fine. Focus on her. But give her a personality instead of giving her a stereotype. Give her a group of younger characters that don’t “trust” Krakoa to navigate the world with to experience things and catch up on all she missed. Hell, Pixie (although she seems fine with Krakoa) would have been a fun character to ‘port her around the world to show her what she’s missed while “buried” within Betsy. Visit some clubs! Do some sightseeing! Beat up some supremacists! Also, don’t drag out the Betsy confrontation; everyone knows she wasn’t at fault. Put X-23 in a different book (maybe Marauders?) and don’t regress her. And for all that’s holy, send kid Cable back to the future and resurrect classic Cable.
Apparently I’ve been living under a rock because these comments are where I learned about Beluski = Yoshida. At the time, I remember thinking, “Hmm, maybe his AoA story won’t be full of cliched discussions of honor and putting -san after everyone’s name to seem authentic”.
I would rather read the story of the actual Yoshida (who was apparently a translator) separating himself from Beluski (who, unlike Betsy, is at fault).
I don’t think you have to be a wartorn future soldier or a ninja with a scarred past to struggle with not belonging to Krakoa. In a way, Husk should be a great fit for that premise. On one hand, she has a high-profile brother in New Mutants, and she herself has been a prominent member of X-teams. On the other, she has a loving and sympathetic family out there, and unlike many mutants, she can “pass” as human. AND, she cares a lot about humans as seen in her late Generation X / Joe Casey X-Men arcs.
Have her visit the family farm. Have her parents not want to even visit Krakoa for some reason. Show Husk’s ambivalence. Have her question the social value of isolating a population of people due to being a mutant. She could be a “fallen angel” from Krakoan paradise.
Cable: even though he comes from an alternate future, some foreknowledge he has about the future may threaten Moira’s plans. Sounds like a subplot to me.
X-23: Have Honey Badger and/or Jonathan bite anyone when the art gets too murky.
Kwannon: Downplay her a bit to build mystery and interest. Let her be Japanese without her having to sound like decades-old samurai epics. Let her say one sentence that doesn’t sound like a Wikipedia version of The Book of Five Rings.
The problem with Kwannonlocke to me, is that by trying to fix a wrong (British woman in Asian body, cultural appropriation to the max), Marvel has doubled down and compounded the problem by making Kwannon generic humourless ninja stereotype. Granted that’s all she was in a handful of appearances, but so much opportunity to go in any direction with this fresh start (as you are all suggesting).
The other problem is I also think Marvel’s motives for separating Betsy and Kwannon are less than pure: it’s simply to retain the sexy bathing suit ninja (with Psylocke codename and butterfly insignia!) for the commercial market. It’s very cynical.
I always liked Psylocke for the oddity of being a mind trapped in another body, and all the questions if identity that would pose. It was weird – the way mutants should be! But the writers over the years have never truly leaned into that direction.
Claremont at least acknowledged the dissonance: his later Asian Psylocke had the artists depict her drinking tea and wearing bathtowels on her head in identikit ways to her older Australia days, which at least provided a continuum of character and could only have been directed by the script.
But I fully understand in terms of representation, Asian Besty-locke can be a disservice or insult to Asian fans. Just as it was status quo for the longest time isn’t a reason not to change. Look at how Beast and others have evolved a d changed appearance over the years! But I do wish it was plot driven, rather than market driven.
“Claremont at least acknowledged the dissonance”
Claremont decided that Bishop and Gateway ought to be family just because they both had black skin.
Claremont finally introduced a Native American character who initially didn’t appear to be a stereotype (Forge) but then couldn’t resist the urge to establish that he was also a mystic medicine man.
Oh wait! Don’t forget that Claremont introduced an Indian character who was called Thunderbird.
You know, because he apparently had some trouble figuring out the difference between “American Indians” (Native Americans) and Indians.
The new Thunderbird character should have been called Garuda.
Neal Shaara? Actually, Claremont originally wanted to call him “Agni” after the Hindu fire god. That actually would have been appropriate, but it didn’t come to pass. Not sure why. Editors probably didn’t think it sounded good, I assume.
If they wanted something more superhero-y, and relating to his powers (solar plasma), I’d have gone with “Corona”.
Mind you, I don’t know what he was thinking naming him “Neal Shaara” in the first place. That isn’t Hindu.
Ishir Bhardwaj. That’s actually Hindu and Ishir is another name for Agni.
Still, why Thunderbird if Marvel editorial said that Claremont couldn’t use the codename Agni?
I doubt this is the reason, because no one would remember the character, and he only made on appearance, but there was a villain who took the code-name Agni.
He was a member of the Lords of Light and Darkness from Marvel Team Up Annual #1.
“Still, why Thunderbird if Marvel editorial said that Claremont couldn’t use the codename Agni?”
Hell if I know. Maybe they couldn’t come up with anything else and maybe it was getting time to renew that trademark anyway.
Remember Sketch anyone? Uncanny X-Men 383? Her one and (understandably) only appearance to date. She was meant to become an X-Man. Claremont wanted to introduce a new X-Man to each book. Neal was that new X-Man in X-Men, and Sketch (whom he originally wanted to name “Reanimator”) was meant to be the new X-Man for Uncanny X-Men.
She was hilariously awful. She drew things and her drawings would come to life. And she was a Japanese illustrator, of course, because manga was hot at the time, and this is how Claremont’s mind works, He later said she got lost in the shuffle after his transition to X-Treme X-Men but presumably someone told him, or maybe he finally realized that she was a stupid idea to begin with (what was she going to do, march off into battle with the X-Men and draw pictures from the sidelines?)
She even looked ridiculous. All kinds of ammo belts draped around her, but instead of bullets, she had pens and brushes in them. She looked like what Cable might’ve looked like had he been an artist rather than a soldier.
The man did a lot for the depiction of female superheroes in comics, but as far as racial and cultural stereotypes go, Claremont did more to reinforce them than to break them down.
Still, you have to give him credit for the context of the times.
I mean, I won’t ever make excuses for post-1991 Claremont.
However, at the time when Claremont was originally writing for Marvel, things like introducing a female African character or having a number of Native American characters as protagonists was pretty ground-breaking.
I mean, what did DC have at the time? Apache Chief?
I still give Claremont credit.
Uh-oh. Looks like I inadvertently tripped a CCDS (Claremont Criticism Detection System).
Fine, I’ll give Claremont credit for being somewhat less racially/culturally clueless than many of his peers at the time. But that just means he was one of the thinner kids at fat camp.
I think that some people want it both ways.
Forge is still a popular character at Marvel, as is Dani.
It’s not as if Marvel are going to be able to create a huge number of popular minority characters to feature in their comics. If they did, those characters would just end up lying fallow, because there are few characters created after the 1980s that fans have any interest.
People will complain that there isn’t enough representation in comics.
Then, they complain that the minority characters who do exist are too “stereotypical”.
Well, if it wasn’t for people like Claremont introducing these minority characters, there wouldn’t be any pluralism in the history of comics to draw from.
At least some of these older creators were trying.
The minority characters usually aren’t offensive, at least.
The character is shown in a positive light and draws upon the history of colonialism and genocide that was faced by Native Americans.
It also tries to incorporate the individual’s own culture.
Forge being revealed as a “mystic”, which was stereotypical, but Forge’s back-story also involved his fighting in Vietnam.
It’s still a largely glossed over fact about how many Native American people were actually involved in the Vietnam War.
Change takes time.
At least these characters were moving beyond the “savage Injuns who are the enemy of morally upstanding white folks”.
Chris, you said yourself you’d never make excuses for post-1991 Claremont, right? Well, apart from my mention of Forge, all I did was talk about Neal Shaara, Sketch, and the Bishop/Gateway thing, all of which was from 2000. So why is your back up? I mean, you prefaced your last post with “Still, you have to give him credit” and you ended it with “I still give Claremont credit”.
And even when I brought up Forge, didn’t I say flat-out that Forge didn’t initially appear to be a stereotype? So why are flagging up his Vietnam background? I know that he’s a Vietnam war vet (and an engineer) which is precisely why I said he didn’t come off as a stereotypical Native American character, at least initially. The mysticism stuff came after, which you agree was stereotypical. So, I’m not sure what this back and forth is we’re having.
It’s fine, Moo. I don’t know why you think I am upset with you.
It was simply a conversation.
If you think we’re on the same page, that’s cool.
Trust me. I don’t have any problem with you or anything you said.
It’s cool. Sorry if I seemed defensive myself but the “give him credit” bits led me to think that I might have struck a nerve. Some of Claremont’s fans, I find, can be a little touchy.
As for the Psylocke stuff, when Claremont did the Lady Mandarin story and Betsy became Asian, I was, I think. eighteen years old at the time, and even then I remember thinking “This probably isn’t such a good idea.”
But if I’m being honest, mostly what bothered me about it wasn’t the race-swap. What I was mainly thinking was “This again? Overnight ninja? Didn’t he already do this with Kitty?”
Evilgus: Props to Claremont and Rick Leonardi for Excalibur #19 too. They drew Betsy’s old bedroom as having Japanese-inspired decor.
And in a modest defense of Forge, a big part of his backstory is that he initially refused to be a stereotypical mystic medicine man.
Moo: I read somewhere that Marvel’s editors supposedly nixed the name “Agni” since – and I’m not making this up – they thought it sounded too much like “acne”.
@Taibak – I believe you. Doesn’t surprise me that editorial might have rejected it for that reason. It should be pronounced ‘uh-guh-nee’ but most readers would have probably read it as ‘aag-nee’, which does sound pretty close to acne, to be fair.
Not that ‘Thunderbird’ was a stellar choice. Made no sense to call him that. But then, Claremont gave his real name as Neal (Gaelic, male) Shaara (Islamic, female) which is a pretty strange name for a Hindu character.
It’d be like if he created an Irish daughter for the Irish X-Man, Banshee, but gave her a Greek first name and a Greek codename, lol. J/k, that’d never happen.
John Byrne has a story about how, when he and Claremont were talking about creating a new X-Men (who eventually became Kitty Pryde) pretty much the first thing Claremont said was “We’re calling him or her Thunderbird.” (Which is what led to the name Kitty Pryde in a roundabout way, as it got them thinking of birds, which led to the thought of a kitty hawk.)
For whatever reason, he seems enamored with the idea of re-using that name.
Yeah, I think I recall reading that account from Byrne too.
Funny that it led to Byrne naming Kitty after a fellow art student (in Calgary, where I’m from) who eventually changed her name to “KD Pryde” as a result…
https://www.cbr.com/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-42/2/
Found it in the X-Men Companion
Byrne: “At one point Chris said, we should call her Thunderbird, and I didn’t like that at all but it put the “bird” name into my head, and I started writing down bird names, trying to think of a name for her, and one of the ones I wrote for her was “Kitty Hawk”. And then I remembered a girl I knew in college whose name was Kitty Pryde, and I always felt that was a neat name. So, as soon as I wrote “Kitty Hawk” I thought, “No– Kitty Pryde: that will be her real name.”
It’d be like if he created an Irish daughter for the Irish X-Man, Banshee, but gave her a Greek first name and a Greek codename, lol. J/k, that’d never happen.
Well, but come on — “Theresa” is just as unimaginative a name for an Irish woman, just one drawn from a different annoying American stereotype about Irish people.
The funny thing is that Byrne was caught in a lie telling almost the exact same “kitty Pryde story” about Robert Kelly.
He said that he was wholly responsible for creating Robert Kelly and named him after a kid in his class.
However, Chris Claremont had already stated that he named Robert Kelly after the author Robert Kelly.
So, it’s good that someone here can actually corroborate that Byrne’s story about Kitty Pryde is true.
Byrne might be a pathological liar. He gave an interview to CBR in 2000 where he stated that he was never interested in writing an Alpha Flight series and it was something Marvel had to rope him into…
“The characters were created merely to survive a fight with the X-Men, and I never thought about them having their own title. When Marvel finally cajolled me into doing ALPHA FLIGHT, I realized how incredibly two-dimensional they were”
^This is pretty hard to square away with the interview he gave eighteen years earlier to Peter Sanderson for the X-Men Companion in 1982…
Sanderson: “Now, you’re planning to bring Alpha Flight back in FF?”
Byrne: “I hope to eventually, yes.”
Sanderson: “And you’d like to do a miniseries with them sometime, you said?”
Byrne: “A miniseries at least.”
Sanderson: “Maybe even a full series? Make it a book?”
Byrne: “Well, if there’s a market for it, I’d love to do a regular series.”
I don’t know, that interview reads to me like Byrne was just reacting to prompts. In a ‘sure, if this brings me more work, I’ll do it’ kind of way.
@Krysiek
Not prompting. Following up on something Byrne had apparently mentioned earlier.
“And you’d like to do a miniseries with them sometime, *you said*?”<——-
To which Byrne replied, "A miniseries *at least*" and then "I'd *love* to do a regular series."
You're really getting "Sure, whatever." from all that?
Well… yes. It reminds me of the news articles about ‘actors expressing interest in playing [any superhero]’ that pop up all the time. It boils down to ‘would you like to have a work opportunity?’ and the answer is almost always ‘yes, I like to eat and have a roof over my head’.
Obviously, all I have to go on is the quote, I don’t know the full context of the interview.
Moo: Those stories really aren’t contradictory. Byrne created Alpha Flight in 1982 and may have had an interest in doing more with them. Then, when he actually started writing them, he realized the characters weren’t as interesting as he thought. Twenty years later, with the benefit of hindsight, he saw himself as more reluctant than he actually was.
Are you guys Byrne’s lawyers or something?
Look, in the 2000 interview, he says they were created “to merely survive a fight with the X-Men.” Throwaway characters, in other words. And that he *never* thought about them having their own title.
Well, that’s obviously not true. Earlier in that 1982 interview he mentioned that he specifically asked Claremont not to touch Alpha Flight again until he had a chance to write them. He didn’t like the way Claremont dialogued them. Snowbird in particular. He was interested in at least doing a miniseries with them and said he’d love to do an ongoing with them if there was a market for it.
That does not match up at all with what he said in 2000. Just because Byrne eventually decided that they weren’t as interesting as he initially thought, that doesn’t change the fact that he at one time obviously thought they had more potential than “survive a fight with the X-Men”.
Taibak, you said there’s no contradiction but then went on to assert “he saw himself as more reluctant than he actually was.” Well, that’s a contradiction. He’s either remembering wrong, or changing his story.