The X-Men and identity politics #4: Reconsidering Wolverine

A decade ago, I wrote a paper about the X-Men. It's been, amazingly, by at least a few thousand people, which is why I'm now turning it into a book. And which is why I'm not re-evaluating a lot of the things that I said 10 years ago. For instance:

Wolverine’s super-power also serves to essentialize his biological male-ness: he is in peak physical condition, a natural hunter with heightened physical senses and instincts (improved senses being another super-power), must constantly train to be patient and keep his temper in check, and – thanks especially to the recent X-Men movies – projects an animal magnetism that renders him irresistible to the opposite sex. In other words, his very powers reinscribe the singular, biological, and essential notion of traditional white maleness – a muscled, animalistic body that, in addition to his moral code, serves to appeal directly to the desires of adolescent male readers.

First, my apologies for the over-writing of an aspiring grad student.

Second, I over-generalized. Sure, Wolverine is John Wayne given superhero form. He's morally righteous, quick to anger, and a brute. He also sleeps with nearly absolutely every woman who's ever been associated with the X-Men. (Except for the girls who are 16ish and younger. For whom he is a father-figure. For nearly absolutely every girl who's ever been associated with the X-Men.) But that hasn't always been true.

In Geoff Klock's excellent book about Matt Fraction's Casanova, he argues that Casanova Quinn skewers, deconstructs, and refutes the need for the sort of superhero masculinity that Wolverine embodies. Klock writes, for instance, that "death surrounds Casanova, and invades him, and the resulting nihilism is what needs to be conquered when the temptation is to embrace it as part of badass masculine posturing." And if it can't be conquered? Then "why shouldn't we all escape from it?"

These are good questions: questions that need to be asked and answered, over and over, because norms of masculinity are stubborn and enduring things that aren't easily undermined or overturned. But y'know what? Wolverine had already asked them. (Or to paraphrase Jason Powell, whose own book on the X-Men is coming out later this year: Claremont did it first.)

But don't take my word for it. Here are a few examples from the Australia Era, which I've previously described as the most progressive and creative era of the comic.


Uncanny X-Men 233-234

Wolverine is implanted with a Brood egg and is transformed into a hideous alien monster. It isn't the first time - he was also implanted with a Brood egg in UXM 162 - but this time is different. It's also the first indication that something is wrong with the nigh-invincible Wolverine, who had recently and ridiculously been restored to life from a single drop of blood in UXN Annual 10. (Because healing factor.)

Unlike the previous infection, Wolverine appears to lose this one - he transforms into a Brood, even losing control of his mind. (The Brood announces "Behold, human, the shape of your world to come!" It's pretty explicit.) Of course, this is Wolverine we're talking about and as quickly as he loses the battle with the Brood, he miraculously recovers. Wolverine thinks it's his healing factor, but Claremont implies that it's actually the work of a preacher, who may or may not be a mutant himself. "I bring peace and comfort to all those out there," the preacher explains as he holds his wife's arthritic hands, as if to suggest that "comfort" is not just a euphemism. "They say I help them." It's probably not a coincidence, then, that Brood Wolverine reverts to regular Wolverine at the moment the preacher touches him.

So, Wolverine is, basically, killed by the Brood egg - an attack that he had previously survived. More importantly, though, this storyline kicks off a much longernarrative about Wolverine's mortality, which will run for at least the next two years: a series of near-death experiences that push his healing factor to its breaking point. And then break it.


Uncanny X-Men 235-237

Wolverine (and Rogue) are kidnapped and taken to Genosha, where his powers are suppressed and his healing factor ceases to work. Unlike previous power-loss narratives, though, which seemed indifferent to problems like 'doesn't it hurt to use your claws?' or 'is all that metal on your skeleton a good thing?', this one devotes a lot of time to Wolverine stumbling and coughing while Rogue - whose mind is under the control of Carol Danvers' personality - carries him and comments on his impending death.

A particularly vivid scene involves Wolverine popping a claw to pick a lock, which causes his hand to bleed profusely. And then just continue to bleed. Cue Wolverine's cool as ever gift for understatement: "No power, no healin' factor." Later, as Storm holds him and he believes his death is imminent, Wolverine still projects a Klingon-like acceptance of his impending death: "Them's the breaks, darlin'. I had a good run. If this is where it ends... ain't such a bad way to go."

So, two quick things to point out:

• Wolverine is saved, again at the last minute, through someone else's action. Carol/Rogue puts a gun to the head of Wipeout, who can remove and restore powers, and asks Psylocke to compel Wipeout to save Wolverine. So, again, Wolverine's healing factor fails him. And, again, Wolverine is granted a last-minute reprieve through the intercession of a third party.
• I may be overstating, but the pathology of Wolverine's non-mutant state - coughing, sweaty, hunched, generally sickly looking, prone to bleeding, and unable to heal - looks an awful lot like an AIDS stereotype. Applied to the most masculine, virile X-Man, no less. This is not to imply that masculine, virile men don't get AIDS, of course. But it does undercut Wolverine's own masculinity and undercut heroic masculinity more generally, yes.

Uncanny X-Men 246

Wolverine takes a leave of absence. What's important here, though, is not the what but the how.

In this brief scene with Storm, Wolverine announces that he's taking a break. And he should, because he looks like absolute hell. This is notable precisely because - outside of stories where Wolverine is getting pummeled, set on fire, blown up, nearly killed, etc. - Wolverine never looks tired. (Fun Fact: in a much later story, a major clue that Wolverine had been replaced by a Skrull was that he said he was tired. Because Wolverine doesn't tire.)

When Wolverine stares into the mirror, his hair - usually standing straight up, like the ears of a wolf - droops sadly to the sides. Normally erect and fearsome, his hair looks weak and flaccid. Sure, it's partly a joke about the Wolverine and Havok miniseries. But if this isn't also a dick joke, I don't know what is.

(Note: This style of hair reappears in Alex Ross's Earth X comics, where Wolverine has become alcoholic and obese - but denies that either is even possible - and it is painfully clear that, yes, the limp hair is a really obvious dick joke.)


Uncanny X-Men 251-253

Wolverine is beaten, crucified on a giant wooden X, hallucinates, and left for dead. It's overkill, but let's unpack the symbolism anyway. This makes sense within Claremont's larger arc for the character - every near-death experience has been more traumatic, more harrowing than the last - and also within the larger X-Men narrative, where the team has gradually become isolated and fractured, to the point that it effectively no longer exists. Basically, Wolverine is the last member of a superhero team that no longer exists.

This might seem like a win for Wolverine's masculinity - last mutant standing! crucified like some sort of mutant Christ! - but Claremont subverts that expectation in several ways. For one, Wolverine is beaten and captured by Donald Pearce and the Reavers with embarrassing ease. For another, he's saved by a 13 year old girl.

Most importantly, though, is the contrast between his outward demeanor and his interior dialogues. While Pearce is enraged by Wolverine's smugness and aloof response to his own torture, Wolverine's true torture is psychological and self-inflicted, as he sees visions of everyone he has disappointed, now dead and blaming him. He's the last one standing, sure, but only because he abandoned everyone else to die.

He's being too hard on himself, sure, but it also turns out that he's wrong. We can read this self-torture can also be read as a manifestation of his masochistic nature - he always runs through bullets, after all, when he could easily avoid them - and the masculine hero's compulsory martyr complex, since he seems to want to die as some act of penance, not because it's truly hopeless. It also reads as a meta-joke about his prominence and popularity, even in 1989: of course it's Wolverine's fault that they're dead because Wolverine is the most important X-Man ever. Of course.


Uncanny X-Men 257-260ish

This is the 'something is still not quite right' storyline that, sadly, goes nowhere. Because that Christ-like imagery from the last storyline? It didn't come with a resurrection. Wolverine continues to hallucinate - though mostly only about his old war buddies, Nick Fury and Carol Danvers - and is demonstrably slower and weaker than he should be, if he's fully healed. In a battle with the Mandarin, Jubilee's blast knocks Wolverine out even though Psylocke and the Mandarin appear merely dazed. Wolverine even collapses in mid-conversation at one point, and thereafter begins to bleed for no discernible reason. It's shocking and unsettling - Jubilee comments that "You'll be dead, you keep this up! You go an' drag me all across the world, mister-- You better make sure you survive to bring me home!"- but... nothing really comes of it. Eventually, he's back to normal. He got better.

I should add that the decision to saddle Wolverine with hallucinatory ghosts of Nick Fury and Carol Danvers is a weird but suggestive one. On the face of it, this is a sort of nostalgic gimmick (that John Wayne, thing again) that merely gestures toward the military and historical elements of Wolverine's masculinity, and there is something very old-fashioned about how Wolverine talks to his ghosts. On the other hand, these ghosts and their conversations are made to seem awfully ridiculous, especially when the hallucinations try to fight the real bad guys. Also, Jubilee thinks that Wolverine is going insane - he probably is - and the only moment in which the ghosts appear to actually do something is when Psylocke, who is tapped into Wolverine's mind and sees their bullets, psychically kills their targets. The scenes are absurd and so to, by extension, are the things that Fury and Danvers represent.

Had Claremont been allowed to follow this storyline through, it was meant to culminate in Wolverine's actual death and resurrection as a bad guy - an idea that was later used not once but twice, for The Twelve storyline and by Mark Millar. (Claremont's only plan is teased at in the scene where he's captured by The Hand, whose brainwashing of Wolverine appears to be working until it suddenly is not. Since Claremont has said The Hand would resurrect him, I'm guessing this would've been revisited.)


In closing

In Geoff Klock's book, he writes that "comic books are often cyclical, stuck in pointless repetitions of, among other things, violence, homoantagonism, misogyny, cheap and easy juvenile bullshit, and the twentieth return of Magneto, and this is what needs to be broken at the end of Avaritia, [the third Casanova miniseries] so we can get something new."

It's worth recalling, again, Magneto was reformed under Claremont, becoming the headmaster of Xavier's and fighting alongside the X-Men before concluding that death follows him everywhere and choosing a life of solitude. Throughout the late 80s, Claremont repeatedly broke with cycles and repetitions - and broke the format of the team itself. So, too, did he systematically undermine the sexy cool masculinity of Wolverine, and start to give us something new. Before the cyclical, pointless repetitions and cheap, easy juvenile bullshit got in the way.

The X-Men don't represent what you think they represent

I'm very late to the game with this one, but I wanted to get some thoughts down on paper. (Or on keyboard. On the screen. Online? Whichever.)


The X-Men, we've been told many times, are less a team of superhero than they are a metaphor. Their creator, Stan Lee, wanted a group of heroes that would engender fear for the simple fact that they are different. "People fear things that are different," writes Lee, and it's hard to think that Lee, a Jewish-American, wasn't thinking of Jews and Roma during the Holocaust.

So, I was a bit disturbed when I saw this scene in an issue of Uncanny Avengers. The character speaking in the panels below is Havok, one of the X-Men. He's never been a particularly vocal advocate for mutant rights - he was briefly involved with a mutant terrorist group, but that was revealed to be an undercover job - but that's probably beside the point. Here's the leader of the Avengers' Unity team - a joint X-Men/Avengers effort to improve the standing of the mutant community - effectively telling everyone that he advocates a post-mutant (or, I guess, mutation-blind) society. And it left me cold:

In a subsequent panel, a reporter asks Havok what they should call him if not "mutant". He replies "Alex."

Now, the problem is not that Havok's speech is unrealistic or unconvincing. Havok has never shown himself to be the most dedicated X-Man - he's quit a couple of times, and for the first couple decades of the comic he preferred to be completely uninvolved in mutant politics or superheroics - and it might be compelling to situate him as a conservative voice for a post-mutant America. The rhetoric is certainly familiar: he doesn't want people to see his powers, just as the post-race bunch pretend that they don't see race; he sees himself as the product of his choices, ignoring the systemic realities that restrict those choices, just as many conservatives do.

It might not be an ideology that I value, but it could make for a compelling read. How would mutants with a more progressive take on human-mutant politics react to the choice of Havok for such a prominent role? Would they perceive some agenda on the part of Captain America, who selected him? And what kind of mutant politics erases the "mutant" from its own politics? I imagine that Havok would face a lot of the same criticisms that were lobbed at Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell when the post-race Bush Administration came to power.

Alas, Marvel and writer Rick Remender weren't planning on taking it in that direction. For them, Havok's rhetoric was not political or even controversial. Funny, the sorts of nonsense you can sell yourself when you're able to write about - and enjoy - oppression from a position of privilege.

Mind you, this isn't new. Marvel has always used the X-Men to encourage people of privilege to experience - and derive some enjoyment from - oppression at a distance, vicariously. But I've never seen them do this, at least not so explicitly. Marvel is using the X-Men to violently undermine the relevance and reality of identity politics, to reduce social categories, from which people derive their sense of self and worth, to dirty words and systems of social inequality to "choices".

That kind of thing is going to make people angry, especially the fans who have been told that the X-Men are a minority like they are. As Ladies Making Comics so aptly put it on Twitter, "Telling people whose rights have been trampled for decades 'But we're all people! Let's get along!': guaranteed to piss them off." Yep, them and everyone else who gets it.

But, wait! said Marvel and Remender. That's not happening at all, because the X-Men aren't actually a metaphor. They're just a fictional category of superheroes, and YOU are reading too much into it. Cue Remender's response to Ladies Making Comics: "Mutants come from all races and sexual orientation. It's not an apt analogy you're making." And fellow X-Men writer Jason Aaron: "It's not the story of what it means to be black or gay in today's society."

In a sense, Aaron is right - the X-Men don't tell us what it's like to black or gay, because the people writing the X-Men are almost always straight white guys who can only guess. But that doesn't mean that they don't pretend that they can. To claim otherwise, as Remender and Aaron (and I can only guess who else) do, is disingenuous, if not dishonest. (Indeed, Racialicious has a huge piece on this story, which includes other writers - and Remender himself - contradicting these comments from Remender and Aaron. You should probably read it.)

But don't take my word for it:

• "What's fascinating about these two characters [Magneto and Professor X] is that they're really the Malcolm X and Martin Luther King of comic mythology." -Bryan Singer, director of X-Men, X2, and X-Men: Days of Future Past
• “I know, speaking to Marvel Comics, that it’s not just gay people who identify with mutants – it’s other minorities, too, religious minorities, racial minorities” -Ian McKellan, Magneto in the X-Men films
• "Every time I would hear one of these ideas, I would always ask myself, 'What's the point of being so specific? A gay mutant? An African American mutant? An HIV-positive mutant? Oxymorons, all of them.' To my mind, mutants are all those thing simultaneously. They're every oppressed minority and disenfranchised subculture, all rolled up into one metaphor." -Joe Casey, former Uncanny X-Men writer

When people are gushing about the property and it's inclusivity, they're quick on the draw to brag about how the comic was always meant to accommodate all these identifications and readings. It speaks to the real world, it allegorizes real people and situations.

But when people start to critique it? When they begin to disagree with the message that Marvel is selling, that it's effectively putting into the mouths of disempowered peoples? Then, the creators deny that it was ever supposed to reflect reality, that it was ever intended to be more than escapist fantasy.

And that's probably the most infuriating part of this whole thing. It's not that they simply deny responsibility for or awareness of the metaphorical reading that everyone is familiar with, it's that they forsake it in one breath but accept any and all kudos in the next. Marvel wants to have it both ways, and they shouldn't get away with it. But they do.

More backlash politics: fanboys and the "triumph" of Superheroes

I can't believe I missed the whole backlash against AO Scott in The New York Times, because he deigned to criticize The Avengers film, but it seems additionally relevant now - because of the controversy with hardcore gamers that I wrote about last week, but probably also because of what happened in Colorado.

Hawkeye, Captain American, and the Black Widow in Joss Whedon's Avengers.
Zade Rosenthal/Walt Disney Pictures.

Actually, Scott's snarky review was probably meaner to the film's fans that it was to the movie itself. Writes Scott,

this movie revels in the individuality of its mighty, mythical characters, pinpointing insecurities that are amplified by superhuman power and catching sparks that fly when big, rough-edged egos (and alter egos) collide. The best scenes are not the overblown, skull-assaulting action sequences — which add remarkably little that will be fresh or surprising to devotees of the Transformers franchise — but the moments in between, when the assembled heroes have the opportunity to brag, banter, flirt and bicker. 

So, there is a not-flattering comparison to Transformers, though this isn't as nasty as it might first seem - if Transformers did anything competently, if not creatively, it was show things exploding. But there is a certain nastiness in the review, and it's aimed squarely at the fans. For instance:

the true guiding spirit of their movie is Loki, who promises to set the human race free from freedom and who can be counted on for a big show wherever he goes. In Germany he compels a crowd to kneel before him in mute, terrified awe, and “The Avengers,” which recently opened there to huge box office returns, expects a similarly submissive audience here at home. The price of entertainment is obedience.

Yikes. It's not terribly surprising, then, that Scott was flamed over Twitter by fanboys with demands that he be fired. (Having not read them, I can't be certain whether these were people who were responding to ostensible insult of the film or the more real insult to themselves. If it's the former, that's an unfortunate irony, because it proves that Scott's joke, above, isn't just a joke.)

Anyway, I bring this up now, and call it newly relevant, because the insecurity that those fans appear to be speaking from is a lot like the insecurity of hardcore gamers. There's a reason, after all, that fans of Marvel comics, in particular, are called Marvel Zombies. (I doubt that Scott knew this. And, yet, he clearly knew it.)

Painting for the Marvel Zombies comic book, by Arthur Suydam.
Yes, the title is a joke. But everyone loves zombies, so it's win-win.

In the blog about hardcore gamers, I wrote that

every man is made to feel like they're lacking in some way. But not every man is conscious of that lack. Geeks aren't only conscious of it, but they're often reminded of it. And this is a problem for them because [the game] may be the only access that they have to a sense of masculine adequacy. To take that away, then, is to threaten their very sense of themselves as men.

To attack the Avengers film or Avengers fanboys, then, produces a similar effect. But it is also similarly problematic. Because, like most hardcore gamers, fanboys tend to be straight, middle-class white men who enjoy an incredible amount of privilege.

There's an additional layer to the comic book issue, though, one that was recently raised by Freddie deBoer. To pick from the very first line in deBoer's blog, over the past decade fanboys have learned that "our particular geeky obsessions no longer seemed special. Everyone knew about them." That's still not entirely true of gamer culture, I think. I'd wager that few people outside of the gaming community would recognize the N7 insignia that Commander Shepard wears if you slapped it on your coat (in fact, I'm not sure that they would know it has any significance at all); I'm fairly certain that a large minority or small majority of people under 40 would be familiar with Captain American's shield or the X-Men's X.

Because I'm filling this blog with quotes, I'll add another one, this time from Andrew O'Heir at Salon:

at what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient? Those one-time comic-book pariahs are now the dominant force in pop-culture entertainment, and their works are deemed to be not just big but also relevant and important.

The hardcore gamers may feel as if they're under assault by hostile forces, but they remain the gatekeepers of their own online kingdom and firmly in control of their own culture. Not so, for the fanboys, who lost whatever control they once had (if they ever had it) long ago to interests in Hollywood and boardrooms, filled with people who want to diversify and grow the audience, not cater to the base. It's like the fans of the Avengers used to speak a secret language that only they understood, and now everyone and their dad uses it in casual conversation. You might call it "triumph"; one could also plausibly call it "devastating".

O'Heir concludes with the remark that "I think these fans are looking to the stars, for some sort of recognition or respect that simply doesn’t exist, for any of us." But I think that the critical misunderstanding is this - these fans aren't happy with success because they were never looking for and never wanted success. (Kurt Cobain, anyone?) They're defined by the things they appreciate that others never will, and so, in a sense, they're looking for a new defeat to rally around. (As evinced by the response to Scott.) Triumph will never be sufficient, and will never be particularly desirable, because it's difficult to feel special - and it's always been about feeling special, unique, and even superior - when everyone else loves and appreciates the same thing that you do.

Counter-campaign, anyone? One Million Moms and their anti-gay superhero backlash

One Million Moms is a hilariously hyperbolic right-wing organization that is "against the immorality, violence, vulgarity and profanity the entertainment media is throwing at your children." Of course, by "against...immorality" they actually mean "we hate gays", and by "hyperbolic right-wing organization" I actually mean "surprisingly polite, albeit hate-spewing, homophobes".

But there's a lot of these groups, right? And I don't typically waste time on this crap, unless they're digging their claws into something that's near and dear to me.

Unsurprisingly, then, I'm posting this because One Million Moms have decided to go after gay superheroes. Helpfully, they explain that both Marvel and DC have some major events planned that revolve around gay characters - an upcoming issue of Marvel's Astonishing X-Men will feature the wedding of Northstar and his boyfriend, and at some point next month (maybe?) DC will reveal that one of their major characters has been in the closet. DC's VP of Sales, Bob Wayne, invokes Obama in referring to the decision as an "evolution", and he's right. Even if the execution is bad - and given the mainstream comic companies' track-record, here, that's probably more likely than not - this is a good thing.

Progress! Also, how cool is it that Doop - the Cold War nuclear military
experiment who is also a green floating blob - is front-and-center?

Unless you're One Million Moms, that is. Here's a quick sampling of what they have to say. (Coupled, of course, with my own brief responses.)

Children mimic superhero actions and even dress up in costumes to resemble these characters as much as possible. Can you imagine little boys saying, "I want a boyfriend or husband like X-Men?"

I love that their fake quote is so awkwardly written. Because no one who reads an X-Men comic would ever say "like X-Men". (Also? I can imagine this, and think it's pretty great.)

Why do adult gay men need comic superheroes as role models? They don't but do want to indoctrate impressionable young minds by placing these gay characters on pedestals in a positive light.

I honestly can't figure out why they think gay men (to say nothing of women) wouldn't want superheroes as role models. Why is that, exactly? Is it because THE GAYS spend all their time and energy distorting and recruiting "impressionable young minds", and thus they can only admire villains? (Sadly, I bet that my mocking guess is really close to their actual reasons.)

Children do not know what straight, homosexual, or coming out of the closet even means, but DC Comics and Marvel are using superheroes to confuse them on this topic to raise questions and awareness of an alternative lifestyle choice. These companies are prompting a premature discussion on sexual orientation.

Wowza. I'm not sure what I find most clueless, here - the suggestion that kids don't know what those words mean, at least implicitly, or that the discussion about sexual orientation isn't already happening. (Albeit a very limited discussion that privileges straight, Disney-romance love.) Regardless, this is just dumb.

But this is easily the best part of their diatribe:

Earlier this year One Million Moms emailed Toys 'R' Us concerning the "Life With Archie" No. 16 with two gay characters getting hitched. Toys 'R' Us had the audacity to display "Archie- Just Married" at the front of the store by the checkout counters.

Amazing. AMAZING. What a spectacular failure on OMM's part, and a fantastic way to send a message to these bullies. This should happen again. Someone, somewhere, needs to make sure that this happens again. 

Cover to Life with Archie #16

So, how do we do that? Well, there's a prompt to action at the bottom of the anti-gay superhero campaign page, where they give you a form letter to send to Marvel and DC. You could start by creatively misusing the form, deleting their hateful garbage and replacing it with words of support for the two companies. That would be pretty cool. [Note: if you do this, you're required to sign-up for their email updates.]

You could also try the other link on the campaign page, which is the One Million Moms complaint form, and tell OMM what you think of their plan. For my part, I took their own sentences from the Take Action blurb on the campaign page, rewriting and replacing words as necessary. So, if you'd like to help me build a counter-campaign by telling OMM that they're the ones that need to change, feel free to take my words and either copy-and-paste or rewrite them to suit yourself (the bold type is their original language, the rest what I've added or edited):

I am sending One Million Moms this email urging them to change and cancel all plans to continue spewing homophobic venom against homosexual superhero characters immediately. I ask them to do the right thing and reverse their decision to publicize this puerile and misguided campaign, which serves only to demonstrate that OMM is totally out of touch with contemporary social attitudes and scientific knowledge.

(Fyi, on the Complaint Form, I referred to the Name of Complaint as "Hate Speech", and the Network as "One Million Moms.com".)

The X-Men and identity politics #3: Jason Powell and the limits of mutant activism

Over on Geoff's blog, Jason Powell has been doing an amazing job of critiquing every issue in Chris Claremont's run on Uncanny X-Men. He's also caused me to reassess some of the things that I wrote in the paper that I have linked in the sidebar - to acknowledge some material that I had either ignored or forgotten. So this is write-up is something of a corrective post-script.

Jason has just wrapped up his analysis of UXM #235-8, a storyline set in the mutant-enslaving African nation of Genosha (not so subtly modeled on South Africa's apartheid state). This is not the same team of apologist and acculturationist X-Men from the Lee/Kirby or Claremont/Byrne days that I complained about. As Jason notes, this is a team that doesn't find a world order that's worth protecting and decides to attack it instead: "Wolverine’s oath to tear down an entire nation built on racism feels utterly right for an X-Men story. As if this is the kind of thing they should have been doing from Day One."

Jason's probably right, though I have to give him additional credit for having revealed both how gradual and convincing the slow transformation of the X-Men - on the level of individual character, Storm and Wolverine, but also the composition of the team itself - from an anti-mutant police force to a pro-mutant terrorist cell is achieved. And there's no denying that the team that tries to destory Genosha is composed of terrorists - sympathetic ones that should encourage us to avoid reductive explanations of terrorism, but terrorists nonetheless. Jason remarks that one of the issues - and I think this comment is applicable to the storyline as a whole - is "the apex of Claremont’s creativity and expression on the Uncanny X-Men series". It's also, sadly, an indication of the concept's limits.

The storyline completes the reversal that began with the old Brotherhood of Evil Mutants becoming the government-sanctioned super-team Freedom Force - the X-Men have, effectively, become the new Brotherhood. That Claremont could pull this off speaks volumes to his skill in building the transformation up slowly and carefully over a period of years, but it's telling that he blows the team up over the next 12 months. You can turn the X-Men into terrorists, but you can't then write an ongoing book about terrorist "heroes" who punish governments for human rights abuses. (At least, not until Warren Ellis and Mark Millar did so with The Authority, which feels as if it owes something to this version of Claremont's X-Men.)

Nor could Claremont, after writing such a convincing and inspiring change of direction, take a step-backward and return to superheroics-as-usual. And so, after the Inferno crossover that has nothing to do with politics and a couple of stand-alone issues, Nimrod reappears to kill Rogue, Wolverine and Longshot leave, Storm is thought dead, and the other four X-Men sacrifice themselves to escape certain death. And then Claremont builds the concept back up from the ground, (and, in so doing, creates something quite unlike what we've seen before) reunites and returns the group to face a different kind of Genoshan threat, and is summarily removed from the book.

But for those few months...

Batman and Robin #1

(Please forgive the awfulness of the image quality - my Photoshop has been glitchy, so I resorted to a hack job in *ugh* MSPaint. Forgive me, Burt Ward and Frank Quitely.)

I wasn't the only person who found Robin's pose on the cover of Batman and Robin #1 really familiar, right? I've been told that Morrison and Quitely are going for a 60s TV show feel, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with how they've managed to the incorporate elements from it without either a) importing the cheese-factor, or b) appearing to mock it.

I doubt I'm adding anything new, but I wanted to reiterate how awesome it is that Quitely pays homage to the visualized sound-effects of the show by actually working them into his drawings (what's the opposite of onomatopeoia, anyway?), how the text and images of the preview recall its cliffhangers, or how Pyg is a sort of grotesque twist on the sorts of lame, circus-like villains of the show. Pyg's henchmen, though, also manage to bridge a gap between the show and Morrison's own ouvre - not only are they a hideous take on the uniform henchman gangs on the TV series, but they also call to mind the Stepford Cuckoo's from Morrison's New X-Men. (Though exactly how far that link runs remains to be seen.)

The X-Men and identity politics #2: Xavier's man Friday

[An exchange on Geoff's blog a couple weeks back with someone who didn't like my X-Men paper had me thinking that I need to start writing about mutants and race (and, obliquely, all aspects of identarian politics) again. For those few people familiar with the old paper, some of this will seem like a retread. But since that paper is long and, by virtue of being written with an academic audience in mind, not accessible enough. Which was one of the reasons I started this series in the first place.]

A paraphrased defense of the X-Men's politics: 'Focusing on fighting other mutants does not make the X-Men anti-mutant, assimilationist, or conservative. Those mutants are evil and would make relations with humans worse, and it's that working relationship which they're trying to build and preserve.'

My short response to this is an unequivocal 'sorry, but I don't buy it'.

The sort of assimilationist practices (and their rationalizations and justifications) that the X-Men engage in are at least as old as the novel format itself, so maybe it would help to historize them. Remember Friday, the slave-turned-servant to Crusoe in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe? Friday is the model non-white citizen of European colonialism - a savage who is so grateful that the white man has undertaken the burden of educating and saving him that he devotes his life to serving that same white man. Quite the opposite of encouraging us to embrace difference or form equitable relationships premised on mutual enrichment and growth, Defoe's story proposes an entirely unilateral transmission and unidirectional relationship. Friday is only worthy of notice because he recognizes his master's superiority and assumes an entirely deferential position relative to him. To do otherwise - to challenge Crusoe's authority or assert an equal standing - would be to threaten the natural order of the world and situate yourself as an enemy to it.

Appropriately, one of the tag-lines for the 2000 X-Men movie was "Trust a few. Fear the rest." And, sadly, the X-Men have participated in a similar politics for much of their publication. Like Defoe, the X-Men's publishers would have us believe that the only mutants who deserve to live in peace with normal humans are those mutants who would unquestioningly protect all of humanity. Yes, even those who would rather see all mutants jailed or dead are more deserving of the X-Men's protection than are the mutants who fight back because they don't want to be jailed or dead. These mutants who reject their oppression and the moral authority of those who oppress them are, at best, ignorant to the natural order and, at worst, evil. Like the hyperbolic island cannibals whose only function is to supply a contrast as the evil Other to Friday's good one, these evil mutants are often made to seem insane or power-hungry, and so undermine the standing of any mutant who objects to the X-Men's approach. Even when an 'evil' mutant, like Magneto, poses legitimate ethical and political concerns, those same concerns are undercut by unnecessary displays of violence and mutant supremacist language - as if these things are ultimately inseperable.

Bryan Singer, echoing the common refrain, suggested that Professor X is a Martin Luther King figure and Magneto was Malcom X. But if it weren't already clear, then I'll make it explicit: if the X-Men comics are meant to be read as any sort of metaphor on the politics of race, then we have to consider that Professor X is actually Crusoe's man Friday.

Uncanny X-Men 503 and THAT scene

I wanted to write something else - less contentious, more literary - about Matt Fraction on the X-Men, so it's a shame that this has to be the first thing. See, there's a scene in the middle of 503 where Cyclops and Emma Frost are investigating the Hellfire Cult's warehouse, during which Emma dresses up in some bondage gear and, presumably, things get a little unprofessional.

The thing is, as we learn at the end of the issue, it's not Emma in the bondage gear. Apparently, I was the only person (on a message board, at least) who was immediately skeptical - "this is kinky even for you", Cyclops' mentioning that she's unnecessarily in his head, and the uncharacteristically glowing red eyes were pretty much a dead giveaway. Or so I thought. But there are other, rather obvious clues: the story arc's mystery villain, the Red Queen, is shown telepathically extracting information about Emma Frost's personality earlier in the issue, and Emma admits to having no idea what Cyclops is talking about when he mentions the scene at the end of the issue - after which Cyclops immediately sees the Red Queen, who he identifies as his ex-wife, Madelyne Pryor. So it's implied and not totally clear until the end, but it happened nonetheless: Cyclops was telepathically raped. (If you're still not with me, see my brief discussion of the issue of consent in the very last paragraph of his blog post.)

When I asked why no one was talking about this on the message board, it was suggested that it's a sort of comeuppance for Cyclops. During Grant Morrison's run, Cyclops and Emma had a psychic affair that the former dismissed as not disloyal to his wife because it wasn't physical, and so Maddie is sort've toying with that logic - that is, it must not be sexual assault because it was only psychic. And, going back to Claremont's pre-Inferno days, the same person suggested that the story element of tricking him into doing something without his informed consent is not unlike the process by which Madelyne was herself transformed into a villain during what she thought was a dream. Notably, Cyclops didn't accept this as an explanation of her transformation, nor did he accept any blame for the mental distress that led her to that point, much of which was his fault.

So to the extent that it seems to be invoking these earlier moments of Cyclops' hypocrisy and using it against him, it works. But there's something so incredibly distasteful about the suggestion of rape, here, that I just can't get past. Maybe it's just that sexual assault is so often sensationalized, and that instances of gender-reversal of his sort are so often handled poorly, that I'm having a knee-jerk reaction that will turn out to be unfounded. And maybe it's also because I have some affection for Madelyne's original character and didn't like her transformation into a villain in the first place - and so I find it additionally detestable that she's been reduced again, this time into a rapist.

[I should also note that this scene caused me to reconsider an element in the last Casanova story arc where something surprisingly similar happens, though it escaped my notice in the moment. In that story, Casanova is undercover as his sister, Zephyr, and has a sexual relationship with a male terrorist named Kubark - who, predictably, feels deeply betrayed and disturbed when he learns that Zephyr was never Zephyr at all. This fits all the same criteria for any legal or moral definition of rape - you can't give informed consent when someone is withholding information that prevents a full awareness of the consequences of your actions, ie. when they're lying about who they are or intend to do you harm. And yet I totally missed it - probably because Casanova is deeply apologetic and Kubark is totally evil, responding with homophobia rather than admitting any emotional pain. It's probably to Fraction's credit that he can do this twice before I catch it, and that it can work so well in the context of the story. But I still find it a troubling sort of trope.]

Some comics...

I haven't done a lot of comic book blogging in the last few weeks (months?), in part because I've been buying trades and graphic novels almost exclusively, but also because a lot of the monthlies I've bought haven't done much to hold my interest.

Uncanny X-Men 502. I think that I might kinda like this story if it weren't for Greg Land's art. There's something very mid-80s Claremont about it, what with the composition of the team, a New Mutant, a Hellion, and the Hellfire Club all making appearances. I don't know what it's all supposed to add up to, though. 501 seemed to be playing with nostalgia - we get the Sentinels and Magneto in that first issue, but as a tasteless art installation and with imitation powers, respectively. This Hellfire Gang seems like an unimpressive twist on the Club, but maybe it needs time to go somewhere. As for Land, his visuals are stiff and flat, the transitions between panels are awkward or incoherent (I shouldn't have to look back and forth between them to figure out where someone came from or how they could have possibly moved like that), and his faces are just... freaky. What kind of expression is Pixie making on page 5 and why is she making it as she gets her head knocked in by a baseball bat? And why does Cyclops always have a completely ridiculous and entirely out-of-character shit-eating grin?

Astonishing X-Men 26. I read this maybe two weeks ago, but I seem to have retained virtually none of it. I remember the villain being slightly creepy and the plot trudging forward at a snail's pace. (Flips through it very quickly.) Ah, yes, and his head explodes or something at the end. And there's a really long discussion about whether the X-Men should kill which is, again, not terribly interesting because it's a discussion that they've had dozens of times and they should all be quite sure of where each other stand on the issue. They couldn't fit in a B-story or something? I'm starting to be of the mind that it's better to be explicitly bad than it is to be boring - and this is boring.

I also picked up the first issue of Omega The Unknown, because I had read a bit about its background and it sounded interesting. And that first issue, at least, wasn't disappointing. Maybe I just need a break from mainstream superhero stuff.

Astonishing X-Men 25

I'm tempted to simply call this CSI: X-Men - though maybe this is only the first 2o minutes of the pilot episode. But something about this book escapes an easy encapsulation. Or maybe it just seems that way because I want to like it. Because I like Ellis and I like Bianchi, but I don't particularly like (or, I suppose, dislike) what they're doing here.

For his part, Warren Ellis admits that there's a certain element of self-indulgence to this project, and that he's planning to have fun with it. Fair enough - I don't particularly like my super heroes to be bland and too, too serious. It's also clear that the only other writers he really cares to converse with are Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon. There's a rather unsubtle moment where Ellis becomes the third in that line to feature a discussion of costumes and social coding - it's also, unfortunately, the least convincing of the bunch. Compare, if you will:

Morrison (New X-Men 114)
Beast: "I was never sure why you had us dress up like superheroes anyway, Professor."
Cyclops: "The Professor thought people would understand the X-Men if we looked like something they understood."

Whedon (Astonishing X-Men 1)
Cyclops: "We need to get in to the world. Saving lives, helping with disaster relief...we need to present ourselves as a team like any other. Avengers, Fantastic Four-- They don't get chased through the streets with torches."
Wolverine: "Here come the tights."
Cyclops: "Sorry, Logan. Super heroes wear costumes."

Ellis (Astonishing X-Men 25)
Cyclops: "We're all things to all people, Ororo. Today, we're consulting to the police, and there's no police officer in the world who's happy when he or she sees a super hero costume. Costuem says vigilante, and, these days, costume can also either say government flunkie or illegal combatant, which is one step away from being a flying terrorist. So when we do something like this, we dress in a way they understand, and we jump past all the crap that comes with a costume right now."

There's a sort of law of diminishing returns in effect here - with each iteration of the costume speech, the explanation grows longer and the meta-level becomes shallower. Sure, Ellis throws in that "we're all things to all people" as a way of bridging the "we're not super heroes/we are super heroes" divide of Morrison and Whedon - speeches that are clearly aimed at the reader - but the Morrison/Whedon disagreement was a largely superficial one in the first place. Their 'disagreement' was over how the X-Men should perform their role in public, and so already a tacit acknowledgment that the characters can mean 'all things to all people'.

A note on the visuals - While I like to look at Bianchi's art, I also have a number of reservations: the coloring is too muddy, the layouts are sometimes too crowded, but mostly his storytelling is confusing. He avoids conventional establishing shots and transitions in time and space, which means that I'm often playing catch-up when the location has changed and it wasn't made obvious - as examples, take the image of the murder victim on the second page (it's totally unclear how or where it's fitting - or, really, why we're seeing it) or the transition from the crime scene to the room where they're reviewing the evidence (how much time has passed? where exactly are they, anyway?). But maybe this is something that I'll get used to.

Giant Sized Astonishing X-Men and the completion of Whedon's X-Men

I suppose that Whedon's goal was to write a moving, tragic close to his run. Kitty appears to be gone for good, Colossus is sad and also gets a great angry moment, and it was e/affective in that way. There's a lyrical quality to the art, especially in these final pages. And, at least on the first read-through, it works.

And then you reach the end and realize that it barely holds together. Virtually everything else ranges from mildly to massively disappointing. We don't know how it is that the bullet Kitty's in is magic and disrupts her power (it just is; it just does); we still aren't totally clear on how the prophecy that Colossus would destroy Breakworld was planted; we don't know what happened to the Cure that Beast had, we don't know whether Cassandra Nova actually managed to implant herself in Armor in the previous arc; we don't know what's going to happen to Danger. (I could also list flaws in the storytelling as it pertains to this issue alone. I'll let Omar Karindu do that instead.)

These aren't inconsequential details. Each arc left us with questions, and what passes for closure in this final issue is incredibly wanting. Unless I missed something, we don't even know what the status of the Breakworld is after Colossus kills the rebel leader and Wolverine slices the arm off of the big angry dude. (I'd go back and check his name, but honestly... I just don't care.) Geoff Klock notes in his audio-review that it isn't enough to say that he's given subsequent writers options to play with. This has been a self-contained vanity project from the start (that Cyclops' blasts return inexplicably at the end of this issue would seem to indicate that Whedon knows that he has to put some things back in the sandbox) and it's very nearly unforgivable that he can't follow-through on what he started.

I imagine that I'll keep a certain fondness for this run. The pacing was a mess - like Battlestar Galactica, it's better consumed all at once so that you aren't conscious of how little content there is to each individual episode - and Whedon either forgets or inadequately explains a dozen or so plot-points from throughout the series, (Thanks to skullfire for this list!) but Whedon has made his name on his character work, not his plots. I suppose I could resent him for doing such a great job with Kitty only to kill her off (well, not really, but you know...), but he also gave me a reason to like Cyclops, made Emma sympathetic, and tried to make Colossus likable too.

So is the whole project a failure, in the end? I think I'd have to qualify my answer: a "yes" with a "but".

Matt Fraction on the X-Men!

It's been a long time since I've made any comics-related posts, but this'll be a short one. From Comic Book Resources:

"Ed Brubaker will co-write 'Uncanny X-Men' with [Matt] Fraction starting on issue #500. Greg Land and new Marvel exclusive Terry Dodson will rotate art chores. 'Stuff explodes, everybody has lots of sex, and then everybody dies. And the team moves to San Francisco,' Fraction said. That may have been a joke."

Fraction doing the X-Men? If it's half as good as his work on this, then it'll still be the best reading on Uncanny X-Men since Pierre Trudeau was last in Parliament*. And if you've never read Fraction's Casanova, you can find a free (and legal) copy of it online here.

*1984, for those of you who aren't Canadian. Or who are, but don't particularly know or care about who has been PM and when.

The X-Men and identity politics, pt. 1

In response to a complaint at the X-Universe Message Board that there are hardly any gay mutants - despite the fact that the mutants in the X-Men's universe are popularly understood as analogous to queer or racially Othered youth - a poster named Tiger Shark wrote the following: "the X-men is already a metephor for minorties everywhere and of all kinds, so there's no need to trot out a 'gay' X-Man just to fill a quota".

There's something immediately appealing about this logic, though I'd suggest that it ultimately fails. It's appealing, I think, because claims to X-Men's metaphoricity are incredibly seductive. Under the logic of metaphor, an implicit comparison allows for the attributes of a to be read on to b. So X-Men is not just a superhero comic - depending on who you talk to, it's also about race relations and civil rights, homosexuality and homophobia, 'the red scare', Jewish-American assimilation, and/or teen alienation.

That said, a metaphorical relation implies equivalence, and some of these metaphors are more equal than others: given the overwhelming normativity - the characters are almost universally whiten, malen, able-bodied, middle-to-upper-class, and heterosexual - of the X-Men, the race and sexuality readings can be contradicted and deconstructed without much effort.

The same poster later accused me of "being too literal" and "lost in minutiae", though these sound like reasonable demands to place on language. We should be skeptical of a comic book that, literally, presents us with dozens of heterosexual characters but asks us to understand (misrecognize?) them figuratively as non-heterosexual. A certain degree of dissimilarity is expected in a metaphor, but this isn't just minutiae that I'm getting stuck on - it's a fairly evident contradiction that's embodied in nearly every X-character.

[This was all inspired by a specific textual incident, but I'll get to that in the next installment. My apologies if you've read my 'Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants' paper, which I posted here, and this sounds redundant. But most people don't want to bother with a 20 page document, and it feels helpful and necessary for me to rewrite some of those arguments in a more concise manner and with some tweaking and more contemporary examples.]

Comic book round-up...

I have two weeks of comics worth to blog about - and an unusually busy two weeks, for me at least - but I've put off making any comment at all until now. (Too busy, and so on and so forth.) So I'll make some brief comments here, which I'll eventually get around to expanding into longer reviews on comicboards.com. (Which is, incidentally, where every blog I write about a comic ends up anyway.)

Astonishing X-Men #23 - I've pointed out a number of times that Whedon's individual arcs have largely the same structure. I won't belabor the similarities that I've drawn out in other posts, but there are some more worth mentioning: Cyclops' resurrection after last issue's suicide marks the second time that the Breakworlders have brought an X-Man back to life; more to the point, this is the fourth time in four arcs that Cyclops has either been killed or recovered from being near death, which seems a bit excessive; as well, his break-out and bad-ass pose on the final page bears much familiarity both narratively and visually to the similar "you've taken your best shot, bub..." poses at the end of AXM #10 (Xavier) and AXM #15 (Kitty). Whedon also continues with his habit of borrowing tropes from old X-Men comics, though the "Cyclops actually can access his powers" swerve is less obscure than those he made in the last couple issues. (Jason Powell notes that this turning point is also featured in Uncanny X-Men #134, #150, and #272, to which I also must add also add X-Factor #39.)

Whedon does manage one repetition with a much subtler and cleverer variation to it, though. In the opening scenes of the issue, two of the rebel Breakworlders discuss the likelihood of an X-Men victory against Kruun. One expresses optimism and Aghanne, their leader, suggests that she has been driven mad by the "hope" that the X-Men have brought with them. It's an interesting choice of words - the mutant cure in the first arc was, we should recall, also called "Hope".

The Order #4 - There's something very Lost-ish, I think, about the frame narrative 'interviews' (job interviews? or therapy sessions? we're not entirely sure) that are probably the most distinctive feature of this comic. New books written in total sincerity and full of characters we don't know are a tough sell, and this quirk shoot straight for the heart every time in trying to compel us to like these people. It's probably not working quite as well for me as I would hope: the first issue's interview was able to integrate Apollo seamlessly into the Marvel Universe and cleverly critique Tony Stark at the same time, making the entire notion of the Order feel somewhat discomforting. The subsequent interviews just haven't cut that close to the bone.

I'm also ambivalent about Barry Kitson's art. He's ideal for the interview panels, where his raised eyebrows or smirks are perfectly expressive without ever being too explicit. But his entirely generic face designs are often confusing, making it difficult to tell one character from another, and there's very little dynamism to their movements. (This is my same complaint of Jim Lee, whose characters similarly seem to be posing when they are ostensibly fighting.)

All-Star Superman #9 - All of the comments I've seen from other fans of this series - I tend to not bother reading actual 'reviews' - seem to agree that something is missing from this issue. Perhaps its the heart. Superman seems weak and whiny in this issue, (and the reason for the weakness, which actually leads to his victory in the end, comes from out of nowhere) and the villains' motivations are cliché but without serving any redeeming metatextual purpose. We certainly don't learn anything about these villains as we did about Lex or Zibarro in their issues, nor do we learn anything particularly interesting about Superman.

Even the political commentary (or what passes for a criticism of Superman's seeming apoliticism, anyway) is rather confused and superficial: the Kryptonians criticize Superman for being at the beck and call of the humans while refusing to release the miniaturized inhabitants of Kandor into the sunlight, but nothing more comes of this potential exploration of Superman's alienness. He meets their complaints with some empty-sounding platitudes and we hear nothing more of it.

Scott Pilgrim #4 - Of all these books, I've read the latest Scott Pilgrim most recently and so given it the least thought. It's easily the most melodramatic of the four books, which doesn't immediately strike me as a good thing. One of the pleasures of the early books is that the heavily stylized art, often esoteric (or, rather, geeky) allusions, and ironic tone have affected a comfortable distance for the readers from the characters: the stories have a kind of magical realism (as opposed to superhero stories which, while featuring fantastical elements, are typically aimed at approximating realism) that borders on the absurd, with dialogue that's too self-conscious and, accordingly, characters that are hilariously adept at meeting our expectations of their type. O'Malley seems to have made a habit of delivering more of everything with each new volume, and this one takes a misstep by turning up teen angst (which is particularly bothersome, for me at least, because these characters are very nearly my age): discussions about the 'L-word', the introduction of new-old love interests just for the sake of complicating things, misunderstandings that could easily be cleared up if the characters weren't sometimes idiots...

Perhaps worst of all, I suddenly realized that Ramona is entirely out of Scott's league and I have no idea what she would see in him. (Which is to say that the consequence of humanizing your characters and giving them real emotional problems is that we begin to regard them as real people and question their decisions accordingly. And there's no question in my mind that their relationship makes no sense.) A recurring exchange perhaps illustrates this best of all - Scott makes repeated mentions of how Ramona's age is "unknown", as if she's some sort of villainous 80s wrestler. And despite this being a cute quirk of the book's style, O'Malley turns it into some sign of their communication problems before finally revealing her age at the book's end as a way of patching things up. (Spoiler: She's 24.)

All this said, O'Malley also continues to widen his range of always entertaining geeky references: that Scott's dreamscape resembles a Legend of Zelda game, complete with a "forest elf", is priceless. It's a wonderful escapist moment in a book that, despite its previous successes in eliding flirtations with the mundaneness of too much realism, seems aimed at demystifying precisely what's made it so interesting.

Evaluating Whedon and re-evaluating Morrison

(It seems silly of me to try and summarize a run that hasn't yet concluded. But my recent renewal of appreciation for Whedon's Astonishing X-Men - coupled with the increasingly annoyed and/or dismissive responses from a large number of folks in X-Men fandom - prompted me to produce a version of the follow comments on the X-Universe Message Board a couple weeks ago. Exchanges with Jason Powell allowed me to refine and add nuance to those arguments, so I'll try to capture some of that, too.)

First things first: If nothing else, Joss Whedon is responding to Morrison's persuasive, if ultimately nihilistic, appraisal of the X-Men canon with an appraisal of his own. Morrison, of course, set out to rejuvenate the X-Men, make them sexy and overtly political - to approach the other without returning to the norm. (Indeed, I recall hearing Morrison theorize his New X-Men as a dialectical process, where JLA was thesis and the Invisibles were antithesis.) When he failed - and it is unclear whether failure was always already immanent - Morrison resorted simply to a vicious mockery of those same X-Men tropes that he had claimed to have abandoned.

The major difference, then, between Whedon and Morrison is that the latter saw the tropes and canonical stories of the X-Men as a restriction - Morrison says that every writer must do the obligatory Phoenix, Magneto, Sentinel, etc. stories - while Whedon seems to regard them more narratologically as guidelines that are fundamental to the telling of an X-Men story. Which is not to say that Whedon isn't ambivalent about the way that those tropes and narratives are deployed, and I think this is made clear in the very first issue:

1. Kitty sees apparitions from some of Claremont's best-loved stories, so we know the past isn't just in play but will be actively haunting this run. And indeed: Colossus returns from the dead, as do the Sentinel that killed the Genoshans, Cassandra Nova, and the White Queen. Though you can argue that certain exercises are less successful than others, it's an excavation of their history - in peeling back the layers, Whedon's trying to get at an understanding of who they are and the compromises that each of his cast has made along the way. (And, in turn, how they have been compromised by those decisions.)

2. The costume/no-costume discussion establishes that this isn't simply a reversion to an old status quo - Cyclops says that they have to look like superheroes, not that they are superheroes. Mutant politics and ethics take something of a backseat, but we'd be mistaken if we thought they were absent and they'll come roaring to the fore soon enough. In this point, I'm not even talking about the Cure or the irony in imprisoning a mutant computer program. The most poignant political moment is when the team, in costume, fights the Mole Man's monster but fails to be convincing in their act. They don't make the news and they don't make things better for mutants; dressing - performing - as superheroes didn't hide the fact that they were still mutants. (And, in fact, I think that this realization allows for Cyclops subsequent growth.) This is certainly a critique of writers who portray the X-Men as Just Another Superteam, and perhaps even critical of Morrison for trying to situate the X-Men as post-human. Cyclops' ambivalent relationship to mutanity and humanity allows us to recognize that mutants cannot extricate themselves from their humanness and find an 'outside' that places them exterior to humanity as post-humans. But likewise, having been marked as mutant they cannot ever be entirely 'inside' humanity, either.

Where Morrison left us with a dead-end - a critique with no obvious direction forward - Whedon seems to be trying to resolve what the X-Men can be if they cannot be like superheroes. The alternative, it seems, is to shift genres entirely: Whedon's latest arc (which heavily alludes to Dune) seems to take heavy inspiration from the early- and mid-80s X-Men stories that often found the team in space and otherwise battling science-fiction tropes, the sorts of stories and characters that have receded from interest in the past decade or two like the Brood (Aliens), Nimrod (Terminator), and the Reavers (Mad Max). To steal a line that I heard elsewhere, it seems Whedon is saying that 'everything you forgot was pretty cool'.

My least developed thought is on the structural aspects of the four arcs, each of which seems to mirror the various parts of the Phoenix Saga more or less closely. What I wonder is if it's fair to suggest that Whedon is elevating this story to a sort of 'master narrative', the "totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience" within the X-Men mythos, the control mechanism though which multiplicity is engaged and difference is recognized, registered, and regulated. Certainly, it seems fair to argue that the Phoenix Saga - both its narrative form and tropes of corruption, forgiveness, rebirth - has established the parameters that allow us to makes sense of difference and what it can be "about" within the context of the X-Men.

It might be silly and/or hyperbolic of me to liken the canon of the X-Men to a phallic economy, but I'll go there and claim that the same caveats apply: that Morrison failed to successfully possess and redirect the X-Men precisely because mastery of a 'master narrative' is always delusional. And, sure enough, in the end Morrison seems consumed by an sort of hysterical anxiety - he is able to say what his X-Men are not, but what they are remains ill-defined or even only negatively-defined, demanding recognition from the canon that it has made great lengths to otherize.

"Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants"...

Click on the title to read "Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants: Appropriation, Assimilation, and the X-Men", a paper I wrote a couple years ago and which was published in the International Journal of Comic Art 8.2 (Fall 2006), pages 387-405. It's unavailable through the IJOCA website, so I've uploaded it to Academia.edu. (I'm not sure whether that means you'll need an account to access it, though.)

Updated:
Also, if you're going to read "Mutant Readers...", I'd like to suggest that you also read a brief follow-up piece from my brief-but-ongoing 'X-Men and Identity' series, which was inspired by Jason Powell's (accurate) observation that I had ignored parts (albeit small parts) of the X-Men's history that challenged my thesis. Just click here to read it. While I stand behind most of the original argument - the X-Men have not been an anti-oppressive force for most of their existence - it's unfair to ignore the moments where they have been. (I also link to some of Jason's own writing, which is worth checking out.) Those moments also provide an explanation of why the X-Men have been unable to live up to their stated goals and of the (often external) limits to superhero radicalism. It's a necessary addendum to the older paper, I think, so check it out.

How Whedon got his groove back

At this point in Whedon’s run, I’m willing to just give in and have some fun. Granted, he’s making it easier for me: it seems, at first, like some of structural similarities of the first three arcs - as I laid them out in this review many months ago - are no longer in play. But then, many of the elements of my cute little morphology are still haunting Astonishing X-Men. Looking at the story’s bare bones, not much has changed: something far more difficult to describe is happening in this latest arc, and this issue is a particularly wonderful example.

So what is Whedon doing differently here? He’s always been incredibly honest in laying out his ancestor texts for the reader in easy-to-read allusions: shades of early Claremont and especially the Dark Phoenix have been littered throughout, as well as Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already notice yourself, though – or anything that I hadn’t noted here before. But there’s a new element in the mix with these last few issues. Take the Beast’s bitter snarking at Agent Brand as their vehicles are disabled by a tactical “snowstrike” and they scurry for shelter: “You’re amoral, you’re abrasive, and right now you’re looking at me like I’m a taun-taun.” The reference - which you either understood immediately or eventually Googled out of sheer curiosity – is to the creature that Luke Skywalker slices open and crawls inside for warmth when he’s trapped on the ice-planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a tiny reference, (though certainly not a throwaway) but it opens the field immensely. I also think that we’d be right to suspect that the visuals of the Breakworld are meant to recall Dune, though I’m not familiar enough with the series to know if it goes beyond that. Regardless, Whedon isn’t just playing with just the X-Men sandbox anymore.

Though it’s much subtler, the Empire Strikes Back connection can also be read into the situation of the captive black SWORD agent that Overlord Kruun is torturing for information. We learn in this issue that he’s made a deal with one of the Breakworlders to give them Colossus in return for saving the Earth. And that this deal is no spur of the moment thing – it has, in fact, been in the works all along. (Though Agent Brand’s complicity is unclear. We don’t know if she planned it.) Sure, reimagining the scene in terms of Lando Calrissian betraying the Rebel Alliance doesn’t add anything to your experience as far as the plot’s concerned, but it makes the process of reading it a whole lot more fun.

Whedon extends his palette of literary references far deeper in time, too. The rebel Breakworlders explain to Colossus that they believe the prophecy – the one that says Colossus will destroy their world – might mean that he’ll destroy the order of the world, a sort of restructuring from which something better will emerge. Their interpretation recalls the Biblical origins of ‘apocalypse’, where ‘the end’ is only ever the end of life-as-we-know-it and not life, period. I’m probably wrong to also read this as a gentle chiding of typical comic book doomsday-prophecizing, where the apocalypse is always the end of everything in existence, but it certainly stands in stark contrast to the usual the-end-is-nigh super-hero stories where the fate of all existence hangs in the balance. Despite the chaos and death that necessarily accompanies it, apocalyptic literature has historically admitted that what follows a day of judgment is eventually better than what preceded it. It’s nice to see Whedon recall that.

Whedon isn’t doing anything particularly new - the clever appropriation of ideas and deepening of subtext through allusion is as old as writing itself – but he is getting more creative with where and from whom he steals those ideas. I’m reminded here of what Geoff Klock says about Matt Fraction’s Casanova: “Before anyone objects that Casanova is hardly new, drawing in everything in its gravity, Casanova FEELS new, which is all I am really asking for.” Whedon is still writing a love letter to Claremont and Morrison, but it no longer feels like that’s all he’s doing, or that it’s even the main thrust of Astonishing X-Men any longer.

I continue to be of two minds on Astonishing X-Men...

I’d really like to be able to write that the newest issue of Astonishing X-Men, and the last issue of the “Torn” story arc, managed to exceed the diminished expectations that I set out in my review of the previous issue. I’d really like to, but I don’t think that I can.

I can say, at least, that it didn’t end with a fastball special, as did the last two. But while I gestured broadly toward some similarities between “Torn” and “The Dark Phoenix Saga” in my last review – whereas I categorized and listed the nearly identical plotlines of all three AXM arcs – the final issue puts those similarities in sharp and undeniable relief. Call it an homage or a reinterpretation if you must, but “Torn” is unmistakably “The Dark Phoenix Saga: 2006”. Rather than draw my own list and risk seeming like I’m repeating myself, I’ll copy-and-paste the list created by X-Universe Message Board poster Omar Karindu:

*Psychic female teammate goes dark and evil.
*Hellfire Club turns up, and swiftly wrecks the team.
*One lone X-Man survives, plunging into the waters below the mansion where the fight takes place.
*A villain who casts illusions into the mind of the X-Man-gone-bad is responsible for their heel turn and is allied with the Hellfire Club.
*A psychic event in Scott's mind involving his telepathic teammate gone bad leads to his breaking loose and free the rest of the cast.
*There is debate about whether the team will need to kill the psychic gone bad.
*Just as the inner conflict of the psychic teammate is reaching the point of resolution, aliens abduct all of the heroes.

To this point, I had been suspecting that Whedon was purposefully re-imagining classic stories and rewriting his own with some end in mind. He did, after all, seem to set a mission in his first issue. When Cyclops discards the leather uniforms of Morrison’s run and decides the X-Men need to dress as super-heroes again, it's with the goal of rebuilding trust between the team and the public – ‘dressing as something they [the people] recognize’. Implicit in his words, of course, is that the costumes are part of an act - the X-Men can never really be super-heroes, but they can try to look like them. The issue of super-heroics and a kind of performance was mostly ignored through “Gifted”, but came up again at the beginning of “Dangerous”, where the team saves the city from a monster but is questioned by the Fantastic Four and fails to make it on to the evening news. Cyclops, for one, seemed disheartened – maybe, then, the slightly crazy Cyclops shown here is our link to that initial plot? Whedon is heading somewhere interesting and new with the team leader, it would appear. Just don’t ask me to explain how it all ties together. Or if it actually ties together.

I'm torn between admiring AXM #18 for its beautiful and idiosyncratic visuals, characteristically snappy dialogue, and wonderful characters – unexpectedly, Danger and Ord are shaping up to be a wonderful comic duo – and admonishing Whedon for plot twists that are increasingly predictable and/or contrived. It’s not that I dislike retellings and reinterpretations – I love The Authority and Ultimates, Marvels and Astro City – but I don’t know that Whedon has a point or goal beyond giving us immediate, visceral satisfaction with his own witty and fun revision of “The Dark Phoenix Saga”. Admittedly, I ask a lot more of Whedon than I do of most comics. And maybe I should realign my expectations – maybe I should just enjoy Astonishing X-Men as pure ‘pop art’, bubble-gum entertainment. I just wish that I didn’t have to.