X-Men Blue #33-36: “Surviving the Experience”
If X-Men Gold had the problem of doing a final issue when nothing was really ending, X-Men Blue has a slightly different problem: the time-travelling teens’ tenure in 2018 is tantalisingly close to termination! They look set to return to the sixties! A simpler, more alliterative and exclamatory time! There’s a real ending here!
Or rather, there’s a real ending, but it’s over in Extermination, which isn’t even written by Cullen Bunn. Nor does it particularly lend itself to any kind of plot set-up. So instead X-Men Blue spends its last issues tying up some loose ends and character arcs, and trying to provide a sense of closure to the run.
This matters, because the ending for these characters is a challenging one to pull off. If these really are the original X-Men, and they really are going to wipe the slate clean and go back to let the timeline resume its flow, then they remember none of this – and so what was the point of it, really? Part of the project here is to try and answer that question.
But first! Even though these four issues are billed as a single storyline, “Surviving the Experience”, in reality it’s a pair of two-issue stories. Issues #33-34 are a time travel story, showing what happened to Magneto when he briefly escaped into the future during the “Mothervine” arc, still reeling from having killed some of the Mothervine mutants when he was backed into a corner. It’s a near future, and it’s a dystopia, because aren’t they all? (I can’t help feeling that there’s a gap in the market in 2018 for optimistic visions of the future, which are in short supply, but something tells me the X-Men won’t be filling that void any time soon.)
Marcus To does a suitably bleak wrecked city in issue #33, which at least feels like people used to live there, and his clunky cyberpunk Reavers are pretty good as well. It’s nicely paced, with a low-key first half of Magneto wandering the city before he finally switches on and takes the Reavers apart in a couple of panels. The twist is that Magneto assumes this is a world that somehow resulted from what he did to the Mothervine mutants, but in fact the survivors greet him as a hero. Since Magneto is in one of his self-loathing moods at the time, he’s not best pleased by the idea that a bunch of people idolise him for his radical revolutionary stuff; it seems the world was wrecked by the battles he fought in defence of mutants, even if he was on the right side, it brings us back to the idea that Magneto’s tactics are ultimately destructive, and deep down, he knows it.
That’s a repeated theme in Cullen Bunn’s take on Magneto – he knows where this is going to lead, but he can’t control or resist his anger enough to refrain. But at the same time, it’s not immediately clear what he did wrong here other than simply show up to fight the Reavers at all – and indeed that’s the line which the survivors take, making him a rather bleak symbol of relative optimism for them. Still, it turns out that he did go on something of a tirade after “Mothervine”, causing a ton of destruction supposedly in the name of defending mutants, even if some of those mutants do remember him fondly. The original X-Men – who are, after all, the stars of the book – never went home in this timeline, and have a crack at killing Magneto in case that makes a difference to the timeline.
In fact, Magneto does indeed avert the timeline on his return to the present, by nipping this version of the Reavers in the bud (with excessive force). Cullen Bunn’s lengthy run on Magneto, dating back to the Magneto solo series, ends with him taking out an entirely genuine threat to mutants, but also retreating into his Silver Age villain mode, holed up on a new Asteroid M and slipping back into his old ways. On one level it’s basically the reset button to get him back to Trad Magneto for future stories, but it makes sense in other ways too. Magneto’s tragic flaw, in Bunn’s stories, is his inability to transcend his dark side; so it works to end on him succumbing again. What’s more, it means that even if he’s separated from the X-Men in this story, in his own way, Magneto is going back to the Silver Age too, and his own simpler time.
That takes us to the final two issues, and the X-Men themselves. In issue 35, young Jean has a final lunch with her older self – quite well done by To, who has to draw two very similar-looking characters in extended conversation, and keeps them distinct and reasonably interesting. Older Jean reveals that she can now remember her time-travel stint, thanks to yadda yadda Phoenix something yadda. On a plot level, that helps to nail down the idea that these really are the genuine X-Men, and always were, but also closes the door on any suggestion that they could stay. (It also creates a plot hole for Extermination, since surely older Jean should know what’s coming… but okay.) At the same time, it opens the door for some of this stuff to matter in the future, partly because the older X-Men might remember it after all, but also because we’re reminded that the older X-Men might at least have been affected by their visitors from the past. Iceman certainly was, after all.
There’s also an attempt in here to make this a “growing up” parable, in which Jean and the other X-Men have to embrace growing up, even though change will make them into different people who they don’t recognise. That doesn’t really work, because what they’re doing is a step backwards in terms of their personal development, not a progression forward – but you get the idea.
Hank, Bobby and Warren also get the chance to talk with their older selves one last time, and Bobby faces the obvious point that if he’s going back in time, he won’t be openly gay any more. This feels like it needed an awful lot more weight, and there just isn’t space to do it here without having it dominate the story. It’s a good scene as far as it goes, but Bobby’s feelings on the topic feel underdone, even if the basic idea – that he accepts the necessity of it, because Time – is fair enough. Scott, of course, doesn’t have anyone to talk to, because he knows he’s going home to die. Good old Scott.
Issue #36 really does go full tilt on tying up the stray plot threads. Mojo TV is taken down in two pages. Scott says goodbye to Corsair and the Starjammers, who make a big point of stressing that Corsair’s second chance to connect with his son in the Cyclops series really mattered a hell of a lot to him. The remaining supporting cast from Madripoor hook up with the Raksha. The new Mothervine mutants arrive at the Xavier Institute. Scott and Jean are back together. The Poison version of Jimmy shows up to take out a bad guy. And that’s pretty much it, leaving the X-Men mentally ready to go home, and only the plot mechanics to go – something which can be kicked off to another time.
Considering the inherent limitations of trying to end the series without actually sending the X-Men home, this is a good final arc. It plays to the strengths of the series, and it really does manage to attach a bit of weight and closure to something that could easily have come across as hammering the cosmic reset button. It’s a strange call to keep Magneto and the X-Men separated in these issues, especially as the book ends with them heading off on one last mission to fight Magneto’s new team (something that isn’t a lead-in to Extermination). That’s a relationship that feels like it never quite came to fruition. But as a season finale for Cullen Bunn’s X-Men work, this satisfies.
This works for me much better than Gold. Blue wasn’t perfect, the Poisons stuff was really too much, I could have done without Jimmy Hudson or Bloodstorm (especially as harvdeath in Extermination felt all the more gratuitous after her “death” in the Mojo storyline not long ago). But thematically Bunn was able to build upon his runs on Magneto and Uncanny, while keeping each book distinct, and also carrying over some threads from Bendis and All-New. And perhaps a bit like Rememder’s X-Force, Bunn manages to tell some good stories that also provide a satisfying in-story response to the ridiculousness of their lives while providing a meta-level commentary on retcons and serialized story telling in general.
> Older Jean reveals that she can now remember her time-travel stint, thanks to yadda yadda Phoenix something yadda. On a plot level, that helps to nail down the idea that these really are the genuine X-Men, and always were, but also closes the door on any suggestion that they could stay. (It also creates a plot hole for Extermination, since surely older Jean should know what’s coming… but okay.)
Actually, I think you’ve misread that completely. What Jean the Elder remembers is onlt the Generations one-shot. [Since Jean got a memory-dump of Phoenix’s experiences back in Inferno, I would have said that the mystified talk of how she can possibly remember it was a nod to how the Generations: Captains America one-shot went out of its way to establish there was no record of any of their Generations trips to the past – not even Falcon’s, despite him living out 50+ years during his trip, becoming a priest and dying an old man before reappearing in the present day as a young man again – but then Zombie Galactus remembers it in the flashforward. So it’s just a plot hole how it could have “actually happened”.]
“It’s a near future, and it’s a dystopia, because aren’t they all? (I can’t help feeling that there’s a gap in the market in 2018 for optimistic visions of the future, which are in short supply, but something tells me the X-Men won’t be filling that void any time soon.)”
It always strikes me that, much like other holdovers from the Claremont days, the X-Men view of the future remains trapped in an early 1980s sci-fi tech-noir future (a la Blade Runner or Terminator), such that stories like DOFP that were creations of a particular era’s pop culture (much as elements like the Starjammers were) have become the everpresent future — such that Cable’s future or Bishop’s future or the 2099 future always look like that, rather than reflect later pop culture ideas of the future (compare that to how views of the future in comics have shifted, utopian or dystopian, over the decades as cultural norms have changed). It’s somewhat ironic, given how much tech-futurism we see in media/sci-fi today, that folks in the X-Men’s future still dress like it’s a hair metal music video.
That’s a really interesting observation. Thank you.
One thought that it provoked is that this is actually less true of DOFP than its successor dystopian X-Futures, even though DOFP is a product of that era in a way that the 90s ones were not. DOFP draws to a large extent on Nazi Germany for its imagined future. Thematically, I think the worries that represents are something that’s closer to what’s central about the X-Men.
The tech-noir stuff is sort of like the fact that the X-Men traditionally have an awful lot of space opera in them — it can work fine, but there’s nothing about it that works particularly well in the X-Men in particular. In both cases, it would be definitely worth stealing from more recent eras of SF.
I sort of feel that this is another area where the decision to wind things back from what Grant Morrison did was a problem. That theme of New X-Men that mutants *are* the future, that we’re all going to be mutants in a diverse and thrillingly weird future of body modification and expanded consciousness — it’s also very much of its time and indebted to things like the Culture. But, you know, it’s a more recent kind of dated.
If the future looks rosy, then there’s no drama to drive the plot. You come back to the present and keep on keeping on? Spend your days trying to be predestined?
I think that’s certainly something that demands careful handling, but I think you can get round it. Especially in the X-books, which trade a lot in “possible” and “alternate” futures.
For instance, do the utopian DOFP, with the equivalent of Rachel Summers – some detail that indicates that it’s not actually “our” future. Then it becomes a statement that a better future is possible, but not one thta it’s inevitable.
(Unless the better future appears to depend on the divergent detail. But then it’s about how we had a chance to create a better world, and lost it. That could be good, too. It’s still depressing, but it’s a different flavor of depressing.)
Also, in the real world, believing in the inevitability of some better future hasn’t always prevented a sense of drama and struggle. Marxists, obviously, have been committed to the idea that a communist utopia is an inevitable development that absolutely is going to happen. This has not stopped them from being quite keen on the idea that it still has to be fought for. Similarly, Christians have historically been able to combine a sense that the triumph of God is inevitable with portraying where we are now as a combat between the forces of good and evil.
So, yes – I think you’re right that it could denude the story of suspense and interest. But it doesn’t have to. It falls in the category of “will need to be written with an awareness of this potential pitfall.”
Nu-D: If the future looks rosy, then there’s no drama to drive the plot. You come back to the present and keep on keeping on? Spend your days trying to be predestined?
I think such a thing would work better as an alternate present timeline than a possible future. I’ve long wanted to see the “616” X-Men encounter alternate versions of themselves that are more successful, healthier, and better off than they are. Invert the trope such that “616” is the comparatively dystopian timeline.
Right; imagine showing a timeline where things worked out….just after a story that shows “our” X-Men made the wrong decision at the point when things diverged.
Well, I’d say it depends on if there is determinism or not, with this conversation of the future.
The idea of Days of Future Past from the Claremont-era was that it was always avoidable, but it was also always a potential threat.
With Christianity, it doesn’t make sense that they would really care about a fight between “good and evil”. That’s Zoroastrian, rather than Christian.
Yes, they (as individuals) would want to try to be good and do the right thing, because of faith and judgment.
However, with the Book of Revelations, Christianity became determinist, where it was inevitable what the future would bring. Great evil followed by the triumph of pure goodness for eternity.
It works with both utopian and dystopian stories.
If the X-Men see an utopian future, if the idea is that it’s only a possibility, but isn’t predetermined, then there’s still something for which to struggle.
Whether or not it “makes sense,” I think it’s historically unquestionable that Christians have often, in different periods, portrayed the Christian life as being a soldier in a war against evil.
I express no opinion on whether this is *correct* Christianity or not, but as a descriptive statement of historical reality it’s accurate. It’s true for some Christians today. Try Googling “soldier for Christ.”
The simplest way to put it , I suppose, is that dystopias show us the extreme case for the consequences of what we’re doing, while utopias show the extreme case for the benefits of what we could be doing.
Maybe that’s why no one has done the utopian X-future: you’d have to decide what the X-Men “should” and “could” be doing and extrapolate from there.
I’m saying it’s not purely Christian, in that sense.
However, the idea of a struggle against evil does make sense, in that Christians would have the need to try to sway others to their path.
Not because it would effect the predetermined future, but because you’d probably want to see more people saved in Heaven rather than condemned with Satan in the “lake of fire”.
No idea how the O5 going back can make even the slightest sense, since they’ve probably aged a few years since departure (how many six-month jumps have we seen between big events?) I guess we will have to wait and see there.
I’d love to see a writer do an inversion of the bleak future motif, where the future is actually great (and not “great with something sinister lurking beneath,” but actually great), but the catch is that one of the heroes has to do something terrible to achieve it. Good moral dilemma there.
But what pop cultural views of the future have we had since the ’80s? It seems to me that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, we entered into a phase of the so-called “End of History,” and aside from the quickly discredited techno-utopianism of the “California ideology”, we either fall back into the 80s dystopian tropes or else are unable to imagine any future at all. I suppose climate related disaster films are a relatively recent phenomenon. And there’s the whole “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
I too like the inversion of the trope as an idea. Bringing the O5 into the future was kind of playing with that, but again just kind of proving how we on a cultural level, have become unable to imagine a future that’s not a mess.
I’ve heard that Kim Stanley Robinson of the Mars trilogy has a new novel, New York 2140, set in a post climate disaster future, which demonstrates that one can indeed write compelling utopian fiction and I for one would like to see more of this.
Forget dystopian/utopian futures. I’d like to see someone like Scott (who will inevitably be back) or Xavier wake up one day to find himself mysteriously and temporarily (say, for 24 hours) in the body of his future self twenty years from now to learn that everything is… pretty much the same.
Sure, everyone’s older and there are some new faces, but otherwise everything’s pretty much in line with the current status quo. Mutants are still hated and feared but no more or less so than they are today and there’s no Sentinels running the place. The school’s still up and running. X-Men still die every now and again but funerals are sparsely attended because nobody believes the dead X-Man in question will stay dead for long.
And after seeing all of this, Xavier or Scott (depending on who it is in the story) is utterly demoralized upon learning that the X-Men have achieved nothing in twenty years. No significant strides forward. They’ve just been running on a treadmill.
It’s easier to write dystopias, because history has shown how quickly an individual’s concept of utopia can quickly turn in to another individual’s concept of Hell.
We saw the naïve optimism of late-19th century political utopias undone by the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, giving rise to totalitarianism Communism and Nazism.
We saw how quickly the inverse of a Wells or Bellamy utopia could be turned in to Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World.
Somehow, after the nightmare of two worlds wars, mass genocide, the atomic bomb, etc. it seemed much easier to imagine the dark, despairing reality of “utopia gone wrong” with Orwell, Huxley, Zamyatin (just to name a few examples).
That’s always the problem with utopias. There is no consensus as to what makes the “ideal society”.
Ayn Rand’s vision of utopia is certainly not not shared by many (regardless of what billionaires would claim).
Huxley showed how a life of nothing except pleasure and happiness in return for total conformity can be a living hell.
Orwell showed how a State that gives you anything you could ever need can also destroy the body and the soul.
Far easier and more acceptable to show how it can all go so terribly wrong.
We have seen brief utopian visions for the X-Men.
Yet, what would be the ideal society for mutants?
As opposed to the dystopian vision of Magneto’s mutant supremacy, mocked by Alan Moore in that Heroes Against Hunger one-shot.
One in which they have equal rights?
Can’t that just as quickly be taken away? The next economic depression sees baseline humans blaming mutants for their problems, and a return to shades of Days of Future Past.
With the concept of X-Men, perhaps constant struggle, with rising and ebbing tides, is the best that can be imagined.
I’ve long wanted to see the “616” X-Men encounter alternate versions of themselves that are more successful, healthier, and better off than they are. Invert the trope such that “616” is the comparatively dystopian timeline.
That’s kind of what they did with the O5, isn’t it? The 616 present is their horrible dystopian future. (Can you imagine a writer in, say, the 90s daring to write a DoFP type story where someone explains “Well, I think the moment things got really bad was when Cyclops killed Professor Xavier…”)
Post-‘80s SF visions of the future that haven’t been reflected in X-futures: postmodern space opera and its adversary the Mundane SF movement. Singularitarianism.
OK, as noted above, I have to qualify the first a little, because there are ingredients of it in Grant Morrison’s take on the X-Men, minus the “space” part. But it never went anywhere after that, and I think there’s room to do more with it.
The second is in its premises opposed to the premises of the Marvel Universe, although I’d suggest that in a universe filled with godlike cosmic beings you can have one of those change the premises for the purposes of an alternate future story (where you don’t have to worry about the implications for every other title).
The third is something that the MU sort of does, but not really, and it hasn’t really been approached as an X-theme in particular, I think.
Only the third really counts as a pop-cultural phenomenon, admittedly.
Yeah, the funny thing is that the X-Men look like their own worst enemy.
Instead of the Homo Sapiens-run government creating an extermination program against mutants, it was the X-Men with their stupid in-fighting which helped create the world that looks so bad to the 1960s team.
It’s very much exactly like that Secret Wars “E is for Extinction” mini-series.
Magneto decided to go ahead and make a better world, while the X-Men were holding everything back by spending their lives hiding, using violence, and fighting with other mutants.
“That’s kind of what they did with the O5, isn’t it? The 616 present is their horrible dystopian future. (Can you imagine a writer in, say, the 90s daring to write a DoFP type story where someone explains “Well, I think the moment things got really bad was when Cyclops killed Professor Xavier…”)”
Like many other things from Bendis’s work, this was a great idea that lasted about five minutes before he saw something else shiny and changed the direction.
This series was ok. While I appreciated what they did with the characters, the O5 for me just don’t work as a collective group. For some reason I just find them more appealing when they’re on teams mixed with other characters. So, I won’t be really be missing them; if anything, I think their return back to their timeline has been long overdue.
The title did do some good stuff with Magneto, though.
Part of why they don’t work as well as a collective group is that what’s interesting about the premise is having the characters interact with the people in their future, not with one another.
But I think that another part of it is that, when you get down to it, they don’t all work as characters very well.
There’s the basic story that you can tell with all of them (to varying degrees), that they don’t like what their older self became and the world that s/he made. But the problem is that you can tell that story with all of them, and it works best with Scott and Jean. The others need something else.
Warren is the most extreme case. What’s his defining trait as a character? His class. If you bring him to the future, he loses all his wealth and social connections, and he basically has no defining traits. He’s incredibly bland.
Hank didn’t work out well, either. He was a less bland character to begin with than Warren, and he’s not really affected by the time travel – he can still be Hank. However, there’s nothing that time-travel really adds, either.
I think it may have been a mistake to have the older Hank be the reason why the O5 are in the future and have it be a Terrible Mistake. Because you’ve got adult Scott and adult deceased Jean to play the “My God, my adult self really screwed things up!” story with. Adult Hank has generally been one of the most beloved and successful people in his own social world, and I think you could have done something with having *one* member of the O5 who really likes what his adult self became. The one who looks like a monster is the one that nobody regards as a monster.
But at the end of the day, Hank is still not a character who’s particularly interesting in this particular story. Making him a sorcerer doesn’t solve that.
Bobby’s the only case where I think Bendis confronted this problem, that most of the O5 are pretty damn bland, and that this story doesn’t add enough to three of them by itself to justify having them in it.
I think it may be telling that Bobby is the one character where – given the status quo for the character at the time when Bendis took over – it’s really obvious that he has no particular reason to view his adult self as a horrible disappointment. Bobby was also, against tough competition, the blandest and least interesting member of the group in the original Silver Age context, with the possible exception of Jean. He really was just “the youngest one.”
So you create something that makes Bobby interesting. And retconning him as gay was a good move, because it complicates the premise. This is the person for whom the future isn’t dystopian. (Bendis’s conceit that the characters are somehow from the early ‘60s is important to this, obviously.)
But I really do think that something fulfill the same function of adding interest to the character needed to have been done with Hank and Warren, or else they should just not have been brought to the future at all.
On the other hand, I find O5 teen Jean much more interesting as a character than adult Jean ever has been for me, and I’m far from convinced that resurrecting adult Jean and getting rid of her younger self is a good move. Admittedly, making younger Jean interesting was achieved by having her have nothing in common with her Silver Age depiction, but you kind of have to do that — Silver Age Jean doesn’t really *have* a personality.
Daibhid Ceannaideach: That’s kind of what they did with the O5, isn’t it? The 616 present is their horrible dystopian future. (Can you imagine a writer in, say, the 90s daring to write a DoFP type story where someone explains “Well, I think the moment things got really bad was when Cyclops killed Professor Xavier…”)
Bendis said as much in an interview years ago.
What I personally have in mind is the X-Men being exposed to a timeline where a lot of the contrived melodrama, spectacle, and character deconstruction of the 616 timeline never happened–e.g. Xavier really is a MLK-like figure for mutant rights and not a selfish, manipulative hypocrite; Cyclops really is a heroic role model and moral leader, not a neurotic adulterer and unhinged zealot; several of the X-couples, starting with Scott and Jean, have successfully started families and are raising the next generation in a community; the X-Men have had at least some modest success in advancing their cause, obtaining a working relationship with some authorities and/or Xavier Institutes open in countries around the world. A timeline where the X-Men are actually likable, admirable people who genuinely have their shit together and aren’t a bunch of dysfunctional assholes. Call it the “DC version” of the X-Men, or “What if things went right.”
How do the X-Men respond to versions of themselves that overcame their problems instead of being consumed by them? That faced similar challenges and made better choices?
I think the problem there is that Professor X was never created to be a Martin Luther King Jr.-type of figure.
Yes, the whole “peaceful equality” thing could be equated to MLK.
However, really, the X-Men were just created to be another superhero team.
I mean, I don’t remember when MLK decided to buy a giant mansion, take in some really good-looking African-American people to come live with him. Tell them to keep their heads down, and do everything they could to act like white guys.
Then, have them dress like vigilantes and go out to beat up any black people who were trying to stand against the system.
I think with that sort of initial set-up, it’s easy to see how things have gone so terribly wrong for Professor X and his “dream”.
Then, when you had a writer with a real vision like Chris Claremont come along, the idea was that the damage had mostly all been done.
Homo Sapiens had become akin to Nazis, and mutants were a persecuted minority looking towards a future of genocide.
Even with Claremont, the mutants-as-metaphor-for-marginalized-minority takes a while to get going.
Early on, it really only registers in the brief appearance of Lang’s “X-Sentinels.” And that is arguably not about the theme as such, so much as about calling back to the Adams/Thomas era. You have quite a while in which Claremont’s X-Men is really more about globetrotting international superheroics, and space opera.
When Magneto first comes back, for instance, his motivation has nothing to do with mutants – he just wants revenge on the X-Men, like any “arch-enemy” might want on any revived superteam.
Chris V: “Orwell showed how a State that gives you anything you could ever need can also destroy the body and the soul.”
The people in Oceania in 1984 did not have everything they could need. Most people were barely surviving under IngSoc. Specifically, there’s a discussion of the chocolate rations being adjusted down. But the state-run media then lies to people to say that rations have gone up.
I meant the MLK reference as a memetic short-hand for Xavier as a genuinely benevolent, idealistic leader (as he’s been portrayed in the movies), not the lying, manipulative villain he’s been turned into in the comics. Broadly similar to MLK in that he advocates integration as opposed to mutant separatism and supremacy as Magneto does.
In case you weren’t aware, the MLK comparison has been made by Stan Lee himself. He’s said he modeled the Xavier-Magneto dialectic on that between MLK and Malcolm X (but obviously heightened and exaggerated to fit the fictional conventions of the genre). In other words, the comparison doesn’t originate with me.
As for becoming vigilantes and “beating up mutants standing up to the system”: 1) those mutants “standing up to the system” tended to be do so via actions like trying to steal nuclear weapons, taking over small countries, and, later on, engaging in mass murder; 2) vigilantism and extralegal violence is an inherent conceit of the superhero genre and gets filed under “suspension of disbelief.”
Getting back to my broader point, the idea is to subvert the dystopian trope by forcing the mainstream timeline X-Men to confront better versions of themselves that have at least partially succeeded in making a better world i.e. to deconstruct the deconstruction that’s largely defined the franchise for going on two decades.
I don’t particularly like the Bendis decision to pluck a version of the O5 from the past, but he is correct in pointing out that the X-Men have strayed far from their idealistic days.
As far back as during the original Secret Wars (in 1985 or so) they were allying themselves with Magneto out of no apparent reason beyond mutant chauvinism. By 1993 (X-Force #24) Xavier was enough of a hypocrite to be both an official ally of the government-sponsored X-Factor and an unofficial contact of the “black ops” X-Force. By that point, after the desensitivization of the Reagan years, legality and idealism were seen as inconvenient obstacles to be overcome.
I feel like somewhere in the heart of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men there was an attempt at restoring hope to the franchise. He never fully realized that for some reason, but it was best expressed through Jean’s idealism about the school and subsequent transformation into the benevolent Phoenix.
She died, of course, and many of the other characters didn’t come out looking so great. Scott and Emma had their psychic/emotional affair, Xavier gave up on his dream again, Magneto became a drug addict.
I don’t know if Morrison said this himself, or if I read it in a review of his New X-Men run, but his work on the book reflects a belief that the X-Men always start from good intentions, but it’s never possible for them to follow through. They always end up in a mess of their own making.
Didn’t Morrison end his run with a dystopian flash-forward? Granted, that ended when future Phoenix Jean told our Scott it was ok for him to start fucking Emma….
Well, I like my X-Men dysfunctional.
Scott had a psychic affair. Bad? Sure. Was it worse than him running out on his wife and infant son because his thought-dead ex-girlfriend turned out to be alive?
I don’t recall Xavier giving up on his dream at the end of Morrison’s run. He was already planning to retire and turn over stewardship of the school to the X-Men before the events of Planet X. I don’t recall that decision being motivated by a feeling of defeat or failure or a lack of faith. As I recall, he simply felt it was time to pass the torch. Correct me if I’m wrong.
FUBAR007: <>
While I suppose it’s true Xavier is portrayed more sympathetically in the films (and even there he’s still kind of a villain, cf. his treatment of Jean in Last Stand, killing the X-men in Logan) I’m not convinced he has “turned into a lying, manipulative villain” as he’s always been a deeply problematic figure. OK, bringing together teenagers at what is ostensibly a school to train them to be his personal para-military thugs can be waived away as a comic, but how many times did this guy fake his own death? What kind of father was his to David (Legion)? He’s always been a manipulative jerk making rationalizations for his behavior, you don’t have to wait for Deadly Genesis for that.
Thom H.: I don’t know if Morrison said this himself, or if I read it in a review of his New X-Men run, but his work on the book reflects a belief that the X-Men always start from good intentions, but it’s never possible for them to follow through. They always end up in a mess of their own making.
I’ve long had a feeling that on some level Morrison and his successors approached X-Men as a bigger-budget, but thematically similar analog to Doom Patrol. What Whedon and Brubaker later did with Xavier reminds me a lot of Niles Caulder.
Joseph S: I’m not convinced he has “turned into a lying, manipulative villain” as he’s always been a deeply problematic figure. OK, bringing together teenagers at what is ostensibly a school to train them to be his personal para-military thugs can be waived away as a comic, but how many times did this guy fake his own death? What kind of father was his to David (Legion)? He’s always been a manipulative jerk making rationalizations for his behavior, you don’t have to wait for Deadly Genesis for that.
Yes, but what if he wasn’t? What if Xavier was forced to contend with a better version of himself who really was a decent man and not an asshole? What if Professor X was a good guy?
I wish DC and Marvel would do a crossover just so we could see who’s more manipulative and retroactively immoral, Xavier or the Guardians of the Universe. I can hardly think of a story about either of them that doesn’t dredge of some secret terrible thing they did and/or covered up.
I think the concept just hasn’t aged well, the paternalistic old guy who gets kids to fight his battles just doesn’t work anymore. And when Xavier tried to lead a field team, such as after he died in the brood saga and had his body cloned (or whatever the hell) he didn’t really work as a character, and he was even more of a jerk. Cf his relationship with Ilyana. I think the current X persona walks that tightrope perfectly. He’s ambiguous, self-interested, and not lording over a bunch of militarized children.
But in general I agree that there are story ideas of engaging with a utopian or even mundane future as a way of forcing the current X-Men to get over the petty squabbling that was characterized their relationships for so long.
@Moo: Scott had a psychic affair. Bad? Sure. Was it worse than him running out on his wife and infant son because his thought-dead ex-girlfriend turned out to be alive?
Right, but I think that was sort of the point. Even in Morrison’s world of mutant potential and optimism, he still has Scott running around having affairs. While mutantkind was in a much better place on the whole, Scott was too traumatized by his experiences in the X-Men to even talk to his wife. The X-Men represent hope as a group, but their individual experiences as X-Men have kind of broken them.
Now that I think of it, the same could be said for Jean. She completes her transformation into the benevolent Phoenix and almost immediately dies because she’s drawn into the same old, stupid confrontation with Magneto.
I don’t recall Xavier giving up on his dream at the end of Morrison’s run.
I’m thinking more of Riot at Xavier’s. Near the end, he gives a speech to the effect of, “my non-violent methods and goals of integration might all be wrong; I’m stepping down as headmaster.”
@FUBAR: I’d read that book. I have a soft spot for utopian sci-fi, especially if the protagonists transcend humanity and get real weird. I can see that working very well with the X-Men.
“I’ve long had a feeling that on some level Morrison and his successors approached X-Men as a bigger-budget, but thematically similar analog to Doom Patrol.”
Morrison saw (and wrote) the Doom Patrol as a therapy group which wasn’t his approach to X-Men.
Maybe that’s the message in all of this. That evolution isn’t taking the world down the path to a better future, but just continuing to take things in a worse direction.
Maybe the end game of where evolution takes life is really the death of everything.
Things were pretty utopian on this planet before there was any life.
Then, life came along, and you had big things eating smaller things, but it was still pretty well in balance.
Next, humans came along, and it seems that humanity may well be killing off all other life on the planet in the end.
So, what comes next is mutantkind, and maybe they’ll create an even worse mess than humanity.
FUBAR-I realize it was Stan Lee’s statement. It doesn’t mean that the writer managed to convey what he was trying to do on the page, or that he later didn’t try to rationalize “skipping an origin story for these characters” with something that sounds more noble.
I also realize that the X-Men were fighting “violent mutant extremists”. However, the point that “violence simply begets more violence” still stands.
If your whole raison-d’etre is, as someone else pointed out, to be a personal paramilitary force working secretively, it’s really not the way to go about creating that better world that MLK was dreaming about.
@Thom: He began to question his own methods, yes, but not his goal…
Xavier: “My *goal* is integration with humankind through peaceful coexistence and mutual self-development. My methods are non-violent and require time and patience. In light of recent events, I’m willing to consider that my *approach* may be in error.”
That might seem like “Okay, well it’s time to speed this up with some violence” but Xavier’s methods up to this point largely consisted of doing fuck all but send the X-Men out into the field to beat up some villains every once in awhile and then return to their isolated estate. Opening up the school to more students wasn’t even his doing. It was Cassandra Nova’s. You’d think someone might have come along to suggest to Xavier “Have you ever considered blogging?”
Adam-I guess I was using “need” in shorthand, as in that you need enough food to survive, you need a place to live, you need a job….all of which are provided for everyone by the State.
I didn’t mean it in the same sense as the lifestyle of mass-consumerism presented in Brave New World.
Where every “want” was provided, as opposed to bare physical needs for mere survival.
Also, there were other amenities which weren’t “needs” given to the “proles” in 1984 as their “bread and circuses”: pornography, beer, sporting events.
Moo: Morrison saw (and wrote) the Doom Patrol as a therapy group which wasn’t his approach to X-Men.
It goes beyond Morrison. Look at the parallels between Niles Caulder and Charles Xavier and the character arcs they ultimately followed.
That might seem like “Okay, well it’s time to speed this up with some violence” but Xavier’s methods up to this point largely consisted of doing fuck all but send the X-Men out into the field to beat up some villains every once in awhile and then return to their isolated estate.
That’s what superheroes do. Once again, it’s an inherent conceit of the genre.
Chris V: I also realize that the X-Men were fighting “violent mutant extremists”. However, the point that “violence simply begets more violence” still stands. If your whole raison-d’etre is, as someone else pointed out, to be a personal paramilitary force working secretively, it’s really not the way to go about creating that better world that MLK was dreaming about.
You’re not questioning just Xavier. You’re questioning the essential premise of the superhero genre. If you (and Moo) aren’t able to suspend disbelief with regard to that premise, why are you reading superhero stories at all?
I understand what you are saying, but my point is simply that the X-Men were created to just be another superhero team, like the Avengers, except they were born with their powers.
It was later that all these “minority” analogies were added to the imprint to give it gravitas.
Most likely due to Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men.
Moore’s Watchmen and Miller’s Dark Knight Returns weren’t just superhero stories. They were deconstructions of the entire genre, with socio-political overtones, meant to speak about the world we were living.
So, since Claremont’s X-Men run was of this time and also considered more literary than the traditional superhero comic, it had to stand for something greater than “a superteam who goes out to fight evil mutants”.
As Voord pointed out, even though there is some of that eventually inherent in Claremont’s X-Men, there is a lot more that is simply superheroics or sci-fi homage.
Therefore, my problem isn’t exactly that it’s playing with the usual superhero tropes, just that the idea that Xavier’s “dream” really was supposed to lead somewhere better, ala MLK, is flawed from its starting point.
There was never meant to be a “better future for mutants” in the concept of X-Men. There was meant to be super-powered individuals fighting other super-powered individuals, much like the Avengers, over and over, forever, amen.
Which is, pretty well, what we’ve gotten from the franchise for decades now.
Thom H.: I’d read that book. I have a soft spot for utopian sci-fi, especially if the protagonists transcend humanity and get real weird. I can see that working very well with the X-Men.
Years ago, I wrote some notes for a fanfic X-Men sequel series about their children and grandchildren. Rachel and Franklin Richards, Nate Grey, and Legion were all main characters. The high concept was these mutants with god-level powers and their kids adventuring across various planes of existence. Building on the Otherworld and Kirby Celestials stuff to explore the broader Marvel multiverse.
The germ of the idea was to give Scott and Jean’s kids a greater destiny than “weapon for Sinister to use against Apocalypse.”
One of these days, if I ever find the time, I may take a crack at writing it.
@FUBAR
Yeah, I understand how superhero comics work. My point to Thom was that Xavier wasn’t giving up on his dream but finally acknowledging that maybe his methods sucked. Something that Paul wrote in a review years ago comes to mind…
“[The X-Men] are meant to be pacifists, they’re meant to be out there pushing for their vision of a better world, and for some reason this means dressing up in costumes and fighting people. There’s always been an awkward tension between the requirements of the superhero genre and what the X-Men are actually supposed to be trying to achieve, which has been one of the things Grant Morrison’s been playing off.”
Moo: Something that Paul wrote in a review years ago comes to mind… “[The X-Men] are meant to be pacifists,…
No, they’re not. They’re a self-organized militia to police the mutant population and also defend it against violent threats. That’s part of Xavier’s dream in that defeating mutant supremacist terrorism and anti-mutant terrorism is a necessary element of integrating with the broader human community. They live in a racist world so they can’t trust the established legal-political authorities to reliably do it for them.
The implied alternative case you and Chris V are making is that, if Xavier and the X-Men renounced all violence, everything would be fine. Given the world they live in, such pacifism would get them slaughtered. Hell, in much of our world, such pacifism would get them slaughtered.
The X-Men aren’t meant to be pacifists. They’re meant to be people who would like to be able to be pacifists. Pacifism is an ideal they’d like to achieve, but, given the world they live in, can’t afford.
The stronger case against Xavier and the X-Men is that they let themselves get so consumed by the superhero stuff and their own personal melodrama, they neglected the mutant rights/school stuff.
“The implied alternative case you and Chris V are making is that, if Xavier and the X-Men renounced all violence, everything would be fine.”
I can’t speak for Chris V, but I’m not arguing anything of the sort.
Look, the X-Men are hopelessly naive to believe that *just* policing their own is going to one day bridge the divide between mutants and humans. Humanity can barely coexist with itself let alone mutants. But the X-Men seem to think saying “Look at us! Mutants can be a force for good!” ought to be enough for humans to relax their stance. Why the hell would it? I don’t trust people universally. I can trust a person. A person that I know. But the existence of good people in the world that I can trust doesn’t mean I think to myself “Oh, people are trustworthy and I therefore no longer need to lock my front door.” Of course we lock our doors.
So frankly, the knowledge that there are a nice bunch of mutants out there doing good deeds wouldn’t make me feel any less uneasy about the whole prospect of random people developing powers in general. I’d be freaked the hell out. What good is my locked door going to do me if there could be a mutant with Kitty Pryde’s powers living in my neighbourhood and he/she happens to be an asshole? And don’t even start me on how I’d feel about telepaths.
And that’s my biggest problem with the traditional X-Men setup. Every time someone has a problem with the idea of mutants, it gets put down to ignorance and/or bigotry. The idea that humans might actually have a point seems to be inadmissible. The politicians who oppose mutants are portrayed as conservative bigots like Robert Kelly or outright lunatics like Grayson Creed. For once, I’d love to see a politician along the lines of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Someone who checks every box in the liberal playbook *however* also believes mutants should have to register. I’d love to see what the X-Men make of someone like that.
The X-Men want peaceful coexistence, but only on their terms. They don’t want to be registered and they think that pointing to their own behaviour ought to be good enough for everybody. It’s silly, really.
Just to occupy the mushy moderate middle:
It’s not that mutants are *never* a metaphor for a marginalized minority before somewhere fairly far into Claremont’s run.
There are bits and pieces here and there. The seeds are in UXM #1 when Xavier talks about people distrusting mutants (basically him). It gets a shot in the arm around UXM #14 when the Sentinels are introduced. It’s there in the Larry Trask Sentinel stuff in the Thomas/Adams era.
The place where it’s arguably clearest and most directly political before Claremont is actually not in an X-book: Englehart uses it as part of the Secret Empire storyline in Captain America (a story well known for being really subtle about its applicability to current affairs of its day :)). In fact, I think that might be the first really strong formulation of the idea that the X-Men fight for a society despite being “hated…feared” by the majority (Professor X, Captain America #173 or thereabouts).
But, bits and pieces. There’s a lot of flailing with the pre-Claremont X-Men, trying to find something that makes them work. This is in the mix, but you have long periods where it’s not being used – I don’t think that Arnold Drake does anything with it when he’s writing the book, for instance.
And there are other things in there that are more emphasized early on. I’ve trotted out my theory that a prep school for “gifted” young people in Westchester, where they work in co-ordination with the FBI is much more coherently a metaphor for privilege, and I suspect that Kirby, at least, was more interested in that early on – Magneto is fairly obviously meant to be a Nazi who believes in his own racial superiority, not any kind of illegitimately marginalized person.
Right. That’s not what I was saying. What I am saying is that there’s a missing middle ground with the concept of the X-Men.
Basically, it’s saying, “OK. We beat up Magneto 150 times, and we kept our heads down, and now Professor X’s dream has come true!”.
That obviously doesn’t make sense.
So, the idea that there should be some utopian future (or present) where Professor X’s dream begins to work is faulty, due to the premise set up by Lee and Kirby originally.
Lee wasn’t interested in seeing how Professor X could be for mutants what MLK had represented for civil rights.
He was interested in creating a superhero series.
At times, it did rise above mere superheroics, even back in the early-1960s, like with the Sentinels three-parter.
That remained a small part of the mythos for many years though.
The X-Men were meant to go out and fight other super-powered individuals for all time, just like the Avengers.
The fact that things have gone so terribly wrong for the X-Men should be easy to grasp based on the original premise.
Even in the comics today, it’s not the looming Days of Future Past dystopia that’s so important to the characters, usually.
Moreso, we’re seeing that things went so wrong for the X-Men, not because they are mutants, but because they tend to act like terrible human beings.
Professor X is a jerk. Scott is a philanderer. Hank acts psychotic with some of his actions.
The X-Men are their own worst enemies, it seems.
Once again, I think this is solely because of Claremont.
He wrote such strong characters that the reader fell in love with, and wanted to know them personally.
I always described Claremont’s X-Men as being very much a soap opera. I don’t mean that as a pejorative either. I have nothing but admiration for what Claremont accomplished on the book.
So, I think later writers wanted to focus on these strong characters that they loved.
The “mutants-as-metaphor-for-minority” subtext became more of a windrow dressing to serve plots as needed. The main drive was that these writers could add to this epic X-Men soap opera.
They wanted to write about complex characters with troubled lives first, and not about characters who were mutants first.