The X-Axis – 9 June 2013
It’s one of our rare quiet weeks! (Well, there’s the Wolverine: Season One graphic novel, but I don’t review those. Not in the week of release, at any rate.)
All-New X-Men #12 – Apparently someone’s decided that it’s time to start pushing the Uncanny Avengers team into the other X-books, since they show up in two of this week’s titles. All-New has them show up to speak confront the remaining Silver Age X-Men (plus Kitty and Wolverine), whom you might recall them blasting out of the sky in the previous issue. But this is a Brian Bendis comic, so once the very expensive aircraft has been wrecked, everyone can settle down to some Very Important Talking.
The main focus of what follows is on Cyclops having a touching reunion with his brother Havok, and Marvel Girl going predictably nuts over the Scarlet Witch still being accepted as a hero. Neither of these seems to advance the plot appreciably in any way, as the story ends with the X-Men going off to fight Mystique’s crew, which is exactly what they were going to do at the end of issue #11 anyway. The more substantial story advancement is over in the subplot, where Mastermind makes clear that she believes Mystique has a more ambitious agenda than merely accruing vast amounts of money, and Mystique more or less confirms it.
Though it’s a very well drawn issue, and the brothers’ reunion has a lot going for it, this issue suffers from the main problems that continue to plague All-New X-Men – the pace is glacial, and the characters have to act in awkward ways to make key scenes work. It’s not just the Avengers gratuitously attacking last issue for the sake of a cliffhanger; that’s hokey, but people have been doing it for decades. More to the point is that the ensuing conversation between X-Men and Avengers features no fewer than three key sequences that depend on characters remaining inexplicably ignorant of things they surely ought to know.
Scott has somehow failed to learn that his brother is (a) alive, (b) was in the X-Men, and (c) is now leading an Avengers team, even though Alex isn’t even maintaining a secret identity and is giving press conferences. Has nobody mentioned this to him? Has he not asked? Jean has to be shocked and outraged about the whole M-Day thing, but how on earth have they managed to live with the X-Men for any length of time without somebody mentioning one of the biggest historical events of the last few years? And Scott somehow still doesn’t believe that Mystique is a baddie, even though the X-Men ought to have tons of material to show him. Bendis wants Scott to be fighting Mystique’s corner within the team, which is a fine idea, but he’s given Scott no sensible reason to do so, and no ammunition, so whenever the topic comes up, he looks like a complete moron.
The slow pacing might be exacerbating these problems. The time to have Scott, Jean and the Others Who Don’t Get Anything To Do reacting to the biggest events of the last few years was issue #3, at a push. Here they are, still learning things that even the readers have known from day one, in issue #12. I get the desire not to have them reacting to everything all at once in the opening issues, but if you want to drag out their learning process a bit longer, you can’t have them living with the X-Men. You need to keep them away from the source of information.
It’s not that the actual scenes are bad, it’s that they’re coming at the wrong point in the series, and the logical underpinning isn’t there. This doesn’t seem uncommon where Bendis is concerned; he’s a writer mainly interested in the big emotional beats and, by all appearances, rather less bothered about the connecting tissue that gives them context. And while that’s a perfectly sound order of priorities, there’s still a balance. A lot of what happens in this series is good in theory, but it hasn’t been structured very well at all.
Cable & X-Force #9 – How odd. This issue does have the advertised story – Hope goes on the run to try and help Cable, and the Uncanny Avengers team try to catch her. And it’s drawn by regular artist Salvador Larroca. But instead of being by regular (and solicited) writer Dennis Hopeless, it’s by Frank Tieri, a name I don’t think we’ve seen at Marvel in quite some time. It doesn’t seem to be an outright filler story, though, so much as a self-contained chapter of the larger plot. Marvel’s website is still listing Hopeless as the writer of the next issue, so it seems to be a rare case of a fill-in writer. (And by the way, Marvel’s website is a lot more navigable than it has been in the past. Looks like you can actually find stuff there without resorting to Google these days.)
It was always clear that we were going to get back to Hope’s story, and what happens here is much as you’d expect. She isn’t happy being stuck in the suburbs with her foster parents, the Avengers politely try to tell her that she’s going back there, and (since there wouldn’t be much of a story for future issues otherwise) she comes out on top. It does what it needs to do.
It doesn’t read, though, as if Tieri is particularly familiar with Hope. Having any character reference the “these are not the droids you’re looking for” bit from Star Wars is a bit hokey, but particularly so for Hope, who if anything ought to be the one person in the room who doesn’t get the joke. And unless I’m very much mistaken, Hope’s power is to copy the powers of other mutants who are nearby, not just other mutants who she met earlier in the day. (Wasn’t there an Uncanny X-Men cliffhanger where she was teleported away from the rest of her team, with the idea that that instantly depowered her?) These are more editing problems than faults on Tieri’s part, but they do give the impression that he isn’t up to speed on the character. Oh, and if she’s planning to go on the run, you’d think she’d be drawn with a bag of some sort. Hope’s nothing if not practical, but it doesn’t exactly take a survival expert to figure out that a change of clothes might come in handy.
Still, Tieri makes a reasonable stab of trying to use his guest stars effectively by having Hope try to play up the tensions over Havok’s improbable status as an authority figure in a team filled with far more established heroes. And it does the job of advancing the wider series plot. But even if the problems I’ve mentioned are mere glitches in the wider scheme of things, they’re too prominent to let the story be anything more than okay.
X-Factor #257 – The cover bills this as “The End of X-Factor, part 1 of 6”, but it seems that “The End of X-Factor” isn’t a storyline so much as a bunch of issues that will wind up in the same trade paperback. This is a Jamie and Layla story, so presumably the remaining issues will catch up on the rest of the cast before everyone gets together one last time at the end. (Right?)
Jamie is still stuck as a silent demon after the Hell on Earth War, and, well, by the end of this issue he’s still stuck as a demon – which is another reason why I assume we’ll be seeing him again. He’s wound up in Marrakesh where a couple of locals have mistaken him for a genie and are trying to use him as a source of mystical power to bring a loved one back from the dead. Layla shows up expecting a straightforward retrieval, but it seems that Jamie actually does work as a source of mystical power, so it all goes a bit wrong.
(Part of this doesn’t entirely make sense, by the way. In the timeline Layla “knows” about, it seems Jamie wasn’t a demon – but in that case, it’s not clear what the story would actually have been, since he wouldn’t have been of interest to the two locals in the first place.)
The result is basically a “be careful what you wish for” story, and I suppose the wider idea is that Layla is meant to (but doesn’t) learn that she ought to be careful about how far she pushes her attempts to cure Jamie. But there’s an optimistic note too, since Jamie’s behaviour suggests he’s still in there somewhere. It’s a change of pace and scale from the previous story, but it does feel like a bit of a detour for a series that only has six issues to go.
Unfortunately for that theory, “bitch” as a word is pretty much inextricable from gender. Perhaps you might try to find a new or a better one for the significant portion of the world that has even a vague grasp of philology and politics?
Or maybe there should be a purely male insult to balance things out, and avoid having to justify casual insults about fictional characters.
I thought bastard was the male alternative?
Anyways, in spite of what she started as and what she represented I actually enjoyed Hope for the most part.
I especially enjoy her relationship with Cable, not only was it a nice inversion by shifting the former mutant messiah Cable into a John the Bapist role towards Hope, it also helped give him a human side that a lot of people enjoyed when he last demonstrated it through his friendship with Deadpool.
I also think Kieron Gillen/James Asmus did great jobs with Hope & The Lights despite it appearing on first impressions to be a pretty bad concept ‘Now Hope must travel around activating mutants! It’s like one of those animes the kids are down with!’
There’s nothing all that “male” about the word “bastard,” though. It just refers to an illegitimate child. It’s also not that insulting in most contexts.
“Bitch,” on the other hand, means “female dog.” In usage, it gets really gendered: it can refer to a aggressive, unpleasant woman, or a weak, whiny, or subordinate man.
Some women do self-apply “bitch” in a way that basically means the same thing men do when they self-apply “bastard,” but that’s about as far as the equivalency goes. Even then, the reclaiming of the word has some obvious practical limits.
Compare calling someone an “old bastard” and an “old bitch;” notice that “prison bitch” has all sorts of creepy associations with homophobia and subordination-by-rape; there’s simply no equivalent phrase with “bastard
in it. Or maybe consider why Ol’ Dirty Bastard is a perfectly acceptable, even endearing stage name, but Ol’ Dirty Bitch isn’t.
I’m not trying to go all ideological here, but there’s a serious practical difference between “masculine” insults and “feminine” insults in practice.
More to the point — and on-topic — it’s not as if calling Hope “that bitch” is a particularly useful or even specific criticism of the character. It’s pretty clearly just “that damned female character I don’t like for vague reasons.”
I always figured “dick” was the equivalent of “bitch.”
Unless you think dick = see you next tuesday
Hope is a bitch. She’s bitchy. She has a bitchy, snotty attitude. Emma too. And Northstar, Quicksilver and Empath. Don’t be so hung up on gender. It’s sexist.
Maybe, as Hope’s still new to the present, she used the Star Wars reference because she’s only just become familiar with it and thus is one of the few people to still find it funny.
Well, no, sexism isn’t just being concerned with gender, it’s positing the inequality of different genders. So there’s another word you don’t know how to use.
You can play Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty all you want, but at the end of the day you’re still wrong…and tellingly defensive.
1. Bastard is insulting. True, by dictionary definition it’s asexual, but it’s always applied to men, and is often the female choice of insult for a man. A man might sometimes laughingly call a friend a bastard, but that in no way means its use is not very often an insult.
2. There’s aso dick, prick, git, tosser…that are usually or always insults towards men. There’s more choice with male insults because the female insult is almost always bitch.
3. If Kitty Pryde called Emma Frost a bitch, it would seem in character to me, and not any kind of issue. Which ties with…
4. A woman looking to insult a woman will very often use the word bitch.
5. It’s much more interesting to discuss why people dislike Hope as a character. I don’t mind her at all.
6. I’d say defensive is being misused as a word there – it’s more dismissive.
7. This is silly.
“If Kitty Pryde called Emma Frost a bitch, it would seem in character to me,…”
we know she called professor xavier “a jerk”.
Jean to Emma in 1st arc/story of Morrison’s X-Men run
If you guys think “bastard,” “dick,” or any other word that can be applied to men is anywhere near as degrading as “bitch” is to women . . . well, you’re obviously men.
Let’s bear in mind that there can be vast differences in the perceived offensiveness of various words in different social and geographical groups. For example, I’ve never lived in the UK, but I’m told that “bloody” and “fanny” are a bit less suited for polite company there than in the US. And there’s a word that I don’t really want to describe at length (I’ll just say it starts with a “C”) that’s considered a pretty vile term in the US that I see bandied about much more frequently in British media (as an insult, but not a “word that must not be spoken” like in the US).
My sister slings around the words “bitch” and “bastard” like they’re the feminine and masculine forms of the same word. It’s like to her, only a woman can be a “bitch” as opposed to a “bastard” not because the word means something bad about women, but for the same reason that only a woman can be a “duchess” as opposed to a “duke.” I’d be truly surprised to discover the word means anything more to her than it does to me, seeing as we grew up in the same environment (if does, she’d have to be a much more hateful person than I thought she was to use it the way she does). But I can easily believe there are people who were brought up to think of it as a terrible word that only degrades women.
I guess my point is that it wouldn’t hurt people to think twice before using the word in an open forum like this, but by the same token, we shouldn’t be too quick to assume everyone who uses it means it in the worst possible way.
“They should kill off this female character – she’s a bitch!”
“That’s really sexist.”
“It’s not sexist at all! I also use ‘bitch’ for male characters too – for instance, the prominent gay character Northstar!”
WELCOME TO COMICS, LADIES! HOPE YOU SURVIVE THE EXPERIENCE!
That’s funny. Since I’m also a homosexual.
And quite a bitch too, come to think of it.
Really, ZZZ, I’m arguing more that individual attitudes towards the word don’t mitigate the undeniable truth that “bitch” in its pejorative sense derives solely from its use as a sexist term of abuse.
(Apologies to errant for the following, but the most recent comments brought a similar “problem word” immediately to mind.) The pejorative use of “gay” is pretty unreflexive most of the time, too. To many of the people who toss that around, it’s just a way of saying “crappy” or “annoying,” and for at least some people that usage doesn’t reflect their Serious Ideas about sexuality and equality. Often they aren’t even thinking when they use “gay” as a term of abuse.
But we all know just how the pejorative sense came about, we all know a lot of less troublesome words that express the same ideas, and we all know that at least some of the people who read or hear the word really are going to take it as a validation of their own homophobia.
“Bitch” as a pejorative is quite similar; *you* may mean “snotty and assholish person, male or female” or even just “That particular woman there who is snotty and assholish, unlike most women,” but the word itself guarantees that some of the people you’re using it around are going to go “yeah, that dude knows what women are *really* like, ammirite?” And when women use it, those same sorts of people get even more validation: “Even women know what women are like!” with the added helping of ” Women throw the word around, so I can too!”
For what it’s worth, I don’t think errant is A Sexist; I just think the word “bitch” as an insult carries a kind of sexist charge, irrespective of individual intention. You can’t control other people’s reactions to certain words, true, but that’s exactly the problem: because so you have to think a bit more about what those reactions might be in some cases.
Words don’t stay within the realm of individual conscious intention, it moves between people. As a matter of practice, you’ve already lost a little control of your intended meaning the minute the words you choose are out there being heard or read. Ergo, choose carefully.
The word “bitch” only means “a snotty and assholish person” in some usages because it *already* meant “that uppity woman who doesn’t know her place.”
Correction:
You can’t control other people’s reactions to certain words, true, but that’s exactly the problem To mitigate the problem, you have to think a bit more about what those reactions might be in some cases.
Shocking News Flash: women can use sexist language and buy into sexist ideology, and gay men can use homophobic language and buy into homophobic ideology.
Hey, here’s a thought: instead of getting mad at strangers on the internet for pointing out that you use offensive language, why don’t you, I don’t know, stop using offensive language? When you know that you’re using language that people repeatedly tell you offends them – and in this case, language that targets over half of humanity – why do you keep insisting on your right to use it?
I’d think “wanker” would be closer to the male equivalent of “bitch”. Bastard always seemed like a more abrasive word to me.
But instead of getting mad at strangers on the internet for using words that could, possibly, reinforce the sexist views of idiots, you could give the benefit of the doubt that it WAS used (and taken) to be interpreted as
“snotty and assholish person, male or female” or even just “That particular woman there who is snotty and assholish, unlike most women”.
It’s also quite possible, maybe even likely, that someone HASN’T been repeatedly told it’s offensive because, when you allow for the way language evolves (rather than looking for it to be as offensive as possible), it’s seen by many people as not particularly offensive any more.
I have nothing constructive to add, but I am amusing myself imagining Ellen Ripley shouting “Get away from her, you jerk!” near the end of Aliens.
I’ll just use whatever language I want and if people want to write paragraph upon paragraph explaining why it is offensive to them, so be it. It’s rather amusing, after all.
I’m less worried about Madrox as a demon than I am Guido as a ruler of Hell. Madrox can probably easily be fixed by Dr. Strange, the aforementioned Guido, or maybe even Tryp (I hope they bring him back to wrap up the earliest stories and see what he thinks of mutants returning via AVX). Guido however, how do you undo what he has done?