Brian Bendis has a tendency to leave undeveloped ideas in his wake, and in an era where incoming writers tend to treat their first issue as a fresh start, those undeveloped ideas tend to stay that way. \u00a0But deciding that a character who’s been around since the 60s is actually gay is the sort of thing that has to be followed up.<\/p>\n
And it has been, for the most part, in\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em> and latterly in\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>. \u00a0But that’s the teenage version who travelled through time; we also have the original, who’s had rather less attention. \u00a0Sensibly enough, that’s the version used by Sina Grace and Alessandro Vitti. \u00a0Grace is an interesting choice; as a creator, he’s mainly known for autobiographical indie books, but he was also an editor for Robert Kirkman titles like\u00a0Invincible<\/em>.<\/p>\n I’ve covered this before, but there’s an obvious appeal and logic to finding a long established character who can be plausibly gay. \u00a0Marvel and DC both have superhero universes based heavily around stables of classic characters who were created half a century ago or more; reflecting the time of their creation, they are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and universally straight. \u00a0By 2017, this no longer looks good.<\/p>\n But nor is this straightforward to fix. \u00a0In theory you could cycle in new characters and sort out the balance over time, but in practice few new characters stick, and besides, it’s not that easy to come up with new ideas strong enough to displace the real classics. \u00a0Not every concept lends itself to legacy characters. \u00a0And while you can tinker with the demographic balance in a reboot like the Ultimate Universe or the MCU, it’s rather harder to change the race or gender of a character within the Marvel Universe itself.<\/p>\n Sexuality, though… well, people do come out, and it does happen after previous heterosexual relationships, so that’s a possibility. \u00a0And in some ways Iceman is an ideal candidate. \u00a0Yes, he’s had a bunch of girlfriends, but they’re mostly storylines that tailed off into not very much; his relationships are not as fundamental to him as they would to be, say, Scott Summers or Peter Parker. \u00a0Frankly, they’ve often felt like something a writer gave him for want of a better plot. \u00a0When you stop to think about it, in fact, Iceman has done remarkably little since 1963.<\/p>\n So here’s the thing: Iceman is a good candidate for this because he’s as close to a blank slate as you’re going to find among major Silver Age characters. \u00a0But he’s a blank slate because, aside from the visual of the ice slides, creators don’t seem to have found him desperately inspiring. \u00a0His original role in the sixties was as the team juvenile; but over time, as he became one of the older generation of X-Men, nothing so well defined came along to replace that. \u00a0And that’s not a great start for the star of a solo series; there needs to be more to him than just “the one who came out relatively recently”.<\/p>\n At the same time, the plot can’t help but focus on the fact that he’s the one who came out relatively recently, because it needs to be followed up and it’s the main point of interest. \u00a0Still, there needs to be another angle. \u00a0Loosely, I think this book’s solution is to play him up as an everyman, grounding the series much more clearly in the real world and making a point of putting him back in touch with the domestic lives of the parents we rarely see.<\/p>\n This could work. \u00a0There’s a sensible take on Iceman which would have him as the X-Men capable of working in the real world; he’s the one who actually went to a regular university and qualified to do a normal office job. \u00a0But then he got sucked back into the X-Men. \u00a0He\u00a0could have been the one who still had a foot in the real world and helped to ground the team, but that’s not the way things went; instead, in the last twenty years or so the X-Men have become further and further isolated from the real world, and the scope for anyone to actually be an everyman figure is greatly reduced. \u00a0Bobby’s parents do have at leat one fair point in this story, when they complain that their son got sucked into the X-Men’s world and never really came back. \u00a0So viewed from a certain angle, \u00a0Bobby’s attempts to start dating and so forth are also about him reconnecting with the regular world more generally. \u00a0And I really like the way Vitti draws the domestic scenes; he does really good work with the parents and their home, the sort of thing that a lot of artists seem to struggle with.<\/p>\n This isn’t exactly a single five issue storyline, but the central thread is about Bobby trying to come out to his parents, partly for the obvious reasons, but partly because he’s so out of touch with them that he didn’t even notice they’d moved house. \u00a0So we get a very awkward dinner at the family home where dad doesn’t want to talk about “mutant stuff”, and Bobby has to politely explain that he really doesn’t have very much else to talk about. \u00a0The Purifiers show up, partly for the obligatory fight, and partly because this gives an opportunity to show dad in a better light; he may be a grumpy homophobe but he’s genuinely contemptuous of the Purifiers and willing to say so to their face.<\/p>\n Of course, we’ve been through this in the nineties when Scott Lobdell did a rather similar arc, and to an extent we’re repeating it here by going through the whole thing again with Bobby’s parents coming to terms with him being gay; but it was twenty years ago and you can’t complain too much about recycling stories on that timescale. \u00a0It’s the material with the parents that really works in these five issues.<\/p>\n Alongside that we’ve got some more routine plot elements, which aren’t always so well fleshed out. \u00a0Issue #2 has Iceman bringing in a new small town mutant called Zach who can power up technology and superpowers. \u00a0He’s a fairly thin character and his story feels like a backdrop for Iceman to have an awkward conversation with Kitty, who gets some very clunky dialogue like “I just felt rejected and left out of your process”. \u00a0But in issue #4 Zach’s back, and runs away to become Daken’s protege. \u00a0It’s good to see threads being laid for the future, but Zach remains stubbornly one-dimensional. \u00a0The main point of this story seems to be to have Daken deliver a too-close-to-home speech about how Bobby can’t carry the respect of his students because he doesn’t convince as an alpha male.<\/p>\n Issue #5 has Bobby’s parents reading his letter while he fights the Juggernaut. \u00a0Why is he fighting the Juggernaut? \u00a0Because the Juggernaut is a symbolically unstoppable force for Iceman to beat at this important moment. \u00a0If you’re looking for a better reason than that, then you might be disappointed, because the answer is simply that Juggernaut shows up looking for revenge on the teenage X-Men, even though that’s the wrong team. \u00a0I’m not sure this quite works; it feels undermotivated for the climactic fight, and there’s some really wonky pseudo-science on top of that – what does “freezing the speed of light” even mean? \u00a0Since when can Iceman turn to vapour, and what does that have to do with ice?<\/p>\n Still, the book does carry off the important bits between Bobby and his father, and it does a decent job of re-establishing a clear voice for the character. \u00a0On the whole, this is pretty good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brian Bendis has a tendency to leave undeveloped ideas in his wake, and in an era where incoming writers tend to treat their first issue as a fresh start, those undeveloped ideas tend to stay that way. \u00a0But deciding that a character who’s been around since the 60s is actually gay is the sort of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3910"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3912,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3910\/revisions\/3912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}