I Know Nothing No 4:- X-Men 3

1.

I've not picked up a monthly X-Men book since the beginning of Grant Morrison's run at the end of 2001, and I was quickly off of that particular runaway train not too long afterwards. In fact, I've not been what might be called a fan, or even a semi-regular reader, since the middle of the 1983.

How is that possible?

For the X-Men were my book when I was very much younger, and Cyclops in particular my hero too, and it wasn't until I picked up Gischler and Medina's "X-Men" # 3 this very afternoon that it finally dawned on me with any real clarity why the affair should have ended in the way that I did.

2.

The X-Men was always my book, because the X-Men were losers. It was the counter-intuitive beauty of the title until it was into its third decade: the X-Men were the geeks who had learned to defend themselves, but who never could win. They were the uglier ones, the odd ones, the short ones, the fat, the shy, the bespectacled, the ones who actually liked to study and wanted praise from the teacher, the abused, the confused and the just plain objectionable. Pick any school canteen in the West and you could spot those kids who'd be the mutants on Marvel-Earth, and the mutant-haters, and the just plain ordinary folks who'd simply want the fuss over eye-beams and levitation to go away and leave them to the challenges of an ordinary life.

I know that this imaginary-mutant spotting can be done, because for 18 years or so I used to sit on duty in canteens, and school shops, and on gate duties, an unhappy man paid by the state to be Professor X and struggling by as something of Magneto, while barely making it to the social competencies of poor maligned Dr Henry Pym. I'd been Cyclops as a boy, in my boy's imagination, big thick heavy glasses and an inability to talk in anything but best-friend confidences with women, and now I was becoming as bald as Charles Xavier and as jealous of my authority as Eric Lehnsherr.

I have often wondered if it is a coincidence that my decision to become a teacher coincided, give or take a year or two, with a catastrophic fall in my interest in Marvel's mutants. Perhaps I'd joined the enemy and now I couldn't even enjoy the X-Men.

3.

It's probably no coincidence that the X-Men were initially the least commercially successful comic of all Marvel's Silver Age books. The truth was, there wasn't a great deal of wish fulfilment possible watching the original mutants. Peter Parker might be hated as Spider-Man, but at least he rather impressively managed to date Betty Brant, and she had a job. But the X-Men were simply losers, hated in costume, hated as civilians, hated by their fellow homo superior, and their chances of social integration were slim. They weren't even, with the exception of Cyclops, particularly impressive as superheroes. One had big feet. Another could fly. The young woman could turn the pages of books with her mind, though it tended to make her giddy.

Of course I loved them.

My X-Men were obviously the kids who simply couldn't collaborate with the social bear-pit that can be the teenage years. And the simple fact that they weren't able to fit in meant that they could serve as a metaphor for any situation where a vanguard of a non-conforming group was perpetually faced with a significant body of prejudice and in its turn was learning how to stand up and fight back.

The X-Men could be Malcolm X's so-smartly turned out women and men, or Martin Luther King's civil rights protesters. It didn't really matter which, for the metaphor could be stretched to incorporate both violent and non-violent wings of any political struggle, just as long as whoever the X-Men were supposed to be representing were demonstratively lacking social power and, to a greater or lesser degree, facing the inequities of persecution.

But somewhere in the middle of the 1980s, the X-Men went from being the thin X-gened line to becoming something of an army, and then a host of armies, and by the Nineties only an idiot could convincingly perceive them to be in any fashion powerless anymore. There were hundreds of them, and then yet more hundreds, and they could take out just about any other superperson force on the planet with a rotating team-membership just to keep things interesting for themselves.


These X-Men weren't victims anymore. They were players. They were insiders. They were deal-makers and breakers in the superhero firmament. Few ends of the world could possibly be averted without their presence. And the metaphor, already stretched and twisted by over-use and mis-use, started to work in unexpected and counter-productive ways. For no longer was it possible to simply pretend that the X-Men were a helpless little para-military barely able to keep their own backyard secure from this month's mutant baddie, given how very powerful an institution they'd become. Now audiences had to be thrilled with the very-powerful-indeed X-Men while their creators struggled to provide evidence that the team as a whole were still really quite put-upon; Sentinels on the Mansion lawn, "No more mutants", unfriendly fellow superpeople teams, a whole smorgasbord of unconvincing Mcguffins to help the audience identify with Xavier's now exceedingly commanding mutants.

In fact, it all got to the point in the mid-Nineties where it was quite understandable, if not condonable, that such a large percentage of Marvel-America should be concerned about this mass of exceedingly fearsome mutants constantly blowing up people, buildings, space stations, alternative realities, planets, suns and Lord knows what else.

And here I am talking about the X-Men, and not any Brotherhood of Evil Mutants at all.


4.

But the final death rattle for the X-Men as a distinct and purposeful metaphor for any individual or group without power finally arrived, after decades of poorly-thought-through stories, with the usually excellent Matt Fraction's otherwise interesting "X-Nation", where the X-Men stood revealed not as an oppressed minority at all, but as the unpleasant lords of a super-powered state. The jocks and the geeks of the mutant world now all stood together on a hunk of rock outside San Francisco, displaying once more how Marvel-USA doesn't share the same laws with our world's America, or else the phrase "territorial waters" might count for more. And with this substantial army of super-powered characters parked unfeasibly free of America's authority, and yet close enough to San Francisco to pop over without passports for a burger and a shimmy in the local fleshpots, the X-Men completed their transformation from the powerless to the powerful, from the oppressed to the oppressor.

For oppressors they undoubtedly were. There were, for example, illegal holding cells far below the surface of Asteroid M/Utopia where the X-Men, or rather a few of their number, held what they regarded as undesirables without reference to any court. And Cyclops was now just another fascist bully quite literally torturing his victims in the name of saving lives, and, most unforgivably, the X-Family now contained an assassination squad, the appalling conceit of "X-Force". The bullied had become the bullies, and if it could be argued that that's what so often happens in political terms to nations who suffer awful oppression, the extension of the stories into this particular metaphor destroyed the myth of the X-Men as a symbol of the huddled masses and the wretched refuse. They were the elite autocratic rulers of a superhero nation, a mass of dangerous and fractious individuals who ruled without care for the political process. After all, Cyclops doesn't seem to be democratically elected, or to pay any attention to the concept of democracy, or indeed, the ideals and practise of the rule of law, considering those minor matters of torture, false imprisonment, and assassination which don't seem to weigh too heavily on his conscience at all.

5.

I'm somewhat staggered that Cyclops at the very least isn't regarded as a toxic character by readers, so conceptually-radioactive with his own moral corruption that everyone clamors for his perpetual imprisonment in a fictional American jail. Similarly, I can't believe that X-Force is allowed to function by the editorial offices of Marvel, but then, if superheroes can do anything and still be super heroes, well, what does anything matter? Everything's fun, nothing's serious, torture and murder serve as marks of heroic necessity, and I suppose that it's now empowering for us to see our heroes escape entirely from either legal or moral constraints, with only the odd debate between Storm and Wolverine at funerals to indicate that Scott Summer's secret state is in any way a contentious business.

In fact, I feel such a measure of despair writing this, such a sense of being a Jonah, in both the Biblical as well as the naval sense, that I can't help but feel that there's no place for me as a consumer of this medium at all.

For it's one thing to be so careless with the fundamental metaphor underlining a book that it comes quite adrift from it. But it's another to turn our heroes into beasts and then peddle them as virtuously pragmatic role models.

6.

The solution to the problem of the all-too-powerful X-Men is dealt with in a sadly-temporary but effective way in "X-Men" # 3, namely, they're provided with an opponent that can be seen to be a match, and perhaps even more than a match, for them. It's been a task that's tested Marvel's creators on and off for decades now, and pulling off the whole matter of convincingly threatening the X-Men remains a challenge for writer Victor Gischeer here, as it would be for any scribe given the team's current firepower. (Why, even Prince Namor quite unbelievably takes orders from Mr Summers now, albeit with poor grace, and lives in the ocean beneath "Utopia", as if he were a senior butler with a fine apartment out behind some stately home.) Yet there is something of a credibly overwhelming threat on offer from the vampires, and it's made more plausible by the not-unexpected twist that key members of the X-Men are being infected with that Type-Bite-Me vampire blood. (It will not shock those who've not read the book yet that Wolverine is yet again one of those who's apparently switched camps to that of the toothy ones.)

Several armies of vampire, therefore, is the simple solution to the problem of the X-Men being nobodies victim anymore, though it isn't one which is likely to work again. The X-Men can't permanently become a book about Scott Summer's women and men and their fight against overwhelming numbers of alien forces. And so, until "Utopia" with its super-powered citizenry, and its black ops organisation, is dismantled, or sanctified by law and a renouncement of terrorism, that wonderful sense of the powerless against the powerful is going to be largely absent from the franchises pages.

7.

I have to confess to feeling somewhat cheated by Mr Gischeler's script for X-Men # 3, since it stands as surely the most sparse set of words that I've seen within the covers of a comic book for a very long time. Even with the generally-followed and dogmatic abandonment of the narrative caption, there were surely still options to the leaving of often-unremarkable panels quite bare of information. And I think that the fact that text is information and part of the experience of enriching the reading of comic-book is becoming forgotten. Though I've never been an advocate of returning to the excesses of Claremontism, "Curse Of The Mutants:Part 3" is so parsimonious with its dialogue that it feels as if a good two-thirds of the word balloons simply fell off the page between computer and printer, if such were possible. Certainly, letterer Joe Caramagna wasn't up at 3am finishing this job off, unless somebody really messed up the scheduling. To take but a few examples, the appearance of Namor bearing Dracula's head is dealt with in two panels and 16 words, though these two panels and 16 words still manage to take up two-thirds of a page. My god, what most writers would give to have a chance to bring that scene to life, but here it's reduced to;

Panel 1

Namor:- (Holds out Dracula's severed head.) "I believe you sent me to retrieve this dubious item."

Panel 2.

Namor: "I can't stay. Much has happened."
Cyclops: "I understand."


Well, I don't know what had happened, and I don't understand, and even if the editorial fiat had declared that readers mustn't be filled in so that they'll be driven to the relevant crossover, something emotional and moving could have been added there. For it's absolutely obvious that Mr Gischler can write and write effectively; but there's a difference between a creator reigning in his indulgences and a writer choosing not to provide his audience with the richest possible reading experience short of unacceptably cluttering up the page. Between himself and equally able Paco Medina, I can't but feel that we might have been offered a more dense and engaging reading experience than is on show here. We certainly might have been offered a story that gave us something more substantial than three unnecessary splash pages and two more which were as close to storyless pin-ups as could be constructed.


8.

I. I do hope that Wolverine's apparent defection to the vampire's cause doesn't turn out to have been part of some grand plan by Cyclops, another mark of how morally-righteous he is even in his deception of all and sundry. Just an issue or two of the X-Men taking their lumps and having to find their way in a world not defined by their overwhelming power would be enjoyable.

For no matter how the writers of the past decade or two have tried to ignore this particular elephant in this specific room, the fact remains that the X-Men and their fellow mutants are appallingly powerful and as a consequence should surely be exceedingly effective in getting their way.

But they're victims still, aren't they? With their own island, and undersea annex, with Namor and Blade and how on Earth is anybody convinced that these characters are victims of anything beyond some very dodgy tailoring?


II. Still, at least the X-Men are seriously outnumbered here. They may not all be heroes, or innocents, or even particularly pleasant, and the adventure itself is at best diverting and hardly riveting, but there's enough of the old loser-metaphor beginning to surface to allow some sympathy to percolate to the mutant's side, if only because a few however-many thousand vampires are even lower on the moral totem pole that Scott Summers and his secret-state-within-a-costumed-state are.

And perhaps a touch of humility might return to the X-Men's pages as a consequence of the experience, because the X-Men as they stand, or at least as they've been portrayed in all the recent books I've encountered them in, currently make most unconvincing put-upon heroes, as well as a rather repellent terrorist superhero organisation too.

9.

But I do remember a different X-Men. And of course I remember Cyclops too. He used to wear heavily-framed glasses and find it hard to talk to girls, and he was a good man.


This was perhaps the last "I Know Nothing" piece for a little while. I hope the day has found you well, and I wish you a splendid tomorrow! No, really, I do. This is a cynic-free portion of the blogosphere and it's been nice to see you here.

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