Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Examining New X-Men Pt. 17
by Travis Hedge Coke
From 2001 to 2004 Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Batman and Robin) and team of pencilers, inkers, letterers, editors and colorists, including Phil Jimenez, Mike Marts, and Frank Quitely made a comic called New X-Men.
Revitalizing the X-Men as a politically savvy, fashion-forward superhero soap opera, New X-Men was published by Marvel Comics as the flagship of a line wide revival.
Part 17
What Comes After
A look at the last twenty years:
New X-Men is flawed. Written by Grant Morrison, there are lapses in its social politics; poor choices in ethnic representation. There are moments of sexualization or eroticization that maybe could have been handled differently. The boys get to go have fight adventures while when women are together, it is most often for conversations or wordless therapy. The issue set in the Hellfire Club is wall to wall eroticization, as counterpoint to how unsexy it is, but do the erotic visuals and literal dick measuring enhance the unsexiness of pretend intimacy, of dodgy strip club management, men drinking away their responsibilities, or is it simply facilitating strip routines, softcore pictures in the men’s room, and a place where women work subserviently and men talk?
The positive ending of Morrison’s New X-Men is the end of the Earth. It is genocide overlapping genocide and the glory of self-sacrifice.
The months following Morrison’s departure included a couple issues titled New X-Men, spent taking apart or severely misunderstanding key plot points of the previous year of Morrison-written stories. The primary misinterpretation and/or retcon is that Cassandra Nova is in a cell in the sub-basement of the school, and not the student and future headmistress we have known as Ernst. The letters page at the back of one of those comics makes explicit reference to Cassandra referring to herself as Ernst, and in that issue, Xorn is still treated as a disguised used by Magneto, but that, too, will quickly be – not undone, but terminally and awkwardly confused.
Many major points of Morrison’s New X-Men will be impossible to causally reconcile after the first half year or so of x-comics following. Not bad comics. One of the Stepford Cuckoos is revealed as sapphic. Cyclops, Beast and Jean sort out the loss (to death or move) of Charles Xavier, Jean Grey, Magneto, and Esme.
Why retcons? Why change characters? Change past stories you still acknowledge in the letters page?
Why do Emma Frost and the Cuckoos spend an issue and a half trapped in a building threatened by normative human rioters? Why are the X-Men all lockstep baseball-playing police?
Some comes in from the other X-Men titles, some is simply hard shift to new writers with new visions, but it remains a harder rearrangement than nearly any other in X-Men history. It is a harder shift, and does more retconning and re-characterization, than New X-Men, itself, which is so often treated by fans as the hardest soft reboot the franchise has experienced.
A look at the last twenty years:
Why create retroactive continuity, why remake scenes with blatant changes?
The problem with telling anyone what the current state of any ongoing comic is, is that the current state is a mess, a crisis, a set of characters in bad places or in precarious happiness. In the abstract, doing the arithmetic, we can see that this is necessary, that drama and risk fuel story, but in the moment of summation? The summary sounds cruel and a mistake. Since Grant Morrison’s New X-Men ended, there have been twenty years of various overlapping monthly comics series, from ongoing titles to one shots and miniseries, to reprint exclusives and webcomics and comics which were solicited but never became for sale. There is a lot to sum up. Too much. The last twenty years of Scott Summers is a book, and that’s why it took twenty years of comics to tell, and even then, I can not say with confidence which parts happened, which parts were mental projection by psychics, which parts were non-canon or changed by time travel, or me misremembering.
Why change any character or any past story, right?
Change can force open new avenues, it might engender just enough frustration in the audience to get them intrigued, to make them pay attention. There are positive reasons for retcons, for going in and showing details previously unknown that may even run counter to what we did know, that may seem implausible with what we know.
And, there may be reasons which are good in some ways and not as good in others. What’s good for the goose is not necessarily good for the audience. Sometimes, rewarding the audience hurts the company, or toy or movie sales ancillary but hugely significant to the company.
As much as we, as fans or critics, as artists or writers, as much as we may stress at retcons, at continuity gotten wrong, at events misremembered or characterization mischaracterized, we do it, too. Everyone one of us misremembers, every one of us messes up our retellings, even the retellings in our heads, hat never leave us.
So, can I judge too harshly when events from New X-Men are retold and characters central for me but not for others are absent from scenes, from events I know they should be included in?
The recent sequence of Giant Size X-Men comics (2020-21) have evoked (2001-04) New X-Men at many turns, one replicating scenes seemingly bit for bit, another echoing visuals and scenarios with a slightly different mix of characters. No one would argue that current showrunner of the X-books, Jonathan Hickman, isn’t aware of Grant Morrison’s work. And I do not want to mistake any one writer or artist’s politics for the politics I perceive in comics they worked on, but when I read Giant-Size X-Men: Jean Grey and Emma Frost, I was physically distressed. When I read Giant-Size X-Men: Fantomex, I was just bored. My strongest reaction was a light chuckle or wondering how they de-sexed Fantomex so much and where was EVA?
Fantomex revisits specific scenes from the New X-Men run, but it removes any kind of flirtiness from Fantomex, and it removes EVA completely. She is gone.
Why remove EVA from flashbacks? From history?
The 2013 Fantomex solo, an out-of-continuity comic published under the MAX imprint, aimed at adult audiences, transfigured EVA from half a person into a holographic sexbot, while turning Fantomex into a hypermasculine government operative, none of which is presented as ironic or satirical. Was I wrong to expect better of the talent on Giant-Size Fantomex? It is better, but it would have to be. Fantomex MAX is offensively bad. Misogynist, politically horrifying, toxic on all fronts. Giant-Size Fantomex is just there and very straight, very cishet hahaha, continuity nod here, continuity nod here, continuity nod here.
The comic removed from existence Fantomex’s sister-half, to reposition another character, Ultimaton, as his brother. Which gains us…?
Grant Morrison, Chris Bachalo
Why recreate a scene from New X-Men, but remove ambiguity, add expository dialogue covering things that every conceivable reader will either already know or not need to?
Jonathan Hickman, Rod Reis
In Giant-Size X-Men: Jean Grey and Emma Frost, many scenes, and the comic itself, mirror the New X-Men issue in which Grey and Frost enter Cassandra Nova’s boobytrapped brain to rescue Charles Xavier.
Scenes echoed include Grey and Frost touching their heads to a prone patient’s, for psychic surgery. In New X-Men, Frost kisses Xavier’s mouth, while in Giant-Size, she is largely cropped off the echoing panels.
The spiral down into a mind is echoed, with New X-Men presenting strata of symbols and coded allusions, from DNA strands to faces and clocks, and in Giant-Size, it is all wiggly color squiggles with a huge tree in the center.
Storm (the patient of Giant-Size) is represented by a giant tree, by grasslands, by pan-African animals to the point that Jean Grey uncharacteristically creates the psychic semblance of an elephant for no other reason than elephants = Africa; somebody is racist.
Russell Dauterman, Jonathan Hickman
Visual affectations, like Xavier wrapped in a healing cocoon generated by the body he is trapped within, or Storm being sheathed in flowers, are fluff. They remind us of the earlier comic, and do little more.
But, Storm’s deepest psyche being snakes, lions, one big tree on a vast grassland? They exist to shout AAAAFFFRRIIIICCAAA! in the worst way.
While New X-Men used symbols as a language within, icon and pictures, Giant-Size spells out “metal” and “machine” and uses mirrored question marks that would seem to imply something but don’t.
In the original, Jean Grey says, towards the end, “We ought to talk,” because up until then, the comic had included no verbal dialogue, no verbal communication. This comic has sparse dialogue, but there are entire conversations and plenty of written communication. The line exists in Giant-Size only as an echo, a reminder.
But, that is me. That is my take.
I can eat myself alive trying to puzzle out why EVA was removed from these comics, why Emma Frost can kiss an unconscious Xavier but not Storm, what even the politics are between Storm and Frost given that Frost has kidnapped Storm twice and forced her into atrocious racist and/or rapey situations.
Why, in Giant-Size X-Men: Storm, is Fantomex slow on the uptake and very honest and forthcoming?
Why is Storm so shortchanged? Is Storm shortchanged?
I am not the biggest Storm fan, or the biggest fan of every take someone has had on Storm. I could be, and I could still be not who this take, these comics are aimed at.
The recent series of X-Factor ended abruptly, lauded for its queer inclusivity and an ethnically diverse cast that was never strictly ethnic caricatures or place settings, criticized for opening by murdering off a mentally ill woman off-page to motivate a mostly male cast, and for closing out by exploring the murder and sexual abuse of Black men. It had a lot going on, and many criticisms are valid and not listened to, while others include anger at the writer being a woman and at her hair color, because comics fandom is full of horrible human beings. And, when they are X-fans, they like to call themselves mutants and everyone else flatscans, enjoying the game of fictional supremacy.
The first rule to surviving as an X-fan happily to acknowledging and believing that you are not the center of the universe and you are not supposed to be.
When Beak and Angel had their mutant powers stripped, Beak started looking like a normative non-birdlike white dude, Angel somehow got way lighter skin and straighter hair and was in just all ways not the same character. So, I jump over their New Warriors era the same way I jump over the New Warriors where a superhero yells at people for vacationing in Mexico.
You can retreat from a character when they are not to your taste and return when they are.
You can skip comics you do not like. No matter how much some fans may press that you have to keep giving a penciler or writer or title a chance, no you do not. You do not.
You just don’t.
And, that does not mean you can have no criticism, it only means, maybe, just maybe, you do not have to let it occupy 78% of your brain light a raging phosphorus-white fire, and don’t shout at people in person or online about it. Do not tweet gifs of women cocking guns, do not private message gross photographs, do not mail death threats. Do not be that ass.
No matter how you may feel about the direction a character has been taken in or where the X-Men are now as comics, that we, as a fandom, as overlapping fandoms and communities, have not improved, that is worse than whether they removed EVA from flashbacks or if she is an illuminated ball subtly in a Giant Size X-Men.
If how we read, how we behave, interpret, and contextualize does not grow or cause good, what have we got? Back issues and issues with the new issues?
A look at the last twenty years:
Phil Noto, Jonathan Hickman
In seven years, I may forget entirely how the unofficial slogan of the current X-Men era – Free thighs for a free people – makes me rage now. It might drift off and I will only remember how much I enjoy parts of X-Factor or Vita Ayala and Rod Reis’ New Mutants.
Or, I may remember every time, the way I remember every time that Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker, whose work I have enjoyed elsewhere, along with artists including Greg Land, created an X-Men run over a dozen years ago, which was so obnoxiously boys club, so determinedly heteronormative that pages are turned into porn memes to this day; and an X-Man, on rescuing a group of trafficked women, is made their de facto guardian by the male voices of the X-Men, because, apparently, women are incapable of speaking or caring for themselves, treated like stray puppies two sitcom sons are keeping in their bedroom closet, hoping the parents never find out.
Free thighs for a free people. In the Krakoan language, as if that makes it cheekier or safer or better. A rallying call in defense of Jean Grey wearing a costume she originally wore as a teenager, a green minidress. When fans were unenthused and felt it undercut her, this is how the controllers of current X-Men responded. And, of course, Jean cannot be free, not in this way. Jean Grey is a fictional character and fictional characters have no autonomy.
She does not have free thighs, free choice, she is not a free person. She is a fiction largely controlled by men. That is why EVA is removed from flashbacks. That is why writers and artists have made efforts to heteronormativize Fantomex, to heterosexualize Fantomex, reducing queerness to a lesbian sliver carved as a female part of his brain.
Maybe free thighs is to bait us, not rally us. Maybe I take things too seriously.
I am presuming to know intents, to make judgments.
A look at the last twenty years:
If how we read, how we behave, interpret, and contextualize does not grow or cause good, what have we got? Back issues and issues with the new issues?
The X-Men world cannot match our world one to one. They exist as a causal narrative that is only causal in semblance. An a-causal set of multiple implied narratives are on the table, and those individually and collectively reflect, distill, cartoon, lampoon, satirize, simulate, stimulate, and counter ours, not in turn but frequently concurrently. The X-Men worlds have to show us what our world is not, as well as parts of what our world can be or is, and it can never show more than parts. What appears to be causal narrative is only as much a reflection as the non-causal political and emotional resonances, which is why it matters what real-world political or social factors EVA and Fantomex reflect, even if in-story those factors do not affect the narrative causality of the story that EVA and Fantomex are in. It is why Magneto has to feel justified and empathetic even at his most villainous and disagreeable, and why when Magneto, in a story, takes actions that are too far for us to hold that empathetic tether, we feel more discomfort with the empathy being strained than we do with the in-story actions or the imaginary psychoses and social situations that drive, in the story, such vile acts.
It is easier both to hate fictions and to forgive them, because even when we believe with all our eagerness in the reality and truth of fiction, we know it is more mutable and more reflective than objective reality. Objective reality, naturally, being the more formal-sounding name for the subjective fictions we feel ate intrinsically less mutable and less reflective.
The problem with telling anyone what the current state of any ongoing comic is, is that the current state is a mess, a crisis, a set of characters in bad places or in precarious happiness. In the abstract, doing the arithmetic, we can see that this is necessary, that drama and risk fuel story, but in the moment of summation? The summary sounds cruel and a mistake. Even while Grant Morrison’s New X-Men serialized, there were various overlapping monthly comics series, sequences, streams, weaving threads of ongoing titles, one shots, miniseries, reprint exclusives and comics which were solicited but never became for sale. There is always too much to sum up. The last twenty years, like the last twenty before that, like the last twenty comics released all contain contradictions and contraindications that make clear and full relation of chronology, of characterization, of events and crossover Events impalpable, unpalatable.
Why change any character or any past story, right?
Sometimes it simply smooths the trip.
I like flexible continuity and a-causal truth, but I like a straight a-to-b retelling, a smooth segue just as much.
Early Thaw, a remarkable short comic in 2021’s Marvel Voices: Pride, involves Magneto comforting a young, repressed, depressed Iceman. It makes sense, in its positioning of Charles Xavier a teacher and father-figure who stresses integration and repression, hiding and passing. It falls apart as unlikely, unreasonable, and maybe even unpleasant in its connotations when we consider that Magneto had his own child soldiers at the time of this story, and that he attempted to prostitute one for power, the Scarlet Witch, who has since had a very rocky path and whose death is launching Events right now in 2021.
Anthony Oliveira, Javier Garrón, David Curiel
Outside of context, on its own, Early Thaw has charm and is moving and kind. Magneto was not a caring, compassionate man, too good to impress children in his war against his old friend Charles Xavier. But, by telling this story, they can make him one. The story takes developments made later in the character’s history, as well as modern perspectives on both Iceman and Xavier, and reforms the past to play well with those perspectives, those developments, and what Magneto, what Xavier and Iceman represent beyond their semblance as fictive people.
Early Thaw, by Javier Garron, Anthony Oliveira, David Curiel, is great, and maybe a distillation of what is best about X-Men comics in 2021.
It helps that it is a complete story, set in the past, with modern sensibilities. It becomes messier when comparing completed stories set in their present, now made past as they are distanced in time and crystalized in that distance, with current storylines and comics radiating immediacy and their flaws more readily in mind as well as their glories.
A look at the last twenty years:
In the New Mutants run, written by Vita Ayala with team of artists, letters, colorist so far including Alex Lins, Matt Milla, Travis Lanham and Rod Reis, the character of Martha has been a consistent, and growing presence. Martha Johansson, No-Girl, is a superhero and student introduced in the first year of New X-Men, kidnapped, amputated from her body and kept as a brain in a snow globe, weaponized by envious humans. She has a friendship with Cassandra Nova, the superhero and student known as Ernst, that lasts for one hundred and fifty years before that timeline is pared away, and in our normative timeline, she has been without that friend ever since. Cassandra, remember, was retconned to have been in a prison in the basement or basements. They never had their friendship, as far as we can see, as far as current continuity seems to flow.
There is a promise there, though, and it is a promise made within the comics, this new run of New Mutants. Like Chris Burnham and Ramon Villalobos’ E is for Extinction, New Mutants seems to recognize that causality cannot be our line. We cannot pursue understanding of X-Men via causal continuity. We cannot appreciate these characters keeping to strict timelines.
When Chris Claremont and Aaron Lopresti were retconning the death of Magneto, in their Excalibur, only months after New X-Men finished, even there, that shift is given nods. Magneto admits it does not make (causal) sense. That Scarlet Witch may have done it is an idea which is legitimately floated, as she was changing reality over and over, resulting in the de-mutanting of most mutants on Earth during a psychological and physical breakdown that also killed her husband and for which she has been demonized and hated by the bulk of surviving mutants ever since.
Like Magneto going evil again, Scarlet Witch being a real world ethnic minority, a woman, a survivor of sexual assault, surviving being a child soldier, trauma, manipulation, means that her villainization carries difficult connotations, impacts that are more significant than any in-world event, because they are the impacts on us, the audience, and how these stories reflect and reflect on us.
One of the most difficult aspects of New X-Men, even more difficult than whether or not we want Magneto to die, to be a good man or a horrible villain, is how difficult it is for us to decide if Magneto was good for his students at any point, just as we are still uncertain how good he ever was for the original New Mutants, or if he actually helped, if he ever saved Scarlet Witch and her brother, Quicksilver.
Are the moments in which he appears to care, when he seems to build them up, to support children and expand their horizons, are these simply machinations, deviant manipulations? Does he mean well and do evil? Does he do good and then change his mind, his mood?
Shortly after New X-Men, Charles Xavier was subject to several revelations: he sent teenagers to their deaths, he wiped memories of those closest to him, he abused trusts, he enslaved someone.
Which is close to where we were before New X-Men, and New X-Men revisited, cursorily, some of Xavier’s biggest abuses, from putting children at risk to the raping cosmic-threat psychic avatars his mutant mind is consistently producing.
You cannot go home again, because you are there.