The Appeal of The X-Men Franchise

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Ampersand

It too often boils down to, “Civil rights struggle stories are cool. If only they were about straight white people, then they’d be great!“

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14 Responses to The Appeal of The X-Men Franchise

  1. 1
    grendelkhan says:
    August 29, 2013 at 4:49 pm

    And if they were about men! And it wouldn’t actually inconvenience people if they had the rights they were fighting for! And there were also totally wicked cool explosions!

    Come to think of it, it’s totally reasonable to profile and imprison mind-reading pyrokinetic people. Man, X-Men is a pretty awful metaphor for civil rights.

  2. 2
    Grace Annam says:
    August 29, 2013 at 5:18 pm

    grendelkhan:

    Come to think of it, it’s totally reasonable to profile and imprison mind-reading pyrokinetic people.

    It is? Just because they can? It sure would be interesting and revealing to hear your reasoning.

    Grace

  3. 3
    Phil says:
    August 29, 2013 at 6:05 pm

    I’m not saying your criticism is unwarranted, but…of which iteration of the X-men are you being critical? There are, to be sure, plenty of potential issues with regard to the X-men’s depictions of race and sexual orientation, but it’s certainly not accurate to say that the X-men are _all_ straight and white. By the time X-men was first released, there had already been a straightforward MLK comic book. (And, excitingly, there is a current hit graphic novel dealing directly with the civil rights struggle, “March.”)

  4. 4
    grendelkhan says:
    August 29, 2013 at 9:03 pm

    Grace Annam: It is? Just because they can? It sure would be interesting and revealing to hear your reasoning.

    If you’re going to take this all seriously, I’ll revise what I said earlier–it’s reasonable to register and regulate persons of mass destruction much like we register and regulate guns. (I know; the fandom isn’t unified in this opinion.) But on the gripping hand, it makes a poor, poor analogy for historical bigotry, unless black people really do have magical powers that they could use to perform dastardly evil.

  5. 5
    Copyleft says:
    August 30, 2013 at 5:14 am

    Wow, that’s… not even clever. Even a little bit. You’d have been better of just leaving it blank if you couldn’t come up with something meaningful, Amp.

  6. 6
    Ampersand says:
    August 30, 2013 at 8:27 am

    You’d have been better of just leaving it blank if you couldn’t come up with something meaningful….

    Sort of refutes itself, doesn’t it?

  7. 7
    gin-and-whiskey says:
    August 30, 2013 at 8:52 am

    Huh?

    First of all, I think the us 60’s civil rights parallel isn’t accurate. There’s been much more of a link to nazi germany in vy view. To the degree that there’s a “equality” issue it’s more in the realm of spartacus than MLK. That tension has been there for decades.

    Second, although it’s certainly been heavy on the white folks, and while there have certainly been some all white iterations, it’s by no means all white. Nightcrawler and Storm, for example (complete with Storm leading the xmen for a while) are not white. Neither was Sunfire. I’ll leave the Beast debate for another day.

  8. 8
    Simple Truth says:
    August 30, 2013 at 11:57 am

    I’m trying to get what you’re saying, because I realize that you’re not directly stating the X-Men are only a bunch of straight, white people. Is this significant because you feel like it has appropriated the civil rights struggle in America? Is this a Scott McCloud symbolism argument, in which the symbols have traditionally been too straight and white in order to truly function as symbols for many people?

    I’m really not understanding what seems to be a derogatory comment towards a comic book franchise that I’ve followed off and on for several years that has an immensive, diverse cast and seems to have tried a hell of a lot harder than most franchises to be inclusive, even against editorial decree (see Mystique/Destiny “leman”)

  9. 9
    Ampersand says:
    August 30, 2013 at 4:54 pm

    G&W and Simple Truth:

    The X-Men has been running for a long, long time, and I certainly don’t claim to have read every version of it, or that every single version of the series has had the themes I’m criticizing. “X-Statix,” for instance, was a brilliant “X” title – certainly the best I’ve ever read – which barely drew from the “analogies to marginalized people” well at all.

    That said, I think it’s undeniable that X-Men has drawn on that well frequently. In fact, the “fight against bigotry against mutantkind” is the theme that it has returned to most often.

    I read it a lot in the 1980s, when it was written by Claremont and drawn by Cockrum, then Paul Smith (by far the best regular X-Men artist), and then by John Romita Jr.,. In that period they pressed the “analogy to gay rights” thing pretty often. We more than once did a “mutant comes out of the closet to their family and friends” storyline, for instance. But they didn’t go so far as to have any of their primary characters be gay or lesbian.

    “God Loves, Man Kills,” the first X-Men graphic novel, analogized anti-mutant sentiment to both racism (the book opened with a lynching), but there were also hints of a Holocaust parallel.

    In the last couple of years, I’ve occasionally read the comics – my studiomate Jake sometimes buys them, and so they’re lying around the studio – and seen all the movies. I take it there were some Holocaust-like events in the years I wasn’t reading (in the sense of a mass slaughter of mutants). A lot of the current stories seem to be drawing on a MLK/Malcolm X moderates-versus-extremists analogy.

    The most recent movie, “X-Men: First Class” could not have been any more explicit in making mutantkind into a civil rights struggle analogy. And it’s just embarrassing that they did that and had only a token black character – it was, literally, a retelling of the civil rights struggle without having Black people involved as leaders, or (other than the one token, who died early in the film) at all.

    Regarding “its by no means all white,” for these purposes I don’t think a character like Nightcrawler – the child of Mystique and (literally) the Devil – works as an example of a non-white character. Yes, he has blue skin; but he does not come from any non-white culture, and his presence isn’t a substitute for having actual people of color in the cast. Ditto for the Beast, who was originally drawn as a white man, and only later turned blue. (Why are they always blue?) Sunfire was an X-Men for all of five minutes – Jubilee or Psylocke would have been much better examples for you to choose. :-p

    Storm is a great character, but she also has a problem of a lot of well-intentioned non-white characters from the 70s and 80s, which is that her origins are mixed up with all sorts of stereotypes – she was from Africa (rarely do they get any more specific than that in the comics), where the ignorant natives worshiped her as a goddess, etc etc. At least they called her “Storm” instead of “Black Storm.” It took them a while for them to be able to have her be a character who was Black, rather than The Black African Character.

    That said, you’re both right to suggest that the X-franchise has done a much better job of a having a diverse cast then nearly any other franchise in comics. But compared to what the world is like – or even just what America is like – it’s still a disproportionately white group. And although it was a good movie in most ways, I hope you can understand why I think making a movie like “X-Men:First Class” is just embarrassing when you think about its racial politics.

    Simple Truth, the Mystique thing is really interesting; arguably she’s the first truly transgender character in comics.

    Edited to add: To be fair, Storm was specified, in her first appearances, as being from Kenya. That was Claremont; later writers sometimes just referred to her as being from “Africa.”

  10. 10
    Simple Truth says:
    August 31, 2013 at 9:28 am

    @Amp

    I really did laugh out loud at “Black Storm.” Not sure how she dodged that bullet, but it’s so true (Black Panther, Black Lightning, etc.)

    Funny enough, I didn’t watch X-Men: First Class. I didn’t think it would be a good movie. The recent turn of events in X-Men comics with Cyclops and the Phoenix Five is supposed to be edgy and interesting, but instead I just wish Cyclops would stop being in the limelight.

    The Holocaust-type event happened in a cross-over called House of M where Scarlett Witch used her magic to depower most of the mutants, killing many of them. There was also a rounding-up of mutants in Genosha which I’m more iffy on because I wasn’t reading during that time.

    The series I was more thinking of were New Mutants and Generation X. They’re not flagship titles by any means, but they introduced a lot of new characters, many of whom I think were “firsts” in American comics, and in general were pretty diverse.

    So, yes, I do agree that if you make a struggle about civil rights with only white faces (as I assume X-Men: First Class ended up being,) given the history of our country (white-washing,) that’s insensitive and more than a little ridiculous. However, I was approaching from a comics standpoint, which didn’t make sense with what you said. Given that most people only know the X-Men from the movies, I think you have a very valid point.

  11. 11
    Hugh says:
    September 1, 2013 at 9:20 pm

    I believe there was a Latino character in X-Men First Class, but she turned evil, so it kind of proves the point – the only non-white characters died or turned evil.

  12. 12
    Radfem says:
    September 9, 2013 at 4:43 pm

    I don’t think any X-Men First Class female mutants ended up with Professor X either. But whether that was racism or whether they just didn’t choose assimilation (which Mystic clearly didn’t want even though she could “pass”) I have to think about it some more as I’m not familiar enough with the series.

  13. 13
    Suzene says:
    September 11, 2013 at 12:57 am

    I generally agree with the criticism of the X-Men’s as a civil rights analogy, but there’s been a recent bright spot. The current iteration of ‘Astonishing X-Men’, written by Marjorie Liu, stars multiple queer characters (Northstar, Karma, Northstar’s husband Kyle) and POC (Karma, Cecilia Reyes, and Kyle). It also veers away from the mutant metaphor in favor of a well-intentioned, if clunky, SSM/DOMA storyline for Northstar and Kyle. It has some notable problems overall, but it’s still nice to see. It’s being canceled next month, of course.

    “Simple Truth, the Mystique thing is really interesting; arguably she’s the first truly transgender character in comics.”

    I tend to think of Mystique as genderfluid rather than trans; while she seems to prefer a female shape most of the time, she lived as a man with her ladylove Irene Adler for some years and takes on identities as they please her.

  14. 14
    James bob says:
    January 6, 2014 at 11:48 pm

    Yes, that would be very interesting. In my opinion, there should not exist any particular racial discrimination. Everyone from all over the world is fair. To be honest, I love the X-men film very much. Sometimes, I even want to have a try when I see many X-men fans are buying their favorite cosplay costumes in the on-line stores, such as Moviescostume, Fandomsky and other stores to play as their loved characters in the cosplay shows. That is really cool and impressive.