Conversation Stoppers in the Comic Book Shop - Talkin' About Magneto and Cyclops, and Generalized Critique of Marvel Comics

Over at Comics Should Be Good there was an review of Fantastic Four 1234. This bit isn't about the article, but the weird flame war that went on afterwards. Or weird to me, anyway. In the review, the author opines that Magneto and Doctor Doom are villain terrorists but that a number of comics fans will launch into apologia when confronted with their villainy. A flame war ensued when, of course, some of the fans did launch into their various apologia, hehe. This is predictable as clockwork.

But I found it interesting, given recent comic book history, that no one turned the apologia for especially Magneto on it's head. I expressed this for the first time at the local friendly comic book store here in downtown Santa Cruz when my friend Peter brought up, y'know, stuff like Iron Man vivisecting people and whether this editorial trend would continue (the answer from the comic store guy was "yes, it will continue indefinitely", which is likely true for the short to medium term).

I said this, "To me, the more interesting question is how is Cyclops going to confront Magneto when he appears doing villain thing. Now that Cyclops is running a black ops assassination squad and condoned the use of torture to get information, how can it be said that he has the moral authority to condemn Magneto's actions. Cyclops is at least as bad as Magneto, now, killing and torturing people who get in his way for the good of the mutant 'species'."

Silence followed. No one at the comic shop really knew how to answer that - and I suspect that the X-fans won't know how to answer it - but I found it really interesting that, so far, no one appears to be even asking the question. Like it's somehow irrelevant that Cyclops and Magneto are now behaving the same way, or if anything Cyclops is behaving much worse than Magneto.

Also at the comic shop, Peter asked about comics where the heroes were more heroic. The counter guy said, accurately, that Marvel is moving heroism over to their children's comics. Tho' he also said, "Tho' Whedon in Astonishing X-Men was trying to insert some old fashioned heroism into the book." And I said, "But now Ellis is writing it so that's fuckin' over." And there were weary and heavy-hearted nods.

And forgive me if I am rambling here, but I think that this editorial decision will be bad in the long term. I mean, first off, it's just not particularly sustainable, as shown in the recent Wolverine's where he was sent to kill Mystique. He doesn't. Why? Because it would be a very bad literary decision to kill a villain as interesting and storied as Mystique. So, despite Wolverine having her entirely at his mercy, nope, he just wounded her and left with a little sassy diatribe about how she had no friends and he did, neener. It just doesn't work for the genre if you kill off villains (and is one of the persistent problems in Punisher comics - there's no real way for him to do his gig and keep his enemies alive, so they get no histories and aren't particularly interesting). Second, it'll drive away the people who don't want to see the heroes act like villains. I number myself amongst that lot. For a while, a lot of readers - young men in particular - will jump on the bandwagon. But they don't have endurance.

Alternately, there's the Real Power of the DC Universe:



In addition to this picture being pure fucking class, it demonstrates some of the differences - the editorial differences - between DC and Marvel. Since the Infinite Crisis in the DCU, there have been editorial decisions that are pulling back from the black on black attitudes that have been growing in comics. They have also been promoting powerful female protagonists a lot more than Marvel.

The black on black grim and gritty attitude has come to almost entirely dominate Marvel's editorial decisions for most of their lines. When those people get tired of that black on black attitude, where will they go? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out.

Cyclops - MASTER OF ASSASSINS

Okay, does anyone out there think that this makes even the slightest bit of sense? Cyclops is ordering people to do assassinations. He's authorizing the use of torture.

Maybe I'm just out of touch, but I'd mostly thought we were past the point of thinking that what was "wrong" with comics is that they didn't have a high enough body count. That it would be be some kind of improvement if every comic book protagonist (at this point, the word "hero" in no sense applies in the modern sense) treated life with absolute contempt.

And the reasons are so . . . creepy. I mean, the whole Endangered Species storyline . . . am I the only person who was all creeped out about that? The problem is that their genetic uniqueness was gone and that they, as a species, were "dying out". So it was okay to do anything to preserve mutants as a "species" because they were "dying out".

Why would I find that creepy? Because, well, first, I don't think that they're a different species. They can breed with "humans", humans largely find them attractive sex partners, blah, blah, blah. While mutants might on some levels qualify as a new species, on others they don't. Indeed, the very word "mutant" implies that they aren't a different species, but merely unusual genetic variations within the larger human gene pool.

Which gets us around to number two. There have often been groups of humans who possess certain genotypes who have been very quick to accuse other people who lack those specific genotypes of being a different species. The best known are the fucking Nazis. And, more generally, any racial supremacist movement you can think of.

So, yeah, I was pretty deeply creeped out about this obsession over the X-gene and it's distinction of mutants into a separate species, one so important that by the time we get over to Messiah Complex the mutants are willing to kill and torture to "protect". The reasoning they use is the reasoning of all the racist nutjobs who think that their "race" is superior to other people's race, and it's being threatened by all those filthy mud people, so it's okay to grab a few of them and burn them alive.

They've become what they hated! Scott Summers has decided not only that Magneto was right, but that he didn't go far enough and has added torture to murder, justified as protecting his "species". This used to be the sort of thing that they fought. It'll make it hard to read the book when these people try to stop someone like Magneto (who has been variously retconned over the years that to find the stuff where he was a laughing megalomaniacal supervillain trying to conquer the world, you've got to go back literally decades - so he's definitely morally superior to Cyclops nowadays) or even Mister Sinister. Cyclops is willing to torture people and kill them to enact his racist agenda, not too differently from Mister Sinister.

But, WOW, the composition of X-Force is even more boggling. I think Warpath is a pretty racist caricature, albeit more gentle than in days past, but whenever the X-writers get near Native Americans it quickly gets deeply stupid. But, still, his participation on X-Force is almost given. And Wolverine, of course.

But then we come up on X-23. Here's this girl - and it is important to remember she's a girl, a legal minor - who has been horribly abused to be shaped into a child killer. Her psyche is altogether crushed, she's almost totally incapable of normal human interaction. She was brought to the school for the specific purpose of getting her away from that kind of bullshit, to learn to interact with humans as friends and loved ones instead of viewing them as obstacles to kill to get to her objective. Cyclops takes this girl and puts her on the team because she's good at tracking and killing. Cyclops has decided that it's okay to destroy X-23's soul because he doesn't want to get his own damn hands dirty.

Which is another thing - this gutless motherfucker is sending other people to do his dirty work. I have trouble interpreting that in any other way than cowardice. He's pretty good at sneaking around, he's got this great tactical sense, huge amounts of experience, and powers that are quite good at killing people. He fits the profile to a T. But, y'know, it's better to let X-23 drown in blood than for him to step up and do the things he asks of others.

Needless to say, I'm not terribly pleased with this. If anyone can make sense of why the writers and editors thought it was a good idea, I'd like to know.