The X-Men, Delineated
Comics writers are fond of bringing in Z-list heroes without their own titles into their team books. There’s more than one reason for this. Dan Didio, referring to the new Teen Titans line up, is right in saying that this is a way to keep telling stories with characters that have potential, but can’t sustain their own books. Other writers continually site the difficulties with progressing character when progress is only allowed to happen in the home title, with a completely different set of editors and writers.
All true, of course. But you have to ask yourself whether your readers want to read a book about Blue Beetle, or Huntress, or fucking Geo-Force. The realities of day-to-day publishing may get in the way, but if people want to read about the Magnificent Seven then maybe that’s who should be in the JLA.
Sorry, got a bit distracted there.
The point is, the practicalities of juggling characters spread over various titles make Big Gun team books difficult to handle, making runs like Morrison’s JLA even more impressive. This isn’t a new problem, and is the main reason why Avengers isn’t really expected to be a Big Gun title in the same way Justice League is. Hawkeye and Wonder Man and whoever allow the team book writer to own some characters.
The best execution of this kind of team book has to be the X-Men. The mutants are so successful, in fact, that they’ve been able to spin off several characters that can stand on their own feet, although Wolverine’s probably the only really successful one (and more on him next week). But most of the X-Men are resolutely one-note, in both power-gimmick and character, and this is very deliberate.
Core Genre: Science Fiction, with the usual Marvel mixture of everything else.
The X-Men should be taken as a single character, a plural protagonist in the nomenclature of screenwriting. Their conflict occurs on two levels; drama between the various X-Men themselves, and the external conflict with their villains. The operatics of the X-Soap has always been the most-discussed element of the book, and it probably goes without saying by now that the psychology of the thing isn’t what I’m going to concentrate on, so as usual I’ll skip over that in favour of the mechanics of the thing.
A) A team
B) of mutant
C) students
D) with distinct powers
E) and access to advanced technology
F) defend a world that fears and hates them
Considering the complexity of its implications, that’s one of the most elegant concepts you’re going to find in comics. Stan Lee and his various colleagues really were that good.
What’s interesting here is that every element here is the root of both internal and external conflict. Hmm, it looks like I will be talking psychology after all. Well, it’s the X-Men. You just can’t avoid it. Their personal conflict stems from their powers, or their race, or their relationship with non-mutants. They argue with each other as well as the outside world. And this is mirrored in their conflict with their antagonists.
Factor A tells us their mode of interaction, a gestalt identity. B is the source of their abilities, and also the inciting element of their conflict, either with other mutants or with non-mutants. B leads to both D (how they interact with antagonists) and F (which gives context to the interaction). Personally, I could live without the advanced technology of factor E, but the jets and the danger rooms and Cerebro/Cerebra have been integral from the start, shaping how the villains are located and put into context.
And their villains are very interesting. Intolerant Homo Sapiens, and intolerant Homo Superior. Peaceful integration is the ultimate goal, even if it has to be fought for. It’s easy to cast a cynical eye over superheroes and their drive to solve problems with their fists, but I’m reminded of a quote from author (and daughter of the Fair Country) Jo Walton, as found in the sidebar of Making Light: “Peace means something different from ‘not fighting’… Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.”
Factor C is the controlling element of the stories. The adventures are all centred round a school or academy, a place of learning. It gives the team its character. It’s also the thing that gives the book a sinister edge.
The idea that a trusted teacher of children sends them out to war is unavoidably creepy. It’s a concept that’s been played with many times since Claremont. I don’t know if this odd vibe was deliberate on the part of Lee and Kirby or just another oddity of 60s Marvel, but it plays to other themes present since the beginning. I’m not sure it can all be considered coincidental, though it may be subconscious rather than conscious.
Student unrest tied in with movements wanting to change the status quo is one of the primary images we have of the Sixties, not only in America but across the world. Stan Lee explicitly wrote this into Spider-man, so it wasn’t something he was oblivious too. I wonder how much this informed the structure of the X-Men. The radicalisation of the young by influential figures is a perennial concern to the Daily Mail crowd, something that can be found in modern hysteria regarding Islamic university organisations, Victorian political concerns, right back to Socrates and Plato.
I’m probably reading too much into it, but the X-Men concept does play into anti-intellectual fears of an educated populace, with university education seen as a threat. Like I say, it’s nothing new but there’s been a lot of it in recent years (and if I was feeling particularly tin-hattish, I’d say it’s yet another tactic to discourage the masses from bettering themselves and to keep education strictly for the privileged few, but that’s just crazy talk isn’t it now.)
Also, the world is run by lizards.
Conclusion: If we dig around there’s some ugly things lurking in the X-Men concept. Of course, that can only help in terms of drama, action and conflict. It shouldn’t be a surprise that, when handled properly, the books are amongst the most popular ever made.
on January 16th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
That’s interesting, about the high-tech stuff…I guess in the early days it was supposed to be a special “Tomorrow People”, mutant-y indicator…another way of locating the conflict: “humans have their technology, we have ours.” Fairly certain it hasn’t been used to any great effect in that way for a long time — in the Claremont years it was just “Marveltech” (especially when drawn by Byrne, who had a love for a certain kind of consistent high-tech “look” in any book he drew), plus they had a plane, which let’s face it is…aggressively normal, by comics standards.
In a similar way, a lot of action was gotten out of the costumes, and this was a big deal! The original X-Men looked creepily alien in their identical uniforms, with the one extreme form a la the Thing in FF (Iceman)…but then upon graduation they were allowed to design their own “individual” costumes. Cyclops is still wearing his, and I always find it funny that it’s pretty much not too different from the original uniforms…our Scott’s a diffident fellow! And then of course you had the All-New All-Different, and they traded on the costumes too — very individualized, so as better to pick out who you were looking at in the big ensemble crowd. A very neat bit of great design that grafts onto older great design…so I’d almost suggest “thematic costuming” as an important part of the way the X-Men are put together — as you say, they have a group identity, and their “individual” costumes ought to help define their position in the group identity. Not that many comics superteams don’t do this already, but few do it to the level of the X-Men (well, once upon a time, anyway): no accident that both Morrison and Whedon paid attention to ‘em. Visual orientation to the group identity, at a guess, is probably only more strongly emphasized in The Metal Men. Hmm, bold claim? Maybe so…
on January 20th, 2009 at 8:48 am
The costumes are a point I hadn’t considered, not only for the X-Men but for all the delineations. It’s all iconography, of course, another kind of interaction.
I suppose it’s only since the Sixties that the comics have shifted the primary importance of costume iconography from what it symbolises to the reader to what it symbolises to the characters within the story.
Superman’s costume is important because it represents his culture/his mother made it for him. It didn’t mean anything in the first appearance, except “the kids will find this cool”. Which isn’t to say its importance within the character’s world never came up before the ’70s, because that was what the whole “I shall become a bat” was about; scaring a subset of characters within the Batman’s world.
I’ve wandered off your point a bit here, but there may be another post in it.
on February 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 am
Your points about Xavier sending students out to war as being creepy is interesting. I guess I was into X-Men mainly in my youth and didn’t question that aspect of it as much as just wanting my action fix. But it is creepy isn’t it?
Plus there never seems to be any order in which X-Men are sent to, in most times, life or death situations. “You, you and you. Go check out Magneto’s hideout for clues in his new weapon. You, you and you. Go suppress that homicidal crowd of Anti-Mutant protestors without hurting them. To the Blackbird!”
I wonder if this is another aspect of Wolverines popularity as an X-Men character. By never really being a ‘team player’ and rebelling somewhat in the way Xavier ran things, there was a bit of subliminal admiration for him rebelling against, however justifiable, a bit of a creepy dictatorship.
on February 6th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Hey Bender, sorry for the delay in replying, still dealing with IT trouble at this end.
I think that’s exactly Wolverine’s role in the team dynamic, which in one of the (many) places the third X-Men film fell down. You try and put him in the “leader” role and it just doesn’t work.