WARNING: spoiler-heavy post.
Despite the middling reviews, I'll probably go see X:Men: The Last Stand like the comics-buying sheep that I am
The movie comes about a year after Marvel launched its silly "House of M" multibook event; both X-Men stories deal on some level with the question "Who am I if I'm not a mutant anymore?"
In the movie, the argument's all about whether you "choose" to be a mutant or if it's curable. In the "House of M" stories, the insane Wanda Maximoff zaps everyone into an alternate universe where being a mutant is the norm, and then overcompensates by putting it all back again with the edict "No more mutants." Her command mostly works.
Officially in the Marvel Universe, there are now a scanty 198 mutants, give or take the ones killed in the miniseries X-Men: The 198 (I hated the art, by the way) and Generation M (loved the series, because why wouldn't I love a book about a drunken girl reporter?) and in the current storyline in New X-Men. Instead of mutanity being an emerging species or biological variant in a population, they're now an endangered species. The issue now is how one treats a species that's all too aware of how endangered it is. Who decides what's best for this group?
These chewy questions are the reason I haven't completely quit the Marvelverse. And in today's CSM article "Superheroes Spin Web Around Red-Blue Divide," there's an explanation for all you comics civilians about how the Marvelverse is now publishing a series that reflects the culture wars in America called, appropriately enough, Civil War. By the time this series is over, I am going to wish I was a grad student in semiotics, if only to have an excuse to deconstruct the writers' decisions to put capitalist Tony Stark on the side of the government and idealist Captain America firmly in the insurgents' camp, tie it all into the 1840s U.S. and then back into today's country.
Y'all know politics and comics are nothing new: I believe we've been over Alan Moore's work before. And in the book I'm reading right now, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, chapter 11 starts off thusly:
No other fad in entertainment has ever paralleled real-life events as closely as the superheroes paralleled World War II. Superman first drew attention in the summer of 1938, as war fears grew out of the Czechoslovakia crisis, and it was after the war really began late the next summer that the superhero fad took flight.
And the Comic Book Resources essay "Afros, Icons and Spandex: A Brief History of the African-American Superhero," points this out:
In a classic issue of "Green Lantern" writer Denny O'Neil wrote a powerful exchange between Green Lantern and a black man from the inner city. The man asks, "I've been reading about you, how you work for the blue skins, how on a planet some place you helped out the orange skins and you've done considerable for the purple skins. Only there's skins you never bothered with. The black skins! I want to know how come? Answer me that, Mr. Green Lantern!" The Green Lantern's reply, "I can't."
The same question could be asked of comic creators during the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to World War II, blacks were rarely seen in the pages of comics. When they were featured the images were often mocking caricatures. However, a glance through history shows that the portrayal of blacks in comics was often a reflection of society
Like science fiction writers, mass-market comics writers have long taken advantage of the fantastical nature of their work to send social messages via metaphor. I will be very, very curious to see what -- if any -- messages come out of X3 and the Civil War this summer.
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