As a hardcore fan of comics, what do you feel about the fact that almost every characterseries owned by DC or Marvel keep going on indefinitely? Is there any major super herovillain owned by any of these 2 behemoths that have been killed off permanently? It seems that death is incredibly cheap , & even if one particular incarnation of a character dies, someone else takes up the mantle- so the herovillain lives on. Don’t you feel series should end after some time (through death or otherwise) ?

This is a problem that crept into comics as a serial medium almost from the beginning, albeit very gradually – part of it is that IP is both potentially incredibly valuable and difficult to come up with on a monthly basis with consistent quality. Even for the best artists and writers, “villains of the month” vary enormously, and you can really tell when someone was scrambling to meet deadline and out of ideas so started looking around their desk for inspiration:

So rather than trying to knock it out of the park every month with a new villain, it’s a lot easier to have tried-and-true villains become recurring features, where the artist and writer can elaborate on proven concepts. The same phenomenon also happens on the hero side, especially in team books, where you have a much larger cast of characters. (I do not envy the people working on Legion of Super-Heroes, for ex.)

This intersects with changing trends in comics in weird ways. So first you have the emergence of the Comics Code Authority in the 50s, which among other things tones down on the violence rather substantially (Batman had already stopped killing people before it came into effect) so that killing characters becomes difficult for a long time, which in turn brings up this long-term tension as to why (if recurring villains keep escaping prison) heroes aren’t doing something more final. Then in the 80s and 90s, the aging of the first generation of comics fans and the desire by creators to prove that their medium wasn’t just for kids leads to people reaching for character death as a way to prove maturity…but the underlying dynamic is still there, so there’s inevitable pressure to bring characters back, which eventually gives rise to the revolving door of death, which desensitizes fans, and then you have an arms race towards grimdark as you need to find new sources of shock (DC for some reason went big into arms being cut off for the longest time).

One person who tried like hell to fight this and ultimately lost was Chris Claremont, who believes to this day that you have to let characters age and change and eventually end, because otherwise they’re not real people. Claremont wanted to replace the old model with one in which characters would die permanently (like Jean Grey) or quit being superheroes to start their own families (like Scott Summers). And when the status quo pushed back against what he was doing, you got real damage to the characters.

So yeah, I think it’s a real problem, but not one without solutions.

One solution, which has become more common in the post-Image era where there’s a lot more creator-owned stuff, is to give creators the freedom to write beginnings, middles, and ends, because their control over the rights means that you don’t get IP-thirsty companies like DC and Marvel messing with good stories by doing things like having Watchmen prequels, sequels, and crossovers, or killing off and then resurrecting almost every damn hero out there.

Another solution, and this is one that I haven’t seen used as much, is to step away from strict chronological continuity and adopt instead what I’m going to call the Cimmerian Approach:

“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars – Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyberborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”

Pulp magazines, as the direct ancestors of comic books, were also a serial medium in need of constant content that hit the same problem. And I think R.E Howard came up with a rather brilliant solution by telling the stories out of order. Conan’s story has a beginning, middle, and end as the first passage in “The Phoenix on the Sword” above indicates: he starts out as a barbarian who comes to the civilized kingdoms of the Hyborean Age, and he ends up King of Aquilonia as he is in “Phoenix.” But after that first story (actually the first to be published, he wrote “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” at the same time, but it was rejected) and “The Scarlet Citadel,” he went back and wrote “The Tower of the Elephant,” which depicts Conan as a young thief who’s only very recently come to the civilized kingdoms. And thereafter, Howard bounced around all over the place: Conan is in one story as a mercenary general, then a refugee from a different, defeated army, then a pirate captain, then an imprisoned thief, and so on and so forth.

What I like about this approach is that it allows you to do the natural human lifecycle/beginning-middle-end that Claremont tried to establish, while also allowing you to produce infinite content by inserting new incidents into earlier periods of their life.

Why is it a big deal that Cyclops is a deadbeat dad? Isn’t Mr. Vice Guy a trope similar to many real-life heroes who have feat of clay, who have affairs, and so on. It reminds me of the whole Spiderman can’t divorce his wife and that’s less heroic and more evil than getting an annulment from Satan?

It’s just not very well-set up in his previous characterization: from the beginning, Scott Summers has been one of those “emotionally repressed, …Type-A…personalities,” I talk about not working as well in the present, which is part of the reason why he has such a big hatedom.

Now, unlike Reed, Summers has historically been more of a follower than a leader – Xavier’s teacher’s pet and hall monitor, the eternal Leonardo to the Raphael/Michelangelo antics of Bobby and Hank (and Warren, sometimes) – but very much a rules-following, by-the-book guy. And the main thing that made him more than a total wet blanket was his Teen Romance-style angst about whether Jean could ever love a man who shot red eye-beams. So to sum up: Scott Summers = dutiful and into romance.

Now, I think there was a way that Claremont could have leaned into the Mr. Vice Guy thing, but didn’t quite: namely, actually exploring Scott’s tendencies to have low-stakes, no-labels affairs the moment he thought Jean was dead/not around (thinking about Colleen Wing, Lee Forrester here) as a way to introduce the idea of Scott straining against his own repression and feelings of being trapped in his role as Designated X-Men Team Leader, and then build up from there to establish Scott Summers as one of these heroes with feet of clay (in his case, a tendency to default to following others’ expectations of him despite not really being fulfilled by the life that results in, and then a reactive tendency to try to wreck his own life in a search for independence and self-knowledge):

But there’s not really any follow-through. Scott and Jean never have a chance to talk through this tendency and how it reflects on his feelings about Jean (even though they’ve got one of those creepy psychic-link-true-love things going on which means she knows and he knows she knows) or what he wants from life beyond being her boyfriend and an X-Men. Nor does anyone really call him out on his hypocritcal jealousy around Jean Grey and other dudes (although one time it was Mastermind, so I guess you get a pass there), or really call him out about about dumping Madelyn (granted, a lot of that was the fault of Fall of the Mutants and Inferno, but still).

Sidenote: I’ve never had a problem with Spiderman being married and, yes, him getting a divorce works so much better than diabolic annulment.

Not the anon who asked you, but since “what makes Dark Phoenix Saga important to the X-Men is that it gives Jean Grey and Scott Summers a emotional arc with weight and depth – it makes them real people”… I have to ask. Do you have any opinions on Madelyn, Jean’s Return and all the stuff that happened afterwards?

Hang on a sec, let me get ready.

nana na na na,

nana na na na….

Yeah, I have some opinions.

I’ve always felt that there was a fundamental ambivalence about what Madelyn Pryor was supposed to be for: is she the impetus for Scott Summers to mature and start a new life outside the X-Men as a husband and a father (which if so is really complicated by having her be an identical twin of Jean, because it starts their relationship off on such a fragile foundation), or she she supposed to be part of some grand conspiracy (whether that’s the Dark Phoenix and Mastermind or Mr. Sinister and cloning or Hell invading NYC)?

Yes, the bigger problem was Busiek coming up with the clone loophole for Jean Grey’s death-because-of-genocide thing, but Claremont’s hardly innocent here – her being an identical twin was always going to get people talking about clones and whatnot, likewise all of his shenanigans about Jean dying and Madelyn being reborn at the exact same second was way too obvious a phoenix metaphor. If Madelyn was going to be Cyclops’ cosmic consolation prize and nothing else – which is a bit creepy, when you think about it – just have her be a different woman! I mean, Lee Forrester is pretty awesome and X-Men artists don’t have a hard time drawing her as distinctly different…

But the biggest mistake, IMO, was having Scott react to Jean’s rebirth by leaving his wife and baby to chase after Jean and pal around with his old school chums in X-Factor – leaving aside whatever you think about Claremont’s ideas about characters needing to age out of the X-Men, on a personal level, that’s some profoundly unheroic behavior. Pretty much everyone from Claremont on down has said after the fact that they didn’t think this through, although I would argue that there were ways to turn into the skid if you weren’t set on the idea of Scott coming out of this ok – after all, Jason was a hero, and look what happened to his first marriage…

On the other hand, as convoluted as it was – and it definitely it could have used a few less moving parts – Inferno was a hell of a way to resolve the tangle, an ambitious as hell decision to turn everything up to 11 and just guitar solo your problem away. (Even if it did involve Madelyn Pryor getting hit with every single gendered stereotype – woman scorned, evil witch, why’s she killing her baby again?, etc. etc. – imaginable.)

But if we could do it over again…

I think the main thing I’d do is to not start from a position that Scott and Jean Are Fated To Be Together. Jean dying, whether she comes back as a clone or what, should be a big line in the sand when it comes to their relationship – he saw her die in front of him, there’s the legacy of the Phoenix and the Dark Phoenix that will always be between them, things could never be the same. So maybe Scott doesn’t leave his wife and kid. Maybe Jean Grey gets to move on and have relationships outside the guys she went to a boarding school with when she was a teenager, and maybe she gets to explore rather than repress huge parts of her personality that she never could while Xavier was keeping a psychic bomb confined in her skull.

Another thing I’d do: embrace consequences. Rather than just trying to kill the hypotenuse so you can have Scott, Jean, and Nathan as a “normal” nuclear family (because it’s not a normal family, time travel and cloning creeps back in, and that’s how you get Cables), why not have Scott lose his shot at happiness with Jean as a way of signalling that maybe what he did to Madelyn and Nathan wasn’t ok? Or maybe Madelyn just takes her son with her, rather than going through the whole Madea plot, because he’s her son and Scott abandoned them (now I’m getting Hamilton and Les Mis scrambled in my brain)?

Or at the very least, how ‘bout everyone has an awkward but open conversation about the dysfunctional dynamics off the Summers-Grey-Pryor clan? Maybe puppets are needed to get across that Jean is kind of interested in trying out BDSM and might not want to become a surrogate mom right now, Scott, or to get Alex to open up about why he keeps becoming romantically interested in manipulative women who remind him of his brother’s ex, or why Scott develops commitment issues around powerful women and then goes off looking for women who resemble his mother-

no, please, use the puppets not the mutant powers…

You mentioned your fondness for X-Men (Claremont’s run) and for the Phoenix saga in particular. I’ve always had difficulty getting into that because to me it seemed highly incongruous in its elements. It has aliens from outer space, it has some ancient cosmic entity. How does that work in the general political/social grounded social commentary of the X-Men as representative of the marginalized? And what according to you should have been the ideal ending of that arc?

Well, I think you either lean into the rich 70s melange of aliens, cosmic forces, secret societies in fetish-wear copied from The Avengers (UK), allegories about the danger of repressing women’s sexuality and power, crash-landing space shuttles, the Blue Side of the Moon, or you don’t.

But in so far as it’s related to the social commentary…well, it’s there in places but it’s not in the foreground:

Jean becomes Phoenix only because the U.S national security state bankrolls Steven Lang’s genocidal Sentinel program, which sets up the aforementioned space shuttle, at a time of intensified “anti-mutant hysteria,” includeding the firebombing of Judge Chalmers’ house.
The Hellfire Club as a metaphor for social class and the failure of intersectionality – they’re mutants who are basically pushing the Sentinel program, because they’re so rich and powerful they think they’re above oppression.
The cold war between Xavier’s and the Hellfire Club over the soul of Kitty Pryde as a metaphor for whether the Youth of the 70s would follow the idealism of the 60s social movements or selfish Yuppieism/proto-Reaganism.
Dazzler the Movie and those shenanigans are bang in the middle there.
And of course, Days of Future Past lands right after it ends…

Here’s how it fits into the larger thing: if all the X-Men are allegories, if they’re just “representatives of the oppressed” and nothing else they don’t work. You have to start with character – are these heroes people we care about and identify with? – otherwise they’ll come off as cardboard cutouts rather than real people and no one will care about their fictionalized oppression. So the hook, to me, is that the X-Men are super-heroes that, unlike the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, face oppression – but you need both parts: yes, the Sentinels and the Hellfire Club and Genosha and everything else, but also the Shiar and the Juggernaut and giant dragons over Tokyo and the Asgardian Wars, and the Dark Phoenix Saga.

So to me, what makes Dark Phoenix Saga important to the X-Men is that it gives Jean Grey and Scott Summers a emotional arc with weight and depth – it makes them real people.

A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Week 4: The X-Men Fight Stagflation

Face front, true believers!

As is no surprise to anyone who read Week 2’s issue, Claremont X-Men is a huge touchstone for me, one of the few comics runs I re-read annually. However, it took a while for Clarmont’s X-Men to feel like X-Men. Issues #94 and #95 focus on Count Nefaria, who’s really more an Avengers villain than a X-Men villain.[1] Issue #96 gives us the demonic N’Garai, and while I love the Cthulhu references, it feels a bit like Claremont borrowed them from a Doctor Strange spec script.

Where it really starts to feel like X-Men is issue #98 (April 1976), where the Sentinels return and ruin the X-Men’s Christmas in order to abduct them to Stephen Lang’s space base. To begin with, the Sentinels are one of the only explicitly and specifically anti-mutant threats that the original X-Men fought, so a lot of the mutant metaphor is grounded in those wonderful purple and pink Kirby robots. And Claremont sharpens the analysis by having these genocidal robots be built by a racist lunatic working within the U.S military (which is something that the U.S Army-aficionado Stan Lee wouldn’t have allowed back in the day), giving added emphasis to the “world that hates and fears them” part of the X-Men’s story that was largely lacking in the original 93 issues:

Second, the Sentinel attack sets up the disastrous space shuttle landing that turned Jean Grey into the Phoenix, the first example of Chris Claremont’s epic long-form storytelling that will define the X-Men for 18 years.

But the other reason that this issue stuck with me is that, far more than anything in the original X-Men’s run, this issue made the X-Men feel like a part of New York City. The issue opens with the X-Men at the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center on Christmas Eve, which is a little touristy, but before the sentinels attack on page X, we get to see the X-Men out on the town:

And critically, the town is there for more than window-dressing. A lot of ink has been spilled in the years since Fantastic Four #1 about how Marvel’s decision to have their comics be located in New York City made it a more realistic shared universe, how it reflected a generation of post-WWII second generation immigrant/“white ethnic” artists and writers, and so on.

In this panel, however, we can also see that it also created a keyhole through which real-world politics could enter. Claremont’s word balloons set the scene of New York as a place grappling with “default and layoffs and garbage and politicians who couldn’t care less” – referring to New York City’s fiscal crisis that brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975 and led to the layoffs of tens of thousands of city workers, an eleven-day garbage strike that took place in December of 1975 and led to “70,000 tons of trash, most of it lining mid-Manhattan curbs in piles as high as six feet,” and Mayor Abe Beame, the hapless and hated mayor whose one term included both the 1975 fiscal crisis and the 1977 blackout and who was the model for the hated mayor who can’t set foot outdoors without getting booed in The Taking of Pelham 123.

These are the worries that the X-Men are trying to put out of their minds with a night on the town, and by extension it implies that one of the real daily annoyances that New Yorkers had to deal with in the 1970s – along with the 1973-1975 recession, the oil crisis, and skyrocketing inflation – was Sentinel attacks in Midtown. In fact, we know that these were real problems for New Yorkers because Issue #98 shows us that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee exist within their own Marvel universe and have run into the X-Men[2]:

In turn, it also suggests that the same real-world problems facing the X-Men are also some of the problems facing Marvel Comics in the 1970s. And indeed, if you’ve read Sean Howe’s excellent Marvel Comics: The Inside Story, you know that one of the big 70s issues that affected Marvel was 70’s inflation. Comic books, after all, were bought primarily by young people without a lot of disposable income who might respond to 1975’s 9% inflation rate by cutting back on non-essentials. Hence, the cover of X-Men #98 prominently displayed that this issue would still cost only 25ȼ (or $1.05 in 2015 dollars, which is a steal, compared to $3.99 an issue today).

However, even Mighty Marvel couldn’t resist the forces of stagflation forever. By October of 1976, when Jean Grey emerged from the waters of Jamaica Bay as “now and forever – the Phoenix,” an issue of X-Men was up to 30ȼ an issue; and when Jean Grey was buried in October of 1980, the regular price went up to 50ȼ an issue, double what it had been four years ago. To try to hang onto their readers, Marvel enlisted the Incredible Hulk to sell subscriptions that came with discounts:

No wonder then, that Chris Claremont started coming up with some unusual solutions to New York City’s economic policy woes: