There is a very common argument that says that the X-books never quite fit in well with the rest of the Marvel line, because in a world where lots of people have superpowers, why are mutants so uniquely threatening? Why is it that they are hated and feared while the Fantastic Four are America’s First Family and the Avengers might as well be the GI Joes?
I’ve never found that to be a problem – in part because there are plenty of other superheroes who also come in for the same treatment (see the Hulk or Spiderman vis-a-vis the Daily Bugle), but also because we have lots of examples in our world of inconsistent attitudes from the public.
My thinking has always gone like this: most Marvel supers have the one-off origin story that was de rigeur in the Golden Age of comics: Cap’s Super Soldier serum is lost, Iron Man is self-built, the Hulk is created in a gamma bomb test, there’s only one Mjolnir waiting around to be picked up by someone worthy. And for the public at large, this is at least somewhat comforting because there’s no reason why they’re special and you’re not, it’s a matter of chance, and who knows, maybe one day you’ll win the superpower lottery, and even if you don’t the people who did aren’t better than you.
But mutants break that comforting illusion: there’s an entire group of people out there who get superpowers because they’re born with it, which means that if you don’t have an active X-gene, you’re no longer “normal,” you’re a flatscan. Which means you’re anti-special, a negative result, you’re a muggle ‘arry. So I could see why there would be a special kind of resentment there. Which absolutely should also be the case with Inhumans and their special latent genes which means they get to come out of the chrysalis a beautiful shiny butterfly while you’re stuck as a caterpillar.
But I don’t think that’s enough to explain “anti-mutant prejudice.” And this is where I think history and politics come into it. In both the comics and the movies, governments in WWII plunged a bunch of money into superpowers and almost all of what they got back was eaten up by the war: Cap goes into the ice, Namor goes back to being a non-aligned power, the Human Torch is deactivated, and so on. And between then and now, governments try to rebuild their capacity and keep powers as a monopoly of the government: hence all of those failed attempts to recreate the Super Soldier serum, Weapon X, etc.
But mutants by their very nature arise outside fo the control of the national security state, and that scares the hell out of them. Your Alpha or Omega class mutants are essentially global superpowers, and can’t be controlled easily or at all. And I think the national security state would start to push that picking and choosing phenomenon: Tony Stark is ok because he’s a human and a military contractor, the Fantastic Four are ok because they come out of NASA, but the X-Men are dangerous rogue elements.
So actually, I think a rebooted X-Men would fit quite nicely into a post-Cap 3 MCU. Thanks to some really clumsy handling of the fallout from the Lagos incident, world governments who were already paranoid about superpowers acting independently start stoking public fear of “enhanced” individuals like Wanda Maximoff. Now all of the sudden, there’s an entire sub-species of “enhanced” individuals hiding in plain sight – are they in league with the rogue Avengers? HYDRA? The aliens? The Daily Bugle demands answers!
To me, the biggest problem is how you fit X-Men’s backstory into the history of the MCU. But I think this is solvable, because we have that nice 60s-70s period of covert superheroing where Ant-Man was active. So back in the 60s and 70s, governments start becoming aware of mutants, but they think there’s just a few individuals. So they keep mutant activity classified, Weapon X starts running quietly in the background, maybe some Sentinels get built during the Cold War “purely for contingency purposes.” And then in the present day, when it turns out that the mutant population has been expanding rapidly but from a really small base, and all of SHIELD’s secrets get leaked…
For most of the X-cast, time isn’t really a factor – either for the original team or the all-new folks or the new mutants or generation x or after, they can really come from any time; Wolverine should have been around for a long time, but his healing factor makes him immortal so that’s not a problem either. The two big problems are Magneto and Professor X. Magneto being a survivor pins him down to a generation that is now rapidly approaching triple digits, and Professor X really should be a peer of Magneto as opposed to significantly younger. So we’re going to need some sort of Bucky-like explanation for why they’ve been kept on ice and why they’ve come out of the ice.
I just got back from seeing Doctor Strange. And as I said on Twitter, while it might not be the best Marvel movie ever, it may have come closest to feeling like the original comic come to life, overflowing with the trippy visuals, corny but evocative mysticism, and just a dash of problematic orientalism that pretty much characterized Steve Ditko’s original run in Strange Tales.
For a more thorough and spoilery discussion, see below the cut:
Character:
Despite the fact that having Benedict Cumberbatch do his best Greg House impression is a bit of a waste (there’s absolutely no reason why he couldn’t speak with a British accent. Hell if it was up to me, I would have told Cumberbatch to do the whole thing as a Vincent Price impression), I thought Benedict Cumberbatch was quite good as Doctor Strange. After doing Sherlock, the insensitive asshole genius bit is pretty much second nature, so it would be easy for him to coast through the role.
What I liked about his performance is that he didn’t stick to doing that bit: he gets pretty damn goofy throughout a lot of the movie, damn near doing Charlie Chaplin in moments where he’s literally running in place because magic is making the floor stretch into infinity under his feet or where the magic cloak (going to talk more about this in a bit) is tugging him around. And that goofiness nicely leavens what otherwise could be a rather leadenly pompous character. Likewise, while Strange is often pompous, you get the sense that he knows he’s being pompous and is playing with people from behind the mask. And while I actually would have liked a bit more Vincent Price nastiness under the surface (the original Doctor Strange was a bit like the Doctor in that he’s a technical pacifist who somehow doesn’t mind Worse Than Death punishments for his enemies or just people who piss him off).
Other characters:
Mads Mikkleson/Kaecilius
is ALMOST as one-note a villain as you’ve come to expect with Marvel movies, with one rather interesting exception. There’s a moment in the film where Strange has almost accidentally captured him and Kaecilius does something rather unusual for a Marvel villain: he actually tries to persuade Doctor Strange that Kaecilius is the hero, that he’s literally trying to save the world, and arguably the universe, by stopping entropy itself through shifting the world into a dimension where it doesn’t exist. And while I was a bit surprised they didn’t fully draw the connection between his desire to abolish death by the fact that Kaecilius lost his entire family violently, it’s a rare Marvel villain who actually has a point.
Let’s bite the bullet. Tilda Swinton does a great job playing the Ancient One – balancing wisdom with a secret hypocrisy – but so could any number of actresses who weren’t white. Yes, the Ancient One is an orientalisttrope. But the way to fix it is to write the character to be a real character that subverts and plays with those tropes. And while some people have said that this is all because Marvel wants the film to play in China and thus can’t say the word Tibet, the movie itself refutes that by just moving the Ancient One’s sanctum across the border over into Nepal. No reason the Ancient One couldn’t have been Nepalese. And honestly, I think the filmmakers realized that they’d kind of fucked themselves, because rather than having the Ancient One be saved in the nick of time, they kill her off two-thirds through the movie so they won’t have that problem in the future.
To be scrupulously fair, however, I do think the movie actually significantly improved on this very problem with two of the other secondary characters, which is what makes their decision not to do it with the Ancient One all the more strange. Benedict Wong, playing Wong, isn’t Doctor Strange’s Chinese manservant – instead, he’s the chief librarian of the Ancient One’s collection of magics, and ends the film as the master of the Sanctum of Hong Kong, making him very much Stephen Strange’s equal. And he’s allowed to be deadpan funny as well as a wise mystic, which makes him feel like more of a well-rounded character. Rachel McAdams as Doctor Christine Palmer isn’t given enough screentime, but I really like the decision to have her be Doctor Strange’s ex and stay that way through the movie, a friend not a love interest.
But above all, the person who arguably turns in the best performance of the movie is Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo. Now, Baron Mordo is a villain that only an Objectivist like Steve Ditko could have thought up: he’s literally someone who chooses to become capital-E evil, turning on the Ancient One because he wants to be the most powerful, that’s it. But there’s no reason for him to seek power – he doesn’t have any deep psychological need for power based on his life experiences, he’s not trying to do anything with the power (like say, Doctor Doom trying to win back his mother’s soul from the Devil), he just wants it in the same way that a Heel wants the WWE Championship belt.
But Ejiofor’s Mordo is something entirely different. His Mordo is a hero for 9/10ths of the movie, a devoted lieutenant of the Ancient One, the one who brings Doctor Strange into the Sanctum, who teaches Doctor Strange to fight back against evil, and who gives his all in the service of the ideals of the order he’s dedicated his life to. The problem is that he’s so inflexibly devoted to those ideals – imagine Javert as the Instructor for Dark Arts – that when he finds out that the Ancient One has been bending the rules by tapping into magics she herself has forbidden, because magic is all about bending the rules for a higher purpose, he rejects the order, because he argues that there are always consequences. And by the very very end of the movie, he’s decided that the way to ensure that there are consequences are for him to wipe out all the sorcerors in existence. And that kind of villain is so good that I really don’t care that Kaecilius is mostly rather dull, because Mordo has the potential to join Loki in the otherwise-empty (mostly because good villains have a habit of dying in Marvel movies) pantheon of actually interesting villains.
EDIT:
Oh, right, the cloak…forgot I was going to talk about the cloak. It’s one of the best bits of the movie – think the carpet from Aladdin by way of tinyGroot in Guardians. It’s playful, protective, useful, and it both looks really damn cool but also is willing to play with the goody side of it. There’s a little moment where Doctor Strange pops the collar and the cloak almost materally wipes something off his cheek and it got the biggest laugh of the whole movie. So here’s my note for Doctor Strange 2: like 10-20% more cloak. Not so much that the joke gets tired, but more.
Story:
I’ve heard some people complain that the story in Doctor Strange is a bit rushed, that it rushes through too much of the Hero’s Journey too quickly so that it can get to the big fight at the end. I find that a bit odd – right now, the movie is a fleet-footed hour and fifty-five, if you tried to make it longer, it would start to bog down, and the potential holes (why did Kaecilius wait around until Doctor Strange was advanced enough in his training to fight back to cast the ritual to summon Dormammu?) would get bigger.
What I liked about the story’s speed is that it felt like a comic book, where you only have 16 pages to tell a beginning, middle, and end. So yes, brush through the early stages of the Hero’s Journey because we’ve seen it all before and because they’re the most boring parts of it – again, one of the best parts of Captain America: Civil War was that they did both Black Panther’s and Spiderman’s origin in two-three scenes apiece.
And specifically, it felt like a Doctor Strange comic. See, early Ditko Doctor Strange stories always went the same way: Doctor Strange is confronted with some new magical threat that would put him in an impossible position and figures out some trick to overcome that threat. They really weren’t action comics or character studies but more like drawing-room mysteries where the fun is in seeing how Poirot or Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple solves the puzzle. So when the big setpiece ends with Doctor Strange first using a forbidden ritual to turn back time and undo the destruction of Hong Kong and then realizing that if he brings this spell into the Dark Dimension of Dormammu where there is no time, he can drive Dormammu nuts by sticking him in a time loop where Dormammu kills Doctor Strange over and over and over until Dormammu goes nuts and promises to leave our dimension alone if Strange freeze him, that is a uniquely Doctor Strange plot that Ditko would have written.
Indeed, it even has Doctor Strange doing something a bit morally dark, by banishing Kaecilius to the Dark Dimension he’d been trying to pull the entire Earth into, where Dormammu promptly turns him into one of his Mindless Ones.
Visuals:
Yes, the visuals are every bit as amazing as you’ve heard, although honestly I think people have undersold them somewhat by saying that the director swallowed Inception whole. Yes, the movie does the whole bending city-scapes thing, and the changing gravity thing, but it does so so much more (I would argue it actually does that trick with a bit more panache than Nolan did). There are whole chunks of this movie that are literally Steve Ditko’s psychedelic panels come to life:
It is so visually distinct from every other Marvel movie ever made that anyone after this who says that all Marvel movies look the same is a damn liar.
And while I don’t know whether or not the movie looks any better in 3D, I will be very curious to see if audience responses change after Prop 64 passes in California…
First of all, he’s got an absolutely ridiculous costume that is a fashion nightmare. Cheetah-print pants, zebra-stripe belt and cuffs, and a lion’s head vest with no shirt, plus the giant 70s stache and soul-patch. You couldn’t forget that look if you tried. So he passes the first test of a great villain: he’s instantly memorable.
Second, he’s got an amazing concept – a big game hunter who insists on killing hand-to-hand because anything else would be insufficiently manly, and who runs out of dangerous animals to kill with his bare hands so decides to hunt…Spider-Man. He doesn’t have some stupid grudge against Spider-Man because of something in their past, he’s not a career criminal or mobster – he just wants to prove he’s stronger than Spider-Man. There’s a purity and simplicity (and to be honest, irrationality – I mean, why Spider-Man and not the Hulk?) there that’s refreshing and novel.
Third, Kraven shot Spider-Man with a tranq dart, buried him alive, put on Spider-Man’s costume, and then went out to prove that he could out-Spider-Man Spider-Man…and actually succeeded, saving Mary Jane Watson’s life and single-handedly defeating Vermin (something Spider-Man hadn’t accomplished). When Spider-Man escaped from the grave, Kraven refused to fight him, having proven his point, and promptly confessed and committed suicide.
What I love about that is that Kraven’s ultimate villainous scheme is that he pulls off a permanent victory over Spider-Man that got into his head and affected him profoundly – you don’t get over being buried alive lightly – in a brilliantly orthagonal way. He doesn’t kill Spider-Man or one of his loved ones (looking at you, Green Goblin), he doesn’t clone Spider-Man or try to merge with Spider-Man or any of that nonesense. He beats Spider-Man thoroughly by out-doing him and then goes out on top so that Spider-Man doesn’t even get the chance for a come-back.
So there you have it, the basics of a quality villain: good look, good concept, memorable scheme/victory.
Following your response to the Iron Man question, do you have any thoughts on Peter Parker you could elaborate on?
Before you read this, go watch anything MovieBob has ever done on Spiderman, because that dude gets Spiderman.
He’s the ur-nerd power fantasy, that a pure accident could come along and transform you, the weak and socially awkward nebbish, give you super-strength, toughness, agility, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound (webslinging basically being how people who grew up with skyscrapers all around them think about flying). Peter Parker isn’t born on Krypton and he’s not a billionaire playboy with a tragic past, he’s a nerdy kid from Queens who went to a science exhibit and became magic. Without Peter Parker and all the characters who followed him, you don’t get Harry Potter.
What saves him from becoming the Gamergate/Rapid Puppies/etc. toxic nerd is Uncle Ben and “with great power comes great responsibility.” It’s pretty remarkable that, out of Steve Ditko’s objectivist anti-populism, Marvel somehow ended up with a working class hero with a conscience. Spiderman rejects the path of personal fame and fortune in favor of selflessly protecting the people of New York because it’s the right thing to do. And despite J Jonah Jameson libelling him every damn day, the people of New York know he’s on their side:
Another thing that sets Spiderman apart from a lot of superheroes is that, even though he’s super-strong, he doesn’t look it. Spiderman doesn’t have the Charles Atlas body of so many superheroes – he’s scrawny, and though he’s pretty lanky, he’s still on the small side and he looks even smaller when you put him up against supervillains who are giant mountains of muscle. By his very design, Spiderman is an underdog:
Partly that’s because the nerd power-fantasy doesn’t work if the secret identity falls apart because Peter Parker suddenly looks like a linebacker, but mostly because Spiderman’s strength comes from within. At his best, he is the David against the Goliath, the little guy who stands up against the big guy and refuses to give up, ever.
This news fills me with a strange combination of retroactive regret, anger, wistfulness, and bewilderment, because as much as I love Captain America: Civil War, Jack Kirby’s MADBOMB is one of the greatest Captain America stories ever written and drawn and it kills me that we might have gotten to see the Russo Brothers attempt it on the big screen but it never happened.
I need a german compound word to express how I feel right now.
I’ve discussed this in some depth over at Graphic Policy. A lot of this stems back from the way that the mutant metaphor was originally developed – early on, there’s just not that much exploration of anti-mutant prejudice that mutants need protecting from, so the emphasis in on this weird strategy of improving human-mutant relations by fighting evil mutants. (since the original idea was that mutancy was just an easy way to introduce a bunch of heroes and villains without having to think up individual origin stories)
His biggest pro-mutant moment in the early comics is the X-Men taking down the sentinels. However, even then, you see Professor X engaging in a narrow form of activism – his first instinct when Bolivar Trask whips up an anti-mutant witch hunt is to engage him in an academic debate, trying to use his credentials as an expert to influence public opinion. It doesn’t go very well, even before Trask sends in the genocidal robots.
And when I have time to write my essays on how Claremont approached the mutant metaphor, you’ll see that this is kind of his main mode of political activism. He’ll testify against Senator Kelly’s Mutant Registration Act, he’ll engage in TV debates with Reverend Stryker, he’ll organize Magneto’s legal defense at the International Court of Justice, etc. And he’ll have his school, where he’ll educate several generations of mutants (OGs, Giant-Sized, New Mutants).
But, in no small part because these are still superhero comics where the main event is introducing problems that can be solved with punching, we never see Xavier engaging in movement-building: we don’t see mutant rights groups being formed at a local, state, or national level, we don’t see a Mutant Equality Bill being proposed to counter the Registration Act, we don’t see Xavier leading protests or direct actions, etc.
I don’t know if he would have been a fan, per se. But as an Irish Catholic with leftish political leanings, he certainly would have been familiar with the Little Flower’s radio broadcasts.
But I think Rogers would have turned against Coughlin pretty early on – Coughlin started attacking FDR’s New Deal in 1934, by 1936 Coughlin’s anti-communism led him to support Franco in Spain, and between ‘36-38, Coughlin went all-in on his anti-semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion/Jewish Bankers are Bolsheviks theory.
Given Rogers’ strong anti-fascist tendencies, I think he would have broken with Coughlin in ‘36 if not before.
“Not a clone, not an imposter, not mind control, not someone else” does not include “no time travel shenanigans involving a cosmic cube/Kang/Doom’s time machine/Mephisto’s powers”, so I’m willing to bet that the same bright ideas that brought us “One More Day” are responsible for this new twist. Oh well, in a few months this will be re-retconned anyway.
Look, there are a couple of possibilities here:
Nick Spencer is lying because the company line is following some JJ Abrams-style mystery box plan to gin up controversy and thus sales. This isn’t a good way to treat your customers. You get more money in the short run, but you’ll also lose some fans in the short run, and you run the risk of damaging a very valuable brand.
It’s time travel or cosmic cube or whatever. As I said, that’s still bad writing. It’s not the kind of twist that adds rather than detracts from the character, it doesn’t suit the character, and it’s going to lead to clumsier writing to fix it.
Whichever one is the case, this run is going to be remembered as “the one where Cap’s a Nazi,” and that’s terrible.
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