Tag: mutant metaphor

I’ve heard an argument that SF metaphors for social issues are obsolete now. You should just have characters that are black or gay or whatever, not have SF equivalents like the X-Men. What do you think?

(Before you read this, you might want to jump in and read my People’s History of the Marvel Universe series…)

That’s a fair argument, especially when the characters that are standing in as metaphors are (in their civilian clothes, and it’s noticeable that all the original X-Men could pass) five WASPY teenagers (with only one woman to boot) who live in a private boarding school in Westchester that’s run by one eccentric millionaire. 

image

At the same time, there are a couple ways to deal with this: the first is Chris Claremont’s strategy, which is to make your cast more diverse so that you have characters who are black and mutant, gay and mutant, and so on. Thus, rather than the metaphor supplanting or erasing the thing it’s supposed to stand in for, you can explore interesting questions of intersectionality, passing privilege (see: the Morlocks), etc. 

Another strategy is to have the issue of mutant rights actually interact with these other movements and politics. We see a little of this when we get into Magneto’s fascinating role in the Cold War, but I’d love to see more, especially in the original period setting. How would the black power movement of the 1970s have reacted to Storm suddenly appearing as the most powerful black woman in America? How would San Francisco politics have changed with the X-Men spending some time as the city’s super-hero team? Why don’t we see mutant urban enclaves (again, other than the Morlocks) before Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men, and how would those enclaves have fit in the complex urban politics of the 1970s? Why don’t we see a mutant rights movement, and how would that movement have developed relationships with the gay rights movement or the civil rights movement or the labor movement? 

Does Professor X actually do all that much for mutants? In the movies at least he seems like a terrible activist

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.