Make It With the Down Boys

I

Everything is Science Fiction 

(or, All You Need to Know About the X-Men Before Rogue)

Having already examined two Rogue solo stories in painful detail we find ourselves a fair way into exhausting our storehouse of Rogue solo stories. Again, she is not by design a solo character. She’s been a team player for the entirety of her career, with personal drama set aside from much of the rest of the book. It still fits because every team needs a sullen loner with a dramatic inner journey whose private angst can be used as thematic counterpoint to the main plot. Wolverine had been the designated sullen loner, but by the early 1980s had been so effectively domesticated that the X-Men found themselves with an opening for a jerk. 

     

Enter Rogue. Here was a sullen loner with two advantages over Wolverine: In the first place she is one of the most beautiful women on the planet, and he is a very hairy Canadian man who wears a costume that usually doesn’t cover his armpits. In the second, she wasn’t going to be cured of her sullen loner status with the introduction of a new lovable team sidekick and a few go-rounds with the ol’ inner demons. She wasn’t going to be cured of that anytime soon. Her inner demons had a lot more bite than usual. 

But, now we’ve started, we should back up to the beginning. 

     

(Invoking the Muse would have been redundant - what else is the title of the book?)

     

Rogue was created in 1981 and did not join the team until 1983. The X-Men have existed in one form or another since 1963. By any measure Rogue was a late addition, joining the team eight years after the formation of the “All-New, All-Different” team in 1975’s Giant Sized X-Men #1. Joining in #171 in the spring of 1983, she was also the only addition to the team between Kitty Pryde joining in #138 and Rachel Summers in #193 (not counting Lockheed). It was a remarkably stable period in the book’s history, and a generative one as well. The version of the team that existed right before Rogue’s joining casts the longest shadow even after four decades.

     

So, I said I was going to back up to the beginning, and we haven’t. Sorry! Probably has something to do with the fact that the X-Men has always been a protean concept, from the very first. Stuffing it all into a single thumbnail is problematic, despite the seeming simplicity of the core premise. Even the sixties incarnation undergoes a number of changes. The root dilemma is that concepts don’t become wildly popular, or it’s rare enough to be a marvel in the passing. Characters become wildly popular. The characters at the core of the franchise from 1975 through to roughly 1984 - a group that just barely includes Rogue but which I think most people would agree does not include Rachel - are the group that people love the most. People don’t want to move on from them. They rarely stray far, even when story logic would seemingly dictate otherwise. 

This has been the book’s dynamic since the very beginning. The team and the book need to change because otherwise it gets stale. It’s a school - or at least remains rooted in that structure and that pedagogical mission - and schools are by their nature changing and changeable institutions. This dynamism, the fact that the books and characters do change, and change considerably over time, is part of the appeal. You tune out for a while, things are going to be different when you tune back in. That’s the concept. It’s also the core challenge, because changing rarely means only letting go of things people hate. 

     

The problem with the X-Men for much of their early history wasn’t that people hated or loved them, but that they were mostly indifferent. The X-Men were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, but they stayed on the book for less than a year and a half. Although both creators spoke about the relevancy of the core concepts of tolerance and education, and the progressive bent of the premise was certainly in line with both men’s avowed politics, I don’t think the book or the characters were close to either of their hearts.

     

Still, there are few greater testaments to their greatness than the observation that the X-Men were practically an afterthought to Stan & Jack both, relative to the rest of the line and certainly relative to their greater careers. These guys were castoffs. Movie studios have spent and will continue to spend billions of dollars trying desperately merely to approximate what Jack could do in an afternoon with a pencil, when he wasn’t even trying. In his shadow they are utter clowns.

The reader is introduced to the premise on the very first page of X-Men #1: there’s a school somewhere in New York where they train mutants to use their powers. Dude with wings is flying around taking orders from a bald guy in a chair. Bam. There we go. Simple, clean. Once someone knows what a mutant is - and if they didn’t, the narration would remind them, frequently - they’re off to the races. As bare premises go it’s pretty sturdy. Hardly the first school-based adventure setup in popular fiction, but as we have seen, the idea of a boarding school for children with special powers remains perennially popular. Worth noting, however, that the Xavier School represents, at least in its earliest incarnations, a very WASP ideal of private boarding school as imagined by two liberal Jewish kids from New York. Less in the way of euphemistic cover for corporal punishment, a lot more in the way of awkwardly sitting around in formalwear being lectured on civic responsibility. Lots of military drills in both instances, however.

     

Once the unwary reader opened the book they were introduced to a variety of caricatures into which later writers would spend decades breathing life. The personalities of the original team were, respectively, uptight, rich, smart, kid, and girl. Professor X was asshole, Magneto was helmet. There was quite a bit of room for later writers to elaborate, is what I’m saying. If that sounds harsh, it’s not really - those caricatures were still more than the Distinguished Competition had at the time.       

Subsequently however some of the caricatures did better than others. Without question Cyclops has received the most development. The focus has almost certainly hurt him, as will be discussed apace. The Beast received the second most focus, owing primarily to his tenure on the Avengers. He was a fan-favorite in that book, and carried the additional characterization with him when he returned to his first book. However, it’s been a long time since he was more than a reserve and occasional stunt member of the Avengers. In the years since returning to the X-Men family in the mid-80s he’s been victim of almost as many unfortunate character-assassinating plot twists as Cyclops. And while putatively featured in many comics Jean Grey has spent the majority of her many lives successfully dodging the intolerable burden of personality.

Angel settled into a nice role as the Marvel Universe’s resident rich snob (who was still a decent enough guy for the Hulk to consider an actual friend, if you remember your World War Hulk). Eventually they turned him blue, gave him razors for wings, and made him perpetually angry. This fan-favorite redesign - which, we should emphasize, made the character popular during the most commercially successful period in the history of the franchise, and therefore the most popular he has ever been by many orders of magnitude - proved so popular that it had been almost completely walked back a decade later. In the decades since he’s returned to the redesign at least once, but who knows what he will look like by the time you read this? 

Iceman benefitted from a rare bit of late-career development when he was revealed in 2015 that he was gay. Turned out there was a surprising amount of circumstantial evidence attesting to the fact that Bobby Drake was only ever an unenthusiastic heterosexual. Even as far back as his very first appearance in the pages of X-Men #1 - by Stan & Jack themselves! - he had been observed blithely opining, at the debut of Miss Jean Grey: “A girl ... big deal!” It’s still remarkable to me that the last major Iceman story before he came out of the closet, in 2013 during Marjorie Liu’s run on Astonishing X-Men, was specifically about the fact that every romantic relationship he’d ever had was unsatisfying and inconclusive. Unplanned coincidence, mind you. 

All of this still lay in the future in the mid-60s. The first incarnation of the book wasn’t that popular. After Stan & Jack the reins were passed to a handful of successors, the likes of Roy Thomas and Werner Roth. Not necessarily bad comics, but decidedly second string by the standards of what Marvel was publishing at the time. There was a bump at the end of the decade when Thomas was briefly joined by Neal Adams in 1969. Sales ticked upwards on the back of Adams’ breathtaking art, but newsstand figures were very slow and ultimately arrived too late to save a book that had been already been doomed. Adams, already a budding superstar based on only a couple brief runs for both Marvel and DC, never returned to the book. His brief tenure on X-Men is still counted among the best sequences in the franchise, but was curtailed too soon to be more than a curio relative to what followed. The series was subsequently relegated to reprints, beginning with issue #67 in late 1970 and continuing until #93 in Summer 1975.  

     

For five years the team was orphaned. Magneto appeared across the line, cementing his status in the period as second only to Dr. Doom in terms of utility as a stunt villain. He doesn’t really serve that function anymore. Claremont’s tenure on the book mostly put an end to Magneto’s usefulness as a punching bag for other heroes. Little was lost in the transformation - before Claremont arrived and began to develop him Magneto didn’t have enough of a personality to cement any real second-order rivalries. Certainly not in the way that Doom eventually established relationships with a host of characters separate from his primary antagonism with the Fantastic Four.

Frequent guest appearances across line kept the characters in currency. They split the Beast off for a solo feature in 1972 and folded him into the Avengers soon after that. He was popular in the Avengers, and truth be told I think he’s still more popular when he’s with the Avengers. With the X-Men he’s perpetually mired in dour, dystopian storylines springing directly from the pile of bad decisions accumulated in a pile at his feet over the last forty years, surrounded by people who know him too well to ever trust him. When he’s with the Avengers he’s jumping around like a monkey, kicking people and quipping. Why don’t they ever use the version of the character people actually like? I know, I know - “changing rarely means only letting go of things people hate.” 

     

(I mean, it’s not like he didn’t make mistakes when he was with the Avengers and the Defenders - bad judgment has long been a hallmark. But I’d argue there’s a qualitative difference between being blackmailed by Patsy Walker for an Avengers membership and breaking the timestream. Which would you rather have, Hellcat or another Scott Summers?)

     

Everything changed in 1975. It’s an old story. Won’t bore you with repetition. Giant Sized X-Men sold well enough to rate a return for the book after lingering for years in a hazy netherworld of reprints. It was written by Len Wein and pencilled by Dave Cockrum, who would also go on to draw the series that ensued. The series landed on its feet and spent the next 17 years bouncing from strength to strength. 

     

So here’s where we meet the reason we care: Chris Claremont. Just another in a row of talented writers coming up at the company around the same time. We remember Wein, and Jim Starlin too, and Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart. Englehart is the guy responsible for giving the Beast a solo career and his Avengers membership. However, whereas these other gentlemen were peripatetic, working across the company and across the industry during the same period, Claremont stuck it out on one massively successful title for the bulk of his career at Marvel. Also wrote a fair pile of Spider-Man, and the first volume of Iron Fist. Later had a lengthy run on Fantastic Four, delivered fill-ins and small runs for a host of other books for much of his time at the company. But all that work put together doesn’t add up to a fraction of the popularity and influence of the X-Men. 

     

He inherited a book that had already been set up by multiple creators, filled with a grab bag of old and new characters. No reason to believe anything other than it might go on to successfully get not canceled for a few years. That was the dream! Worth pointing out, many of the company’s most storied long runs from this period and later originated in similar places: Peter David’s run on Incredible Hulk and Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America were also both more or less dogsbody assignments given to people inside the company with experience but without a big creative profile. Journeymen taking journeyman assignments that just happened to turn into massive character-defining epochs. Also both runs that ended under clouds of acrimony generated by Bob Harras, incidentally. Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe, perhaps the nearest peer to Claremont’s achievement, operated under different incentives: because Hama served at the pleasure of a third party licensor, he was both safe in his job and also unable at such remove to put too personal a stamp on Marvel company IP. 

Because that was always the problem, right? The company likes selling comics but doesn’t like it so much when the appeal becomes less the name on the cover and more the names in the credit box. The X-Men snuck along under the radar for a while. Took a couple years for the book to do well enough to graduate from bimonthly to monthly status. By the time Marvel realized the nature of the book’s enduring success said success had already made Claremont too powerful to completely control. It was too late. Another breed of leviathan would be necessary for an ouster, in another era.

So, why were the All New, All Different X-Men such a success? It wasn’t just one thing. Claremont was the biggest influence at every step of the way, but he had good artists. He had good editors. He inherited a handful of truly classic superhero costume designs - this is no small thing! Picture the core group of Bronze Age X-Men - Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler. Nothing but clean lines and bright primary colors balanced perfectly, so as to allow them to be recombined an infinite number of times on comic book covers without losing their distinctive, dynamic profile. (Wolverine was a John Romita Sr. design, the other new X-Men were Cockrum’s.) Minus a couple nonessential members like Banshee and the late Thunderbird, the team already has its look down solid on Gil Kane’s cover to Giant Size #1.

Yeah, I said Banshee was nonessential. I’ll pause a moment while you recover upon your fainting chair. 

It’s important that the book never had a bad artist. Made John Byrne a superstar, made every subsequent artist a superstar (excepting Paul Smith, who demurred the question of stardom). The closest it ever got to bland was during the second Cockrum run, a problem I put down to inking. Joe Rubinstein seemed to sap some of the vitality that had been present in Cockrum’s first tenure, where he had been inked by a variety of folks who generally agreed his work looked better with heavier blacks. But that’s a small complaint. Cockrum II was followed by Paul Smith, after all, and Paul Smith changed the game completely.

Anyway. It feels like I’m beating around the bush. The fact is that Claremont inherited a great set-up but no one could ever have predicted the follow-through. 

What sells comic books? Lots of things can sell comic books - but what keeps people coming back? What makes people go from liking a comic book to loving a comic book, from buying a book out of habit or mild affection to slamming it on the top of the pile every month? Claremont figured it out. There was a formula, more or less, although he might bristle at the intimation that there was anything formulaic about the results. It really was a simple recipe, though: establish a group of friends who have good banter and smash them with a hammer, over and over and over. Rinse and repeat for almost two hundred damn issues. 

Am I simplifying? I don’t really think I am. Go back and read from the beginning - second beginning, that is. Claremont inherited a variety of caricatures, whose personalities were, respectively, uptight, imperious, German, Russian, girl, and jerk, sometimes Irish country music fan thrown in. They weren’t much to look at, for starters. He gave them some room to establish voices. Then Claremont put them through their paces, smashing them with a hammer over and over and over, until people loved them. I mean, there were a few steps in between there, but that’s the gist. 

Why do you think sitcoms never go out of style? People like watching other people bicker and banter. The X-Men is an action story and not a sitcom, but they spend their time bickering and bantering as assiduously as any television ensemble, be it sitcom, soap opera, or police procedural. People like watching relationships form and friendships develop and rivalries ripen, all that good stuff that takes a lot of time and space to develop properly. People like seeing friends develop in-jokes. 

One of the problems the first set of X-Men had was, bluntly, they were all too nice. Wasn’t a jerk among them, excepting the Professor. A team needs a jerk to act against, someone to act the part of the irritant, the grain of sand in the oyster around which forms the pearl. Warren Worthington being a slight pill didn’t really cut it. Put Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Jean Grey, and Wolverine in a room together, they’re going to find something to talk about. Even if all you have to start with is uptight, imperious, German, Russian, girl, and jerk. There’s nothing for the reader to latch onto if they get along perfectly fine. It’s too smooth. Put a jerk in the room and suddenly there’s something besides just the plot to which the characters can react.

Why is Wolverine putting his hand down his pants? And did he just smell his hand? Oh my god, he’s so sexy.

Another testament to the vivacity of Claremont’s design is that I can’t stand many members of the team. Not because they annoy me but because I know them too well. Does that sound weird? I’ve read the large majority of comic books Cyclops has ever appeared in, I know the guy really, really well. And he’s so much bigger a jerk than Wolverine. Has Wolverine ever left his wife? Left two wives? Cyclops is a complete sack of shit walking around on two legs who repeatedly uses his commitment to the X-Men to try to absolve himself from having a giant gaping void where his soul should be. Nothing he does ever works because he’s a fundamentally selfish person who refuses to see himself as anything other than a hero even when his actions are actively harmful. This is canon. This was literally the ending of AvX.

No one person fucked up Cyclops so bad, is the thing. After six decades creators have actually done a good job maintaining a consistent through-line for the guy. Just as for Iceman the through-line under most writers led more or less invariably to closet case, the through-line for Cyclops under most writers leads more or less invariably to asshole. It merits mentioning that many of Cyclops’ more egregious sins were the product not of writerly fumble but editorial mandate - I refer of course to the circumstances behind which he left his first wife, primarily but not solely. In that one stroke he went from dipshit who was still basically a hero to fundamentally broken person with whom I could never again sympathize on any level. And it sucks that one bad decision made for bad reasons by an editor in 1986 did that to him forever, but barring a reboot it’s a hard one to put back in the bottle. Not without establishing the precedent that, oh, yes, Scott Summers is indeed the kind of frozen motherfucker who will straight up walk out on his wife and newborn and carry on like nothing happened. So it’s no real surprise when he’s found cheating on his wife - the woman for whom he left his first wife, mind - in another woman’s mind. It wasn't out of character.

It’s all to Claremont’s credit, I think, that I dislike Cyclops so much. He made the guy seem real. That was the design, after all: at first it looks like Wolverine is the biggest jerk on the team, but it’s actually the leader who refuses to adapt and also refuses to take a joke. And then when he does adapt and learns to work with his team instead of against them he faces the depressing realization that inflexibility was inherited from his teacher. The story then acknowledges what was plain from the very beginning of the Lee & Kirby days, if never plainly stated: the real jerk all along was the father figure who impressed his hang-ups on his pupils. (After all, Kitty’s only moment of true insight was the realization that the boss was indeed the real jerk of the outfit.) And that was Cyclops’ arc, and why it made sense when he left the book in issue #201, because he had outgrown the role for which he was created, outgrown both his teacher and his need to be teacher’s pet.  Found some degree of peace in a manner parallel to Wolverine’s journey through the same period. Oooh, theme!

That’s the story of the X-Men right around when Rogue joins, actually: the team was in the process of changing, not just adding new members and processing the trauma and grief of the series’ previous few years, but also continuing the very long arc of maturity that led to them outgrowing Xavier, learning to reject not his ideals but his control. This is similar to what Grant Morrison would later do for the Doom Patrol, during a run influenced by Claremont's first few years on Uncanny and published concurrent to Claremont’s last few years on Uncanny. The Doom Patrol was another idea that had been progressive in the sixties but come to seem increasingly out of touch, and for much the same reasons. Kids eventually outgrow teachers, who are often ill-equipped to deal with change. One of the many themes the two franchises share is that education is necessarily grounds for generational conflict, for better and for worse. Educators become calcified and conservative almost despite themselves, students bristle even at necessary boundaries placed by experience. Eventually the team leaves the authoritarian asshole behind. 

By the end of Cockrum’s second run Colossus and Nightcrawler had settled into their positions as the team’s supporting players. The book rarely centered their lives - Kurt’s relationship with Amanda Sefton is consistently shown only in passing, Colossus often overshadowed in his own plotlines by Kitty and his sister. They start off the picture of loyal and steadfast but both decline over the course of the series. Kurt began as a swashbuckling free spirit, was gradually worn down by circumstances, and ended his first tenure on the team an insecure neurotic mess. Kurt was eventually returned to something resembling his former self after bamfing over to Excalibur, a lighter spinoff that launched in 1988 featuring three characters written out of Uncanny - Kurt, Kitty, and Rachel. 

There would be no such light-hearted redemption for Colossus. After the merciful end to his completely inappropriate relationship with the underage Kitty Pryde, he fell into a funk out of which he never really snapped. Sullen and withdrawn, his mood and demeanor grew darker with the book’s darkening tone during John Romita Jr’s tenure as artist. His artistic frustrations become more relevant in the book’s later stretch.

All that still lay well in the future, however, when the new team was first assembled by Xavier to rescue the old. At the outset of his run Claremont established an important principle: these guys kind of sucked. They got rolled every other issue. Old enemies like Juggernaut and Magneto came out of the woodwork to give the new kids a kick. Even when the team won, the victories were practically Pyrrhic. People got hurt, lines got crossed. As they got better and more confident the enemies kept getting more powerful. All the way back to the first Cockrum run the series' hallmark was seeing characters in desperate straits either learn and improve in real time or suffer the consequences. Mistakes and lapses in judgement are common. As the series progresses moral questions become increasingly thorny and the characters' responses more contemplative. The characters themselves realize alongside the reader that their lives are far more complicated than previously imagined. Maybe the readers look at their own lives different.

Easy to see all the ways it could have gone wrong. Readers like seeing characters overcome adversity, they don’t like open-ended failure. There’s no way Claremont could have known - in fact, every historical trend strongly argued against - him ever having the kind of tenure on the book that would enable him to set up such a long game so early. He killed a member of the new team on their second adventure! And yet somehow he managed to stick with it long enough that he could make the story of the team coming together the work not of a month or a year but over half a decade. 

That Claremont was able to chronicle this evolution and track these changes so precisely over so many years is perhaps the best answer to the question of how, exactly, he could make so many people love this book. For much of its tenure it was the best book Marvel published, and none of the other candidates for the title were anywhere near as good for as long. He respected peoples' intelligence by assuming they could read subtext and inference, and remember subtle details at years' remove. That alone made the book a veritable feast compared to almost anything else offered by the mainstream at the time.

But you can see the germ of the problem even in the very beginning, all the way back to John Byrne’s tenure. The hotheads from the earliest days had already by then become, if not seasoned vets, at least a more effective unit. More trusting of their teammates. What lay in the future? Well, Byrne left right after the team’s biggest defeat to date, and they spent much of Cockrum’s second tenure dusting themselves off from that. Adding a kid sidekick for the team gave the book momentum at a time when it could have gone adrift, even if Kitty Pryde would soon prove a problem in her own right. 

While my antipathy towards Kitty Pryde is well documented, it’s worth pointing out that the period during which she was at the center of the book also represents its sleepiest period. There’s lots of world building that would pay off fifty or a hundred issues down the line, but there’s also a lot of hanging around the mansion looking at Kitty’s terrible costumes. It gives the book a lighter feel when it could have easily veered into darker territory following the death of a founding member. Certainly, enough people liked Kitty that you could argue the focus was merited. But if you find Kitty an excruciating ordeal in human form these passages can be a slog. 

Jesus H. Christ, you ask, do you actually like any of these characters? I mean, besides Rogue. And Kitty, of all people! So harmless, so beloved . . .

Funny thing about Uncanny X-Men is that through most of the book’s history women were the main driver of the plot. There’s often a woman at or near the center of the book, whose travails form the crux of the drama - another unusual aspect of the book for the time, when seeing any character-based drama was worthy of note, to say nothing of one that took women seriously. (Not to imply female-led character-driven stories are all that common today, either.) Dark Phoenix set the template here, and became the impetus for much of what unfolded over the following years. Kitty moved into Jean Grey’s place at the putative center of the book after Jean died. Rogue served the purpose for a while but soon gave way to Rachel Summers, a more difficult character whose saga ends neither in resolution or tragedy but frustration. Rachel Summers was in turn followed eventually by Madelyne Pryor. Storm’s mega-arc spans the entirety of Claremont's run. 

There’s enormous progression here. In the first place, I’ve never thought much of Jean Grey. That’s not euphemism for dislike, honestly I just never really thought of her as a character very often at all. Just what is she? Of all the original X-Men she’s the least developed. She has often seemed more or less a blank slate onto which everyone projected their own desires and inferences, chaste and prurient - reader, character, and creator alike. After she rejoins the X-Men at the outset of the 90s she becomes the team mom. She gets married because it’s what people want to see, for some reason. She’s held up as a paragon by all and sundry for . . . Reasons. She died but got better and then not better and then strangely better again. Unfailingly kind and supportive, but a stubborn selfish lover. I don’t fucking know! Her fantasies are very problematic, but to be fair she's not the only female X-Men whose deepest fantasies involve the antebellum south. Sad trombone. 

Anyway, the most damning thing you can say about Jean is that she saw what he did to Madelyne and somehow thought it wouldn’t happen to her. She dreams in taupe for all I can tell. The Phoenix Force was wise to pick a dishrag.  

Kitty was an improvement on Jean inasmuch as she was usually portrayed as a person with agency, which Jean Grey was most certainly not for most of her career, at least her early career. But as I’ve alluded, if you find Kitty to be less a “fantasy girlfriend” and more a “Cousin Oliver,” its slim pickings hanging around while the creators sexualize a precocious minor, repeatedly, over the course of many years. 

I mean, that’s a thing they did. It’s right there on Marvel Unlimited, you’re welcome to check it out if you’d like - right next to Jean and Rogue's respective Gone with the Wind dream sequences. There’s a popsicle eating sequence at the end of Annual #7 in 1983 so foul I don’t even want to put it up on the blog. She brings out the worst in every creator. A lot of Kitty stories carry that kind of uncomfortable edge, being as they are almost always about adult designs on a pubescent girl. Everyone wants to kidnap Kitty. Everyone wants to trick Kitty. No one ever wants to just seal Kitty in a box and mail her to Abu Dhabi, nope. Which of these options seems the rational course of action to you? 

Now of course, there was another woman near the center of the book for a while in the early 80s during the second Cockrum run - oddly enough not a mutant but a former Avenger by the name of Carol Danvers. She had gone by Ms. Marvel with the Avengers, before becoming estranged from that team in an incident so ugly it wouldn't be resolved for almost two decades, during Kurt Busiek's run on the book. Long before that, beginning with issue #150 she hung out with the X-Men in the pages of Uncanny for a while after being hung out to dry by her old team. Carol was then recovering then from an assault received in Avengers Annual #10 in 1981- a different kind of assault from the one which had prompted her leave from the Avengers. She'd had a rough time of it, is what I’m saying. 

Ms. Marvel was beaten to a pulp and left for dead by a new member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Some psychopathic bitch threw Carol’s limp body off the Golden Gate Bridge. Steals other peoples’ minds and powers, like a vampire. What’s worse, after almost killing Danvers she went after Dazzler, too - tried to kill her a couple times. Positively obsessed. Creep must have a thing for blondes.  

Carol Danvers represented one of the X-Men’s lesser emphasized but consistent priorities, using their powers and resources to put right things other mutants break. Certainly there could be no circumstances under which their friendship with the victim of a savage attack on the part of an evil mutant could come into conflict with their commitment to helping fellow mutants in need. No way that could ever turn into just another rejection in a career of rejections for the most unlucky woman in the Marvel Universe, nope. 

The end of Cockrum’s second run and the beginning of Smith’s was the climax of a year-long outer space adventure that introduced both Danvers’ Binary powers and the deathless Brood. The team had been through a lot, both before and after Kitty’s arrival. They worked well together. Wolverine was less the jerk and more the wry older brother, falling in love with Mariko and proving a deft mentor to Kitty. Cyclops had mellowed, ready to begin a new chapter in his life. Jean was long gone and Kitty’s dominance in the plot had begun to wane. Things were stable.

Surely it was clear sailing ahead.

________________

Oh, What a Rogue

1. I Got No Clue What They Want to do With You

2. Hello Again

3. Kick it With the Down Boys 

    I. Everything is Science Fiction 

Oh, What a Rogue

II

Hello Again

Perhaps there is a disjuncture in the idea of fandom - this being for the moment a discussion of fandom. For its faults fandom remains the difference between living culture and dead lines in an archive. Fandom performs transubstantiation, changing the bare materials of art into something new that exists entirely outside the control of the artist or, it should be noted, the copyright holder. Fandom has become the process by which aesthetic artifacts are transformed into social currency through discourse and action.  

I’ve long bristled at the label of fan, even when young and far less critical in my ardor. There seemed something servile in the notion of fandom, an association enhanced by the industry’s constant baiting of the fanboys themselves throughout the late 80s and 90s. Who signs up for that kind of abuse? A fool, clearly. Of course, that passive aggressive resentment towards audiences is fairly common in the arts. Any number of Hollywood satires or literary farces attest to the noble tradition of biting the hand that feeds, as does Lobo’s denim vest emblazoned across the back with “BITE ME, FANBOY.” 

     

The dilemma that broke me upon its horns was a conflict between self respect and material reality. I hated being a fan because I knew I was a fan. I knew in that admission lay ownership of a stereotype of self-effacing and uncritical loyalty - undignified loyalty - against which I chafed, and against which frankly I still do. How have I resolved this conflict? To a degree I probably haven’t and never will. But to a larger extant, I think, the conflict is resolved by defining the object of loyalty - of what are you a fan of? Are you a fan of creators or characters, or are you a fan of a brand? I grew up with “Make Mine Marvel,” but grew out of that attitude long before I was ever going to outgrow the comics themselves. 

The problem in a nutshell is that the corporations that own and control the fates of our most beloved fictional characters do not have those characters’ best interests at heart. They have certainly never considered the best interests of creators. This isn’t a new situation, this is how the business has always been run. How all business has always been run since corporations got in the IP business. 

     

The two most significant events during the twilight of my comic book reading adolescence were the formation of Image Comics in early February of 1992 and the death of Jack Kirby just two years and a week later. The convergence of these two events was the cause of creators’ rights. The narrative that surrounded the Image uprising was simple enough even the early 90s comics press could put it together: generations of pioneers had been hung out to dry - Kirby’s name invoked almost every other breath - so Todd and Rob and Jim were, as Jay might put it, overcharging for what they did to the Cold Crush. Kirby’s death two years later, and after a period of extensive industry carnage, seemed to signal a punctuation mark. The death of a giant to mark the end of an age. 

Were the Image founders completely sincere in their repeated framing of their corporate power move as a blow for creators’ rights in an atomized industry? I believe so. That they turned around - some of them within the year - and replicated something similar to the factory system they had fled is ironic but not perhaps hypocritical. (That two of them would remain intimate parties to Marvel’s corporate deliberations for many years to come is another matter entirely.) They still maintained control of their shit, and everyone else who came to their company retained control over their shit as well. What they did with that control was indicative of their character, whether they wanted to launch a media empire to compete with the one they’d recently left or just wanted the freedom to create independent of oversight. Erik Larsen is still going on Savage Dragon and Jim Lee is still going on covering for Bob Harras. To every man his own heaven. 

     

My problem was that I took seriously what I read. When I saw what Stan had done to Jack, I couldn’t feel the same way about Stan. How can you forget that? You can’t. But it made sense because these facts were all of a piece, part of a pattern that added up to an entire industry implicated in the miasma of its foundation. It also fit with what my parents told me about the world, who it worked for and how it worked. They did it to Jack, they did it to Steve, they did it to Jerry and Joe and Bill too . . .  I wasn’t even a teenager before I had learned both that the sausage was made by people and that people were the sausage.

     

So I knew from very young not to be loyal to a brand, because a brand is just a company. Companies don’t deserve loyalty, people do. And furthermore, that loyalty shouldn’t be absolute either, but dependent on respect. Does it matter, you ask, that supporting creators you respect and following characters you love means supporting a company you have, at times, actively despised for their many and various turpitudes? Well, actually, it does. It matters a lot, because I knew I was a hypocrite for continuing to give money to Marvel. I’ve always known that, haven’t had plausible deniability in the matter since I was twelve.  

     

Fandom has become another kind of identitarianism. The mass loyalty towards Marvel and DC as brands qua brands is a patently destructive phenomenon in that it levels all nuance to achieve binary stasis across mass culture. Very Manichaean on all sides. I believe very strongly that if you love or have ever loved what Marvel does you should be sharply critical of how they do it. Historically and empirically the company has done nothing to earn our trust as readers or consumers.  

Do I love Marvel? No. Do I love many things Marvel owns? Oh yes, a great many. I have found that a profitable disjuncture, inasmuch as I have learned a great deal over the years from worrying the open sore in all its nuance. Profitable as fodder for writing, perhaps, if terrible for the soul.

     

Trust that I do speak from love, if not a love for the brand. Why else would I be angry?

     

It’s too easy to drown in bile. Too facile an exit from responsibility. Aren’t we here for something more? 

     

We are. Let’s talk about love. 

     

As mentioned earlier, I joined the X-Men right at the outset of an extended absence on Rogue’s part. She was gone. The few times I’d seen her were in passing, or flashback. That was when she had that late 80s ‘do like she personally killed half the ozone layer. Just another super chick with music video hair. (Still hate that late 80s hair for her, incidentally.)

     

And then I picked up Classic X-Men #44, early January 1990. Same month my dad chopped off part of his hand in a snowblower accident. My first real introduction to Rogue. That issue of Classic reprinted #138 of Uncanny from late 1980, Jean Grey’s funeral - the denouement of the Dark Phoenix Saga, immediately prior to Kitty Pryde joining the main cast. It’s the one where Cyclops is especially lachrymose. I know, really narrows it down. Rogue wouldn’t appear at all for the better part of a year, and wouldn’t join the cast of Uncanny X-Men for a few more years after that. So she’s not in the main story of that issue of Classic, but she is in the backup. 

     

The first four years of Classic X-Men carried backup features, because every dollar not spent on an X-Men book was a dollar you could spend on Green Lantern. Nobody wanted that. Certainly not if they could entice the most loyal readers in the industry to double dip on stories they’d already read. “Her First & Last,” as such, was a weird pick for an introduction to Rogue. It was a new backup in a reprint book, for one, and a childhood flashback for another. It wasn’t even written by Chris Claremont, but Ann Nocenti. 

     

Nocenti is one of the most talented people to ever work in comics. We didn’t and don’t deserve her. She didn’t write very many X-Men stories, but the few she put her hand to proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she understood these characters intimately. Hired by Denny O’Neil in the early 80s and mentored by Mark Gruenwald for her earliest writing and editing jobs, her success is also testament to the measurable ways in which the company became less progressive as the 80s turned into the 90s, and women and people of color found far less purchase than just a few years previous. By 1987 Nocenti eventually earned the coveted cursed chalice of following Frank Miller and “Born Again” on Daredevil. What should have been a suicide mission became a four year run considered by some superior even to Miller’s, if clearly less celebrated. 

     

(I’m “some,” incidentally.)

     

I wish I could remember what it felt like to read this story for the first time. I know I read it over and over, because this was one of my favorite issues of Classic. Much of it is flashback and recap about Jean Grey’s life - great for newcomers because it more or less tells you everything you need to know from the book’s first incarnation in the 1960s. You never forget the first time you meet Factor Three. I’ve always loved comics that recap other comics, a strange affectation that comes from appreciating the dense and wonkish reading experience bred by that kind of intertextuality. (Also why I was attracted to medieval literature, incidentally.) I liked learning about the characters almost as much as I liked their actual stories. Took more time to read those comics, and I appreciated that.

     

What was I thinking when I read “Her First & Last” for the first time? Perhaps I didn’t think anything. I just remembered it. Remembered every beat of this strange, sad story. Returning to it for this essay proved a shock, because while I remembered the story vividly I know I couldn’t at the time have articulated why it meant so much to me. It hit me now as if I was reading it for the first time. How the fuck do we process these things, if something as significant as the reason I like my favorite character was a secret my pubescent self buried close to their heart and forgot about? How is it possible to have remembered a story but forgot the impact crater it left?

     

The original impulse behind wanting to reread Claremont’s X-Men was actually social. By early 2020 I had been through a period of prolonged intense seclusion while maintaining what was more or less my “day job” of taking care of my parents for the State of California. (I haven’t had a day off from round the clock care of my dad for . . . over a year and a half? Is that right? That can’t be right.) This was during the first stages of pandemic, mind you, so I wasn’t entering seclusion at that point so much as merely confirming an additional period of seclusion. From my perspective the world was finally joining me. As such I wanted to read something I could talk about with someone else. Wasn’t that always part of the appeal? Everyone read it because everyone read it. 

     

If you’ve ever read anything of mine you know I’ve been - well, how do we put it? Estranged from myself. Emotionally speaking. I’m used to being surprised when I go back by the strength of an emotional reaction in hindsight. But I wasn’t expecting, nor was I in any way ready for, the absolute tsunami of subconscious bullshit that poured out of my brain when I started poking the box marked “X-Men Feelz.” 

     

It was certainly a surprise to me that where was such a box, even if in hindsight it makes complete sense. Perhaps you have such a box yourself, whether you know it or like to admit it. Or, hell, maybe you revel in it. There was just so much water under the bridge, you know. In so many ways. For both me and for the comics industry, my life and the lives of the X-Men. Easy to pack it all away. Couldn’t efface the bond, try as I’d like.  

     

Because we did have that bond. I say “we” because there’s a good chance if you care enough to read these words you share it too - a feeling as if perhaps these weird characters were just a little bit more than the next schmucks on the shelf, in some intangible way. And that achievement, building a stable of players vivid and durable enough to carry on a full thirty years and counting past the master’s first leave-taking . . . well. That kind of achievement lingers with a body.

     

Oh yeah, thirty years - did you notice? Thirty years this summer from the end of the Claremont run. As of this writing. 

     

Just because he left didn’t make us stop loving the characters. And Marvel knew that. They knew they had us by the short hairs and weren’t about to let go. If they didn’t know before the Image founders left - if there had been any doubt whatsoever about the solid commercial appeal of the franchise in Claremont’s wake - it was shelved once they realized the shambling zombie books they pushed out with spit and bailing wire through the lean years of the early 90s still sold well, if never better, than the books they published when they gave a fuck. But well enough in the moment to mask the general downward trend of an industry wide slide.

The lesson was, if we bought X-Cutioner’s Song we’d buy anything. 

So of course the books kept getting worse, as the company kept getting worse. Enthusiasm generated by periodic signs of life - Joe Madureira’s extraordinarily influential run, the still-beloved Age of Apocalypse - invariably led to further disappointment. Then after the turn of the century and a decade of Harras-led strip-mining the books shifted into different gears under new management. They caromed down the next decade through a sequence of ill-advised decisions that left me feeling, when I checked in, as if I simply did not recognize the characters anymore. It wasn’t just one bad story or unintended consequence of an editorial mandate, it wasn’t one bad run or even a number of them. There were still decent, occasionally good books published. Just like always, the books were good when they hired good people to do them and weren’t worth wrapping fish when they didn’t. But every new creator good and bad was still stuck dealing with the same roulette wheel of editorially mandated new directions since the turn of the century, new directions that sometimes left very little room for individual characters to express the kind of agency they need to thrive. OK, this month we’re on a rock outside San Francisco Bay . . . 

     

Do you see why I lost touch? Why I began to harbor grave suspicions that the men (only ever men since the early 90s) in charge of Marvel misunderstood the X-Men on a fundamental level, characters and metaphor alike? Even as I continued to read out of habit, even long after my only real excuse (not illegitimate but perhaps unsatisfactory) was professional? I never felt quite so estranged from the rest of the Marvel line. But with the mutants I lost the plot. By the time we hit the second decade of the millennium . . . AvX, the motherfucking Bendis years (shudder) . . . I had no problem tapping out for a while. Still don’t know how the Original Five got home, I’m assuming they were probably killed by the Scourge first. Justice is served! 

Pum-SPAAK!!! 

It’s worth pointing out that it’s natural to lose touch with these things. Most people do let things go as they get older. Some people always get left behind when the new thing that used to be the old thing just isn’t their thing. It happens. Part of growing up is realizing that leaving things behind sometimes just means making room for something new in your life.

But they just kept nagging at me, the X-Men. It seemed more, I don’t know, personal. Maybe that feeling of incompleteness was only ever the phantom pain of the original Claremont run being so violently terminated. When I arrived it was almost over. There was also the added injury of seeing these intimately familiar characters bowdlerized by rabid misogynists in real time as we paid for the privilege. That sense of loss, of estrangement from something important, that hurt. That hurt went into the same closet as all the other feelings of shame and self-loathing that I am stuck carrying from a lifetime of dealing with an industry that advertises its contempt for both its readership and its creators on a daily basis. It’s the latter I can’t forgive. Because I know I’m indicted as well. When will the hurting stop? Perhaps when we are no longer rent by the moral disjuncture of continuing to support companies who do not deserve our respect. 

     

Of course . . . that closet was only one closet in the rather large haunted house that is my brain. There were so many other traumas, serious traumas, far more personally injurious than mere hypocrisy or missed stories. There were other closets.  

Rereading these stories has been profoundly disconcerting to me because I’ve been surprised by the depth of my connection to these characters - and one character in specific. Rogue was always my favorite even through periods when I actively avoided the series for long stretches. That’s why Carey’s X-Men Legacy was the book that really brought me back to the franchise even as I didn’t really dig the books’ overall direction. It’s the closest we’ve ever gotten to a Rogue solo series, even if it was still ultimately about her dealing with X-Men shit. It was always the first book I read. Legacy is my favorite non-Claremont X-Men run, and how I rediscovered Rogue as an adult after years of unspoken resentment from being burnt through the 90s. They made me hate my favorite character, putting her through one terrible storyline after another. I mean, come on, people. Joseph. (I’ve filled and am still filling in some of the gaps from the years I missed, but Extreme X-Men is a bit like laudanum in that too much in one sitting will probably kill you. We’ll get there. Baby steps. We’ll do it together and it won’t be so hard.)

    

It’s embarrassing for me to acknowledge how deeply it affected me to reread the old stories - the first run of Rogue stories in Uncanny, specifically, but also dipping into later series. I didn’t remember how much she meant to me. As simple as that.

     

Because, when you get down to it - I’ve never had a bond with a fictional character as strong as Rogue. I’ve being reading comics since before I could read. I spent a total of ten years studying literature in undergrad and graduate school. I’ve known lots of characters. I’ve felt connections with lots of characters, just like most people. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about these connections, but also about what I perceived as my own problems relating viscerally, emotionally to fictional characters. I’m uncomfortable with any kind of parasocial relationship. Like Rogue I’m a profoundly lonely person, and have developed a sensitivity to whether or not friendships are real or simply a figment of my imagination, having been stung too often by not being able to tell the difference. It strikes me that devotion to a fictional character is about the most abject kind of parasocial relationship of all. Not even a real person, literal lines on paper.

Perhaps I’m just picking nits because on some level I’m deeply embarrassed about the whole thing. Estranged from myself. Isn’t that what I’m trying to do with my own writing, create some kind of emotional connection with people through my words? What rank hypocrisy. 

So of course I wish I could go back and ask myself, circa 1990 - what are you thinking about this story? Do you see yourself? Does that make you uncomfortable - why? 

     

What’s it actually about, “Her First & Last?” Well, it’s about Rogue as a kid - on the cusp of being a teen, after her powers first manifested. It’s not Cody’s story - although, I should mention even as I intend to punt the question, the actual circumstances of Rogue’s childhood years are kind of fraught. Continuity-wise, that is. There’s some dispute because different writers working from Claremont’s template have differed on various details, including whether or not she lived with Mystique before her powers manifested. Some of the comics that purport to answer these comics were written by Scott Lobdell, to add injury to insult. 

In any event, this isn’t Cody’s story, this is Freddy’s story. Who’s Freddy? No one, really. Some neighborhood kid Rogue liked to play with. She already knew what her powers did and was already wearing tights and long sleeved shirts that covered every inch of skin. But not yet fully aware what all that really meant. It’s a simple story, really, and a familiar one: Freddy keeps trying to kiss Rogue. Obviously doesn’t take no for an answer. Finally he gets his wish and its more than he bargained for.

     

It’s not a story about something happening to her, however, or even about poor Freddy. It’s a story about bad decisions. 

     

What was I thinking when I read this story for the first time? Did I understand it? Most likely no. What was I thinking? Probably nothing too profound. I was a kid.

     

So here’s Rogue, young and happy, with the biggest smile of her life. Rogue doesn’t always smile a lot. She smiles when she’s flying, probably because that’s the only time she doesn’t have to worry about hurting anyone. Riding on the handlebars is the closest she can get to that freedom, for the moment. 

 

 

     

The art here is provided by Kieron Dwyer, with inks by Hilary Barta. This is a great combo - Dwyer’s loose, cartoony figures and broadly expressive faces naturally fit with Barta’s supple line. So much can be expressed simply through the variable thickness of a single mark on a character’s face.  

    

Look at Dwyer’s body language for young Rogue throughout the story. Loose and limber, in motion - above all, comfortable in her own body as only a kid can be. She still hasn’t quite internalized the degree to which growing older means saying goodbye to that easy comfort with herself, for her more than anyone else.

But here, in these opening panels, you can’t help but think of Berkeley Breathed. The Bloom County gang spent lots of time crashing into dandelion fields. Breathed always had a much more expressive line than he needed to, given the limitations against which he very vocally chafed. He was a better draftsman than he gave himself credit. 

Even given her fending off Freddy’s awkward adolescent advances - certainly exacerbated by her own willfully ignorant persistence in hanging out with a guy who clearly wants to kiss her - it’s all more or less normal. One might even say idyllic. She clearly wants to kiss him too, is the thing. She just doesn’t quite understand how to square that circle between must and can’t. 

     

I mean, can you blame her? Lots of people die never knowing the difference. It’s a hard thing to accept that the unique circumstances of your life will entail different consequences from those suffered by your peers, especially at a tender age. It sets you apart to know that you are different, especially when the difference is invisible. It makes you old before your time. 

     

Enter Mystique.  

As a point of principle I avoid referring to Mystique as Rogue’s mother. Mystique was a terrorist who kidnapped an orphan for the express purpose of grooming said orphan to be a terrorist. Like every narcissist Mystique’s purported love is coldly self-serving and purely transactional. Regardless of what their creator may have intended, Rogue dodged a bullet in never having that parentage confirmed (in continuity). What she actually did end up with in terms of parentage wasn’t much better, mind, but that’s another day and another headache. 

     

Mystique is, during Claremont’s tenure, a mostly ineffectual mole in the Pentagon whose greatest achievement was figuring out how to get the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants on the government payroll. (I have also always assumed she embezzled a great deal of money.) She does things for only two reasons: to suit her own selfish goals and because Destiny said so. That’s it. She has no agenda beyond “survival” and “my wife” (Borat voce) and to that extent what little she does in the direction of benefit to mutantkind is purely self-serving, more or less along the lines of well, I don’t want to die in a concentration camp in ten years so I guess I should probably assassinate this guy, because my wife tells me there’s a cause and effect somewhere or other. I believe everything my wife tells me. Who is Mystique, after all, but a Wife Guy gone horribly, horribly wrong? After said wife dies does she not immediately descend into rank sociopathy? QED!!!

   

Mystique finds Rogue blowing dandelions in the front yard and we can see, immediately - the story is not subtle about showing us - that Mystique means Rogue harm. She is explicitly framed as a threat, cold ivory hand reaching in from outside the panel to disturb the idyll with the touch.

The dialogue through this sequence seems intentionally stilted and awkward, like any young teenager yelling at her parents - “I can too have boys! I can have what every normal girl can have!” Of course, Rogue probably shouldn’t be playing with boys, at least not like that. That’s the worst part: it’s not like Mystique is wrong. She’s also a coolly manipulative piece of shit who doesn’t know how to do anything but immediately try to turn Rogue’s pain into a weapon for her own use: “Your power is special,” she says, “It can be used to help us.” 

Note the exchange immediately after Rogue leaves. Destiny counsels Mystique that, essentially, she will come to regret treating someone she ostensibly loves like a means to an end. Despite being precognitive Destiny is also almost always an ineffectual nag. To be fair, Destiny had to live with the fact that she premiered two months after Madame Web (Amazing Spider-Man #210, November 1980 vs Uncanny X-Men #141, January 1981), meaning she was more or less the Garfield to Madame Web’s Heathcliff. The elderly blind precognitive woman X-Men villain was always going to be more popular than the the elderly blind precognitive woman Spider-Man supporting character, but true heads will always know who came first. (Score another for Denny O’Neil, who this essay isn’t even about, but who created Madame Web with John Romita, Jr., in addition to discovering Ann Nocenti.)

Rogue runs away from Mystique, heading for a meet-up with Freddy. She needs to play, have a good time, be with people her own age - but she’s also stuck. She can’t move on. Because that’s precisely the age, right there, twelve or so, when playing kids tend to segregate along more rigid gender lines, going through the early rites of man and womanhood that transpire in social spaces across the world. Simple as apple pie . . . 

But that’s not Rogue. She doesn’t get to develop anymore beyond this point in time. And she can’t just keep playing on the tire swing with Freddy. He doesn’t know that, to be fair. He doesn’t know the last dork to pull this trick got put into a coma for the rest of his life. 

And this is the difference, right here. She knew what was going to happen and she did it anyway. 

Look now, with me, at those two panels of Rogue’s face in the bottom row. No narrative boxes, no thought bubbles - just a few lines on a face to indicate the most fateful deliberation of her life to date. Look at that first panel - eyes fixed on the middle distance, every muscle in her face clenched. She’s running over the dilemma in her mind. So much story expressed through so little. 

Then she gets a dare and it’s all over. You can see from the look on her eyes, she remembers - wait a minute, I have the upper hand. I have no reason to be afraid of him and I don’t back down from anyone. Whether she realizes it or not it’s in that moment that she is most like her putative guardian - that’s Mystique’s logic, merely to take as she wishes and be damned with the consequences for anyone else. 

But it’s done. In a moment it’s over. She experiences everything he ever was or, truly, would ever be, and leaves him slumped over unconscious.

 

Rogue absorbs all of Freddy’s memories over the course of two full pages, narrative collages framing the central image of Rogue hanging upside down on a rope swing and in profile. The glow of young attraction is flipped in an instant to violence. Intentional hurt. Violation. “He would have told her these stories slowly, naturally, in time,” the captions tell us, “and she would have revealed herself, slowly, to him . . . but Rogue will never know the pleasure of that journey.” 

       

She lands and the narration relates her thoughts:

Rogue sees his unconscious form and cries. For her to know someone is to rip his mind out, possess it, spit it out again. This is not, and never will be, love. Not for Rogue. A kiss is not a gentle thing . . . She cries for a long time, mourning the normal life she’ll never have.

 

Have you ever had to do that - kill a part of yourself in order to live? 

 

This is why Rogue is different, even from the rest of the X-Men. In order to survive she had to disassociate herself from her emotions. That’s a living hell. To realize, from a young age, not just that you are different, but that you are different in a way that will dictate the shape of your life, limit your horizons, prevent you from ever experiencing so much of what we consider “normal” life. To be granted at such a tender age not just that knowledge but the additional perspective granted by her powers - the kind of interpersonal perspective and emotional awareness granted by her powers sets her apart. Already at that age she knows more than anyone around her about seeing the world through other peoples’ eyes. Even Mystique and Destiny, for all their prowess. But when knowing precedes understanding people get trapped, traumatized premature brains held in rotting cages stifled by perpetual arrested development.

We get stuck sometimes at the point where we have to protect ourselves. That fits Rogue to a “T”: wise beyond her years in some respects but childishly naive in a few crucial ways. She doesn’t know how to protect herself from people who would never dream of putting her interests before theirs. As such her life from this point spins out of her control entirely. She returns home that afternoon and volunteers straight away for whatever dangerous mission Mystique was intending a twelve or thirteen year old girl to be able to accomplish.

The next time we see Rogue in continuity she’s punching Captain America through a wall in Avengers Annual #10. She has become precisely what Mystique wanted her to be: someone who could turn off the part of herself that felt any remorse in order to strike out at the world at the behest of someone else. A weapon. 

And we saw where that got her. Driven mad from isolation, loneliness, touch starved, gaslit about the color of the sky by Mystique, so painfully jealous of the rest of the world she became a Dazzler villain out of spite . . . look. I’ve given Spider-Woman “the business” more than once for having a less-than-stellar rogue’s gallery, but the fact is that she has a rogue’s gallery - and a sizable one - whereas Dazzler had . . . 

. . . uh, well, there was Rogue, obviously . . . Enchantress? didn’t she fight Terrax? . . . Robert Christgau? Marvel Unlimited doesn’t want me to know. 

Rock bottom looks different for everyone. Rogue’s rock bottom was trying to kill Dazzler. Now, the person I really feel bad for in all this is Dazzler. That’s gotta hurt, to know your one time arch villain - who only ever tried to kill you in the first place because she was extraordinarily depressed - is a better superhero than you ever were by an order of magnitude. Well. That’s just got to sting. 

Anyway. 

As much as I like the X-Men in many ways, I’m also critical of the premise. I don’t think it means the same things it used to, and I don’t even know if it ever really meant what it was imputed to mean. I’m not here to gainsay what anyone else feels about the books, but to attest for my own purposes that the books’ greatest strength is their characters. When you can hear those characters it still works. When the writers and editors lean on high concept status quo upheavals that deterministically funnel every character into the same situations, the stories can lean repetitive. When the characters don’t have enough freedom to make their own bad choices they become just like all the other long underwear types who do things out of custom. Only, y’know, with more weird conceptual baggage of the type that keeps them from doing actual fun superhero stuff a lot of the time. 

“Her First & Last” underlines the degree to which Rogue as a character is a problematic addition to the franchise. Her powers are harmful, not just in the wrong hands or without training. She usually can’t live anything resembling a normal life - the status quo may change periodically, but to permanently get rid of the limitation on touch would hurt her as much as being able to change at will would hurt The Thing. Her powers are a tremendous burden and carry the risk of potentially debilitating trauma almost every time she uses them. This makes her uniquely vulnerable, but also - and for this discussion, just as important - it’s what makes her an interesting character. 

Lots of real-life disabilities and diseases are mutations too, after all. The books are often ill-equipped to deal with mutants whose fantastic powers resemble more harmful disabilities, even though plenty of characters exist who could possibly fit that bill. (Rockslide and Glob Herman, I’m sorry you have no junk. That must be profoundly disconcerting.) I mean, perhaps the point should be stated directly: if the limitations placed on Rogue’s life by her powers aren’t a disability I don’t know what is. Does Krakoa have disability accommodations? I’ve still only read a bit, maybe it does. 

Plus, of course, there’s the bipolar disorder, a boring old real world disability exacerbated and inflamed by her powers and decades of trauma, clearly defined in the cycles of her violent antisocial behavior. Another thing we share: anger management issues. Like me, the adrenaline from anger makes her manic. She was manic a lot. Bipolars who live like that burn out like candles - cf. DMX RIP. In an early flashback (Uncanny X-Men #203), she describes the thought process behind trying to murder Carol Danvers by throwing her unconscious body off the Golden Gate Bridge: 

Ah was so wired from the fight, ah didn’t know really what had happened - ‘cept that, somehow, she’d made me crazy. Ah thought, by gettin’ rid of her, once an’ for all - by destroyin’ her body as ah had her mind - ah’d silence the voices, the screams, the pain, the rage inside my own head.

Notice the slippage there? She starts by saying that absorbing Carol’s mind made her crazy, but then ends by indicating that somehow during the course of the fight Carol becomes identified with all “the voices, the screams, the pain, the rage” she was already suffering. As a result of years and years spent in denial, using violence and adrenaline to self-medicate, scarred by lack of treatment for mental illness and lack of accommodation for disability, constantly disassociating because of around-the-clock gaslighting at the hands of a paranoid narcissist, she arrives at adulthood barely functional. 

So, follow me here: Mystique finds a troubled and desperate young mutant and trains her to be a terrorist. Rogue teaches herself to get by no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much it costs to mask her own feelings. It works for a time until, well, she loses her shit entirely and tries to kill the Dazzler. Multiple times. Finally she breaks free from years of brainwashing and - in a rare lucid moment between manic fugues spent trying to kill women on whom she had become psychosexually fixated - arrives on the doorstop of her enemies to beg for help with her inherently destructive powers. Help which is granted, even despite vocal objections from most of the team. 

(Usually not mentioned that one catalyst for her change of heart was a fight with ROM where she absorbed a spark of the Spaceknight’s inherent kindness and nobility. Better than lithium!)

That should be a good story, but somehow I can’t help but thinking that the next part matters too, the part where the kid who just made the first tentative steps in the direction of some kind of treatment for her severe mental illness was then handed a thick three-ring binder labeled “People Who Will Want to Kill You Now That You Are an X-Man.” It’s a strange list, basically just a couple inches of loose leaf pages from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Master Edition. You know, the one where everyone’s holding up their capes to show off dat ass tho. Biggest entry by far is the Appendix entitled “Chucksies’ Whoopsies,” a catalog of Charles’ personal errors in judgment which might at any moment come back to kill someone. It’s got lots of handwritten notes and some Post It’s sticking out because the information is very fluid.  

I’m not saying the business model is fundamentally flawed but I am saying Charles Xavier never met a personal problem he couldn’t solve by raising a private militia of troubled teens. Maybe not such a great idea to index an entire civil rights movement to the mercurial whims of a rich WASP. I tend to like the books the better the further away he is from the story. For a number of reasons, not least of which being he has objectively terrible personal judgment. What is the value of a father figure who is almost always wrong and what’s more a bellicose prick? Who will, and please be advised I’m about to use some “spicy language” to indicate my contempt, abandon his charges at a moments’ notice to go hang out with space bird strange? Like he did in issue #200 of Uncanny?

Yeah, I know. He had reasons. Bet they were good reasons, too. He had to buy a pack of smokes on Chandilar. At least the book gets better once he’s not there to piss all over everyone’s Frosted Flakes. 

I don’t have a lot of patience for father figures, I guess you could say. The X-Men as a franchise is stuffed to the gills with father figures working out their father issues by raising private militias, often of literal children. I know it’s the premise, but I don’t really believe in leaders. If you don’t believe in leaders it’s a problematic premise. The Avengers operate as more or less a democracy, with team leaders elected and major decisions made as a group - the JLA and the Legion work on the same principle. The X-Men, bless their hearts, huddle around and wait for one of three people to tell them what to do: the serial liar who was also Onslaught, the guy who left his wife twice - and that’s two different wives - in the most abjectly humiliating ways he could imagine, or Storm. I mean, maybe I’m exaggerating a trifle. But as organizations go the team is rigidly hierarchical in a way other teams seem to actively strive against. Can’t shake the basic association with the schoolhouse chain of command.

And I ask you, is this a good environment for Rogue? After all she’s been through? 

Now, if you’re an astute reader you might be expecting me to loop back at some point to a glancing comment a made towards the beginning of the essay, about my dad’s accident back in 1990. But for these purposes the individual circumstances of that accident are besides the point - the point in this case being not one trauma but many. Accidents and incidents from throughout childhood and subsequent years that ring in memory like tinnitus, even as more benign surrounding memories and associations fade. Once you start turning off parts of yourself, you don’t really get to choose after a while what gets turned off. The circuit box got permanently jammed after a lifetime’s worth of weird and traumatic shit, years spent learning to disassociate from the material circumstances of my life, from the onslaught of mental illness and gender dysphoria, and, fuck, various kinds of neuroatypicality just sprinkled around on top like chocolate chips. Well! You know what that does to a body. Driven mad from isolation, loneliness, touch starved, surrounded by people who didn’t necessarily have your best interests at heart . . . 

What was I thinking when I read this story for the first time? Did I understand it? Most likely no. What was I thinking? Probably nothing too profound. I think at the time I thought Dwyer’s young Rogue was the cutest girl I’d ever seen in the world. My whole life I’ve fallen in love with girls for looking just a bit like that.

There’s no way I could have understood at the time why the story would mean so much to me so many years after the fact, looking back with three decades experience in the painful consequences of that kind of self-repression. For Rogue, as for me, what seemed such a simple decision in the context of the story is far more fateful in light of the next miserable period of her life, years spent killing the best parts of her because they were the parts that hurt the most. In the process she became the worst possible version of herself. It’s a hard thing to be a kid and realize, to grasp on some obscure level even if distinctly, that you’re different than other kids, and you’re not necessarily different because you’re special but because for the rest of your life the conflicts within your head are always going to seem just a little bit more vivid than the conflicts outside your head. Not something everyone can or wants to understand, especially if you barely do yourself. 

Other people have a way of picking up on stuff like that. Rogue masks it well, better than I do. “Rogue has a way with men,” we hear repeated in various formulations through her history. All because she’s a tiny bit aloof, somewhat distracted, and definitely impatient. Of course, the fact that’s she’s a stunner doesn’t hurt. But it’s her attitude. Generally disinterested. Drives men wild. Even though it’s just Rogue being Rogue. Always something on her mind, even if she mostly keeps her own counsel. Always feels alone in a crowd.

There’s a disjuncture in the idea of fandom, for me, because disassociating myself from my genuine love from these characters - specifically Rogue - was nothing more than collateral damage from a decades’-long war against my own mental health. Just another inconsequential memory. A fraction of a thought. 

But not every memory resurfaced singes the brain with the uncanny recognition through time of myself. The disjuncture is with me, my discomfort with the vulnerability required as an entrance to fandom, a problem I’ve written about for years and come no closer to exsanguination. Letting go of critical detachment, professional or academic, is still not easy. What is fandom but a public profession of love, and what is a public profession of love but an admission of vulnerability? Exposure of a soft underbelly, the one missing scale? 

What else am I trying to do but maintain a safe distance so as to avoid being hurt again? 

Running into Rogue again like this, taking the time to catch up with an old friend - well, you know how it is. I guess we’ve both been through the wringer - started strong, ran into some bumpy patches because of bad writing, acted dependably out of character for years at a time. Did the best with the cards we were dealt. After some forty years still all potential and poor execution. Just two more neurotic burnt out xennials who took a wrong turn in the 90s and spent the next decades trying to find the person they could have been. Ravishingly banal, when you put it like that. The great wisdom of middle age is that every day not spent trying to kill the Dazzler is a triumph. Simple as apple pie.

Speaking of forty years - 2021 is Rogue’s fortieth anniversary. Do you know who hasn’t acknowledged that, so far as Google is able to reveal? Marvel Comics. Maybe something bigger is coming down the pike for the fall? Perhaps a line of variant covers with Rogue’s costumes through the years drawn by her greatest artists? I mean, come on, it’s right there. This shouldn’t be so hard. 

Weird to think my writing a book about her is more than Marvel’s done yet. You did figure out that’s what we’re doing here, right? 

Thanks for reading the first two chapters of my book about Rogue. She means the world to me.