Across the finish line, limping



Some days you wake up and it's just not worth the effort to get out of bed . . . realizing that you somehow got onto the subject of the freakin' X-Men on your blog and have more to say before you totally exhaust the subject is one of those instances when life begins to look less rosy. Oh yeah, and the whole grinding poverty thing.

But anyway -

The first question we began with was - why are the Starjammers still such a prominent element of the X-mythos, given the fact that most people would probably not automatically make the connection between "mutant super-heroes fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them" and "space opera". These were devices created by Chris Claremont as springboards for future stories, with little or not thought given at the time to how these devices would play "down the line". Eventually, the one-time devices became recurring motifs, and eventually permanent fixtures of the series. Claremont's influence on the franchise was such that, after seventeen years, his distinctive style had cohered into the default style for X-Men projects.

So, if elements like the Shi'ar and the Starjammers were originally specks of sand in the context of the ongoing X-Men saga, time and tradition cohered around them in much the same way that sand becomes pearls in the mouth of a clam. Just as Frank Miller's Dare -



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Justice is served.

Why Is This So?



After seeing the comments on my brief X-Men post the other day, I was able to clarify my thoughts on the matter, in such a way as that I realize now that I was putting my question in an awkward, slightly specious fashion. The question is not: why have the space-opera elements become such an integral part of the X-mythos despite a presumed thematic incongruity; but why have these elements continued to be regarded as central to the mythology long after Chris Claremont has ceded his role as the franchise's chief architect? Although he's been back on and off the central and periphery X-titles for some time, Claremont's historically central run on Uncanny X-Men lasted for seventeen years and ended in 1991. He hasn't been in the "driver's seat" on Uncanny for almost as long as he actually was - and his various returns to the books have been notably unspectacular for a number of reasons. Regardless of one's opinions on Claremont's current skill as a writer, the X-Men books are not now even what they were in 1991. It's to his credit that the book - and amazingly it was just one book, for years and years - was as coherent as it was under his stewardship. The fact that they soon ballooned out of all recognizable proportions is probably a testament to his success as much as anything else.

So: go back to the mid-70s, when the then-adjectiveless X-Men book was still just a foundling, trying to regain its footing after years of limbo. The team was a group of multi-cultural misfits who barely seemed to get along, let alone work with the kind of precision expected from most established super-groups. The mutant angle was just another bit of accrued baggage, hardly that much more important than any number of other bits and pieces. Who remembers that Professor X was initially crippled by a wannabe alien warlord named Lucifer? Or that one of the biggest storylines in the original series' run had been a long battle with the alien Z-Nox, or that their most fiendish foes had been the less-than-sinister Cold War-relic Factor Three? There was a reason why X-Men was, with a few notable exceptions, considered the runt of the 60s Marvel litter - even Sgt. Fury lasted longer. So Claremont's various stock plots and motifs - space opera (the Shi-ar, the Brood), demonic invasion (Belasco, N'astirh, the N'Gari), S&M (the Hellfire Club, Rachel Summers, the Fenris twins), and off-the-wall stuff that doesn't really fit anywhere else (Dracula, ninjas, cyborgs, ninja cyborgs) - didn't relate back to any kind of central thematic bailiwick so much as simply acted as plot engines for the franchise. Reading the early Claremont issues, you definitely get the feeling of someone making it up as he goes along - even fairly well into the run there's still a free-wheeling energy pushing the book forward at a breakneck pace. That sense of momentum was what made it such a monster hit, and pretty much set the standard for post-Bronze age superheroics.

But eventually even Claremont's industrious energy began to falter, and the Logic of Empire began to assert itself. Spin-offs began to accrue - slowly at first, but eventually at a break-neck pace. Perhaps the slightly aimless direction of the post-200 run - ostensibly so because he had been forced to change directions after being told that Marvel UK plot elements were unavailable for his use - was a conscious effort on his part to avoid turning the book into the kind of static franchise he probably dreaded. Considering just how massively popular the book was, it is amazing he was able to run it with as much of a free hand as he did. Considering how weird and dispirited many late-80s X-Men books were, it is likely that he saw the writing on the wall. He could only keep the team atomized and beset for so long, and once the 90s had kicked into high-gear there were already spin-offs on top of spin-offs coming at a feverish rate. He was let go, and the books almost immediately calcified into the staid institution we see now. Inasmuch as any kind of commercial blockbuster can be considered an idiosyncratic personal work, X-Men seemed to belong wholly to Chris Claremont. When he left, the series became pretty ugly, essentially a paramilitary soap opera acted out by geentically pure ubermeschen with vague allusions to prejudice peppered gingerly throughout.

And it is on these vague allusions where the franchise most often flounders. Claremont was in no way a "subtle" writer, but he was smart enough to keep his subtext firmly on the back burner: obviously, anti-mutant prejudice became a much bigger deal than it had been under Roy Thomas and Werner Roth, but he was smart enough to keep the tone generally light (until he got to the rather ponderous middle 200s, that is) and use the subtext to inform the plot, not the other way around. It's all about fighting and soap-opera, and that's what it's always been about: give the X-Men someone / thing to fight that serves as a reflection of their metaphorical struggle, or even better, their interpersonal struggle. Whatever subtlety Claremont had brought to the enterprise left with him, and soon the X-Men saga became as deeply mired in eugenical debates and ceaseless pontification as it possibly could - the sneaking tendencies of Claremont's later run were amplified, and soon you had whole issues set aside simply for "woe-is-me" angst. It didn't seem to effect sales at all, even though those paying attention couldn't help but see that the sheer size and scope of the franchise had effectively halted the momentum that had made the book not merely popular but pretty good - perhaps the best exemplar of well-made trashy pulp comics circa 1975-1990. What was left wasn't particularly good anymore, but it was popular. And I guess that's all anyone really needs . . .

How is that again?



Something that's been bugging me a bit lately: how exactly does the X-Men franchise get away with inserting lame space-opera elements into the mythos when it really makes for an odd fit? For decades now, since almost the very beginning of the "All-New, All Different" X-Men and the franchise's sales hegemony (a domination that has continued unabated for almost thirty years, waning only very recently), there has been an established annex of X-Men stories that take place in space, specifically the Shi'ar empire. By nature the vast majority of these stories are removed from the tightly-plotted soap-operatic confines that represent the bread & butter of the franchise.

And yet, to the best of my knowledge, the X-books periodic space stories have never produced a noticeable decline in sales or readership. One of the laziest canards when writing about superhero comics is to trot out a property's "thematic underpinnings" (or whatever you want to call it) as reason for said property's enduring success. This is certainly true for the movie versions of these characters, where screenwriters have to develop thematic and metaphoric shorthand to express things to a general audience that have been, in most case, long ago sublimated by comics readers. Hence, the Spider-Man films harp on the "power and responsibility" themes to the point of ponderous repetition, and the X-Men films are far more rhetorically concerned with the "hates and fears" underpinnings than the comics themselves (usually) are. But in the reality of the comics themselves, the characters have mutated far beyond their initial brief. Sure, the X-Men titles have always touched on the whole "world that hates and fears" them vibe, but the day-to-day working of the series has always been much less about tapping into metaphorical significance than finding ways to keep X amount of characters busy for Y amount of pages, to be continued next month.

In actuality, the X-Men's myriad space adventures have one real explanation: Chris Claremont liked putting the X-Men into space, and he did it a lot. The Shi'ar were introduced during the Phoenix saga as a kind of cosmic deus ex machina, dancing around the giant MacGuffin of the god-like Phoenix force. With Phoenix out of the series, the Shi'ar could easily have faded back into the woodwork, but for some odd reason they stayed at the forefront of the mythos: Professor X fell in love with Queen Lilandra; the leader of a band of Shi'ar space pirates (!!!) just happened to be Cyclops' long-lost dad; hell, at some point Wolverine was even revealed to be a Skrull in disguise (way back in the late 90s), so it wasn't just the Shi'ar that kept intruding. Hell, travelling around space at some point the X-Men encountered another race of foes called the Brood, a group of predatory parasites who had even less to do with the series' original brief even than the Shi'ar and their quasi-feudal militaristic bird people oligarchy. At the very least, the Kree and the Skrulls always seemed plausible: highly militarized pseudo-fascist oligarchies, one of which just happened to be ruled by a technological amalgam of thousands of the race's brightest minds (still a pretty striking idea, considering how often alien races get boiled down to "humans with funny skin condition" archetypes).

But the Shi'ar are presented pretty much at face value, in such a way that the readers are expected to care about "good" empresses and "bad" emperors - all of which points to a pretty disgusting royalist streak on the part of these creators that really doesn't jibe with the egalitarian identity politics at the supposed heart of the franchise. I'm a citizen of the United States, and the only "good" emperor is one that's been deposed and beheaded. I wonder, in helping to prop up the Shi'ar oligarchy, just how many interstellar atrocities can directly or indirectly be laid at the X-Men's feet? I imagine that to the average Shi'ar on the street, folks like the X-Men seem about as legitimate an instrument of imperial power as Hessian mercenaries seemed to the American colonists in 1780.

And yet, as I said, to the best of my knowledge none of these factors have ever had so much as the slightest impact on the books' popularity. Which, I suppose, is as good a commentary on the nature of franchise storytelling in mainstream American comics as anything else: as long as you've got Wolverine making with the stabby, does it really matter what he's stabbing, or why? By that same token, there was a period when Claremont (at the outset of Wolverine's own solo book) tried to inject Wolverine into a pseudo-Terry and the Pirates milieu, the "Patch" period where Logan spent all his time on the mythical southeast Asian island of Madripoor, fighting Chinese gangsters and retro-styled femme fatales. Did it matter that the whole thing was preposterous? No, because it just didn't matter what Wolverine was doing. As long as he was doing something, people would buy it. And boy oh boy, Wolverine's done a whole lot of something in the pages of his own books for the last twenty years or so. As to just what that something is - well, there have always been a lot of guys in suits with guns, and ninjas. About as fun as watching grass grow, but there you are. I feel the same way about the X-Men's space adventures (and I'm generally a fan of space-opera stuff). I'm obviously not the market, however: the market is people who just want some kind of monthly dose of Wolverine and Co. They could be sitting around baking a Christmas ham for all that the actual content of the books has ever influenced their popularity.