For years, the X-Men fought to make the world recognize that no matter if you're black, white, blue, have gills, or shoot lasers from your eyes, we're all just people. It was Magneto who tried to divide "homo superior" from the "flatscans," until Grant Morrison's team in New X-Men started using that derogatory term as well, and teaching their students that mutants don't act or think or learn like humans.
Say what?
I get the intended metaphor about cultural/orientation pride, that in the modern age we need not assimilate and act like the majority so that our voices can be heard. The problem is, it doesn't work for the X-Men. There are subsets of mutants who have shared common experiences and developed their own unique cultural identities: Xavier alumni, Morlocks, the Brotherhood, etc. But outside of a small handful of telepaths, why should mutants think or learn differently from anyone else?
The X-Men's core metaphor seemed even more muddled in the Decimation that followed House of M, as the mutant population was severely reduced and rebranded as "endangered."* Aside from a few genetic markers, how are mutants a species? What is the "mutant culture" that they fear is now doomed to die out? With all this focus on survival, a series that had been a provocative exploration of issues of race and identity suddenly and strangely seemed to be more about life in our uncertain age of global terror. Not an unworthy metaphor in its own right, but I wasn't sure it had much to do with the X-Men.
Yet Matt Fraction may just be pulling it all together again. In the wake of proposed anti-mutant legislation, riots, and the imposition of martial law in their city by Norman Osborn, Cyclops has officially divorced the X-Men from the United States altogether. He's established a new mutant sanctuary on an island off the coast of California and issued a statement of intent to the world: here the X-Men will stay, with any and all mutants and their families who will join them.
"We have been, and always shall be, sworn to protect a world that hates and fears us. Only now... we shall all be free."
The idea of an emancipated mutant homeland is not quite new; in the late '90s, Magneto bullied the world into allowing him to run Genosha as his own mutant kingdom. And of course Norman Osborn immediately tries to paint Cyclops' new "Utopia" in the same light, as a militant state of crazy people. But this isn't a former terrorist running a mutant dictatorship, it's the X-Men, trying to save the world like they've always done without any government legislation or angry mob around this time to interfere with how they live at home and off duty.
The idea of the X-Men and their fellow mutants building a new nation seems far more in keeping with the series' base metaphor than the "there are only a few of us left, we can't make powered babies no more, and crazies want to kill us all off" schtick of the last few years. (It's Star Trek IV, and the X-Men are the whales?) Can one small band simultaneously serve as superheroes and Founding Parents? It's going to be fascinating to find out. And in the process, the X-Men might just be inventing that distinct mutant culture they've been so emo about saving from extinction ever since the Decimation.
The sequencing's a little off, sure, but I'm willing to forgive that.
- JC
*Let's not even talk about the fact that Joe Quesada supposedly encouraged the decimation because there were too many mutant characters in the Marvel U, yet only a small fraction of the dozens of current and former X-Men actually lost their powers. And a few of those joined new teams anyway. Huzzawah?
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