a post that requires a new joe quesada tag

I do not read any comics with X-Men in the title. I have not read House of M, any of the Decimation stories, anything by Grant Morrison, or Matt Fraction's latest offering, Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: The Exodus, which JC just reviewed. I like Matt Fraction. I don't blame him in the slightest for doing the best he could with the X-dross that he has been given by years of mismanagement. I blame Joe Quesada. However, this concept of putting the remaining 200 mutants on an island is either the worse metaphor in history or just a really stupid plot development.

JC says the mutants have been talking about their culture since before House of M, and it's been seen as a metaphor for any "minority" (usually gay but sometimes any generic non-privileged) "culture" (that is, the stereotypical behaviors or markers collectively identified by the privileged [or, more accurately, the media] and used when talking about/reporting on the minority in question). (To save time and abuse of quotation marks, I'm going to use the term "gay pride" for people who have chosen to identify themselves and act in ways that have become stereotypical. This is in contrast to those who are gay but not connected to or identified with the stereotypical subculture. No offense is intended.)

The difference, you stupid bastards, is that gay pride is a chosen way of life. Being a mutant is a quirk of genetics. There is nothing connecting mutants to each other any more than bald people are connected to each other. They may have support groups and wear T-shirts with funny bald jokes on them, but there is no inherent bald culture. There is no inherent gay culture. There is no inherent mutant culture. While I appreciate the dramatic uses of the competing ideologies (let's call it Magneto v. Xavier), no writer should ever have tried to create mutant pride as an exclusionary concept (i.e. Xavier's kids using Magneto's separatist doctrine). The concept of mutant culture is particularly ridiculous in a world where not everyone with extra-human abilities is a mutant.

And then came the de-powering of the mutants, leaving only 200 people (in the world? in the country? wtf?) with powers due to mutant genes. And then they began to be persecuted MORE. Again, not having read the books, I just can't understand how this is a logical storyline. With only 200 (give or take) people in question, they could all be rounded up by secret police in the middle of the night. The teams of really strong superheroes fight back against the secret police, at which point the secret police are like, "Okay, just don't go in there." The Powers That Be battle the mutants in private and turn public opinion against them. They don't use their political power and write laws that affect only 200 people. That's just idiotic.

And now, apparently, the mutants are so persecuted that they have decided to go and live on an island. I get that, sort of; they've been written into a corner and the Dork Avengers are not letting up anytime soon. To spare their allies the pain of guilt by association, they separate themselves entirely and plan to do their world-saving with a little extra travel time. JC lauded this as a chance to build that mutant culture they've been talking about since 2001. It's still pretty stupid; you can't tell me that you wouldn't be safer underground or in a series of secret bases than on an island where you could all be taken out by one well timed bomb.

But either way, 200 people isn't a culture, it's a commune. A group of people who have nothing more in common than the fact that they're been persecuted by the rest of the (country? world? after this many decades with X-teams saving people's asses, how is public opinion really anti-mutant?) are not a community. They haven't chosen to be together because of their common values, opinions, behaviors, or landscaping. They have been exiled to the island, a sort of Survivor in reverse, which does not a community make. The characters are following the story to it's logical conclusion, but it has no basis in the new themes of culture and community.

If this is meant to be a continuation of the gay pride parallel, it's the shittiest, most exclusionary treatment I've ever seen. No federal protections for gay employees? Go live on an island! Not allowed to marry your partner? Get married on the island! Having trouble adopting? Next stop, the island! F*%$ that s@&!, man. Just f*%$ it.

JC wondered if perhaps this was meant to be a reference to the founding of Israel after World War II. The difference there, of course, is that the Jews did have a common culture, obviously, and while they were being offered/commanded to live in this place, they could build on their extended families and strong religious beliefs to build their new life. The mutants, like the bald, have nothing in common beyond their DNA.

I don't plan to read how Fraction treats the x-commune (although if they turn out to be the Others, I will personally apologize for everything bad I ever said about Joe Quesada), but I'm sure JC and those like him who do read Uncanny X-Men are hoping for strong characterization and good dramatic arcs to make up for the utter absurdity of the past several years. It's about time.

- RD

House of M: Others

Since my original House of M post, I've been tracking down the various tie-in issues and miniseries from that event, to see how they might alter my impression of the story as a whole. And ultimately I've found it's not just the changes from the Marvel universe we know that make the House that Bendis Built so intriguing. Often it's the things that haven't changed at all.

Bruce "Hulk" Banner spends his alternate reality vacation (Incredible Hulk, Peter David) in Australia, bonding with Aborigines who are helping him make peace between his "two minds," and claims he's never been happier. So his dream reality doesn't involve a reunion with his deceased wife Betty?

Similarly, in the main miniseries, Jean Grey is still dead, and Scott Summers is instead married to Emma Frost - something even Emma wonders about when their memories are restored. I was all set to blame Jean Grey's "Live, Scott, live!" brainwashing from the end of Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, and then I read Christos Gage's House of M: Civil War miniseries, about Magneto's rise to power in the Houseverse. Here we learn that even in this Magnus family fantasy world, Magneto's first child (Anya) still died, his wife Magda still left him, and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch still grew up orphans. And I started to wonder.

Perhaps the writers were suggesting that most of us, on a day to day basis, don't really wish for a life so different from the one we already have. The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver didn't sit everyone down and ask them for their alternate reality wish-list, they had a telepath scan everyone's minds. So the lives they made were just a little better than the ones people had been living before. Lives people believed they could have, with just a little luck, or a little more work, with a few telling exceptions.

In House of M: Iron Man (Greg Pak), Tony Stark's dead, demanding father is alive again, but a villian, so Tony can face and reject him on his own terms. And in Mark Waid's House of M: Spider-Man, Peter Parker was married not to Mary Jane but to his murdered first love Gwen Stacy (and they have a son!), and Gwen's dead dad and Peter's Uncle Ben were both alive again as well. The tragedy of Peter is that he lives his whole life in regret, carrying ghosts everywhere he goes. It's enough to bring Gwen, Captain Stacy, and Uncle Ben back to him in the House reality, but when the world is restored, Peter is left wondering what it means that Mary Jane was left out of his other life and mourning a son he never actually knew. Even Peter's dreams, in the end, are just another reason to be emo.

Wow. When I put it like that...I'm kinda depressed now. Get over yourself, Spider-Man! Go look at pictures of some Giant Flemish Rabbits: http://z.hubpages.com/u/109006_f260.jpg or something.

- JC

House of M

I've just read House of M (Brian Michael Bendis) for the third time, and I'm still not sure what I think of it.

The miniseries picks up more or less where Bendis' Avengers Disassembled arc left off. Wanda Maximoff (the Avenger Scarlet Witch, and daughter of X-Men arch-foe Magneto) has been driven mad by her reality-altering mutant powers. Several of her Avengers teammates have died because of her breakdown, and the remaining Avengers and X-Men are no longer sure they can help her. Just as the two teams come together to decide what can be done for their friend, the world goes white, and suddenly everyone's living in Magneto's world. The war Magneto foresaw between men and mutants has apparently come and gone, and now the Earth is one big shiny-happy mutant-friendly society run by the "House of M" - Magneto and his children.

The heroes of the Marvel universe have all been given the lives they've always dreamed about: Peter Parker is married to Gwen Stacy and his Uncle Ben is still around, Captain America never got frozen in the ice and got to grow old with his own generation, Wolverine is a top S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and now remembers his entire life. Yet this also makes Wolverine one of the few who remembers the real Marvel universe, and realizes that he's starring on Extreme Makeover: Planetary Edition. He hooks up with a human underground movement - it turns out not everyone's happy with Magneto's leadership after all - and together they set out to wake up the heroes, find the Unwicked Witch of the Crazy, and Put Things Right.

Every time I've read this story, I've found it gripping. It begins and ends with a surprisingly down-to-Earth family drama. Beneath the capes and masks, it's a story about a family coming together in despair, struggling to cope with a loved one's mental illness. The issues in the middle, in the world Wanda creates, are on the surface a fairly standard heroes-trapped-in-fake-reality adventure, the kind we've seen in any number of comics as well as on Star Trek and in movies like The Matrix or Dark City. Yet it's also a story about Wanda's response to her family's and friends' grief and her attempt to repair the pain she has caused them all and give them the world they deserve. The dialogue is clever but heartfelt (it's Bendis); the action is big, brassy and exciting.

But House of M raises several huge, intriguing questions, and I find myself wanting more, or different, answers than Bendis gives us. Upon realizing reality has been changed, the heroes have only one short debate about whether or not they should try to change it back. Kitty Pryde and Jessica Drew ask why it isn't just as wrong to unmake this reality, to take away these lives people are living - why, in a world of fantastic superhuman powers, this change couldn't be something that's supposed to happen - and are immediately shot down by Wolverine and the rest on sheer principle. No one talks about how life is worse for some in this reality, or about the racism of mutant rule, or about the people who are dead in this world but alive in the other (or vice versa). It's just taken as a given that when someone magically changes the world, it's your job to change it right back. And maybe that is a given - in America, at least. In our democratic society, we tend to hold free will above all other virtues. The idea that one single man, or family, could enforce a whole new reality on the world, even a reality that made most people's lives better, is anathema to most of us.

Yet Wanda didn't impose her own ideas on the world, or even her father's. Supposedly she linked with Charles Xavier's mind and got him to tap into everyone's dreams and hopes and wishes, and used that to give people the lives they all wanted. It's a brilliant storytelling device, exploring the characters in the regular Marvel reality by seeing the lives they would have chosen to live in this one. It was great fodder for other Marvel writers, too, who followed these lives in tie-in stories. But like Jessica Drew asks, if everyone got what they wanted, not just Magneto, than why is it necessarily wrong to just let it go?

Of course, not quite everyone got what they wanted: while some of the dead have risen again in this new world, others alive in the regular Marvel U are deceased here. Was it because people like Charles Xavier and Reed and Sue Richards would've figured out the truth too quickly? Or were some people's dreams were granted primacy over others, meaning that Magneto and Doctor Doom really don't see the world as big enough for themselves and their superhero nemeses?

It also seems as though Wanda plays favorites - or at least I prefer to think so rather than suggesting that Bendis' own power couple Luke Cage and Jessica Jones got separated in this new reality because of some relationship angst from one or both of them. It's implied that Jessica Jones is with Ant-Man Scott Lang in the M-verse. Scott was one of the Avengers killed during Wanda's Disassembled breakdown, so I think giving Scott back his ex was Wanda's gift to him.

I also really wanted to know - or wanted a character to ask - why Magneto's world had to turn out like it did. Wanda blames her father near the end, suggesting that his petty and cruel nature made a petty and cruel world, even when he ruled it. But is Magneto so petty and so cruel? I've always thought that Magneto believed he had to be a harsh man in a harsh world, but that did not mean he would choose it. I've always believed he wanted the same world of harmony and cooperation Charles Xavier wants; Magneto simply didn't believe it was a realistic goal. If Wanda is reaching into her father's head and remaking the world for him, why couldn't she create the kinder, gentler Xavier version of reality? Do her powers, or her madness even, demand a certain amount of logic and consistency, a world the inhabitants can still believe is real? Does this mean that she changed only history, not human nature, and that Wanda couldn't believe in Xavier's dream any more than Magneto could?

I could answer all these questions myself. I could spend days answering them, really. (I have a BA in English Lit, I'm marrying a woman with a BA in Philosophy, we write this blog, hi!). But I wanted the characters to put a few more of them on the table themselves before they rushed into their big fight scene. Yes, great drama sets up a debate and lets the audience answer, but if the characters don't ask enough of the questions for themselves, then they start to feel a little too much like plot devices rather than people. It's a very tricky tightrope to walk, and I don't think Bendis got it quite right with House of M. Still, there's a lot to be said for any story that lives so vividly in my head for days after a third reading.

- JC