Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants: Appropriation, Assimilation, and the X-Men more

387 Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants: Appropriation, Assimilation, and the X-Men1 Neil Shyminsky “We [the X-Men] need to get into the world. Saving lives, helping with disaster relief… We need to present ourselves as a team like any other. Avengers, Fantastic Four— They don’t get chased through the streets with torches.” - Cyclops, Astonishing X-Men #1 (Whedon, 2004: 16) “[A]lways preeminent is the drive to affirm the humanity of individuals and groups in the face of restrictive often violent social realities. Historically, however, this process of individual or group affirmation has often entailed an objectification or vilification of ethnically or racially defined others.” - Aldo Regalado, “Modernity, Race, and the American Superhero” (2005: 86-87) The best-selling American comic book of the past 25 years, as well one of the highest grossing film franchises of all time, Uncanny X-Men and its related titles are driven by a metaphor and message – that of tolerance and acceptance – that has been written of with glowing praise by fans and critics of all sorts2. “Feared and hated”, as the cliché goes, by regular humans for their freakish difference and/or perceived advantages, the X-Men consist of a race of super-human ‘mutants’ who were granted powers by an accident of birth. As with the victims of racist, sexist, or homophobic violence, the X-Men are similarly unable to reject or deny their powers but are nonetheless punished by family, friends, and government for possessing them. X-Men creator Stan Lee explains simply that “people fear things that are different”, and the comic’s various writers and fans argue that its anti-oppressive message can be applied to any person or peoples suffering from one or another form of oppression within a hegemonic political system (Meth, 2005:1). Ian McKellan – best known by X-Men readers for his portrayal of Magneto in the X-Men films – explains that the comic book consequently carries an incredibly broad appeal: “I know, speaking to Marvel Comics, that it’s not just gay people who identify with mutants – it’s other minorities, too, religious minorities, racial minorities” (Singer, 2002). Former XMen writer Joe Casey notes that the X-Men appeal to “every oppressed minority and disenfranchised subculture”, and various critics have extended interpretations of X-Men beyond the usual fields of race, gender, and sexuality in order to interpret the comic book through the lens of McCarthy-era Hollywood and with regard to the anti-Semitism that its creators faced within the comic book industry itself (2006:16) 3. However, there is a considerable difference between the ideal reader of XMen – as described by Marvel Comics and repeated by McKellan – and the actual reader, and this disconnect is both problematic and under-theorized. IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 388 Erik Dussere characterizes the majority of comic book readers, and X-Men in particular, as “mostly people like me: boys, mostly geeks, weirdos, smart kids - in a word, mutants” (2000:1). Dussere explains that young, male readers are taught to associate their own hardships with those represented in X-Men, as “the comics' evocation of the ordeal - and the hostile rhetoric - that many gay men and women face allows the adolescent reader to see his or her own alienation in the experiences of these characters” (2). But while the X-Men metaphor appears socially progressive in its inclusivity, the company and creators’ refusal to suggest that some identifications are closer to the mark than others – and indeed, that one person’s unique ordeal can be easily substituted for or appropriated by another – implies an equivalence between all of the various readers’ oppressions. Though adolescence is often traumatic, the implication that being a “geek” brings with it oppressions that are akin to those of racism, sexism, or homophobia seems wholly overstated, especially when the majority of X-Men’s readers are white, male, and heterosexual. It is useful to think of the advantages of being male and/or white in North American society not simply from the perspective of educational and professional opportunities, but as an “invisible knapsack” of unearned assets, advantages as simple but important to one’s sense of safety and well-being as “the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court” (McIntosh, 1988:11). It is this suggestion of equivalence that is the key problem underlying the politics of mutanity in X-Men: If being a straight white “weirdo” or “geek” is equated with being a gay and/or racial minority reader and all can claim mutanity, what kind of reader is X-Men actually soliciting and how is it empowering them? As a substantially young, white, and male group of heroes within a genre whose creators and reader are nearly uniformly white males, the X-Men actually solicit identification from a similarly young, white, and male readership, allowing these readers to misidentify themselves as the “other”. Rather than reflecting McKellan’s suggestion that disempowered minorities are reading about and identifying themselves in the pages of the comic book, most readers are being taught to identify with oppressions that are unfamiliar and, I would argue, unequal to their own. Additionally, the use of racialized and gendered victim positions by white male readers is particularly troubling when one considers that, despite the obvious difficulties associated with being a teenager or a geek, these readers still often benefit from the “unearned advantage… of our arbitrarily awarded power” (McIntosh, 1988:12). While the popularly accepted suggestion, as described above, is that XMen espouses a progressive politics of inclusion and tolerance, a deeper textual analysis would seem to reveal the opposite. The first section of this essay examines some of the ways in which the writers of X-Men associate the X-Men themselves with privilege; the second suggests that the X-Men’s battles are presented as normative white versus transgressive non-white, IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 389 where difference is punished and conformity rewarded; and the third considers Wolverine, the most popular X-Man, as a celebration of white masculinity. The allegorical affinity that mutants are supposed to share with oppressed peoples allows otherwise privileged white males to appropriate a discourse of marginalization. To quote sociologists Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack, it allows the readers who identify with mutants to “race to the margins” and assume marginalized positions in relation to the authority of the dominant culture – where no other obvious claim to these margins and victim positions exist (1998:339). While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality. 1. “Black” Heroes and White Readers A brief survey of comic books fans, critics, and authors produces a numerous colorful descriptions of the liberating potential and utopian mission of super hero narratives. Sociologist Gerard Jones characterizes the work of comics’ first creators as one “a fantasy tomorrow” which “spoke to the anxieties of modern life more sympathetically, more completely, more acutely than they could have foreseen” (2004:xv). Likewise, novelist and comic book writer Michael Chabon suggests that superhero comic books are endowed with a mission “to redeem the suffering and helpless of the world” (Weich, 2005). Though Aldo Regalado’s analyses of super hero comic books are more skeptical of their racist underpinnings, he suggests nonetheless that super heroes “express popular longings to challenge and overcome the potentially atomizing, rationalizing, dehumanizing, and oppressive forces” of modernity industrial society (2005: 85). As persecuted minorities themselves the X-Men appear well positioned to redeem the suffering and the helpless. Within the universe of the X-Men movies and comic books, mutant super-humans are able to utilize racially charged discourses of oppression and victimization because they are commonly figured as normative humanity’s racial other4. Implicitly, this metaphor often situates mutanity as black and non-mutant humans as white – a relationship that has been made explicit in Peter Milligan’s recent X-Men spin-off, X-Force. Directly likening the social oppressions faced by a mutant to those faced by an African-American, The Anarchist explains to a reporter that, “I’m a black mutant. In this country, that’s like being black with a little black added” (Milligan, 2001:8). It is unsurprising that no mutant hero before the Anarchist describes mutanity in such specific and blunt terms, and telling that Milligan put the words in the mouth of X-Force’s only black member. While it is tacitly understood by many of X-Force’s – and X-Men’s – readers that to be mutant is to be a minority, a white man claiming to be “a little black” IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 390 would likely produce a jarring or discomforting effect. More commonly, the plot of the X-Men has revolved around the more subtly racialized machinations of the mutant terrorist Magneto and the heroic peacemaker Professor Charles Xavier. Magneto, a Jewish-gypsy survivor of the Holocaust, and his Brotherhood of Mutants see race war with non-mutant humans as inevitable. As such, the Brotherhood denies the potential for compromise and champions the creation of a mutant state as preferable to the only other alternative: mutant enslavement. Conversely, the benevolent Professor Xavier and his students at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters – the X-Men – are Magneto’s reluctant opposition, and would prefer to work with both their mutant enemies and non-mutant humans toward peaceful coexistence. In an interview with Premiere Magazine, director Bryan Singer explains that Magneto and Professor Xavier should be read properly as analogues of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.: “They both embrace mutantkind. Magneto has a very separatist view. Professor X believes that all men and mutants are created equal” (Meigs 1997:55). Beyond these sweeping philosophical parallels, however, Xavier and Magneto’s connection to the African-American civil rights leaders seem dubious. An upper-class white American who inherited a substantial family fortune, Xavier does not simply pass as a regular human – he even hides the purpose of his school and his own mutanity until he is “outed” by an enemy. While Magneto’s identity is far more wrought by the violent realities of racism, the frequency with which he proclaims himself monarch of one country or another and callously murders his enemies hardly make him a consistently desirable point of identification for readers. The disturbing association of non-whiteness or otherness with undesirable and evil behavior will be expanded upon in the next section of this essay. Promoting a team that, like Xavier, is largely white and upper or middle class, X-Men publisher Marvel Comics appears to favor and even interpellate a similar sort of reader. While the company suggests that their outsider heroes are meant to solicit identification from readers of any demographic, the company’s online Media Kit suggests that their audience is incredibly homogenous. The publisher classifies 100% of their sales as either “Kid/Tween Male” or “Young Adult Male”, and while their accuracy can certainly be questioned – surely, women buys Marvel comic books – other sources suggest that these statistics are still fairly accurate (Marvel, 2004). In his study of Milestone Comics and its fans, Jeffrey A. Brown states “the largest bulk of comic book fans are males between the ages of eight and twenty-two” (2001:93). Brown also suggests that as much as two-thirds of Toronto’s comic book specialty store shoppers are white – a number that might even seem low, except that Toronto’s white citizens account for only half the total population of the city. The results of a survey that I conducted on Comicboards.com’s X-Universe Message Board (XMB) tell an even more IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 391 lopsided story. A staggering 95 percent of the XMB’s 87 respondents identified themselves as male, while another 83 percent identified as “white” or “Caucasian”5 (Shyminsky, 2005:1). While any detailed study of readers would require more thorough research than can be provided with reference to a single city or internet forum, it seems clear that X-Men appeals largely to an audience that cannot share in the experience of being either female or black in a socioeconomic system dominated by white men. Fig. 1. Page 8 of X-Force #116, penciled and inked by Mike Allred. Throughout the interview depicted here, the Anarchist is ambivalent about his position on the team – he suspects that he has been hired to be a black mutant martyr rather than a black mutant role model. Rather, the readers form an appropriative relationship to the X-Men and their experiences. Appropriation – a process whereby subordinate cultures are robbed of aspects of their identity by a dominant culture – occurs in every instance where, as described earlier in this paper, these privileged white male readers are allowed to collapse the distance between their own experiences of marginalization and the experiences of those who have been are historically outside and have been marginalized by institutions of white masculinity. While the possibility that a reader can lay claim to both the socio-economic privileges of IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 392 white masculinity and the victim positions of women and people of color may seem a contradiction in terms, it is a feat managed by the X-Men themselves. Indeed, Charles Xavier is not the only member of the white upper class among the X-Men. Of the six founding X-Men, all are white Christians, five are men, and they count among their “feared and hated” ranks no less than two doctors and two millionaires. The lone woman, Jean Grey, is a red headed swimsuit model whose mutanity manifests only in her invisible psychic powers. Paraphrasing the Anarchist then, is Jean Grey to be understood as a politically sincere attempt by the X-Men’s creators to write a white woman “with a little black added”? As with X-Men’s readers, it is difficult to imagine how a beautiful white woman – not visibly othered and as unable to totally distance herself from that “invisible knapsack” of privilege – might actually lay claim to the same socio-political oppressions that an average black woman might. Patricia Williams explains that the sort of literary “blackness” implicit in the mutant metaphor is based on representations or performances of blackness that have no necessary connection to a biological blackness. According to Williams, the performance of blackness "depends upon a dynamic of display that ricochets between hypervisibility and oblivion", and, in the case of a white body performing blackness symbolically, becomes a vehicle through which the other is metaphorically visible while literally invisible (1997:17). As such, Williams’ model describes the ease with which blackness – and its connected politics – can be easily appropriated by savvy writers. Indeed, despite the implication that mutants are just like African-Americans, it was not until twelve years after X-Men began publication that the team welcomed a visible minority to its roster. Of the ten mutant X-Men to that point, the character of Cyclops – who can only control his own destructive super-power with the use of conspicuous ruby glasses and suffered the loss of his parents as a child – is aligned more closely with Chabon’s “suffering and the helpless” than any of his teammates. However, just like the rest of the X-Men, Cyclops still has access to Xavier’s money, mansion, sprawling countryside, and private jet. Mutanity aside, characters like Cyclops and Xavier – and accordingly, the readers who identify with them – can be understood as simultaneously privileged and oppressed because of a recent “crisis” in white masculinity. While science has located little definitive evidence in asserting a biological or otherwise necessary difference between various races or genders, traditional assumptions of biological proof are still pervasive and their supporters are constantly articulating new grounds for asserting divisions. According to sociologist and cultural critics, the politics of movements such as masculism – which seeks to reinforce the essential differences of men and women – have been created in response to the threat that progressive and anti-oppressive politics pose to institutions of white male privilege: Stephen Ducat (2004) describes the anxiety associated with the loss of privilege as “the wimp factor”, IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 393 Thomas Dipiero (2002) as “masculine hysteria”, John MacInnes as a “psychic insecurity” (1998), and David Savran as “white male paranoia” (1996). Whether a loss of exclusive control over socioeconomic power can be understood rationally as victimization, these writers suggest that anti-racist and anti-sexist politics are often perceived as victimizing by the white men who have come to take their privilege for granted. What these writers identify is often more commonly described as “reverse racism” and “reverse discrimination”, a response which seems all the more remarkable in light of the continued dominance and privilege of white men within global economic and political arenas. Though this consideration of “white male paranoia” may seem extraneous to an analysis of the X-Men, it is actually integral to any such consideration. X-Men allows these sorts of white males to claim oppression and a victim status even as they continue to enjoy the privilege of white male power, effectively robbing the other of their gains. Rather than accomplishing the goal – as stated earlier by McKellan and Dussere, repeating the company line – of reaching a diverse readership and spreading tolerance, the conceptual framework of X-Men leads its white, male readership to empathize uncritically with the “feared and hated” mutant heroes. Identification with the XMen feeds into a “masculine hysteria” and “psychic insecurity” in its young, white and socio-economically privileged male readership, allowing those same readers to appropriate a marginalized identity (Dipiero, 2002; MacInnes, 1998). 2. Acculturation and Resistance In “X-Men as J Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie”, Lawrence Baron argues that, the cartoonists who created X-Men and the director of the film are all Jewish Americans who champion acculturation as a strategy for minority groups while simultaneously condemning bigotry and ethnocentrism. The creators of the X-Men comic book series belong to the generation of American-born Jews who sought acceptance and social mobility through assimilation. (2003:45) Indeed, even the most optimistic reading of X-Men need account for the benevolent acculturation agenda expressed by the comic book’s creators through Professor Xavier. Differing from assimilation – which describes a process whereby one distinct cultural group is fully absorbed into another – by degree rather than type, acculturation characterizes the less severe exchange in which a cultural group retains its distinct identity even as its cultural patterns become more like those of another group. In fact, while Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are credited as creators of the X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 394 and the Incredible Hulk, their ethnically distinct birth-names – Stanley Lieber and Jacob Kurtzberg – are meaningless to most readers. Just as the topical issues of racial oppression in X-Men were literally “white-washed” by Lee and Kirby, Lieber and Kurtzberg’s new names made the Jewish creators more palatable to their mostly Christian market. Likewise, Matthew J. Smith suggests that creators like Lee and Kirby are guilty of projecting their own insecurities as minorities on to the characters they write, forcing monsters and non-humans to reject "their heritage, in part or in full, for assimilation into the American melting pot" (2001:147-8). For characters like the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm –The Thing – this meant leaving the character’s Jewish heritage implicit, while the Norse god Thor and extra-terrestrial Silver Surfer were bound to Earth and forced to adapt to human society. But while Grimm’s Jewish connection was often alluded to through particular cultural references and allusions – suggesting that, while acculturated, his Jewish heritage is still a significant part of his identity – there is little in the characters of the white X-Men to suggest their allegorical connection to the Jewish or black sources that critics have suggested. In fact, there is little space within which any sort of minority reader can easily identify with a Cyclops or Jean Grey. Given that most of the X-Men so closely resemble their white male readership, it is fairer to suggest that they have been fully assimilated by, and are indistinguishable from, normative white America. Given that X-Men debuted in the early 1960s – and that the great majority of its North American sales into the 1980s were still made in grocery, confectionery, and drug stores – it is perhaps fair to suggest that the inclusion of an ethnic minority character prior to 1975 would have “added” a little too much “black” to the mutant metaphor for consumer comfort6. With the mediated successes of civil rights and women’s movements over the first twenty years of XMen’s run, as well as the average age of readers climbing and comic books moving into more exclusive and adult-oriented specialty stores, writer Chris Claremont introduced the mostly non-white and often gender ambiguous Morlocks, a community of sewer-dwelling mutants who described themselves as “deformed, despised, deserted” (2001:9). In an issue which explicitly questions Xavier’s philosophy of peaceful co-existence, the Morlocks criticize the “pretty” X-Men for peddling their hypocritical, egalitarian platitudes among mutants who cannot pass for regular humans and, as such, are not even shown “dignity an’ respect” by the X-Men themselves (14). Disappointingly, the accusations do not move the X-Men in the least. The X-Man Nightcrawler, a blue-furred mutant with demonic features, rhetorically undercuts the Morlock’s victim claims by explaining that he lives by the creed that he be “judged by my deeds instead of my looks” (14). Aligning himself with a conservative ideology of meritocracy, Nightcrawler accuses the Morlocks of being victims of their own prejudices first and foremost, chiding them for their own intolerance of non-mutant humans. IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 395 Fig. 2. Page 14 of Uncanny X-Men #170, penciled by Paul Smith and inked by Bob Wiacek. If there is an irony to be found in this confrontation, it is in the X-Men’s eventual victory – the Morlocks are defeated by breaking Xavier’s commandment to never kill. Despite the poverty in which the Morlocks live and their inability to pass for non-mutants as most of the X-Men can – among the most prominent Morlocks is a green child with no nose and a four-foot tall albino, neither of whom have hair – these mutants are figured as villains as a direct result of their refusal to conform to non-mutant norms. As a mutant success-story, and especially as a similarly deformed mutant himself, Nightcrawler attacks the Morlocks’ almost pathological reliance on their oppressions as a source of identity. Indeed, the title of “the Morlocks” is itself an obvious allusion to the underclass race of creatures in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. While this connection might lend itself to a more complex recuperation of the wayward group of mutants, their refusal to conform marks them indelibly as other in the X-Men’s universe – an act which further legitimizes the X-Men as an acculturating force for good. Speaking to the transgressive potential of super hero stories – especially those IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 396 in which super heroes appropriate the language and imagery of racial minorities – Regalado suggests that the “process of individual or group affirmation has often entailed an objectification or vilification of ethnically or racially defined others” (2005:86). Indeed, the personal goal of characters like the demonic Nightcrawler or animalistic Wolverine is the denial of their mutant power’s resulting freakishness and affirmation of their humanity. Importantly, this sense of humanity is defined relative to the non-mutant norm, and their struggle to accept themselves and be accepted by others also requires the rejection of the extreme mutant otherness that the Morlocks embrace. Internet critics Morpheus Reloaded and Julian Darius suggest that the XMen do not simply fail to achieve the political goals of social justice, but actively oppose them. Rather than working diplomatically to resolve human-mutant tensions, Morpheus and Darius criticize the X-Men for almost exclusively battling “evil” mutants, thus restricting themselves to reactionary strikes against militant mutant radicals like Magneto or the Morlocks. Describing the early X-Men stories by Lee and Kirby as displaying a distinctly “white perspective” on black civil rights-era politics, Morpheus notes that the X-Men are “at times more interested in protecting humans from fellow mutants than dealing with that which oppresses them…more interested in protecting their oppressors than fighting for their freedom” (2003). Sounding a similar objection, Darius suggests, “the X-Men were not revolutionary. In fact, they were explicitly counter-revolutionary. They were not created to fight for civil rights; rather, they were created to fight against those who did so” (2002). Indeed, while the X-Men have faced a number of non-mutant foes and their racist offensives, the majority of their enemies are other mutants who are punished for their refusal to participate in non-mutant society. The vilification of characters like the Morlocks is an unavoidable result of the X-Men’s antirevolutionary, and even anti-mutant, politics. 3. Wolverine and the Model Reader More so than any other mutant, James “Logan” Howlett – better known as Wolverine – functions most explicitly to solicit and structure identification from X-Men’s adolescent male readers. Appropriately, the character is also a fertile site upon which to analyze the anxieties of race and gender at play in X-Men’s lead characters. Self-described as “the best there is at what I do. But what I do best...isn’t very nice”, Wolverine is a samurai-trained martial artist, a specially trained military operative, and a drunken lout (Claremont, 1990:1). An Executive Producer on the X-Men films, Tom DeSanto describes Wolverine as “the fan favorite, in a lot of ways…Cut from the same mold as Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and that ilk, because he’s such an emotionally torn character, such a IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 397 reluctant hero” (X-Men 1.5, 2002). DeSanto’s claim that Wolverine is “the fan favorite” is not simple hyperbole. While there are currently three monthly X-Men titles, Wolverine is the only character to have a starring role in each, as well as the only X-Man with his own solo title and the only mutant on Marvel Comics’ allstar super-team, the Avengers7. Judith Halberstam suggests that “current representations of masculinity… unfailingly depend on a relatively stable notion of the realness and the naturalness of both the male body and its signifying effects”, and nowhere is this realness and naturalness more super-humanly apparent than in the character and body of Wolverine (1998:234). The writer of Uncanny X-Men and X-Treme X-Men for 23 years, Chris Claremont singles Wolverine out as the strongest point of identification for his readers. Explains Claremont, “Wolverine is what every adolescent wants to be. Strong, sure of himself, a sense of honor, a defined moral code. I know what’s right, I know what’s wrong, I won’t take bull from anybody, and I have the moxie, the ability, the character, and the body to pull it off” (XMen 1.5, 2002). Wolverine’s appeal is grounded in nostalgia for a morally absolute brand of dangerous masculinity. As suggested by DeSanto’s invocation of McQueen and Eastwood, Wolverine gestures toward the Hollywood era of “the roving cowboy, bound to early libertarian codes of social action” and “augmented by family or spouse substitutes”, and is nomadic, private, and self-sufficient (Ross, 2000:89). Appropriately, his out-of-costume attire resembles “Western wear” and typically features bolo ties, jeans, and cowboy hats. In the thirty-two years since his introduction, Wolverine’s character and goals have changed very little. A mysterious loner with unexplained emotional baggage when he first appeared, Wolverine is still in search of inner-peace and self-actualization8. Claremont characterizes that which motivates Wolverine as “a primal, elemental need that’s always been at the core of Wolverine’s being” (1996:11). In fact, there is little reason to believe that any character or reader can recall a time in which he was not Wolverine. At the end of Origin, a limited series that revealed the untold story of Wolverine’s childhood, it is suggested that Wolverine’s unchanging personality and incomplete memory are a function of his mutant “healing factor”. A super-power that typically rescues him from physical injuries, the healing factor can also mend emotional scars and psychological trauma. Wolverine’s entry in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Wolverine explains that “his healing factor ultimately eradicated most if not all of his memories of the first eighteen years or so of his life”, and notes that his mind reacted similarly at least once thereafter (Ronald and Moreels, 2004:2). Indeed, though he has been killed, resurrected, and brainwashed since his introduction, Wolverine’s personality remains largely unchanged. For all intents and purposes, Wolverine has always been – and will always be – the rogue wanderer of Westerns.9 Wolverine’s absolutist world extends far beyond his sense of moral action and cowboy ethic – as exemplified by the healing factor, biological IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 398 absolutism similarly inflects his mutant super-powers. While the most obvious, outward display of Wolverine’s power is in the retractable metal blades that emerge from between his knuckles, these “claws” would cause Wolverine to bleed to death if not for his ability to heal. The healing factor functions as a superhuman auto-immune response, granting Wolverine “the ability to regenerate damaged or destroyed areas of his cellular structure at a rate far greater than that of an ordinary human” at a speed varying “in direct proportion with the severity of the damage Wolverine suffers” (Ronald and Moreels, 2004:10). Wolverine’s body reconstitutes injuries according to an essential genetic template, a physical form so particular in its specifications that removed or burnt body hair grows to its prescribed length within moments. While Wolverine’s body has never been required to regenerate entire limbs, Claremont’s narration explains that, “given sufficient power, [Wolverine’s] entire body could be regenerated from the genetic data encoded in a single cell, or drop of blood” (Claremont, 1987:36). His metal skeleton the one exception, Wolverine’s healing factor rejects any surgical alteration to his body, always restoring him to the form encoded in his DNA. As such, Wolverine’s super-power also serves to essentialize his biological male-ness: he is in peak physical condition, a natural hunter with heightened physical senses and instincts (improved senses being another super-power), must constantly train to be patient and keep his temper in check, and – thanks especially to the recent X-Men movies – projects an animal magnetism that renders him irresistible to the opposite sex. In other words, his very powers reinscribe the singular, biological, and essential notion of traditional white maleness – a muscled, animalistic body that, in addition to his moral code, serves to appeal directly to the desires of adolescent male readers. While it is important to recall that Wolverine’s masculinity is dependent on his mutant biology and impossible to achieve outside his fictional realm, the existence and success of characters like Wolverine confirm the culturally pervasive desire for such essentialized representations of maleness. In The Wimp Factor, Ducat suggests that “men’s fear of the feminine is a conscious or unconscious psychological reality” for many men – a fear that is alleviated through identification with Wolverine’s naturalized mutant maleness (2004:25). This is not to say that Wolverine’s own identity cannot be destabilized. Indeed, in the rare stories where Wolverine’s mutant powers have been removed by artificial means and the stability of his uber-masculine body disrupted, the effects are disastrous. Wolverine’s skeleton is surgically laced with Adamantium metal, a highly toxic substance that would quickly poison him if not for his mutant healing factor. In fact, it is only because the Adamantium is constantly poisoning Wolverine that his healing factor cannot operate at full capacity and his full mutation cannot be realized. Already supermasculine, Wolverine mutates into an even more masculine, animalistic version of himself when the metal is removed: faster healing, hairier, longer claws, and IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 399 with less self-control. Given the descriptions of anxious white masculinity as earlier listed, it also seems appropriate that the villains who have twice bonded the metal to his skeleton are themselves non-white: Lord Darkwind, a Japanese crime lord, and En Sabah Nur – code-named Apocalypse – a Darwinian, would-be world conqueror from Egypt who advocates the eradication of the human race. Indeed, the Adamantium appears to function symbolically as a restriction placed on white males by villainous minorities, aimed at denying the natural attributes of his white masculinity. As such, Wolverine does not simply appropriate victim status from ethnic minorities through X-Men’s mutant metaphor, as already described, but is literally a victim of the minority characters that try to interfere with his hypermasculine mutant biology. Through Wolverine’s ordeals, the oppression of white men is able to move beyond the abstract and highly dubious – for the reader, it becomes truth undeniable. 4. Mutant Activism and the Reflexive Reader In Grant Morrison’s 2001 “reboot” of New X-Men, the team abandons their bright-colored superhero spandex and adopts black and yellow leather uniforms that “look as if they were designed by Tommy Hilfiger” (Klock, 2002:175). Morrison’s change extends beyond the superficial, as in his first issue Professor Xavier openly considers “better ways to encourage people to trust mutants” (Morrison, 2002:14). Among these “better ways”, the X-Men expand their mission to include mutant safe-houses and response teams around the globe, outing the school and the X-Men’s mission with the understanding that “human protests will fade when they see we have nothing to hide and much to offer them” (2002:12). One of the original X-Men, the Beast questions why Professor Xavier ever “had us dress up like superheroes anyway” – suggesting that the XMen have never been superheroes at all – to which Cyclops replies that “the Professor thought people would trust the X-Men if we looked like something they understood” (2002:14). The “people” to whom Cyclops alludes could be either those regular humans that fear mutants or the readers who misidentify the mutants as if they were exactly like the geek-turned-heroes Spider-man or Captain America. Ironically, Xavier comes to recognize that he has contributing to the misunderstanding of mutants by actively (mis)representing them as something familiar and easily understood. Appropriately, the artists hired to work with Morrison – especially Frank Quitely and Igor Kordey – are reputed for drawing “ugly characters”. On the discussion forum at Morrison’s website, Barbelith, a poster named deletia voices a common criticism of Quitely’s work, charging that “his characters IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 400 have these absurd faces, and increasingly seem to have one of a finite number of absurd faces…I want my X-Men to be Sex-Men, darn it!” (2001). Accused of deglamorizing beautiful characters like Jean Grey, Quitely and Kordey fill X-Men with physically deformed, discolored, and visually unsettling mutants, perhaps best exemplified by the mutants of the “Special Class”. The mutants of the Special Class – not simply othered by their physical appearance but distanced from the other students at Xavier’s because each has a power that is considered useless or wholly undesirable – purposely resist identification from those readers who are used to appropriating a romanticized mutanity through the beautiful characters drawn previously by “pin-up” artists like Jim Lee or Marc Silvestri. While it is folly to use the freakish – even by mutant standards – students in Morrison’s Special Class as a representational standard to which all mutants must adhere, this decidedly unromantic and unsexy approach provides perhaps a more fair allegory by which to represent the effect of being “feared and hated” for deviance from the cultural norm. This is not to equate the physical unattractiveness of these mutants literally with the attractiveness of actual minorities – or, for that matter, to exoticize the other in some grotesque way. Rather, it is to equate the treatment given the Special Class by those regular humans and other mutants that deem them losers and embarrassments with the treatment given those who are disempowered by those who have privilege and power. Morrison’s critique of his privileged readership does not end with the representations and subsequent discourse on his new mutants. In critique of the suggestion that being simply an intelligent and socially awkward comic book fan is equivalent to being a mutant, Morrison’s fourth issue introduces the U-Men, an organization whose members are regular humans that murder mutants and steal their super-powered organs. As the issue opens, a self-described “geek” has shot a classmate in order to steal his x-ray eyeballs. Dressed provocatively in a Magneto tshirt, the student holds an auditorium hostage while he describes the affinity that he feels with mutants: Anybody else want to sneer at my comic book collection? Anybody else want to call me a geek? How about mocking my anime DVDs? Well? Anybody want to complain about all the time I spend on the internet, or my so-called ‘obsession’ with mutant culture? …See, I’m proud to be a geek. …When I join the U-Men and have them [the eyeballs] implanted, they’ll be my eyes. Welcome to a world where the weird are kings (Morrison, 2002:1-3). The character John Sublime, CEO of a successful pharmaceutical company and founder of the U-Men, explains that his organization is “about empowering the different, celebrating the strange, and about taking that step into a new world” (19). While Sublime’s benevolent rhetoric is undermined completely when his U-Men kidnap several X-Men and attempt to steal Cyclops’ eyes, Morrison’s point has already been made. The supposed “empowerment” of IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 401 regular humans through the absorption of mutant power and culture occurs through an act of appropriation that is unavoidably violent and deadly to the mutants form which they steal it. The parallels that can be drawn between the UMen and those X-Men readers who would engage figuratively in equally damaging practices of appropriation are painfully clear. Fig. 3. Page 14 of New X-Men #114, penciled by Frank Quitely and inked by Tim Townsend. Note the dark colors and quasi-militaristic design of the Quitely uniforms. Though Morrison reveals that the X-Men could never be both super heroes and social activists, the future and direction of the X-Men and their comic book remain in flux. Though Morrison had Magneto killed, he returned almost immediately; though his X-Men stopped acting or dressing like their super peers, the costumes also returned. Current writer Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men proposes another option, one in which the X-Men wear brightly colored costumes but play the role of super hero self-reflexively. “We must give the ordinary humans respect, compliance, and understanding,” explains the new co-headmaster of Xavier’s school, Emma Frost. “And we must never mistake that for trust” (2004:10). Under Whedon, Cyclops makes IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 402 battlefield decisions with an eye toward public perception and Wolverine spits the word “super hero” as if it were pejorative. In writing of the representational politics of race – and specifically with regard to the manner in which white Americans represent and perform the other within their art – E. Patrick Johnson asks, “has not the colonizer become more humanized by the presence of the colonized? I suggest that some sites of crosscultural appropriation provide fertile ground on which to formulate new epistemologies of self and Other” (2003:6). Indeed, having grown up on the comics of Chris Claremont and subsequently praising Morrison’s work, it is hard to imagine Whedon’s X-Men chastising the Morlocks. Instead, Whedon’s team introduces a new type of mutant hero – these X-Men have returned to super heroics but with a knowing wink to the reader. The X-Men have become a team mistrustful of the very genre and politics within which it exists and participates. While it is impossible to guess where the mutants will go from here, X-Men’s selfreflexive characters are challenging their readers to become more aware of their participation and politics. Consciously mediating and complicating their identities as they refuse their readers a comfortable and merely entertaining experience, XMen is finally establishing a mode of anti-oppressive mutant activism. References Baron, Lawrence. “X-Men as J Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22 (2003): 44-52. Brown, Jeffrey A. Black Heroes, Milestone Comics, and their Fans. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2001. Byrd, Ronald and Eric J. Moreels. Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Wolverine 2004. New York: Marvel Comics, 2004. Casey, Joe. Playing God and Discovering my own Mutanity. The Unauthorized XMen. Ed. Len Wein. Dallas: Benbella, 2006. 9-18. Claremont, Chris and Alan Davis. Uncanny X-Men Annual 11. New York: Marvel Comics, 1987. Claremont, Chris, John Byrne, et al. The Essential X-Men Vol. 1. New York: Marvel Comics, 1996. - - - . The Essential X-Men Vol. 2. New York: Marvel Comics, 1997. Claremont, Chris and Frank Miller. Wolverine. New York: Marvel Comics, 1990. Claremont, Chris, Paul Smith, Dave Cockrum, et al. The Essential X-Men Vol. 4. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001. IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 403 Darius, Julian. “X-Men is not an Allegory of Racial Tolerance.” Sequential Culture. 25 Sept 2002. Accessed: 26 Oct 2005 <http://www.sequart.com/columns/?col=2&column=229>. deletia. “Frank Quitely - Ron Smith. Has Anyone Seen Them in the Same Room Together?” Barbelith Underground. 20 Aug 2001. Accessed: 10 Nov 2005. <http://www.barbelith.com/topic.php?id=3072>. Dipiero, Thomas. White Men Aren’t. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Ducat, Stephen J. The Wimp Factor. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Dussere, Erik. “The Queer World of the X-Men.” Salon.com. 12 July, 2000. Accessed: 3 Oct 2005. <http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2000/07/12/x_men/>. Fellows, Mary Louise and Sherene Razack. “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women.” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 1 (1998): 335-352. Friedlander, Judith. Being Indian in Hueyapan. New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1975. Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow. New York: Perseus, 2004. Halberstam, Judith. “Drag Kings.” Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 231-266. Klock, Geoff. How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. New York: Continuum, 2002. MacInnes, John. The End of Masculinity. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1998. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Peace and Freedom, July/August: 10-12. “Media Kit.” Marvel.com. 2004. Accessed: 13 Oct 2005. <http://www.marvel.com/company/media_kit.htm>. Meth, Clifford. “Stan Lee: Grand Master – Part Two.” Silver Bullet Comics. 2005. Accessed: 25 Oct 2005. <http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/masters/108326857658949.ht m>. Milligan, Peter and Mike Allred. X-Force 118. New York: Marvel Comics, 2001. Morpheus Reloaded. “Beyond Children of the Atom: Black Politics, White Minds and the X-Men.” Playahata.com. 8 May 2003. Accessed: 26 Oct 2005. <http://www.playahata.com/pages/morpheus/xmen.htm>. Morrison, Grant and Frank Quitely, Ethan Van Sciver, et al. New X-Men Vol. 1. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002. “Pickup Shots.” Premiere: The Movie Magazine. Ed. James B. Meigs. December 1997, 55. Regalado, Aldo. “Modernity, Race, and the American Superhero.” Comics as Philosophy. Ed. Jeff McLaughlin. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2005. 84-99. IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 404 Ross, Andrew. “Cowboys, Cadillacs and Cosmonauts: Families, Film Genres, and Technocultures.” Engendering Men. Ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Routledge, 1990. 87-101. Savran, David. Taking it like a Man. Princeton: Princeton UP: 1998. Shyminsky, Neil. “Results from the XMB Demographics Poll.” X-Universe Message Board. 15 Nov 2005. Accessed: 15 Nov 2005. <http://www.comicboards.com/xmb/view.php?trd=051115203836>. Smith, Matthew J. “The Tyranny of the Melting Pot Metaphor: Wonder Woman as the Americanized Immigrant.” Comics and Ideology. Ed. Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell Jr., and Ian Gordon. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 129-150. “The Secret Origin of the X-Men.” X2. Bonus feature. Dir. Bryan Singer. With Stan Lee and Chris Claremont. 20th Century Fox, 2003. Williams, Patricia. “The Pantomime of Race”. Seeing a Colour-Blind Future. New York: Noonday Press, 1997. “The Uncanny Suspects.” X-Men 1.5. Bonus feature. Dir. Bryan Singer. With Ian McKellan, Tom DeSantos, et al. 20th Century Fox, 2002. Dave Weich. "Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures." Powells.com Interviews. Interview with Michael Chabon. 2005. Accessed: 13 Oct 2005. <http://www.powells.com/authors/chabon.html>. Whedon, Joss and John Cassaday. Astonishing X-Men #1. New York: Marvel Comics, 2004. Notes: This paper is based on a presentation delivered at the Northeast Popular Culture Association’s annual conference in 2005, which was held at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. The finished paper, more or less as you see it here, was first published in The International Journal of Comic Art, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall 2006). The IJOCA website is located at http://www.ijoca.com/, though the electronic version of issue 8.2 is not yet accessible. 2 These comic books include a number of monthly, quarterly, annual, “one-shot”, and collected publications, the most abundant of which are Uncanny X-Men, XMen, X-Treme X-Men, New X-Men and Astonishing X-Men. For the purposes of reading ease, I will refer to them collectively as X-Men when not speaking of one or another in particular. 3 Specifically, in Julian Darius’ “X-Men is not an Allegory of Racial Tolerance” and Lawrence Baron’s “X-Men as J Men”, respectively. See the references for bibliographical details. 4 Both the characters and fans of X-Men sometimes contend that mutants should be regarded as an altogether different species from humans, and those who do not 1 IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006 405 often refer to mutants as a race of humans. Neither term is wholly applicable. Though the genetic differences between mutants and humans suggest that the two are different species, the rules of scientific classification contend that, since mutants and humans can create fertile offspring, they must also be of the same species. 5 It must be noted that the interpretation of internet demographics can be uncharacteristic of offline trends as, for example, Pew Internet and American Life’s 2005 Tracking Survey reports that white Americans are about 20% more likely to regularly use the internet than black Americans. 6 For a detailed history on the evolution of the retail market for comic books from newsstands, to supermarkets, to specialty stores, I recommend reading Robert Beerbohm’s column “Comics Reality”, available online at: http://members.aol.com/ComicBkNet/reality.htm. 7 Given Wolverine’s prominence in the first three X-Men films – which have grossed $1 billion in box office receipts internationally – and the star-status that his character has lent Hugh Jackman, it would be reasonable to suggest that Wolverine’s mind-share among superheroes is surpassed only by iconic comic book super heroes such as Spider-man, Batman, and Superman. 8 It seems as appropriate here as elsewhere to be mindful of the important role that X-Men’s periodical publication plays in maintaining Wolverine’s character and failing to resolve the problems that mutants face. As a serial with no foreseeable conclusion, the interest of readers is maintained through a recurring cycle of threats and near escapes. 9 Recently, Wolverine has regained these memories and is in search of more clues as to his lost identity in the 2006 mini-series Wolverine: Origins. Neil Shyminsky is a Ph.D. student in the Social and Political Thought programme at York University in Toronto, where his research interests are focused on representations of white masculinity in contemporary North American popular culture. He has moderated the X-Universe Message Board at Comicboards.com for nearly a decade and credits the board and its community for his fascination with comic books and their readers. IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006