No One Feels Bad About Decapitating A Robot

The next X-villains are ones that almost everybody of my generation is familiar with. In the animated X-Men series of the early nineties, they were the antagonists of the two part series premiere. I give you the elite  robotic mutant hunting force of the world, the Sentinels.

Art by Buster Moody

Certain aspects of the sentinels as a concept make them ideal for villains in an early nineties Saturday morning cartoon. They have relatively little individual personality (most of the time) which allows more space to establish the individual X-Men and women's personalities, they let you introduce the idea of non-powered humans hating and fearing mutants in a way that has substantial metaphorical weight, and ,best of all, they are robots. That means you can have Wolverine do whatever you want to them and it's a-okay. Decapitations and eviscerations aplenty are perfectly acceptable, as long as it's happening to a big dumb robot. The title of this debut episode is Night of the Sentinels, a riff on Remero's classic debut that launched a thousand apocalypses. Sentinels tend to be used like the zombie as a creature our heroes can abuse almost anyway they like without moral reservation. Our heroes can't murder the human scientists and politicians and average people on the street who react poorly to their fear of being rendered obsolete by quirks of genetics, but they can abuse the robotic manifestations of that hate and fear all they like. It's a role they play well, but as with the other X-folks I've looked at here, I wonder if the narrow role of a robotic anti-mutant gestapo is really the best that can be done with these guys.

Wolvie and Cyke: A Love Story

Well, here we are Valentine's Day week. What better time to discuss our favorite mutant twosome? True they have there occasional conflict. What long term couple doesn't? At the moment they are experiencing a pronounced 'schism'. One of them has been around since the very beginning of the series, and the other is the most popular thing in yellow and blue spandex ever conceived. With the X-franchises general focus on adolescence and adolescent drama it makes a lot of since to have a couple of guys around to represent adolescent angst about hair growing in odd places and 'power' spurting out of control.  They also speak to a classic pairing that's come down through the millennia: the man of the city and the man of the wilderness. Yup, they're quite the pair.

From Thought Faucet

An Uncle Telling That Embarrassing Story About You When You Were Five - Forever.

I think we all have at least one. Some person, maybe an uncle or aunt or cousin, maybe a parent or sibling if you're particularly unlucky, who has this one very fixed impression of you as a person. That impression doesn't change no matter what you accomplish and no matter the opinions of those who know you best. Maybe they see you as the baby, or the slacker, or just the one who doesn't like peas. They will continue to believe these things about you regardless of how many plates of peas you shovel down in front of them. No matter where your life takes you, this person will insist on dragging you back to the moment at which they've decided you live. Professor X has someone like that too.

"From Her Ashes Risen"

While she's been part of the X-Men books from the beginning, she rarely gets stories or treatment in general to match her teammates. She doesn't make an easy metaphor for male adolescent aggression, or struggles with relinquishing a sense of control. In fact, for most of her history she's been relegated to facilitating those metaphors. There's really only one big story she's known for, granted it's one of the two or three most important storylines in the history of the series. Still, Jean Grey, or Marvel Girl, or Phoenix is mostly known for being the rope in a romantic tug of war. Like most Marvel heroines of the Silver Age she was subjected to unfortunate moments like this:

Note that Professor X has his hands in the pimpin' formation. 

Magneto, and How He Works.

So we talked about Professor X. I outlined the various reasons I, and others, find the comparisons between  Professor Xavier and Magneto, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X problematic. This isn't to say that it is entirely a mistake to evoke historical figures in the construction of the two characters. I linked Professor X to the likes St. Francis Xavier, and people like Carl Sagen who preached a "gospel" of secular humanism and scientific progress. Likewise, I do think there are a number of  historical figures that can be drawn upon to inform Magneto's character.

   

Professor X-savior?

Everyone knows the head, and we do mean head, honcho of the X-Men. Professor X is the ultimate teacher/mentor. We know he's a benevolent tyrant at the head of all X related projects, when he isn't presumed dead or on sabbatical. He has to be a goodie, Patrick Stewart played him for gosh sake. A lot of people, Stan Lee among them, make a natural leap and paint the Professor as a Martin Luther King Jr. stand in. It's a bit problematic, especially when you take into account who his opposite number is supposedly meant to stand in for. It may be more useful to think of Xavier and that other guy (More on him at a later date.) along religious lines, rather than as a stand ins for real historical figures. Xavier representing a gospel of accord, mutual benefit, and belief in the invisible world that links all be they mutant, human, or alien, as for Magneto, well, we'll get to him when we get to him. It's right there in his title, he professes.

Heck Xavier, mutant not saint, already sports a halo of sorts in quite a bit of the promotional art.

The value of X people.

I had a conversation about the X-Men this evening that reminded me that I haven't posted anything here since February. They're probably the most popular super team franchise ever and they have a movie out right now, a movie that I haven't seen yet, so few spoilers, please, so they seem as good a place to start as any.The X-Men are mutants sworn to protect a world that blah blah blah-blah, you all know it by now. Let it be clear. I love the X-Men. Despite some of the things I will say throughout the rest of the post, the X-Men remain one of my favorite ideas to come out of superhero comics. Still I have some issues with the X-Men franchise itself, as well as some of the ways it's been presented and perceived over the years.

One of my main problems with the comics is the way that mutants, as a metaphor, have been used. You know the whole thing where mutants represent racial, sexual, social minorities? Despite its popularity with fans, and in the face of many of the series' best known writers overt use of this metaphor, I don't buy it. If this metaphor has given you succor in your own struggles with feeling different, as I know it has for many, I don't mean to sell short your interpretation of the X-Men, but I have some trouble getting behind it for a few reasons. The primary reason is that fear of various social minorities in real life is irrational, fear of mutants in the Marvel Universe is actually kind of rational. A gay person can't blow my house down just by looking at it; a black person can't walk around inside my mind to learn any personal secrets I might have; a Jewish person can't grow footlong claws, making them an instant killing machine. (Except for Mossad agents, who I have been assured have all these and many more powers at their disposal.) I think it sells short both the X-Men's metaphorical potential and the very real problems faced by actual members of minority communities to equate mutants too explicitly with these specific issues.