Fred and Loathing on The Internet

My Jokes About Dorian Grey Never Get Old

2024-Jun-16

The second promised blog post about Marvel Comics X-Men! I don’t mean the on-screen X-Men of the past twenty years. I do not mean the fighting game characters in Capcom’s video games. I also do not mean the 90s Saturday morning cartoon that had a smashingly good sixth season produced this year (see two blog posts ago). I want to go to the core of what makes the X-Men: the comic books. Text bubbles. Panels. Chris Claremont + (Jim Lee or Marc Silvestri)

I have only personally read the X-Men books of my childhood, with my interest starting on the record breaking sales hit X-Men #1 in 1991. My exceptional taste for X-Men among my other comic book choices waned around 2000, when the ‘Ultimate’ universe debuted, leading with Ultimate X-Men. At that point Ultimate Spiderman, and especially The Ultimate, had appealed to me more.

Also, some say The Ultimates has not aged well, or that it does not deserve the acclaim it garnered at the time. I disagree with the idea that its accolades came from the mere novelty of seeing edgy Mark Millar versions of Golden/Silver Age characters. At the time I already found the dialogue stilted and less than believable, so age did not make them seem more awkward. The ideas of how to make Golden/Silver Age characters work in a believable enough modern world still come off as effective, and were largely the basis for the movie version of The Avengers. Ignore the text bubbles on The Ultimates and you would still have lifelike visual storytelling from the masterful Bryan Hitch- who I would say was as his peak penciling The Ultimates.

After that side analysis into comic books other than X-Men, I would like to reiterate the Ultimate X-Men was a quarter century ago. So many more X-stories have come and gone since then! Hundreds of issues jam packed with cataclysmic crossovers. One for almost every year since. And not just X-Men crossovers. After 2000, Marvel started making universe sweeping crossovers, bringing in the X-Men to the complexities each time.

As a child, the idea that there were entire sets of interconnecting stories put together in a ‘crossover’ presented me with a reading/collecting challenge and with something to be excited about for the next year. Pages could be mined for clues about what could be coming in the next big storyline. Searching around for missing pieces to the story compelled me to acquire any issues I could find.

Now the idea of finding out what are the repercussions of each of these ‘cataclysms’ sounds utterly ludicrous. A big fat waste of time. As a child I was limited by my very meager budget, so many X-Men issues slipped through my fingers. Price is no longer a factor, yet I can’t bring myself to read them all. Recently I borrowed several volumes of collected X-Men issues from my local library. I barely read half of all those pages.

I enjoy the idea of what the X-Men represent. Just how much of what I like about the X-Men can be displayed on twenty two pages every month? It can not go on forever. No story can. (For X-Men, I figure it’s about 100 issues) Eventually what I want to see in a X-Men comic book series will either eventually become boring or changed enough to stop being what I think the ‘X-Men’ represent. All good things come to an end is what I’m trying to impart here. For me that good thing I saw in the X-Men was found when they were an almost clandestine publication, known only to the coolest kids in school.

Keeping up with contemporary stories- and treating them as if they mattered to my idea of the X-Men- would be as if finding out what has been going on in the latest issues of Zeus, Satan, and King Arthur. I use those examples because they are myths I find entertaining. That each has a large set of good stories that can only be revisited so many times before I come to find them boring. How many times I can find mirth in hearing what new woman Zeus has seduced is about equal to the amount of times I can enjoy a ‘new’ story about the X-Men protecting the very people that hate them.

Beyond the inevitable end-of-life cycle for a good myth, I question how somebody can spend a lifetime reading about characters that do not age, yet find fault in the canon put forth on these characters. Their expectations of hearing their favorite story told to them over and over again, yet offer something different sounds like Sysiphus whining each day for something new to watch on TV, instead of pushing a big rock up a hill.

Ridicule seems like the obvious emotion I am expressing for middle aged nerds who express concern for the canon of the characters they have read since childhood. It’s not ridicule I have for the fans who have very serious misgiving about literary minutia, like how the love triangle between Scott, Jean Grey, and Logan is presented in the current comic books. No, it’s not ridicule. It is astonishment! I have an uncanny anthropological curiosity. It fills me with several questions searching for the reasons why superheroes in tights could stir up such emotion in adults. I love superheroes too, with a tight stable of favorites whom I know an obscene amount of details about. Somehow I took a different path as I aged. Marvel heroes became common day celebrities yet I don’t think that is a reward for my early appreciation for them.

I have similar sentiments about conservative nerds as I do for Christians who dismiss any faiths wanting to add to the ‘gospel, like Mormons or Jehova’s Witnesses’. Or conservative Catholics who are upset with Vatican II. These middle age nerds just might have the idea that they got the idea ‘right’ about X-Men based on the liturgy of their youth. I say youth, because I’ve yet to meet somebody who got into the X-Men as an adult. In my experience, this is a ‘get them while they’re young’ phenomena of allegiance.

At least those examples are from religious beliefs that usually have large repercussions beyond the religious debate itself. The eruption from devotion to rancor does not seem too much of a stretch for religious beliefs. Super heroes are often wonderful, inspiring stories, yet I suppose the commercial interest that produces them gets ignored enough to have them be placed on the same pedestal as religious convictions. Superman is noble as Jesus, but he’s an IP selling merchandise for whatever conglomerate owns the DC Comics rights.

How could a modern person get their identity caught up so much in the presentation of their favorite myths? Not only that, but myths that are owned by corporations! Myths that are nakedly money making intellectual property! There is a bit of hyperbole with this concern. The level of vitriol for super heroes losing their original details to match the changing demographics of their audience is online comments and word of mouth. The worst I had to suffer from extreme comic book conservatism is hearing from somebody that they think the new version of their favorite is too ‘woke’, or makes too many quips, or isn’t brutal enough.

There are a ton of comic book characters now that I used to love that have made changes that I do not agree with, yet I do not give the idea more attention than I can. I have (or can find) the originals I liked. And if they kept making more of what I wanted, my interest would sorta run out within years. In theory, if Chris Claremont was paired with Jim Lee indefinitely, that could stretch my considerations for what will eventually become boring.

I had used ‘middle aged’ as a label for the nerds that cling to the ‘canon’ of the corporate owners to their favorite myths. The X-Men or most Marvel franchises, are now older than the lifespan of one creator. Does nobody else find it absurd for Chris Claremont- who started his incredible run in 1975- to be held to those specifications twenty-five years later when he had a very advertised return to the series?.

How long are the X-Men to remain teenagers? If they do stay teenage forever, the weight of each wrenching emotional turmoil repeats into tawdry melodrama instead as an injection of human emotion into fantastic stories of good versus evil. I believe the chronological limits of creators and the audience torpedoes the possibility for these super heroes to have canonical details. Adding more authoritative details means the characters grow older, but always eventually reset in age whenever it's expedient for production needs. I suppose timeless myths ought to be remade whenever the original audience has grown, and should have found new myths to burn though.

The best you can get for a myth is a handful of visual and backstory rules that cannot be broken, but for the rest: anything goes! Gilgamesh 2099 could work as long he’s the mayor, becomes friends with Enkidu after wrestling, and deals with a troublesome witch wife. If it turns out he did something gay in his teenage years or he’s got a robot arm is fine with me. If not I’ll read the original cuneiform where canon is respected.

I had intended to write pages about just how superior Jim Lee is to any other X-Men artist until the 90s. I suppose you’ll have to tune in next time to hear me dissect esoteric artist names and eras of X-Men design. To me my F-Men!