267 – The Saddest Joyride

Scattered thoughts. Long ones, this time, I’m afraid. These are three interesting comics, with a lot to think about even if not necessarily to like.

– My God, are our hosts right about the brilliance of the Weeks/Sienkewicz depiction of Frost-in-Bobby’s-body. Honestly, just on that alone, can we keep this character and not have this era’s Bobby back for a while? He’s entirely disposable: name one reason why stories in this era need to have him around.

In pretty much all of the character’s existence prior to the decision to have him come out as gay (which finally gave Bobby something to contribute to the X-books) Iceman is a very bland character. With the exception (and obviously, in comics this is a big exception) of the fact that visually his powers are tremendous. But if we kept him possessed by Emma, we would get the visual impact of the powers combined with an actual personality. The name is even Frost!

– But speaking of characters being retconned, this is obviously the moment at which the Emma Frost that we know nowadays comes into being. Now that I’m at this moment, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.

When this came up in tlast year, Icon_UK and I discussed it here, and at that point I expressed comfort with accepting that Emma is just one of those characters who has existed in different versions, and one treats earlier stuff that doesn’t fit as sort of not having happened.

In my case, the biggest thing is Emma’s role in the Dark Phoenix saga. To recap, the only reason why Mastermind’s powers were able to affect Jean in that way was because Emma (displaying a long-since forgotten technical-genius side) designed a special device to enable him to do it — and what Mastermind does is the Hellfire Club’s *plan*. Emma is a knowing and fully aware accessory to something that’s as close to mind-control-facilitated sexual assault as Claremont could get away with putting on the page in 1980.

This is not really the sort of thing to which “She did it for the children and now she sees that Charles Xavier was right all along [more on that later]” is going to cut it as a way to confront the issue.

But, OK, 1980 was a long time before this comic came out, and all this can be allowed to fade into the past as sort of having not happened? The thing is, though, since we discussed this last year, I’ve encountered more of Scott Lobdell’s X-work and it’s not as easy for me to just file this under “long-running superhero comics” as it was.

In particular, I’ve read Lobdell’s handling of Jean forgiving Mastermind on Mastermind’s deathbed, and I’ve learned about how he chose to introduce Britanic. This is an area where Lobdell’s writing (and I’d like to emphasize that I am talking about his writing, not his personal behavior) has a troubling blind spot. I am not sure that I can really give him a third strike by viewing this story’s obliviousness to just how negative some of Claremont’s depiction of Emma Frost was in the area of consent as no more than business as usual for the genre.

I find this quite sad, because the new version of Emma Frost (whom, having skipped reading superhero comics in the ‘90s, I first encountered in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men) has been one of my favorite characters since coming back to the X-books, and I think my enjoyment is probably always going to be a little diminished from now on by my sense of how this feature of Lobdell’s writing is implicated in her creation.

-But what about the next UXM? I was really curious to know what Jay Edidin would make of this, because he’s talked on the show about his negative reaction as a child to spotting the Christian allegory in the Narnia books.

Because this story offers Christian allegory that is approaching Narnia levels. Hell — Should I say Hell? Will that make this comic sad? — heck, this is approaching Perelandra levels of unsubtlety.

I find it annoying how much the comics of this era take as their premise that the key to a good X-story is that Charles Xavier is the central figure in the X-mythos. But I did not expect that I would be encountering a comic in which Charles Xavier is a blatant stand-in for Jesus and the story is about how we should reject false prophets and turn to Him as our personal savior.

I mean, for Go-goodness sake, look at how the Neophyte describes his Road to Damascus moment of meeting Xavier. This is a classic hagiographical narrative, with the Neophyte as the saint (and almost martyr) and Colossus as the Christian who has fallen away but can still be saved if he repents his sins and returns to the fold.

It’s so bizarre that I even quite like the story for its sheer quality of surprise — it’s just not something I was anticipating, even though in hindsight there were signs that this was the direction in which Lobdell wanted to go (“You taught me to believe, Professor.”) As a piece of Christian apology, there are some nice touches. I like the way that the standard image of the false idol is reinvented as the unspeaking Magneto.

This all sheds quite a different light on the contentlessness of “Xavier’s dream” in this era (for all that the characters will not stop going on about it, they never really define it much beyond mutants and humans getting along). Xavier’s dream turns out to be, “There is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ” — it doesn’t need to be fleshed out to work as an allegory, because the fleshing-out happens after you move past the allegory to the thing that the allegory represents.

But: the story has got the problem with a lot of Christian allegory of this sort, which is that it doesn’t do a good job of accommodating the possibility of ambiguity, doubt, and legitimate alternative views. Note how Colossus, our viewpoint character, has already changed his mind, decided he was wrong and Xavier was right, and confesses that the sin lies within himself for not having the strength to walk Xavier’s path. That seems to be something that the story needs for Peter still to have the possibility of being forgiven.

It’s perhaps not the worst thing that this Magneto is not supposed to be Jewish, because otherwise this is all walking straight into a very bad place.

-Then there’s Glenn Herdling’s annual. This interested me for how it was subtly different in its attitude to the Claremont past than the normal run of X-books in this era.

First, it is, I think, fairly likely that here we have a fan who read the Claremont UXM at the time when they were coming out and is writing from that perspective. Specifically, this is a Kitty Pryde devotee who knows a lot about Claremont’s Kitty Pryde and intends to use what he knows. As such, it reminded me a bit of Whedon’s run, certainly more than anything that Lobdell or even Nicieza were doing contemporary with it. (Although judging from Nicieza’s remarks on the podcast when interviewed, this might be a less competently-written version of the sort of thing that he might have done if left to his own devices.)

In fact, as far as comics of the time go, this is more like something along the lines of Mark Waid’s Flash run (not as good, obviously, but similar in spirit): it forms part of the nostalgic turn in superhero comics that hasn’t really impacted the X-books in this period, but which certainly had been appearing elsewhere.

I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing, necessarily – Waid’s Flash imagined a useful idealized past that it was really creating, and this is using a relatively recent past that was an accomplished and important thing in its own right — it’s condemned to be secondary in a way that Waid’s Flash wasn’t.

-“Now let’s cut all this posturing.” In this era? Never.

Case in point:

“Nothing is ever clean and simple when – – Bishop – – is involved.”

Umm, Mr. Loeb? That’s not impressive and Kewl. That means that Bishop is *bad* at being in charge.