342 – Angry Birds

Waid does an interesting job of (a) not changing any of Lee’s original dialogue (or possibly Kirby’s) from UXM #3 — so even the most fanatical continuity-obsessive could not say that there’s a definite retcon here — but (b) omitting part of it so that the impression of what happens is quite different.

One would naturally assume here that the reason why Xavier “can never” and doesn’t “have the right” to express his feelings is because it would be wrong for him as Jean’s teacher to do that, and has nothing to do with his disability. It’s still not great (Improved-Ethics Xavier would not think of Jean as “the woman I love”), but it’s a significant step up.

There’s something interesting here about how Onslaught characterizes Xavier no longer feeling that way as a terrible and hypocritical act of repressing a “negative emotion,” when it could be described in less hyperbolic terms as Xavier having inappropriate feelings, but choosing to behave appropriately, and in due course getting over those inappropriate feelings. But I can’t quite put my finger on it.

There’s clearly meant to be some sort of parallel with the various bits of hypocrisy early on. But Xavier seems different from most of those people. Most of them are clearly being hypocritical in a straightforward sense, having internal thoughts that contradict their public face — in some cases in ways that speak rather nicely (at least to me as someone who grew up outside the US) to the creepiness of American service culture, in which everyone in a store or a restaurant behaves as if they were your solicitous best friend.

The exception, where there’s no literal contradiction between inner and outer, is, perhaps tellingly, the first hypocrite — the “stiletto heels” man, who is also the closest parallel to Xavier in the specifics of his private feelings. Waid loads the dice here by making it all a bit kink-shamey, of course. But all that person actually does is be helpful to someone (that he finds attractive) in ways that conform to social convention..

Onslaught does seem to be essentially a *child*, impulsive, easily frustrated. He seems to view any situation in which someone has thoughts or feelings that do not conform to their ideals, as meaning that their belief in their ideals is meaningless and a lie — the childish view that that a good guy always wants to do the right thing and never has any other desires. From this perspective, the appearance of Juggernaut, the figure who defines Xavier’s childhood, seems significant.

(There might also be something about comics-universe shared-storytelling in itself here, how there are these little bits of discarded continuity that provoke anger in how they frustrate the fannish desire to have it all be a single seamless story without contradictions.)

At any rate, this seems interesting, and seems to have more to it than just the hackneyed “Onslaught is the personification of all of Xavier’s repressed Daaark side,” that I was expecting to get from this storyline. And still am expecting to get, honestly — Lobdell and Harras are still Lobdell and Harras.

*On the ableism of this, the obvious comparandum is Donald Blake,** and to be fair to Lee & Kirby — not that this palliates things completely — there it appears that the ableism is Blake’s own internalized ableism, and that Blake’s disability is not something that should be an issue from Jane Foster’s perspective, or the story’s . (Of course, Blake is also Foster’s *employer*, and that’s its own problem.) I haven’t read enough early Daredevil to know how Lee handled the Matt-Karen relationship there.

**Wow, Lee & Kirby did love their “two people are madly in love, but each thinks that the other has no interest in them” romantic plots. I always feel that Jean Grey-Scott Summers makes the most sense, partly because of how Scott is characterized, but also because they’re both teenagers, and this is 100% credible behavior in teenagers. I suppose that’s part of why early Marvel proved such a success with a slightly older audience.