SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #48: ...Afraid To Step Into The Light

Poor old Davis Cameron. Just millimetres away from the keystrokes needed to name the demon summoned to destroy the United Kingdom and smear its sagging porcine face in the ashes that remain. Unreasonable though it may be, it's hard to judge Slipstream fairly. 

Potentially this is a big problem, because when viewed with an unsympathetic eye, Davis doesn't come out at all well. But let's try not to pre-judge him before we've strolled though his whole story. It's not like it'll take very long; Davis' tale is even shorter than his sister's.

The first word to suggest itself when considering Slipstream is expediency (X-pediency?) The X-Treme team required some method of rapid transit they could afford on the tight budget of a renegade branch of X-Men who'd already blown their cash on guns and sunglasses. A new mutant who could create wormholes fit that need very nicely. The fact that, as a nod to Davis' surfer past, the "warp-wave" was something he can use his board to navigate is... well, let's not pull our super-punches: it's corny as all hell. A stupid idea welded to an obvious narrative short-cut. The fact that Davis doesn't even have these powers until Sage activates them for him - the very instant they're needed, no less - underlines how convenient this all is. Claremont wanted to set one story in Australia, the next in Madripoor, and figured the easiest way to get from one to the other was to have a character suddenly discover their mutant power of mass transportation.

Start peeling this onion, however, and the situation starts to look a little different. The sudden emergence of Davis' powers allows Claremont to run one of his favourite games: the rookie tagging along with the professionals in a situation geared to challenge the latter. He'd already done this once in this very title with Thunderbird, but Davis is even more of a fish out of water, having literally just learned he's a mutant, having had absolutely no experience or training, and being entirely lacking in the offensive/defensive power Thunderbird could boast from day one. Indeed, in terms of defence, Slipstream only has the one trick; he can get the hell out of dodge faster and further than anyone else going.

This is an important realisation. Davis signs up to the team explicitly to rescue his sister from her captor, but almost immediately finds himself thrust into an inter-dimensional war. The boy who chose to surf whilst his sister was saving lives suddenly finds tens of thousands of people are relying on him to save them, and that his own life is in danger to an extent even someone used to swimming in shark-frequented waters can't really imagine. When Thunderbird finds him in tears during a lull between missions, it's completely believable; the poor kid is simply overwhelmed. But the fact Davis is so afraid isn't what's crucial here. What's crucial is that he's terrified, he's been given the power to literally go anywhere he wants, and yet he stays and fights. Escape would be the easiest thing in the world for him; even if his wormholes couldn't get him through Khan's barrier and off-island, Madripoor is famous for the amount of hiding places it offers; I doubt its tourist board gets to talk about much else, other than maybe the total absence of extradition treaties.

Rather than run, though, Slipstream stands his ground. More than that, he runs combat missions. Sure, they're comparatively low-risk gigs: warp in, drop a few grenades, and warp back out. But even that has its dangers; grenades are specifically designed to require a bit of effort to activate so as to limit the chances they'll go off prematurely, and it only takes one of Khan's elite soldiers to draw a bead on him whilst he's pulling pins and Davis is tumbling through his last ever wipe-out. Indeed, this is exactly what happens when Vargas tries to take out Rogue and Slipstream interferes, intending to drop him through the warp-wave and instead taking a blade to the back.

In short, a man with every reason to run and every opportunity to run stays put, out of a desire to do good, as a way of honouring the character of his missing sister, and in the hopes that he will see that sister again. All of which makes what happens next all the more tragic.

Because when Davis is at last reunited with his sister, she is utterly changed. Gone is the beautiful blonde Baywatch analogue. Instead, a seven-foot tall golden bird-woman stands before him claiming to be Heather Cameron. Davis reacts to this with savage unpleasantness, screaming that his sister is beautiful, not a monster, and demanding the shining alien insisting she's Heather get the hell out of his sight. It's a moment of supreme ugliness, and as I've said, Slipstream does not come out of it looking at all good. But there is plenty of thematic heft to his reaction. After all, Davis has just risked life and limb (nearly losing at least one if not both) in order to become more like his sister, only to find his actual sister isn't anything like his sister any more. Probably much more to the point though, Davis' response is an all-too familiar one amongst those that call themselves allies, which is to insist that they are completely supportive of oppressed groups when that oppression is just a theoretical exercise, but who crash and burn appallingly the instant they are required to give more than token support. Slipstream apparently is the kind of person who will insist on holding progressive credentials, but who will explode with rage when either asked to directly confront the actual fact of the existence of those they claim sympathy for ("I'm not a racist but IMMIGRANTS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS") or, worse still, to take ownership of the ways in which they benefit from and even perpetuate the oppression they claim to oppose.   

Slipstream is a classic case of all that. Davis was perfectly happy with the idea of his sister being a mutant just so long as she looked like a flatscan.  Just so long as she was "passing", or "closeted", depending on how one wants to interpret the mutant metaphor on this occasion. But now her mutant nature is obvious; inescapable. And, like the heterosexual man who's convinced he's fine with his brother being gay until he actually sees him kissing another man, Davis freaks out. Because now the struggle for equality he claimed to believe in comes with a cost to himself. Something in how society has programmed him is rubbing against the ideals he claims to believe in, and Davis can't throw the latter onto the bonfire quickly enough. 

Which is horrible, and inexcusable, and everywhere. If you want to seriously go about structuring a metaphor for the struggle for equality, you need someone like Davis Cameron in there, if only so he can be knocked down. And indeed Claremont wheels Nightcrawler in specifically to do that, to verbally slap him around for equating extreme non-standard body shapes for monstrousness, and to generally remind him that not every mutant is going to look like a body-builder or a lingerie model (though since at the time of writing, Lifeguard was at most the fifth X-Person out of over forty to look even vaguely non-human, there is a certain bitter irony in being lectured in the importance of not fixating on the cosmetic).  Ultimately, what's frustrating about Slipstream isn't that he gives voice to these awful impulses, it's that he's never given the chance to reflect upon them and try to redeem himself. Whether or not such redemption is even possible is not for me to say, of course, but the act of attempting that redemption would surely be of interest.

Instead, Davis disappears rather than face his sister, and is to my knowledge never actually seen again. Just as with his sister, a promising character is shuffled off the board almost immediately, generating disappointment and whiplash in equal measure. Alas, Heather and Davis Cameron. We hardly knew ye; here and gone too fast for us to do anything but wonder what might have been.

Still, since we're on the subject of supersonic character trajectories anyway... how about next time we take a look at Northstar?

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #47: Some People Stand In The Darkness...

Writing an essay on the subject of Heather Cameron isn't the easiest task in the world, simply because she's spent so little time on the page. Claremont introduced her in the late stages of X-Treme X-Men's first arc, and she disappears at the end of the second. I know from the handy chart at the time that she reappeared during the Utopia years, but I couldn't swear to having ever read a book in that period where she actually appears, let alone speaks.

In several ways, it's a shame we don't get to learn more about her. With her mutant power being the ability to spontaneously adapt to deal with any situation, she's very much the forerunner of the ever-interesting Darwin. Indeed, should one wish to be smug, you could label her a Darwin at an early stage of evolution. And we always want to be smug around here.

But there's more to Lifeguard than that, which is just as well considering that, as we shall see, Claremont quickly ditches most of the possibilities that her power set offers.  There are two distinct advantages (potentially at least) to having Cameron be literally a life-guard. The first is something I at least nodded to when discussing Cecilia Reyes, there's something rather nice and generally unexplored about those with the power to become superheroes who instead devote their time to saving people in comparatively prosaic occupations. There's obviously a difference between Cecilia and Heather; one tries to ignore their abilities whilst the other makes use of them to be more effective in their job (whether this would still be true if Cecilia's powers could have been useful to a trauma surgeon is an interesting question). But the basic question is still the same: how would actual people go about living their lives as mutants? The nature of the central X-Book metaphor is such that most mutants become vigilantes, criminals, or victims, so it's nice to every now and again see someone with the X-gene who's just going about their lives. Indeed, it's pointedly not the fact Lifeguard is a mutant that brings her into the story, rather the fact her father was an Australian crime-lord, recently murdered, and the team wish to protect her from whomever has beef with the Camerons. The coincidence that our heroic mutants tracking another mutant find he's murdered the father of yet another mutant is rather pushing the laws of probability even by Claremont's standards, but at least the results are interesting.

Alas, this idea is rather blown out of the water (pun entirely intended) early on when extra-dimensional forces invade and Heather's biology responds by revealing her half-Shiar side. The already bubbling-over cauldron of coincidence has now exploded of course, but that's not the problem here.  The problem is we go from a woman using her evolutionary flexibility to hold down a lifeguard job on an Australian beach to being a golden bird-woman fighting to save the Earth from alien interlopers. Her power is now simply to look like alien royalty and freak out Khan's flunkies accordingly.

Ultimately, then, this reaches a bit of a dead end. So too does the other interesting aspect of Heather Cameron, though I'm a bit more ambivalent on this one in any case. It doesn't take much effort for anyone who lived through the '90s to recognise what Claremont and Larroca are referencing with Lifeguard's first appearance. And even if you don't catch it, the artwork is helpful enough to write the name of the show on Lifeguard's red swimming costume (on her chest, natch).

There are two ways to process this. The rather more generous one is to suggest this is an experiment in adding mutants to a narrative that already exists, to see how their presence warps the story.  In theory this is a brilliant idea; if you want to postulate the existence of an entirely new kind of person, figuring out how those people would change the way we tell stories is an important thing to do. Hell, you don't even need to invent a new minority; adding the oppressed into narratives that traditionally exclude them and seeing how it alters that narrative is both a vital task and one that's doing wonders reinvigorating the sci-fi genre right now. Either way, the suggestion that the popular stories of the past must be revisited and improved upon from a perspective of social inclusion is a powerful one.

But whilst all that might be true, there's a glaring problem in this specific instance. My exceptionally hazy recollections of Baywatch (it wasn't a show I watched) suggests there was indeed a problem with its failure to meaningfully include minorities, and indeed a quick Google search of the original cast suggests only one of the eleven main characters the show started with was non-white. But what Baywatch was most frequently criticised for wasn't the racial imbalance in its cast, but in how completely it was geared towards the male gaze. This was a show that took the "for the dads" idea to its ultimate endpoint, including so much for the dads there was little left for anyone else. The standard idea of Baywatch centring on an endless array of large-busted women jogging in slow-motion down beaches may or may not be exaggerated, but it's apparently true that the show became so reliant on Pamela Anderson flaunting her curves that when she quit the show the producers hired three more similarly voluptuous women to fill the gap. If aliens had intercepted broadcasts of the show, they would have been impressed Earth had so many performers at open-air strip-clubs who would interrupt their routines to save drowning swimmers.

So if we wanted to warp the narrative of Baywatch to make it more progressive, at an absolute minimum you need to get rid of the scantily-clad curvaceous women (not that I want to body-shame anyone, any more than my desire to see less white people on TV suggests there's something wrong with being white).  This, it goes without saying, is not something we can hope for from a 2002 Marvel comic. Indeed, it's not even possible to tell if Heather looks the way she does because she's modelled on Pamela Anderson, or just because this is what passes for the standard female form in superhero comics. This is already a problem before we consider the fact that Pamela Anderson has in her life had four sets of breast implants. Her motivations for those operations are her own business, but the result was to make herself look more like the standard model of western female sexual desirability created and maintained by, amongst other things, comics books. There's something profoundly depressing about a comic book character modelled on a woman who had her body altered to essentially look more like a comic book character. Ultimately then the answer to how including mutants would warp the Baywatch narrative is: not at all.  It's still about women with - in the neutral sense of the word - unnatural body shapes saving people whilst not wearing all that much in the way of clothes.

It's worth remembering though of course that much of the problem above, whilst real and dangerous, can be laid at the feet of all comics at the time, not just this one. So I'm still inclined to give some credit for the narrative invasion idea, whilst wishing Claremont had been smart enough to take Peter David's approach with Darwin and argue Heather's body shape is its own kind of subconscious mutation to make her life easier [1].  But of course this idea too is rapidly shut down by an actual invasion. Which is a real shame. Some promising ideas got cut short here by another Claremont indulgence in space opera. But then that was almost always what Claremont's space stories did. They separated the comics from their central metaphor, and replaced it with a crudely-whisked melange of whatever sci-fi franchises happened to be in the ascendancy at the time. Heather Cameron's story is just one more casualty of that.

Actually, though, I am being a little unfair. There is one aspect of Heather's character that remains of interest once the antimatter bombs start falling. Discussing that, though, requires a slight change of focus. We need to talk about Davis Cameron.

[1] Though one could respond to this that suggesting white skin makes one's life easier than brown skin is very different to arguing the more conventionally attractive and sexually desirable a woman's body the easier they will find life. Perhaps it's just as well Claremont never tried to wade into that particular swamp; he may have needed saving from drowning too.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #46: Just Some Streetwalker

The late '90s and early '00s were not an easy time for Marvel.  Titles were hemorrhaging sales in the wake of the great comics crash, and the tricks cynical writers had used to keep superhero stories afloat since the late '80s had finally been mined out. Even if the hyper-violent boobpocalypse hadn't reached their respective reductio ad absurdum endpoints, comics found themselves crowded out by the continuing rise of video games and the arrival of online porn, which both offered more... direct doses to the consumer.

But old habits die hard.  One of the truly remarkable things about the cataracts of blood that stained a decade of comics was how easily people bought into the idea that it somehow represented "maturity".  It was a bizarre form of arguing by inversion: children's literature features very few deaths, therefore bodycounts that would have seemed excessive in the later Rambo films must somehow occupy the other end of the spectrum. The next step in the "maturing" of comics followed the same misguided logic: if children's stories were completely devoid of sex, the most mature angle possible would be to include a character who had as much sex as possible.

It was time to move the conception of super-being sex beyond coy glances thrown at pneumatic-chested models.  It was time for a hooker superhero.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #45: Luvver Boy

Welcome, one and all, to the sad tale of Jonothon Starsmore.

Writing about Chamber as an X-Man is no easy task.  I mean, I don't have the world's best memory, but can anyone remember anything notable Chamber has done as a member of the senior team?  About the only storyline that's coming to mind is "Poptopia", but that was a) over a decade ago and b) shit.

Even in the late noughties and early teenies (shut up, those are the names), an era in which Marvel writers seem to be putting more effort into characterising their minor roles than ever before, Chamber can be fairly summed up as a walking artillery pierce with an embarrassing English speech pattern (seriously, you'd think British writers have managed large enough inroads into the US comics industry for this kind of ludicrous over-egged rubbish to have fallen by the wayside).  No-one seems to have the first clue what to do with him, as demonstrated by the kind of major re-jigs of his basic nature (he has no face!  He has a face!  He's Apocalypse-lite! He's a man with a sonic weapon strapped to his chest!  He has no face!) that seem to dog characters who combine significant fan nostalgia with current writers' complete inability to use them sensibly (see also: Moonstar, Dani).

There is, of course, a reason for all of this, and it stems from Chamber's very beginnings.  Consider the ultimate fate of the characters that, like him, were either introduced in Generation X during the early '90s, or who are most associated with same.  Husk has rocketed between being utterly side-lined and appearing in stories so bad one wishes desperately she was side-lined for longer.  Jubilee has gone through the same repeated extreme make-over process, with no more pleasing an effect.  It took years for anyone to use M effectively, and given Peter David's reputation for rehabilitating limited and forgotten characters, her starring role in his revamped X-Factor is more damning with faint praise than anything else.  Mondo has long ago disappeared, and Skyn only reappeared after years in exile so Chuck Austen could kill him with breathtaking cynicism.  Hell, Synch was pretty much the only character to not suffer post-Gen-X ignominy, and that's because he was blown to pieces before the book was.

So what is it about these super-powered teens that made it so difficult to spin stories out from them after their own title ended?  To answer that, we need to think about what exactly Generation X was, and what it was supposed to do.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #44: Chinese Puzzle Boy

Update: Somehow I managed to get my Xorn's the wrong way round (ironic, given my argument that this isn't as complicated a continuity snarl as people say). I've fixed the mistake now. We regret the error.

This seems to have become an unfortunately recurring theme in these posts, but yes, I've been dragging my feet over this one as well.  At least with Kuan-Yin Xorn, people can guess about what about the character has caused such a long delay.  You'll almost certainly guess wrong, but you can at least give it a go.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #43: Cold As Ice

Once again it's time for the old villain-to-hero switch.  Obviously, Frost is far from the first such example of this comic phenomena amongst the X-Men.  That said, if we dismiss those characters who were only briefly villains (or who only rarely showed up at all, like Marrow), there's really only two major examples: Rogue and Magneto.  Most of our discussion of Rogue centered around female characters in the medium, and the Magneto post mainly concerned itself with the nature of the character's back-story, so I think we're overdue a consideration of what a successful transition from supervillain to superhero actually entails.

So far as I can see, there are three goals that need to be reached if this kind of thing is to be pulled off successfully.  First of all, there needs to be a compelling reason for the change of alignment.  Secondly, there needs to be a plausible way for the X-Men to be able to forgive or at least overlook the past crimes of their new recruit.  And thirdly, there needs to be something about the character that makes the effort that goes into this kind of manoeuvre worthwhile.

Of those, the third is the easiest to deal with; if you can't do something interesting with a character who's switched sides, then you may as well not bother.  If, for instance, Emma Frost had been intended to simply be a snarky telepath with a ludicrous rack (even by Marvel standards), then there'd be no reason to not just create a character from scratch.  But the first two are at least as important.  Particularly the second.  If you can't come up with a good excuse for the new status quo (Rogue's sudden insistence she was terrified of her power and didn't want to murder people any more, for instance, came entirely out of the blue), then that can sink a few stories during the transition period.  Screw up the justification for forgiveness, however, and the whole enterprise is doomed.

Take Marrow, for instance.  At first her role on the X-roster made sense; the US mutant population was being decimated by Operation: Zero Tolerance, and the fact that the crisis made for uneasy bedfellows wasn't remotely difficult to understand.  With the (editor-mandated) return to the status quo following the cross-over, however, her place on the team was obviously ridiculous, since she showed no remorse whatsoever for the innocent civilians she had killed or tried to kill, and constantly seemed on the verge of a new bout of homicidal violence. Rogue at least quickly managed to prove her willingness to change, and Magneto's rehabilitation was (correctly) deemed so important as to require the entirety of UXM #200 to work through.

(We could also briefly consider Gambit, here, who got around this by not letting on as to what his past crimes were, and therefore gained all the advantages of being a former villain turned hero without any of the baggage, at least until UXM #350).

Magneto, in fact, is a useful comparison for Emma Frost, because they both joined the X-Men for similar reasons: the desire to mould the next generation of mutants.  This both ensured Emma past the first of the three tests, and represents one of her most fundamental character traits; her love of teaching.

To Whom It May Concern

Dear Captain America,

I should note at the top of this letter that I am not one of your reflexive haters.  Sure, I'm British, so I find the idea that a far-flung confederation of massively different and mutually suspicious grouping of disparate people somehow stumbled onto the secret to viable democracy almost as ridiculous as wanting to dress up in those people's flags and punch out criminals (there's a reason Captain Britain is a dipsomaniac boor, after all). Despite that, though, I like to think I'm on your side.

Certainly I defended you when I lent the official record of your exploits during the superhero civil war to my then housemate, which led to him declaring you 'a dick'. I might not have been quite so willing to lay all the blame on Iron Man as others, but still, you had to do what you had to do.  He went after your boys; that's a line crossed.

That said, however, I've now had the opportunity to study the full record of what took place during your recent battle with the X-Men under Scott Summers, and I have a few questions I'd like to ask.  Since this is an open letter, I should warn those who are interested that I'll be discussing how that particular rift in the superhero community was resolved.

SpaceSquid vs. The X Men #42: Basic Errors

10 PRINT "SAGE"
20 INPUT "Are we sure you want to do this?", A$
30 IF A=N GOTO 520
40 INPUT "Are you quite sure?  This is going to be really, REALLY boring.", B$
50 IF B=N GOTO 520
60 PRINT "Fine. Just don't come crying to me once you realise you've wasted your time."
70 PRINT "Without question, the central aspect to Sage (also Tessa, no last name supplied) is the time she spent as an undercover agent of Xavier's from before the very first issue of 'Uncanny X-Men' (or just' X-Men' as it was at the time).  This was revealed in the somewhat unlovely 'X-Treme X-Men' series that kicked off in 2001, more than twenty years after she first appeared. In-between, she was the primary confidant and servant to Sebastian Shaw, Black King of the Hellfire Club (well, usually)."
80 PRINT "The thing is, though, none of that was remotely evident at the time. It's not at all hard to come up with multiple examples of altercations with Shaw that could have ended up with an X-Man or a New Mutant killed, and in none of these cases did Sage think it worth sending warning ahead. Even worse, as UXM.Net point out, had Sage told the team Mastermind was gradually turning Jean Grey's mind into Eton mess, it might have saved a great deal of bother for an awful lot of people (they do their best to come up with a justification, but - and your mileage may vary - I don't buy it for a second)."
90 PRINT "What can be said about Sage, then, depends almost entirely on whether or not you can swallow the idea that a character whose inaction nearly cost the lives of various mutants, and allowed Jean Grey (or the being everyone thought was Jean Grey at the time) to explode into a madness that ultimately killed billions of sentient beings, was working for the X-Men all along."
100 INPUT "Sound plausible to you?", C$
110 IF C=N GOTO 130
120 IF C=Y GOTO 160
130 PRINT "Yeah, I don't blame you.  And the problem here is that once you put aside that idea out of sheer disbelief, there's really very little left to hang the character on.  Each new revelation about her past just compounds the problem.  This in itself wouldn't necessarily be too great a problem, except that the Sage biography put together by UXM.Net (a resource even more valuable to this series than normal this time around, since I gave up on 'X-Treme X-Men' pretty quickly and in some disappointment) demonstrates that the vast majority of storylines focusing on Sage revolved around new information surfacing regarding her past.  Once you've concluded that said past doesn't make any sense in any case, there's a real difficulty in connecting with any of this."
140 PRINT "But the fact that Claremont (the only writer who really seemed that keen on using the character very much) revisited this well so many times seems to me symptomatic of the real problem with Sage, which is that as a character, there's just not enough there."
150 GOTO 190
160 PRINT "Well, OK.  That's not how I see it, but it certainly isn't difficult to find people less concerned about such contradictions than I am.  Moreover, I'll readily concede that if a writer wants to use a character retcon at the start of a '00s so as to make their new comic more interest, and realises it will cause problems with two decade-old events in an entirely different book that they wrote in any case, "Fuck it" is a legitimate artistic stance to take on the matter."
170 PRINT "And if that is how you see all this, then the idea certainly has legs. There's perhaps little original in the central idea of a hero having been so deep undercover for so long in a villain's lair that plenty of sympathetic people are wrongly after their head, but then there's all sorts of plots across the line that would be revealed as far more hoary than they seem once you took all the mutant powers out of it.  We needn't worry about the concept's provenance right now."
180 PRINT "What remains relevant, of course, is whether or not the idea is smartly done.  Here, in fact, I can't really say much, given I've read so little of those stories.  My own experience with 'X-Treme X-Men' and its general reception doesn't exactly fill me with hope, but I've no real evidence to go on.  That said, at least some of my doubts in this regard spring not from what the stories themselves contain, but my problems with the nature of Sage's character itself.
190 PRINT "The problem with the concept of Sage in terms of who she is - rather than who she was, which seems to have done all the heavy lifting during her time on the team - is two-fold.  Or maybe not, depending on how you look at it.  There's definitely two major problems, but one is entirely contained within the other, like a Russian doll of conceptual difficulties."
200 PRINT "First, consider how Sage's mutant powers operate.  Firstly, she has a photographic memory.  Which is cool and all, but so did Doctor Sam Beckett.  And Doctor Sheldon Cooper.  That's not a character hook, that's a coat of paint on a hook you've installed already.  Which, in this case, is that Tessa is capable of processing information from a position of perfect logic - essentially, as though her brain were a computer. That's much more interesting, but only potentially. Just by way of example, a woman who can control the weather or a man who can transform his skin into steel are ideas that are going to work immediately. Ruthlessly logical thought processes is more of a seasoning; something you add to food that already has to be there and be appealing if you're going to end up with a tasty dish.  Oh, and sometimes she has telepathy, which is probably the second least interesting and imaginative mutant ability imaginable, after generic energy-casting."
210 PRINT "My point here is no to argue that all X-Men must have unique and fascinating power sets in order to be interesting.  Indeed, as the years have gone by and more and more mutants have been created, it's increasingly difficult to come up with abilities that are original without being self-consciously weird or ludicrously specific.  But as that has become increasingly obvious (and of course M-Day has reduced this problem to at least some extent), the solution applied by many writers is to just make sure the characters themselves are interesting, independently of how their powers operate.  Which is probably how it should have been done all along, and what led to the best results when it was applied.  I'm not the biggest fan of Gambit, by any means, but I can recognise why so many love him, and it's not that he creates bombs out of objects.  It's that he chooses to use cards as ammunition, and that this choice acts as a window onto his whole outlook."
220 PRINT "So it's not that I find the mind of a Vulcan and the memory of an elephant just too boring.  It's that once you remove Sage's past, Claremont seems to think those powers alone are enough to keep people interested.  And that doesn't work.
230 INPUT "I didn't mention Vulcans as a quick aside, in fact. If we're going to talk about how to make logical thinking interesting to the observer, I'm not sure one can consider a better test case. So, here's a question: who's your favourite green-blooded main character?  Spock (type 'S'), Tuvok (type 'T'), or T'Pol (type 'DD')?" , D$
240 IF D=S GOTO 270
250  IF D=T GOTO 330
260 GOTO 400
270 PRINT "Well, obviously. Neither Tim Russ nor Jolene Blalock could fairly be called poor actors, but neither of them got anywhere close to the kind of still gravitas offered by Leonard Nimoy. There's no doubt that watching Nimoy's restrained performance was frequently a treat.  But of course, that immediately sketches out the problem we have with regards to Sage: no-one is playing her.  Everyone is still on paper.  It's taken artists generations to figure out ways to generate the illusion of activity and passion within the panels of a comic strip, which makes Sage feel like more of a regression than anything else."
280 PRINT "That's only half the problem, though. The other thing missing from Sage's adventures is someone to take the Dr McCoy role. The genius of the original Star Trek was to pit McCoy and Spock against each other, with Kirk in the middle.  When done right, it was never possible to point to either character and state they were entirely in the right.  Kirk, as captain, needed both passion and logic (which might have been more strong an subtext had he not also needed far more than his share of exotic space booty, but let's put that aside).  Again, this requires a strong actor (and DeForest Kelley was exceptionally strong) to make work, and isn't a model anyone should expect to have worked on the page, even if Claremont had been interested in trying it, rather than just have everyone constantly suspecting Sage of being evil."
290 INPUT "To read the Tuvok entry, type 'T'. To read the T'Pol entry, type 'DD'.  To move on from the consideration of Vulcans, type 'M'.", E$
300 IF E=T GOTO 330
310 IF E=DD  GOTO 400
320 GOTO 500
330 PRINT "Interesting choice.  Actually, I don't dislike Tuvok as much as I do, you know, everything else to do with 'Voyager', but I'd argue he worked better in concept than execution (again, I'm not inclined to blame Tim Russ for that). There are two things that are genuinely interesting about Tuvok, though really they're the same thing from two different angles. There are at least two instances in the first season alone (about the only one I remember particularly well, since I saw it twice) in which Tuvok comes up with something that sounds utterly illogical, but argues his case to the hilt.  He doesn't do too bad a job of it, either, which leads me to my point. Tuvok does exactly what needed to be done with the Vulcans by demonstrating that the value of their logical strings are only as useful as the axioms they started with in the first place. 'Enterprise' took this further by introducing the axiom that humans are a bit of a pain in the arse, but let's stick with Tuvok right now."
340 PRINT "The idea here is a fascinating one; a race of totally logical beings that will still end up disagreeing based on their initial assumptions.  Indeed, Tuvok already demonstrated this by going undercover as a Maquis and Chakotay and Torres (among others) not being suspicious in the least. Either they're idiots, all Vulcans support the Maquis, or these variations are commonplace."
350 PRINT "So how does this have anything to do with Sage? Well, because of what it says about Tuvok, which is that his most interesting character traits lay in how he differed from a previous character who we'd been led to think he wouldn't differ from at all.  This isn't an idea that can keep a character interesting indefinitely (and indeed Tuvok didn't), but it's at least something, and Sage never had that. The only people we have to compare Sage with are actual PEOPLE, which is where the problem comes in."
360 INPUT "To read the Spock entry, type 'S'. To read the T'Pol entry, type 'DD'.  To move on from the consideration of Vulcans, type 'M'.", F$
370 IF F=S GOTO 270
380 IF F=DD  GOTO 400
390 GOTO 500
400 PRINT "Heh.  'Go to 400'. If this were a Fighting Fantasy game book, you'd have just won right now.  Of course, what you've won here is some nice boobs."
410 PRINT "I'm kidding, obviously, even if I'm perhaps the first person in the world to work a titty joke into his BASIC coding (note: there's no way I'm the first person in the world to do that). That said, I don't think there's any real doubt that for an awful lot of people, T'Pol's gender is a non-trivial part of what makes her appealing.  And the fact that out of all Star Trek female stars, she has the most... 'comic-like' proportions (other than Jeri Ryan, of course) makes her particularly relevant when talking about Sage, the umpteenth example of the mutant gene having a notable and impractical effect upon human mammary glands."
420 PRINT "I realise that what I'm about to say is unabashedly a straight male perspective.  Then again, I AM a straight male, and there's no getting around that.  More to the point, I'm who both superhero comics and sci-fi TV shows are generally aimed at - an observation, of course, not a note of approval - so while my perspective is no more valid than that of anyone else, it is more in tune with the vast majority of authorial intent - again, I'm noting this, not nodding approvingly. From this viewpoint, then, the pitch line for T'Pol is this: she's a creature of pure logic, but also disgracefully hot."
430 PRINT "Already we begin to see a problem. To the best of my knowledge, Tim Russ isn't considered a remarkably attractive man. Even if he was, the decontamination body-rubs T'Pol had to both receive and perform more than once during the 'Enterprise' run most certainly demonstrated that this was not intended to be business as usual - to the show's significant discredit."
440 PRINT "But this gets us to a central problem with Sage as well. In the world of comics - as oppose to the otherwise all-human crew of the original Enterprise - the idea that anyone would come up with male X-Man who's only unique skill was to be very logical would be utterly ridiculous.  That's not a superhuman ability, it's the stereotype of an academic. The implication that by putting that brain into an attractive woman constitutes sufficient hook for a character strikes me as problematic to say the least. I know gorgeous women who can think rings around me, who have a skill for mathematics I can only dream of.  The idea that this is remarkable because of how they look bothers me, and neither 'Entrprise' nor Sage seem free of this idea, especially when you consider a major part of T'Pol's development was that her desire to have sexy times with Trip interfered with her ability to think straight.  Hell, we've all been there, but again, the optics are problematic."
450 "If this sounds a bit like I'm slamming T'Pol, and trying to paint Sage with the same brush, then that's not unreasonable. I maintain though that if one were to swap around the powers of, say, Sage and Xavier, then no-one would think the founder of the X-Men to be remotely interesting."
460 INPUT "To read the Spock entry, type 'S'. To read the Tuvok entry, type 'T'.  To move on from the consideration of Vulcans, type 'M'.", G$
470 IF G=S GOTO 270
480 IF G=T  GOTO 330
490 GOTO 500
510 PRINT "Which, blissfully, brings us to the end of our discussion.  Sage was an acceptable second-tier villain, but a tepid main character, and the difficulty in transferring her from the former to the latter role really makes one wonder how Claremont could possibly have thought it worth the effort."
520 PRINT "We have now survived Sage. Let us never speak of her again."
530 PRINT "Next time we take a look at another female former member of the Hellfire Club now living with the X-Men, and luckily Grant Morrison will be on hand to demonstrate how this is supposed to be done."
540 STOP

RUN

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #41: The Shifting Psyche

Well, this has taken a while, hasn't it?

There are two reasons why I haven't come back to SS v X in over a year, and both of them involve today's focus: Danielle Moonstar.  The first is fairly simple; Mirage graduated to the X-Men a little over a decade ago, but she's never been around too much in the main books. Add that to the fact she's been a fan favourite in various spin-offs since she first appeared in the early '80s, and you have a character about which a great deal can be said by others, but not really by myself.

The other problem is perhaps somewhat more interesting.  Mirage, like Thunderbird and Forge before her, is a Native American, and I'm worried that I'm beginning to sound like a broken record when it comes to discussing that particular group in these articles.  Simply put, I'm concerned that repeatedly lamenting the similarities of their characters is in itself reinforcing the idea that Native American characters are all the same. Am I picking up on a genuine problem?  Or am I contributing to it with ham-fisted analysis?

SpaceSquid vs.The X-Men #40: Askani'Son

You can’t get this far into a series of essays on the X-Men without realising that certain themes keep cropping up time and again. I don’t know whether that’s due to the fundamentally simple nature of the series’ central metaphors (and I in no way intend that as a criticism), or whether I’m just viewing every character through the same narrow lens my own experiences and interests have sculpted. It’s probably a little from Column A, a little from Column B.

Either way, this is not the time to suddenly change direction. We may have touched on (or fully embraced) the subject of nature vs. nature many times over the last few years, but Cable probably exemplifies that conflict better than anyone else. For one thing, there’s the two other versions of him running around the Marvel Universe stirring up trouble - and we’ll get to Stryfe and Nate Grey later - but that's only a fairly minor part of the picture.

Hat Banshee's Millinery Corner

This is Pause's fault.

Next week: Hat Banshee takes some time to appraise the fashion choices of visitors to the Blarney Stone, AND HE DOES NOT LIKE WHAT HE SEES!

(X-posted at Year X)

Because Life Wasn't Short Enough

Given my recent comparative increase in spare time, I've decided to embark on a project I've been toying with for years but never found time for: a complete re-read of all my X-books in an attempt to conclusively demonstrate once and for all how long the team has been in existence for in Marvel time.

Obviously, this effort is doomed to failure.  Hideous, awful, mock-worth failure.  Still, hopefully it will be fun along the way.  Possibly even illuminating as well, on occasion.  Regardless, such an epic undertaking is worthy of its own blog, which can be found here.  Let the experiment commence!

SpaceSquid vs.The X-Men #39: Diminishing Returns

Innovation and revelation can be tricky things.  Just because someone can blaze trails previously undreamed of doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be any good at laying roads.

So it is with art.  As vital and worthy of praise as they are, pioneers are rarely the greatest examples of the genres they forged, and when they are, one suspects it's only a matter of time before they're overtaken.  Philip K Dick is not the best sci-fi writer the world has seen.  No matter what anyone says, the Beatles are not the best guitar band so far formed. And Chris Claremont is not the best writer of superhero comics.

Obviously, some trailblazers remain relevant and entertaining for longer than others.  Clearly, the Beatles have done well enough in ensnaring my generation, and the one following it, sufficiently well to prove there is more to them than simply being first.  But even then, it doesn't follow that because what they did was new at the time, and still loved today, that we should be particularly hopeful about the results of them returning to the studio, even if they were all still alive.

There is no doubt in my mind that Chris Claremont's initial sixteen-year run on Uncanny X-Men changed the face of superhero comics forever, and delineated an approach to the team that no-one had seriously attempted to revise by the time he returned in 2000 after a nine year absence.  Even now, if a character walks into the comic and the X-Men recognise them, I'd be prepared to bet even money that they were created by Claremont.   When he took over Exiles a few years ago (with, by all accounts, distinctly underwhelming results), he was told to ensure every character on the team was a version of one he had put together during his - and the X-Men's - golden era (not to be confused with the Golden Age, natch).

In short, Claremont was a big fucking deal.   In the years after he first left the book in 1991, sales took a tumble, along with fan appraisal.  It's an interesting question as to whether or not the sales problems were because Claremont left, or whether he simply was lucky (or smart) enough to leave at the right time [1], but either way, Marvel brought him back to the book with high hopes back in 2000.  His opening salvo: a baffling "event" storyline that, amongst other things, introduced Neal Sharra: the third Thunderbird.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #38: Safe, Maat; Safe

It seems appropriate that we see 2010 out with the last of the 20th Century X-Men.  At least, I think it does, and I hope that you agree with me on that point. There's very little chance that you'll agree with anything else I have to say here, after all.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that "Even in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth".  Sure, he probably meant it regarding the inevitability of India's freedom from colonial rule, but I'd like to think he'd be thinking along similar lines if he'd lived long enough to see how often Maggott ends up at the top of "WORST X-MEN EVAH" lists.  I think it'd be his kind of thing.

People hate this guy.  They hate him with a passion that's almost impressive in its vitriol, given how little time Japeth was actually on the team (only around a year or so).  For the life of me, I've never understood why.  Given his comparatively short tenure, I could understand people not giving a damn.  I can see why having the mutant power of not being able to digest food might strike more than a few people as less than gripping.  Beyond that, though, I'm struggling to see the problem.

Of course, I would struggle to see the problem, because I believe that Maggott is genuinely awesome.  When the immanent return of Nightcrawler, Colossus and Shadowcat from the pages of Excalibur apparently necessitated the ousting of Cannonball, Cecila Reyes and Maggott, it was the latter whose loss I felt most keenly.  And given my deep and abiding love of Cecilia (I'm delighted she's back in the comics these days, even in the current "generic doctor" role she seems to be fulfilling), that's high praise indeed.

What follows, then, is a full-throated defense of the X-Universe's most underrated mutant.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #37: The Unlovely Bones

There is a brilliant moment in an episode of The Simpsons - one of the earlier ones, obviously, when the show was still skewering tired institutions rather than being one - when Homer puts down a copy of Andy Capp and says with amused fondness: "Ah, Andy Capp.  You wife-beating drunk".

Marrow could be said to inspire a similar reaction. "Ah, Marrow.  You unrepentant mass-murderer".  The X-Men isn't intended to be light-hearted comedy, of course, but arguably it's no less incongruous to include the orchestrator of a nightclub massacre on a superhero team than it is to make spousal abuse into a Sunday paper cartoon punchline.

Frankly, I don't think there's any way to consider Marrow without dealing with that fundamental problem.  Nor is it easy to solve, given the blood and violence involved.  Perhaps we can at least find a way to consider it, though, by returning to a topic we've covered before regarding both Gambit and Joseph: redemption.

X-Quz

So, I figured it might be fun to run a more specialised quiz this week.  The idea is simple.  Each of the twenty-five comments below makes reference to a specific X-Man amongst the thirty-six I've discussed so far. Some are obvious, some are not.  Some, indeed, have been referenced in the posts themselves.  All I want from you is which X-Man - codename or real name - goes with which comment (which, of course, means the quiz will get easier as we go along).  I'm going to limit each player to two guesses per comment, to prevent answer-spamming, and to just one answer at a time, so as to stop someone with as ludicrous a degree of obsessive knowledge as me just swooping in and taking all the goodies.

Right, get to it!

Good luck!

Update: There seems to be some confusion regarding the rules; mainly this is my fault for not being clear.  I'd like one answer per comment in the comments section, and will allow each player only two guesses overall at each numbered comment within the post.

Sorry to have been so confusing!

1. Became one of the many iterations of Apocalypse's "Death", a process which turned their skin black and their hair white. Gambit (Mozz)

2. Orphaned at age five or six and raised both by and as a thief. Storm (Llama God)

3. Once targeted for assassination by way of an explosive robot, disguised as a lisping toddler named Elsie Dee (get it?) Wolverine (Chris B)

4. Had both legs crushed fighting an alien warlord calling himself "Lucifer". Professor X (Christopher)

5. Was at one point brainwashed by the mad assassin Arcade into believing himself a capitalist-hating superhero named The Proletarian. Colossus (Anonymous)

6. Lost a duel for leadership of the X-Men to a depowered Storm. Cyclops (Ste)

7. The only X-Man to retain any memory of the Age of Apocalypse, in which he spent several decades following the time-altering murder of Charles Xavier. Bishop (Gooder)

8. Stabbed to death by Wolverine aboard a decaying space-station to save them from a slow, agonising end. Jean Grey (Llama God)

9. Calls Logan "Wolvie" to his face and gets away with it. Jubilee (Allen)

10. Attempted to counteract the effects of M-Day by grafting superpowered genes into humans, with horrific results. Forge (Jamie)

11. Betrays team to the Super-Adaptoid, only to change sides again when they learns their new master intends to destroy all life, including them.

12. Got set on fire by a mad island, and burned to death. Wore green. Petra (Jamie)

13. Got set on fire by a mad island, and burned to death.  Wore purple. Sway (Pause)

14. Impersonated Professor X whilst the latter prepared for invasion by the Z'Nox.  Died whilst still undercover. Changeling (FireStillBurns)

15. Once tried busking as a juggler to raise money for a plane ticket to Europe. Iceman (Chris B)

16. Spent several years living in a lighthouse and pretending to be a pirate. Nightcrawler (Mozz)

17. Spent the Age of Apocalypse with a chip on their shoulder and a black bar-code on their face. Havok (Brutal Snake)

18. Fell arse-first onto the talisman of the Ru'tai Pilgrimm, breaking it and banishing the demons. Cecilia Reyes (Brutal Snake)

19. The only X-Man to have dropped the N-bomb. Kitty Pryde (Anonymous)

20. Had their mutant power activated by their exposure to the nuclear wasteland of Hiroshima.  Sunfire (Brutal Snake)

21. One of the rare examples of an X-Man losing their powers on M Day, a fact they hid from the squad for several days in an attempt to seem useful.

22. Spent years under the impression that they were one of a race of immortal mutants, before everyone suddenly forgot about the idea. Cannonball (Chris B)

23. Can bake a lemon meringue pie with their feet. Beast (Chemie)

24. I got myself a PhD to prove this character could never possibly exist. Longshot (Chris B)

25. Died of the Legacy Virus and was never mentioned again for over two decades. Revanche (Mozz)

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #36: We Don't Need Another (Super) Hero

One of my favourite things about science fiction and fantasy is all the fascinating stuff you can do with it. On the most obvious level you have the sheer visual/conceptual thrill of the Black Gate of Mordor, or the glittering crystal valleys of Minbar, or the lazy grace of a school of star-whales. Beyond that, though, as many have pointed out before, you have the ability to use the tropes and settings of these clearly impossible realms to explore unashamedly terrestrial or even mundane concerns. Indeed, it was recognising the (nominal) subtext that attracted me to the X-Men in the first place.

Naturally, this is just as true for individual characters. Any writer worth their salt should be asking themselves two questions immediately upon inheriting a character: what makes them who they are, and what is it they have to say?

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #35: The Approximation

Character descriptions can be tricky things. On the one hand, you don’t want them to be overly complicated. That’s not to saying complex characters are a bad thing, obviously, but if you can’t sum up the essentials in sound-bite form, it’s generally evidence things are too murky and confused. Psylocke is a case in point: “Sexy psychic ninja [1]” doesn’t give us anything about who she is, and anything in addition is liable to trap us upon the endless Ferris wheel of madness that makes up her existence. “Angry, lonely, beer-swilling samurai”, on the other hand, gets us far closer to who Wolverine really is.

Things can also go wrong when you try defining a character by what they are not, rather than what they are. “She’s not a typical woman!” “He’s not the sort to give a crap!” “They’re not going to play by the rules!” Whilst these might not necessarily be automatically bad (or the last two, anyway; see below), there is a depressingly high number of examples for which this approach has led to sub-Gambit-style literary laziness.

In short, then, you ideally want something snappy yet informative, which defines the characters rather than just sketching the outline they form against the void.

With all that in mind, then, it’s probably not a good sign that the only real way to describe Joseph seems to be as follows: “He’s not Magneto”.

Looking back at Joseph’s brief life, it seems like every dramatic beat in his entire story involves him behaving either just like Magneto, or entirely unlike him. He loves human children, but he massacres those who threaten his charges. He has faith in human nature, but he’s still desperate to take Rogue aside for some horizontal jogging. Plus, of course, he goes crazy at anything the writers judge reminiscent of the Holocaust.

It was probably inevitable that things would turn out this way. Joseph could no more escape Magneto’s shadow than New Coke could distance itself from its ubiquitous older sibling (and in fairness that was at least partially the point – both for Joseph and for Coca Cola). Still, just because something was bound to happen does not mean we should be happy when it does. In truth, Joseph is of very little interest as a character, precisely because of this phenomenon – everything he does is compelling only in comparison to someone else.

So is there anything we can take from what literally no-one is calling “The Joseph Years”? Well, one would hope we might say something regarding the old battle between nature and nurture. This, of course, is a central issue within the X-books, at least from Claremont onwards. The assembled masses of anti-mutant hysteria are ignoring nurture entirely, after all, claiming nature is so important as to trump any consideration as to who someone is, rather than what. Moreover, there is always some interest in seeing how well-known characters react in radically different circumstances. This is one of the wonderful qualities of the Age of Apocalypse. It’s fascinating to see Cyclops forced to choose between his conscience and his father figure, rather than finding them always in lock-step (until after the millennium, at least), or watch Wolverine actually with Jean Grey, and then watching her drift slowly away. The AoA was an entirely different world, though. If you want to study the effects of altering someone’s background, one should not start the experiment in a laboratory and conclude it in a burning field.

Joseph gives us the opportunity to change the pieces without changing the board. This is a great idea in theory – though it’s worth noting that as careful as the Holocaust needs to be handled in superhero stories in general, you need to handle the idea of Holocaust survivors forgetting their experience far more carefully still [2]. Unfortunately, though, it turns out that the ‘90s X-Men writers were uniformly of the opinion that Magneto – horrific personal trauma – years of fruitless struggle = whiny little bitch. Even his one real remaining link to his past, his powerful attraction to Rogue (and I do like the idea that this is coded into his DNA, though this may be because I am convinced my predisposition towards redheads is entirely genetic) reduces him to squabbling with Gambit like a lovelorn and sulky teenager.

This is particularly disappointing because the juxtaposition between Joseph and Remy is far more interesting for other reasons. The comparison between them is particularly important whilst considering this question: can you be held responsible for crimes you no longer remember?

This is naturally relevant for Gambit. His crimes remain a secret for almost the entirety of Joseph’s tenure on the team, and when they are revealed it is not through his choice. If Joseph can be held morally responsible for the crimes of Magneto, however (if we make the same assumption as the characters at the time and work from the position that Joseph is a de-aged amnesiac, rather than the clone he ultimately proved to be), then it is clear that Remy is no longer the X-Man most in need of absolution. Somehow, though, Joseph is accepted by the majority of the team almost immediately. Worse, Gambit watches Rogue, his former love who left him specifically because of her fears about what he might have done, become Joseph’s most stalwart defender, and perhaps more as well. Apparently, fighting and sacrificing for redemption is far less appealing to the observer than simply waking up one day and forgetting what you need to atone for in any case.

In this particular example, the flaw in Gambit’s logic is clear. Lacking recollection of Magneto’s messy and blood-stained past might save Joseph from some sleepless nights, but that’s irrelevant beyond it being Joseph’s good luck. The X-Men have already forgiven a Magneto entirely in possession of his memories once before, in the ‘80s, precisely because the deeds he chose to atone for were well-known, and because he asked no-one to forget them. Gambit, in contrast, keeps it all secret and hopes everyone else will forget any of it was ever there in the first place. It’s like apologising to someone for stealing their money, and offering to pay it back in monthly instalments, but refusing to disclose how much you stole in the first place.

In general, what should be done with Joseph is unclear. Or at least, one’s initial inclination might well diverge sharply from the law. As far as, say, Rogue is concerned, Magneto is gone. Not dead, necessarily, because Joseph may in theory regain those buried memories, but perhaps in a coma – a state which does not generally suggest itself to a jail cell. Whilst Joseph remains ignorant of his past, then, it could at least be argued that there is nothing to be done.

Is that true, though? Part of the answer to that depends on how one views justice, and weighs its various aims. We talk about those who die before sentencing as “escaping justice”. Rehabilitation (often the most pressing concern of the liberal, myself included) has now become a non-issue, but society’s need to see the guilty punished has been denied. If such is your primary concern, then it is very difficult to argue that someone can escape justice whilst going free. That might seem to depend on what we understand by the term “guilty”, but actually it doesn’t. The law is quite clear that amnesia is almost never a defence against verdict, merely a qualifying factor in punishment (this is why, to return to Joseph’s true nature, one should not consider an amnesiac criminal as entirely interchangeable with a clone of same).

Our question, then, is not whether Joseph should be held responsible, so much as what should be done about it. This boils down to considering his capacity to re-offend. If Joseph is truly divorced from “his” former life, then rehabilitation is not only impossible, but if one is interested in preventing Magneto from committing further crimes, locking him up with no memory as to why would seem to be entirely counter-productive.

But is that divorce total? His reaction to the Phalanx proves his memories are entirely missing. He is clearly in possession of a great deal of his education. He can speak English, he knows where America is, he doesn’t have any problems understanding the way a convent works. If all that remains (and yes, a lot of this simply stems from the way fiction treats amnesia), then can we be sure that the state of mine that led to him, say, sinking a Russian submarine with all hands is truly no longer in evidence? The nature of law states that whilst one is assumed innocent until proven guilty, once the latter is decided the burden is upon the defendant to prove they are deserving of clemency. This can be summed up by the following example: if you are found to be carrying heroin, claiming it was planted upon you will not save you from conviction, only (possibly) helping you out with your punishment. Whether or not this is fair is a discussion for another time. It remains true. Whether Joseph should escape jail time (or even the death penalty) is a matter for sentencing, not for the attribution of guilt.

Obviously, none of this is really relevant with regard to the X-Men. As Rogue, Emma Frost and (to a far greater extent, as we shall cover next month) Marrow make clear, the team is entirely willing to take in former criminals, even when their contrition for their earlier crimes is somewhat less than complete. At that point, however, we’re into the question of how much one should consider oneself beholden to a system you already know is desperately biased against you – a topic for another time. Let’s just say that the team tends to believe they’re a law unto themselves, and this is something that always works far better in fiction than it would in the real world. Moreover, perhaps the good a superhero can do is so great that we should consider serving with the X-Men as a form of saving lives (though there is probably an entire article to be written on whether the sheer power of superheroes should mean that they should be allowed to atone for serious crimes by what amounts to exceptionally useful community service), though that is of course an argument that the system can be improved, rather than ignored.

Let us leave things there. Joseph serves as an interesting experiment. Perhaps he was a failure as a character, but it must be said that anyone who can generate so much text on the subject of his existence (even compensating for my tendency for ludicrous verbosity) should not be immediately dismissed as irrelevant.

Next month, we take a very brief break from considering mass-murderers and ask ourselves what you're supposed to do when all your mutant power serves to do is get in the way of your true gift.

[1] I feel bad listing “sexy” as a trait, in all honesty, but then I don’t have a great deal to work with. I shall refrain from embarking upon another rant about how “strong woman” only counts as a character description if you secretly believe a woman behaving like she has no interest in being a second-class citizen is worthy of comment. It’s a mirage, a way of providing female protagonists without providing female characters.

[2] Hint: having Joseph explode with rage because his memories of Auschwitz have been stirred by bird aliens being eaten by Borg aliens? Not the way to go.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #34: The Ex-External

It has been noted more than once that it can be difficult for anyone to replicate the feelings they experienced the very first time they fell in love. There is something about that initial explosion of feeling that renders it unique and unrepeatable, no matter how unwisely it was embarked upon or how miserably it all fell apart. Montgomery Scott once remarked that the same is true of the first starship you serve on as chief engineer,

Obviously, I've never been chief engineer of a ship, star-borne or otherwise [1], so I can't comment. I do think, however, that the phenomenon often extends to long-running TV shows and comics (and even the more extensive film series, like Bond). There's something about the writers and characters that dominate the era you first encounter that make them special to you, entirely independently of how the period is viewed by more seasoned hands.

So it is with the X-Men output of the mid '90s. As many have documented, and as I have discussed before, many long-time readers are rather less than enamoured with this particular slice of mutant history. For me, though, it will always remain my "in". Moreover, those genetic anomalies who were serving at the time I first joined their adventures, persuaded by the excellent X-Men cartoon to pick up a shiny copy of UXM #323, will always remain "my" team. Storm and Wolverine, Archangel and Psylocke, Rogue, Gambit, Ice-Man, Bishop, Cyclops and Jean Grey, with Professor X to lead them.

All of those characters, I have discussed before. There was also a newcomer amongst the ranks, though. One mutant given the rank of X-Man at the exact same time I began to follow their story: Cannonball. He was not new to the X-Universe, any more than I was new to reading comics (though it had been a couple of years since I had picked one up, ever since I had lost patience with the slow pace and lacklustre ideas and art of the X-Files title), but we both took our first faltering steps into the world of the X-Men together.

Again, my uneducated view of Cannonball clashed with that held by those more knowledgeable in the ways of this fictional world. To me, Sam's nervousness, self-confidence issues and almost puppy-dog like desire to please made perfect sense for someone who has been suddenly thrust into the front lines with the world's best known and (depending on who you ask) most well-respected mutant team. For those who knew more of the early life of Samuel Guthrie, however, his sudden reduction to a shaky, unsure neophyte was ridiculous. "He spent years in X-Force" they told me (not that I had more than the dimmest idea of what that was at the time). "He served under Cable, mutant ball-breaker extraordinaire", they opined (Cable was from the future and had a gun; that was the limit of my knowledge, though in later years of course I learned that that was also the limit of Rob Liefeld's conception of characterisation). "He hasn't lacked self-confidence for ages".

I can see why it would piss older fans off when characters they care about take sudden left-turns in their development, or seem to have cast aside years - or even decades - of development. Hell, it's certainly happened to me enough times (witness Alan Davies' treatment of Marrow, or Chuck Austen's near-total destruction of Polaris). With Sam, though, even almost two decades on, and having read through a great deal of his earlier adventures (not including X-Force, naturally, I might be an obsessive completist, but I'm not a total idiot), the sudden change I was just too late to miss the first time round actually makes total sense.

This is all about the fathers.

It seems almost redundant to point out how much of the X-Universe boils down to difficulties with one's paternal parent. Sure, it's true. Xavier's father died when he was young, and his step-father was a cruel brute of a man. Scott's dad abandoned him on Earth. Iceman's old man was a vicious bigot. Wolverine once had no idea who his father is, but Sabertooth spent some time trying to claim the title, presumably in an attempt to fuck with his nemesis' mind as much as humanly possible. But whilst the history of Xavier's students is littered with deep-seated paternal issues, that's just a feature of drama in general. Lost was obsessed with the father/son dynamic. The West Wing dabbled far more than a little. Though the scales are tipping, fiction - or at least television and especially comics - is still somewhat male-heavy, and the two things a man is most likely to write about is women, and fathers.

Of course, show me a story about an absent and/or failed father, and I'll show you a surrogate father figure. Further, you can lay good odds on it being a two-way street, too; the vast majority of surrogate fathers are looking for surrogate sons themselves. Everyone is looking for something they lost, one way or another. Like I said, that's just what drama is.

In Cannonball's case, the loss is entirely literal; his father Thomas Guthrie passes away when Sam is sixteen; a victim of the coal-dust that fills the mine Thomas slaved in all his life. His father's ugly, undignified death thrusts Sam into the role of patriarch, as breadwinner for his mother and his veritable horde of siblings. He does this not out of necessity - Sam hardly lacks for brains and has already won a college scholarship - but out of duty, a sense so strong that he immediately begins work in the very mine that killed his father.

In this sense, Sam has already acquired metaphorical children; the younger members of clan Guthrie. We see this, years later, in the way he treats those junior Guthries lucky (or unfortunate) enough to develop mutant powers and head to Xavier's - all overbearing protection and hard-headed authoritarianism. It is difficult in the extreme to reconcile Cannonball + siblings with Cannonball + X-Men, but then that's the point. By simultaneously becoming an alternative father and looking for one of his own, Cannonball forms the final link in a very long chain.

It is impossible to fully understand Sam without recognising how far back the chain really goes. As it happens, it stretches all the way back to the beginning, to Almagordo and Doctor Brian Xavier, one of the first experts on mutant biology, who showed a distinct tendency to treat his son like a case-study, right up until the point he came down with an unfortunate case of nuclear-blast-to-the-face. Thus does Charles Xavier (who you may have heard of) lose his father, before watching in horror as his mother first marries Brian's former colleague and all-round vicious motherfucker (thus rendering the metaphorical literal), and then first turns to alcohol, and then passes away.

This, needless to say, is not good news for Charles. Whomever he turns to for the paternal influence lacking in Kurt "Never Knowlingly Gave A Child An Insufficient Beating" Marko, I am not sure; perhaps history does not recall it at all. What matters, though, is that he not only loses his father, but also his son, who develops in his teens into the lunatic time-bomb Legion, an MPD basket-case Charles is forced to view as a threat first, and his offspring second.

I doubt anyone reading this needs me to tell them who becomes Charles's surrogate son. And, true to form, Cyclops is searching for a replacement father, since his own Dad is first believed dead and then revealed to be a little too busy detonating spaceships and shagging interstellar foxes (and I mean that in the most literal sense possible) to check up on poor old Scott and Alex. Scott is the next link in the chain. The next step in the vicious cycle. Inevitably, then, he loses his own son Nathan, this time to a combination of demonic interference and a weird futuristic pestilence that results in the boy being taken into the far future.

This is where it gets complicated. Scott needs a surrogate son, to replace Nathan. Bizarrely - though of course that's a deeply relative label where comics are concerned - Scott's alternative to Nathan is Nathan, thanks to Cyclops and Phoenix travelling to the far future to raise Scott's child whilst inhabiting alternative bodies (and if anyone is starting to develop a continuity headache, I don't blame you). This arrangement can only last so long, though, and the next time Scott sees his son, he is fully grown, older than himself, and going by the name Cable. And Cable, of course, has his own problems with his son, the insane villain Genesis.

Here, at last, we can return to Sam. When he first arrives at the mansion, his pseudo-father is Professor X, and Sam panics under the pressure. He eventually learns to find his feet, only for Xavier to be replaced by Magneto. That goes badly at first as well - albeit for very different reasons (in fairness, being casually murdered and resurrected by a godlike alien entity is a damn good reason for a certain malaise, and Sam is far from being the only victim in that regard). Eventually he ends up under Cable's influence, and whilst I haven't read through that particular era (remember: Liefeld), if that didn't lead to a new wobble of self-confidence, it can only be because the writer handling him was too grotesquely incompetent to understand what was going on (did I mention Liefeld?).

There is a chain from Charles Xavier to Cyclops to Cable to Samuel Guthrie. What makes Cannonball unique is not simply that he exists at the end of that chain (even if he sees his siblings as his children in some sense, they most certainly do not return the feeling; Husk and Icarus can both attest to that), it's that at various times he's been thrust into the surrogate son role with all three father figures that exist earlier in the chain. And when that happens, every time (at least it damn well should be every time, and anyone who ever attempts to offer counter-evidence using Liefeld's scribblings is completely insane; see also "Shatterstar, Obvious Homosexuality Of") he is thrown backwards into the same stumbling, second-guessing clumsy bumbler. Because that's just how it goes. He has a new father to impress; one who has no reason whatsoever to be impressed, and impressing your father is the only thing that matters to more sons than you can imagine. It doesn't matter if it's been done before, it doesn't even matter if it's been done with the same man, a change of father means a change of outlook; returning to Xavier is no easier than meeting him in the first place. Our nebulous "long-time fans" might have been angry at what I saw in my first encounter with UXM, but to decry it as contrary to Sam's nature is very much to miss the point.

There's a brief scene in X-Men #54, just before Onslaught breaks loose, and all Hell with him, that Sam confesses to Cyclops that Xavier has just metaphorically beaten the crap out of him. Scott immediately knows what to say - he's been there, after all, he's higher up the chain - and confesses he too has been on the end of one of Xavier's verbal slap-downs. If this isn't the exact moment that Sam's loyalties shift, that Scott becomes his next new "father", then it must have happened pretty soon after (of course, Xavier going crazy and attempting to destroy the world probably has something to do with it).

This, then, is the way to understand Cannonball, especially in recent days. As Scott has found it within himself to become Xavier, Sam has found it within himself to become Scott. The good son, and the good soldier, though I suspect that Cannonball, like Cyclops before him, would struggle to understand the difference. The comparison is not entirely fair. Scott had the advantage of never having to switch his surrogate father (Cyclops pretty much imprinted onto Professor X like a baby duckling), but there's more besides. Xavier's stoicism might make him a good role model, and an examplar of his dream (right up until he freaked the fuck out, obviously), but it also makes him a lousy parent. I have some experience of the way those abused as children deal with becoming parents themselves, and whilst I would never claim to be an expert, I find must that is familiar in the way Xavier deals with Scott. It's all brain, no heart. All evaluation and no passion, because Charles can conceive of passion only as violence and loss (Magneto can hardly have helped in that regard, along with Xavier's momentary lapse of control that led to him briefly seizing the mind of his former lover, Amelia Voight).

All too often, these things get passed down through the generations, and so Scott is little better. As Emma Frost has often pointed out, he's basically an expressionless outer shell struggling to contain a roiling, seething mass of repressed emotion just beneath the surface - in direct contrast to his actual father, and his hot-headed brother. Cable is perhaps less robotic (which is ironic, given half is body has been conquered by a techno-organic violence), but he's still so focused on the mission that other considerations are entirely ignored.

Sam, it turns out, is more than the latest iteration. He is the goal. In him, at last, the desire to do his duty, to fight for the dream and his friends, are balanced with his other passions. Even whilst he has one eye on the whole board, on the long game, he can process the personal (though admittedly on occasion he needs Dani Moonstar to beat it in to him). The very first thing I ever saw anyone say to Cannonball was this: "Hanging out with Cable has toughened you up... you got guts." And when Wolverine tells you you've got guts, you believe it. What's just as important, though, is that Logan's comment came about in the midst of a confrontation in which Cannonball was refusing to let him hurt a defenceless Sabertooth. Partially because he had been tasked to protect the quiescent Creed, no doubt, but also partially because of how important his charge was to his girlfriend Boomer. His loyalty and tenacity ultimately stretches decades into the future, where (in one time line at least) he gives his life willingly to save to save Cable, one of his replacement fathers, and Hope, the child who in a very real sense is the daughter of all mutant-kind. [2]

In short, for all Cyclops insists that there is no reason to believe mutant-kind's next leader need be Sam, it cannot be ignored that each iteration in this strange, bitter-sweet process is producing someone more balanced, more stable, and is doing so without sacrificing anything. If you like, the primary dynasty of the X-Men is mutating, finding new and better forms. Readying itself for tomorrow. Just as Charles, and perhaps Brian before him, had always dreamed.

If he can avoid fucking it up.

Next time: we consider the relevancy of the centuries-old nature vs nurture debate when it is applied to a man who is the clone of an unbalanced, massively powerful mutant, and was raised by a lunatic tyrant who was sexually attracted to the man who bears your DNA.

[1] I once piloted a motorboat which had three speeds, only two of which involved any actual motion, and only one of those was forwards. I'm guessing that doesn't count.

[2] In the process, of course, he proves once and for all that Cannonball is not the immortal he was briefly and pointlessly labelled as back in the early '90s, by someone going by the name "Rob Liefeld".