A sinister ideology (reprinted from a fanzine of a few years ago)
The seeds of the evolutionist idea were planted in the superhero genre from the beginning; that is, from the invention of Superman. The first explanation of Superman's powers had nothing to do with red suns; in ACTION COMICS #1, the baby's home planet was simply said to be evolved, I forget whether thousands or millions of years beyond ours. For this reason, we infer, the baby immediately showed inhuman strength.
It would be unfair to attribute any very developped socio-biological theory to two teen-agers like Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who had simply had a vision and tried to make a living from it. The vague allusion to fallen Krypton's high degree of evolution was probably never thought through; it was just a part of the atmosphere of legend that the two youths had envisaged around their human god, a glimpse of great and doomed things. It was potent, and ever since the great figure of Superman has partly owed its golden aura to nostalgia for Krypton, a lost and glowing glory.
But while Krypton's memory was cultivated as carefully as the rather modest talents involved allowed, one thing was discarded; the pseudo-biological explanation of Superman's powers. More mature minds decided on a different kind of pseudo-science, involving not evolution but solar radiation. The classical Superman legend knows nothing of an evolution beyond that of homo sapiens on poor ol' planet Earth; Krypton was a great fallen civilization, but not racially superior.
In 1963, a talent of another order resurrected the idea of homo sapiens evolving into a super-powered creature: Jack Kirby created THE MUTANTS, quickly renamed THE X-MEN. I feel confident that the idea belongs to Kirby rather than Lee. It's exactly in the line of Kirby's SILVER STAR, involves the genetic concerns of such Kirby titles as ETERNALS, KAMANDI or even the Arnim Zola story in CAPTAIN AMERICA, and it's quite unlike those characters and stories where Lee's influence is beyond argument, such as Iron Man or the Silver Surfer's John Buscema stories. Stan Lee, curiously for such a showman-like character, is a heavily moralistic writer with a certain amount of fascination with mysticism. Iron Man's armour is as magical an artifact as Green Lantern's power ring (it is, to this day, impossible to make motor exoskeletons for disabled people: there is no way to provide enough power). He received it from an elderly guru-like teacher in an Asian jungle, for all the world like Dr.Strange. And just like the sorcerer supreme, a moneygrubbing medical materialist until his encounter with the Ancient One, Tony Stark, before his Asian episode, was a worthless rich fop. In both cases, whether consciously or not, the West is contrasted with the East in terms of money against Wisdom. This is the mind of Stan Lee as shown in works where his writing primacy cannot be doubted. No Kirby work shows any similar dichotomy; and no work by Lee shows any serious interest in mutation, controlled biology, or genetics.
The world did not exactly stand still when X-MEN began. The new title was one of the less successful of the Lee-Kirby age, and was soon handed over to the distinctly second-string team of Roth and Thomas. Beyond a vague allusion to the Sub-Mariner being a mutant, it had practically no impact on the Marvel Universe of the sixties. Such disastrous concepts as The Mutant Master show that post-Kirby authors didn't understand the idea of mutant human beings at all; Kirby had incarnated the future of mankind in those few youths with the super-powers, but this was lost in the fog. To the young Roy Thomas, mutants seemed to be not the image of the future, but just another human sub-species like the Inhumans or Namor's Atlanteans, existing with no particular temporal or evolutionary prospects, the object of purely material and present-day conspiracies. He seemed to recover some of that dimension in the brief Adams period, when he pointed out that homo sapiens is in the same position to homo superior as Neanderthal man was to Cro-Magnon; but the title was practically cancelled soon after.
Resurrected under unpromising omens in the seventies, it achieved unexpected success thanks to the ruinous talent of Chris Claremont. It was the same time as I was coming to comics, and Claremont became one of my heroes. X-MEN #100 thrilled me; X-MEN #137 shook me to the core. Soon after, though, I found myself struggling with unadmitted doubts. For a while, I denied the evidence (I was young) and clung to my idol; then Heidi MacDonald's article in THE COMICS JOURNAL #99 opened the floodgates. There was something wrong with Claremont's recent work; and, more than wrong, maleodorous.
The turning point was the memorable X-MEN 141. No masterpiece ever spawned such a progeny of horrors, not just from imitators, but from its very author. Until #141, no Claremont story had had anything to do with mutation as such. The central impulse in the series, though often kept to the back of the picture, was the development of the figure of Jean Grey/Phoenix, and, as the Phoenix, Jean Grey was not a mutant at all; she was a goddess. In the Marvel Universe, this is a clear and significant distinction.
This was the high noon of Claremont's talent, before a mixture of extremely ill-digested feminist and libertarian ideology (bear in mind that the single biggest influence on his work is the ultra-libertarian Robert Heinlein) took hold of his mind, and a demon of overwriting of his pen; and it has really nothing whatsoever to do with any biological or social content. It's all about personal responsibility. (It was, also, forced into its proper shape by orders from Jim Shooter; left to himself, Claremont would have delivered a limp ending with Jean Grey surviving and de-powered. This, which we didn't know at the time, was a dreadful omen: how often, thereafter, was Claremont to kill and resurrect one, many, or all X-Men for melodramatic effect?)
But when the impulse of Jean Grey’s tragedy had spent itself, Claremont changed direction. He resurrected Kirby's evolutionary hypothesis, Sentinels and all. Now, Kirby's ideas had not been very structured; he produced them scattershot as they came, in a period in which he drew five titles a month, and Lee wrote fifteen. He and Lee were more interested in Magneto's power lust or the Juggernaut's fury than in the Sentinels, created extempore to comment on the civil-rights struggles of the period.
But Claremont treated them with an encyclopedist's care and a commentator's punctilio. He identified the book's core concept as the prospect of a future mutant humanity - and the opposition to it. That had never been the case before, save for a couple of episodic stories, one by Lee and Kirby, another by Thomas and Adams. Until #137, X-MEN had been about Jean Grey's personal responsibility; from #141 on, it started thinking Big Thoughts about The Present and The Future.
I suppose Sentinels and related concepts might have been harmless as long as they were not taken too seriously or as long as a mind as large as Kirby's held them in balance with other human elements. Raised to the centre of the X-universe, they proved deadly. In order to have a story at all, the book began to assume that large swathes of common humanity hate and fear mutants. It developped an assumption that homo sapiens, the genetic present of mankind, looks on homo superior, its future, with fear unconsciously underlain with hate and jealousy. Mutant mankind is under threat of persecution simply because it exists; and under the fear which Claremont and his successors displayed in ordinary mankind towards its own future, it was easy to perceive the jealous hate of an evolutionary dead end for a group which has that terribly terribly precious treasure - evolutionary progress.
At roughly the same time, an older Jack Kirby briefly returned to his evolution-theory concerns with SILVER STAR. He, with his decades of thought and experience, did not include any indication of prejudice against "the next step". To the contrary, his point (a typical Kirby point) was to show that mankind may evolve to physically "higher" forms and powers without in any way becoming morally better than homo sapiens. "Man by any name" - says one of his characters - "is nothing more than his old sweet self".
Kirby had been thinking about genetic progress for forty years; and his final conclusion was that it had no moral significance at all - except perhaps that mutant powers such as those he gave to mad Darius Drumm would multiply the power of human evil a hundredfold. Otherwise, man by any name is nothing more than his old sweet self. Claremont, on the other hand, more or less allowed himself to drift into a sinister position in which the possession of mutant powers - the possession of the evolutionary future - is a positive good, and those who are seen as in any way opposing it are directly, whatever their reasons, in the wrong.
In fact the very idea that the present hates and persecutes the future is totally groundless, unless we all turn determinist. Unless we believe that everything in time is irrevocably fixed, there is no such thing as a "future", the future being by definition "what is not - yet"; and if the future has no existence until it becomes present - which, from a human point of view, it does not - then it is complete balderdash to presume that any feelings - hate, love, even mild annoyance - may be entertained for what is nothing at all. You can feel nothing about nothing; only things that exist, or that are believed to exist, can be hated. Indeed, we have no guarantee that anything will go on existing even another second, let alone that an immense picture of a pre-determined “future” will ever dominate us. But the ideological content of Marvel's most popular title of the eighties and nineties - a book that has helped to form the minds of hundreds of thousands young Americans - is nothing else except just that the present of mankind hates and fears the future; that the genetically inferior sapiens stock hates and fears the genetically superior superior one, because it feels itself threatened.
I could give this ideology a terrible name; and I will. But first I want to point out how far this obsession with mankind's supposed genetic future has gone. X-MEN ANNUAL 11 features a sort of cathedral in space where races are tested, and those found worthy are allowed to evolve. After hundreds of races (graphically shown by their statues standing outside the cathedral) have been tested and found wanting, guess who it is who comes along and wins the prize of continued genetic progress? Yes, folks, it's our own dear X-Men, led by that champion of human nobility Wolverine. Henceforth Earth's mankind, sole among creation's races, will have the privilege to evolve! Boy, aren't we lucky! Sure, it's in order to let humanity evolve genetically that heroes fight! Isn't it? Nothing to do with good or evil or right and wrong; those are mere disguises; it is genetic superiority and genetic evolution that are heroes' ultimate goal. Heroes fight to improve the race, or so that a superior race may prevail.
This ties with a horrible concept conceived by Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart: the Skrull and Kree (then the Marvel Universe's main alien races) were at an evolutionary dead end, and hated and feared the people of Earth who still had an evolutionary future. Now, let us make one thing clear: there is no such thing as Krees or Skrulls. Even if intelligent races existed elsewhere in space, one thing is certain: they would not be Krees or Skrulls. Krees and Skrulls are products of our own homo sapiens imagination.
Some readers may by now be thoroughly confused. What is this you are saying: that, because super-beings and alien races don't really exist, you shouldn't invent them? Are you arguing for flat materialistic pseudo-realism?
No, I'm not. We may do anything at all. We may imagine, like Luke Walsh, somebody who lives time backwards; we may work out, like Dennis Mallonee, delicate psychological problems resulting from quite impossible experiences like being kidnapped by an extra-dimensional goddess as a child (Lady Arcane), assuming another person's body (Lady Arcane and Sparkplug), or aging twice as fast (Flare) or half as fast (The Huntsman and his father) as normal human beings. You may do anything you want - as long as it has imaginative, intellectual and moral relevance to human life.
My point is not that Claremont’s mutant ideology, with its Marvel predecessors, has no moral relevance to real life; it is that the kind of relevance it has is the wrong kind. In the case of the Phoenix epic, both the moral and the imaginative content of the story were obvious. We felt the death of Jean Grey as the death of a friend; and we saw the inevitability of that end - Jean's seduction by Mastermind and the sins, small and great, that she ends up committing, all built up to it. There were some intellectual weaknesses, which I may one day examine; but imaginatively and morally, the progression was magnificent.
The deeper, on the other hand, you go into the content of the mutant concepts, the worse they look. Imaginatively, the pseudo-biological context is chilling, turning the human warmth of love and hate into a mere side-issue of biological processes. The Krees and Skrulls hate mankind because they lack certain genes, and not for warm-blooded reasons such as that they want to take our beautiful planet for themselves or that our super-powered representatives often thwart their will; mankind hates and fears mutants because they are genetically inferior, and not for any reason that actually made neighbouring peoples or castes hate each other.
The moral and imaginative power of a conflict story depends on what is being fought over. The thing being fought over should be worthy to be fought over. This is the one great weakness, for instance, of Disney’s otherwise magnificent Snow-White, in which the immature and simpering Snow-White does not seem a person we would get up to offer a seat, let alone risk our lives, for; and the strongest single point in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which Minna Harker, sweet, clever, intelligent, practical and heroically courageous, is clearly a woman for whom any man of sense would easily lay down his life out of sheer good taste.
Now Claremont and his followers tell us that future conflicts will be fought for the sake of genetic advancement. Tell me that you care. People will fight for a country, for people, for a woman or a friend or a relative, for justice, even for a football team; but who would go to war for genetics?
- unless, of course, some sort of perverted rhetoric had managed to invest this empty and abstract notion with something of the warmth of home, neighbourhood and friends, or of the fire of justice and truth. But such rhetoric would be, I repeat, simply a perversion.
Imaginatively, then, genetic evolutionism is repulsive. Intellectually, it contradicts itself disastrously on at least two levels; the biological (if the Skrulls congenitally lack certain genes, how can they know enough to resent what they lack? You only miss what you know you can have) and the philosophical (if mutant mankind can lay claim to the future, then the future is pre-determined; if the future is not pre-determined, then it's wrong to value mutant mankind on the ground that it represents mankind's future, since there's no such thing).
Worst of all, it places all the "inferior" races beyond the reach of moral judgement. Morality is always individual; but here we have whole races judged and condemned in advance - races whose every individual is born into the world under the heavy doom of lusting for genetic potential it is condemned never to have. It is in their nature to be evil towards a better genetic stock, and we should not blame them for it - although of course any manifestation of that innate evil must draw forth our forces, not for the sake of justice - an irrelevant concept here - but because hostility between them and us is inborn in the nature of things.
This is how Englehart and Thomas imagined races other than human, before Claremont imported the idea into the relationship between humans. I think we are entitled to ask what kind of a picture of the real world this suggests: how does this set of facts reflect on the real world? Well: Marvel alien races - the Skrulls, the Kree, the Shi'ar - are not only different racial groups, but different organized societies. I cannot remember one major Marvel space race that is not described as an Empire; that is to say, a sovereign State with institutions whose origin is independent from that of "our lot". I don't think we are far wrong in seeing in them imaginative projections of non-American, especially non-Western, nations; I mean not so much single states or cultures - it's clearly silly to identify the Skrulls with China, the Krees with Russia, the Badoon with Japan, etc. - as much as of the fact itself that cultures alien to America exist and cover much of the world. I am saying that the description of alien races reveals, unconsciously, the writer's reaction to the fact of sharing our globe with a lot of different people.
So we are told that only "our lot" have the potential of growth, the "future", inherent in us; that other civilizations, indiscriminately, will have to give way to our genetically superior strain. This is bad enough for what it unconsciously says about America’s underlying feeling about other countries and other cultures; but Claremont has brought the same poison to human life on earth. Now it is not even a matter of the unacknowledged superiority complex of the world’s one surviving superpower, but of social relations within the superpower itself. Claremont curses the vast majority of the American public to hate and impotent fear, reserving the chrism of genetic evolution for a minority of the elect who know each other but remain secret from the unenlightened majority. In the books, homo superior is "those near to us", "our kind", "our race", "our lot"; they are those the heroes recognize, those with whom they almost always band together, those with whom they have dealings, our neighbours, the Old School Tie - of Professor Xavier's Academy. Even where there are clashes between mutants, they are in the nature of internecine warfare.
This is the group that stands out, the group whose genetic evolution must not be snuffed out, the group which ANNUAL 11 has anointed with the promise of genetic evolution. The rest of mankind are jealous, frightened, stupid, inferior outsiders, deprived of the understanding that comes - no doubt - with superior genes; to be given, as long as they don’t endanger the supreme goal of genetic evolution, the kind of protection that superior beings can afford to give their inferiors; but to be resisted with all our powers if they ever look as though they would like to interfere with us - because, of course, any interference from them can only be identified with the beginnings of terror and massacre. There is no half-way house, no reasonable compromise; one line in one of Claremont's issues made it clear - "registration of mutants today, concentration camps tomorrow."
Claremont's re-orientation of Magneto's character is highly significant in this context. Kirby's Magneto rang with echoes of Hitler, and the imaginary army his servant Mastermind raised in San Marcos wore Nazi uniforms. Arnold Drake's Magneto was literally the Devil; Roy Thomas and Neal Adams made him the snake in the Garden of Eden, first insinuatingly sweet, then vicious; John Byrne saw him as a sadistic sleazeball.
Almost as soon as Byrne was off the book, however, Claremont began the work of making Magneto sympathetic and justifiable. He gave him an Auschwitz past and a tormented conscience, in howling contrast with all preceeding appearances. Consider above all that he made him an old friend of Charles Xavier's - quite unnecessarily - and indeed placed him in Xavier's place at the head of... the Old School! the Old School Tie! So: if you are a mutant working (or so you say) to protect mutants, then your deeds, however hideous, are excusable. Previous writers, however untalented, had applied simple morality to the actions of Magneto: if a man used his powers violently and for self-aggrandisement, then he was a villain, end of story. But to Claremont, the expected misfortunes of his fictional mutants are enough, if not to quite justify, at least to make comprehensible and sympathetic even the crimes of Magneto. He was doing it in a good cause; misguided as to the means, but not as to the end.
It's worth noting that the same courtesy is not extended to anti-mutant humans. Claremont grants the good intentions of a very few of his Sentinel-minded characters, but they are the good intentions of dangerous fools. As a phenomenon, opposition to mutants is condemned beyond appeal. The very idea of the Mutant Registration Act is presented as inevitably tending to the extermination of mutants, where in actual fact a Government that neglected to keep some sort of control on the holders of potentially lethal powers would be, not liberal, but criminally remiss. The whole concept, in short, is presented with an unpleasant hysteria that reminds one of the worst political propaganda. Claremont has got so caught in his special pleading for his imaginary mutants that he has taken the worst characteristics of real-life special interest groups.
I said I would give the mutant ideology a terrible name. It is: Nazism.
It's not enough to call it, generically, racism. Racism such as was practiced in South Africa had no perspective in time; it dreamt of an arrested state in which separate racial groups will remain themselves, without miscegenation or invasion of other's areas, for eternity. No South African ever imagined, I suppose, that the white race was rally meant to erase South Africa's black nations from the map, and they retained a sentimental regard, in particular, for the Zulus, the toughest warriors of them all; a favour no Nazi would have extended to any Russian or Jew, however brave. There was a sort of aesthetic tribalism about Afrikaner racism, that dreamed of black warriors untouched by white contact, waving their assegais and ox-hide shields for ever; but in a Nazi Europe, inferior races would have been subjected to a strict time limit - and as for romantically idealizing their past, well!
Nazism is the only ideology whose core is genetic advance. It exists for the sake of genetic advance. The whole Nazi party, the whole state structure, were dedicated to and justified by the purpose of genetic advance. To the Nazis, "superior race" did not just mean, as in South Africa, the race in which political power was vested; it meant the race that would ultimately supplant all others.
I assert that Nazi ideology views inferior races exactly as the Marvel/Claremont ideology views non-mutants. Inferior races - especially the nether race, the Jews - do no more belong to the same mankind as Aryans, than homo sapiens, Krees, Skrulls, and other races belong to the same mankind as homo superior. They subconsciously know this; they hate and fear the Aryans because of their innate genetic inferiority. So they plot against them, they persecute them, they try to prevent their numerical and political growth. Am I, or am I not, describing the Sentinel state of mind? Mutants are hated and feared because they exist. Any desire to control and regulate mutants is represented as persecution (and did anybody notice the sublime unconscious cheek involved in Claremont's use of such symbols as Auschwitz?). If anybody does not smell the reek of the ruin of reason in this, I do.
I'm not charging all the hundreds of thousands of X-fans with Nazi tendencies. Most readers, when I was involved in comics fandom, tended to love the characters and hate the concepts. And indeed, even in the offending X-MEN ANNUAL 11, we can find evidence of Claremont's talent. The progression from a howling drunk Wolverine, offensive to eye and nostril ("A real class act!" sneers the elegant, fair-haired Alex Summers when the Canadian throws a whole can of beer down his neck and belches) to the hero who alone can stand the test, would, in itself, be a fine, thought-provoking moral idea; the best of mankind may indeed be found among what seems the worst, sometimes.
But this loses itself in what is frankly a rape of the Christian story: mankind is genetically saved by Wolverine's blood, death and resurrection. As "Christian" Nazis raped the Gospels in the interest of their genetic ideals - you may know of the "nordic Christ" who "died to save us from Hebraic degeneracy" - so too Christ/Wolverine dies and sheds his blood to save mankind's genetic future. Alan Davis, artist on the story, looks damned unconvinced, as well he might; when Wolverine comes to his great-big climactic decision, the usually reliable Davis draws him with a "wot, no party?" expression that deflates the whole scene. He, at least, is not collaborating with this blasphemy.
This is the rake's progress of genetic evolutionism from its childish beginnings in ACTION COMICS 1 to its obscene flowering in recent X-titles. I do not think that anything can be done at this time of day to reverse it, but I intend, at least, to point it out.
It would be unfair to attribute any very developped socio-biological theory to two teen-agers like Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who had simply had a vision and tried to make a living from it. The vague allusion to fallen Krypton's high degree of evolution was probably never thought through; it was just a part of the atmosphere of legend that the two youths had envisaged around their human god, a glimpse of great and doomed things. It was potent, and ever since the great figure of Superman has partly owed its golden aura to nostalgia for Krypton, a lost and glowing glory.
But while Krypton's memory was cultivated as carefully as the rather modest talents involved allowed, one thing was discarded; the pseudo-biological explanation of Superman's powers. More mature minds decided on a different kind of pseudo-science, involving not evolution but solar radiation. The classical Superman legend knows nothing of an evolution beyond that of homo sapiens on poor ol' planet Earth; Krypton was a great fallen civilization, but not racially superior.
In 1963, a talent of another order resurrected the idea of homo sapiens evolving into a super-powered creature: Jack Kirby created THE MUTANTS, quickly renamed THE X-MEN. I feel confident that the idea belongs to Kirby rather than Lee. It's exactly in the line of Kirby's SILVER STAR, involves the genetic concerns of such Kirby titles as ETERNALS, KAMANDI or even the Arnim Zola story in CAPTAIN AMERICA, and it's quite unlike those characters and stories where Lee's influence is beyond argument, such as Iron Man or the Silver Surfer's John Buscema stories. Stan Lee, curiously for such a showman-like character, is a heavily moralistic writer with a certain amount of fascination with mysticism. Iron Man's armour is as magical an artifact as Green Lantern's power ring (it is, to this day, impossible to make motor exoskeletons for disabled people: there is no way to provide enough power). He received it from an elderly guru-like teacher in an Asian jungle, for all the world like Dr.Strange. And just like the sorcerer supreme, a moneygrubbing medical materialist until his encounter with the Ancient One, Tony Stark, before his Asian episode, was a worthless rich fop. In both cases, whether consciously or not, the West is contrasted with the East in terms of money against Wisdom. This is the mind of Stan Lee as shown in works where his writing primacy cannot be doubted. No Kirby work shows any similar dichotomy; and no work by Lee shows any serious interest in mutation, controlled biology, or genetics.
The world did not exactly stand still when X-MEN began. The new title was one of the less successful of the Lee-Kirby age, and was soon handed over to the distinctly second-string team of Roth and Thomas. Beyond a vague allusion to the Sub-Mariner being a mutant, it had practically no impact on the Marvel Universe of the sixties. Such disastrous concepts as The Mutant Master show that post-Kirby authors didn't understand the idea of mutant human beings at all; Kirby had incarnated the future of mankind in those few youths with the super-powers, but this was lost in the fog. To the young Roy Thomas, mutants seemed to be not the image of the future, but just another human sub-species like the Inhumans or Namor's Atlanteans, existing with no particular temporal or evolutionary prospects, the object of purely material and present-day conspiracies. He seemed to recover some of that dimension in the brief Adams period, when he pointed out that homo sapiens is in the same position to homo superior as Neanderthal man was to Cro-Magnon; but the title was practically cancelled soon after.
Resurrected under unpromising omens in the seventies, it achieved unexpected success thanks to the ruinous talent of Chris Claremont. It was the same time as I was coming to comics, and Claremont became one of my heroes. X-MEN #100 thrilled me; X-MEN #137 shook me to the core. Soon after, though, I found myself struggling with unadmitted doubts. For a while, I denied the evidence (I was young) and clung to my idol; then Heidi MacDonald's article in THE COMICS JOURNAL #99 opened the floodgates. There was something wrong with Claremont's recent work; and, more than wrong, maleodorous.
The turning point was the memorable X-MEN 141. No masterpiece ever spawned such a progeny of horrors, not just from imitators, but from its very author. Until #141, no Claremont story had had anything to do with mutation as such. The central impulse in the series, though often kept to the back of the picture, was the development of the figure of Jean Grey/Phoenix, and, as the Phoenix, Jean Grey was not a mutant at all; she was a goddess. In the Marvel Universe, this is a clear and significant distinction.
This was the high noon of Claremont's talent, before a mixture of extremely ill-digested feminist and libertarian ideology (bear in mind that the single biggest influence on his work is the ultra-libertarian Robert Heinlein) took hold of his mind, and a demon of overwriting of his pen; and it has really nothing whatsoever to do with any biological or social content. It's all about personal responsibility. (It was, also, forced into its proper shape by orders from Jim Shooter; left to himself, Claremont would have delivered a limp ending with Jean Grey surviving and de-powered. This, which we didn't know at the time, was a dreadful omen: how often, thereafter, was Claremont to kill and resurrect one, many, or all X-Men for melodramatic effect?)
But when the impulse of Jean Grey’s tragedy had spent itself, Claremont changed direction. He resurrected Kirby's evolutionary hypothesis, Sentinels and all. Now, Kirby's ideas had not been very structured; he produced them scattershot as they came, in a period in which he drew five titles a month, and Lee wrote fifteen. He and Lee were more interested in Magneto's power lust or the Juggernaut's fury than in the Sentinels, created extempore to comment on the civil-rights struggles of the period.
But Claremont treated them with an encyclopedist's care and a commentator's punctilio. He identified the book's core concept as the prospect of a future mutant humanity - and the opposition to it. That had never been the case before, save for a couple of episodic stories, one by Lee and Kirby, another by Thomas and Adams. Until #137, X-MEN had been about Jean Grey's personal responsibility; from #141 on, it started thinking Big Thoughts about The Present and The Future.
I suppose Sentinels and related concepts might have been harmless as long as they were not taken too seriously or as long as a mind as large as Kirby's held them in balance with other human elements. Raised to the centre of the X-universe, they proved deadly. In order to have a story at all, the book began to assume that large swathes of common humanity hate and fear mutants. It developped an assumption that homo sapiens, the genetic present of mankind, looks on homo superior, its future, with fear unconsciously underlain with hate and jealousy. Mutant mankind is under threat of persecution simply because it exists; and under the fear which Claremont and his successors displayed in ordinary mankind towards its own future, it was easy to perceive the jealous hate of an evolutionary dead end for a group which has that terribly terribly precious treasure - evolutionary progress.
At roughly the same time, an older Jack Kirby briefly returned to his evolution-theory concerns with SILVER STAR. He, with his decades of thought and experience, did not include any indication of prejudice against "the next step". To the contrary, his point (a typical Kirby point) was to show that mankind may evolve to physically "higher" forms and powers without in any way becoming morally better than homo sapiens. "Man by any name" - says one of his characters - "is nothing more than his old sweet self".
Kirby had been thinking about genetic progress for forty years; and his final conclusion was that it had no moral significance at all - except perhaps that mutant powers such as those he gave to mad Darius Drumm would multiply the power of human evil a hundredfold. Otherwise, man by any name is nothing more than his old sweet self. Claremont, on the other hand, more or less allowed himself to drift into a sinister position in which the possession of mutant powers - the possession of the evolutionary future - is a positive good, and those who are seen as in any way opposing it are directly, whatever their reasons, in the wrong.
In fact the very idea that the present hates and persecutes the future is totally groundless, unless we all turn determinist. Unless we believe that everything in time is irrevocably fixed, there is no such thing as a "future", the future being by definition "what is not - yet"; and if the future has no existence until it becomes present - which, from a human point of view, it does not - then it is complete balderdash to presume that any feelings - hate, love, even mild annoyance - may be entertained for what is nothing at all. You can feel nothing about nothing; only things that exist, or that are believed to exist, can be hated. Indeed, we have no guarantee that anything will go on existing even another second, let alone that an immense picture of a pre-determined “future” will ever dominate us. But the ideological content of Marvel's most popular title of the eighties and nineties - a book that has helped to form the minds of hundreds of thousands young Americans - is nothing else except just that the present of mankind hates and fears the future; that the genetically inferior sapiens stock hates and fears the genetically superior superior one, because it feels itself threatened.
I could give this ideology a terrible name; and I will. But first I want to point out how far this obsession with mankind's supposed genetic future has gone. X-MEN ANNUAL 11 features a sort of cathedral in space where races are tested, and those found worthy are allowed to evolve. After hundreds of races (graphically shown by their statues standing outside the cathedral) have been tested and found wanting, guess who it is who comes along and wins the prize of continued genetic progress? Yes, folks, it's our own dear X-Men, led by that champion of human nobility Wolverine. Henceforth Earth's mankind, sole among creation's races, will have the privilege to evolve! Boy, aren't we lucky! Sure, it's in order to let humanity evolve genetically that heroes fight! Isn't it? Nothing to do with good or evil or right and wrong; those are mere disguises; it is genetic superiority and genetic evolution that are heroes' ultimate goal. Heroes fight to improve the race, or so that a superior race may prevail.
This ties with a horrible concept conceived by Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart: the Skrull and Kree (then the Marvel Universe's main alien races) were at an evolutionary dead end, and hated and feared the people of Earth who still had an evolutionary future. Now, let us make one thing clear: there is no such thing as Krees or Skrulls. Even if intelligent races existed elsewhere in space, one thing is certain: they would not be Krees or Skrulls. Krees and Skrulls are products of our own homo sapiens imagination.
Some readers may by now be thoroughly confused. What is this you are saying: that, because super-beings and alien races don't really exist, you shouldn't invent them? Are you arguing for flat materialistic pseudo-realism?
No, I'm not. We may do anything at all. We may imagine, like Luke Walsh, somebody who lives time backwards; we may work out, like Dennis Mallonee, delicate psychological problems resulting from quite impossible experiences like being kidnapped by an extra-dimensional goddess as a child (Lady Arcane), assuming another person's body (Lady Arcane and Sparkplug), or aging twice as fast (Flare) or half as fast (The Huntsman and his father) as normal human beings. You may do anything you want - as long as it has imaginative, intellectual and moral relevance to human life.
My point is not that Claremont’s mutant ideology, with its Marvel predecessors, has no moral relevance to real life; it is that the kind of relevance it has is the wrong kind. In the case of the Phoenix epic, both the moral and the imaginative content of the story were obvious. We felt the death of Jean Grey as the death of a friend; and we saw the inevitability of that end - Jean's seduction by Mastermind and the sins, small and great, that she ends up committing, all built up to it. There were some intellectual weaknesses, which I may one day examine; but imaginatively and morally, the progression was magnificent.
The deeper, on the other hand, you go into the content of the mutant concepts, the worse they look. Imaginatively, the pseudo-biological context is chilling, turning the human warmth of love and hate into a mere side-issue of biological processes. The Krees and Skrulls hate mankind because they lack certain genes, and not for warm-blooded reasons such as that they want to take our beautiful planet for themselves or that our super-powered representatives often thwart their will; mankind hates and fears mutants because they are genetically inferior, and not for any reason that actually made neighbouring peoples or castes hate each other.
The moral and imaginative power of a conflict story depends on what is being fought over. The thing being fought over should be worthy to be fought over. This is the one great weakness, for instance, of Disney’s otherwise magnificent Snow-White, in which the immature and simpering Snow-White does not seem a person we would get up to offer a seat, let alone risk our lives, for; and the strongest single point in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which Minna Harker, sweet, clever, intelligent, practical and heroically courageous, is clearly a woman for whom any man of sense would easily lay down his life out of sheer good taste.
Now Claremont and his followers tell us that future conflicts will be fought for the sake of genetic advancement. Tell me that you care. People will fight for a country, for people, for a woman or a friend or a relative, for justice, even for a football team; but who would go to war for genetics?
- unless, of course, some sort of perverted rhetoric had managed to invest this empty and abstract notion with something of the warmth of home, neighbourhood and friends, or of the fire of justice and truth. But such rhetoric would be, I repeat, simply a perversion.
Imaginatively, then, genetic evolutionism is repulsive. Intellectually, it contradicts itself disastrously on at least two levels; the biological (if the Skrulls congenitally lack certain genes, how can they know enough to resent what they lack? You only miss what you know you can have) and the philosophical (if mutant mankind can lay claim to the future, then the future is pre-determined; if the future is not pre-determined, then it's wrong to value mutant mankind on the ground that it represents mankind's future, since there's no such thing).
Worst of all, it places all the "inferior" races beyond the reach of moral judgement. Morality is always individual; but here we have whole races judged and condemned in advance - races whose every individual is born into the world under the heavy doom of lusting for genetic potential it is condemned never to have. It is in their nature to be evil towards a better genetic stock, and we should not blame them for it - although of course any manifestation of that innate evil must draw forth our forces, not for the sake of justice - an irrelevant concept here - but because hostility between them and us is inborn in the nature of things.
This is how Englehart and Thomas imagined races other than human, before Claremont imported the idea into the relationship between humans. I think we are entitled to ask what kind of a picture of the real world this suggests: how does this set of facts reflect on the real world? Well: Marvel alien races - the Skrulls, the Kree, the Shi'ar - are not only different racial groups, but different organized societies. I cannot remember one major Marvel space race that is not described as an Empire; that is to say, a sovereign State with institutions whose origin is independent from that of "our lot". I don't think we are far wrong in seeing in them imaginative projections of non-American, especially non-Western, nations; I mean not so much single states or cultures - it's clearly silly to identify the Skrulls with China, the Krees with Russia, the Badoon with Japan, etc. - as much as of the fact itself that cultures alien to America exist and cover much of the world. I am saying that the description of alien races reveals, unconsciously, the writer's reaction to the fact of sharing our globe with a lot of different people.
So we are told that only "our lot" have the potential of growth, the "future", inherent in us; that other civilizations, indiscriminately, will have to give way to our genetically superior strain. This is bad enough for what it unconsciously says about America’s underlying feeling about other countries and other cultures; but Claremont has brought the same poison to human life on earth. Now it is not even a matter of the unacknowledged superiority complex of the world’s one surviving superpower, but of social relations within the superpower itself. Claremont curses the vast majority of the American public to hate and impotent fear, reserving the chrism of genetic evolution for a minority of the elect who know each other but remain secret from the unenlightened majority. In the books, homo superior is "those near to us", "our kind", "our race", "our lot"; they are those the heroes recognize, those with whom they almost always band together, those with whom they have dealings, our neighbours, the Old School Tie - of Professor Xavier's Academy. Even where there are clashes between mutants, they are in the nature of internecine warfare.
This is the group that stands out, the group whose genetic evolution must not be snuffed out, the group which ANNUAL 11 has anointed with the promise of genetic evolution. The rest of mankind are jealous, frightened, stupid, inferior outsiders, deprived of the understanding that comes - no doubt - with superior genes; to be given, as long as they don’t endanger the supreme goal of genetic evolution, the kind of protection that superior beings can afford to give their inferiors; but to be resisted with all our powers if they ever look as though they would like to interfere with us - because, of course, any interference from them can only be identified with the beginnings of terror and massacre. There is no half-way house, no reasonable compromise; one line in one of Claremont's issues made it clear - "registration of mutants today, concentration camps tomorrow."
Claremont's re-orientation of Magneto's character is highly significant in this context. Kirby's Magneto rang with echoes of Hitler, and the imaginary army his servant Mastermind raised in San Marcos wore Nazi uniforms. Arnold Drake's Magneto was literally the Devil; Roy Thomas and Neal Adams made him the snake in the Garden of Eden, first insinuatingly sweet, then vicious; John Byrne saw him as a sadistic sleazeball.
Almost as soon as Byrne was off the book, however, Claremont began the work of making Magneto sympathetic and justifiable. He gave him an Auschwitz past and a tormented conscience, in howling contrast with all preceeding appearances. Consider above all that he made him an old friend of Charles Xavier's - quite unnecessarily - and indeed placed him in Xavier's place at the head of... the Old School! the Old School Tie! So: if you are a mutant working (or so you say) to protect mutants, then your deeds, however hideous, are excusable. Previous writers, however untalented, had applied simple morality to the actions of Magneto: if a man used his powers violently and for self-aggrandisement, then he was a villain, end of story. But to Claremont, the expected misfortunes of his fictional mutants are enough, if not to quite justify, at least to make comprehensible and sympathetic even the crimes of Magneto. He was doing it in a good cause; misguided as to the means, but not as to the end.
It's worth noting that the same courtesy is not extended to anti-mutant humans. Claremont grants the good intentions of a very few of his Sentinel-minded characters, but they are the good intentions of dangerous fools. As a phenomenon, opposition to mutants is condemned beyond appeal. The very idea of the Mutant Registration Act is presented as inevitably tending to the extermination of mutants, where in actual fact a Government that neglected to keep some sort of control on the holders of potentially lethal powers would be, not liberal, but criminally remiss. The whole concept, in short, is presented with an unpleasant hysteria that reminds one of the worst political propaganda. Claremont has got so caught in his special pleading for his imaginary mutants that he has taken the worst characteristics of real-life special interest groups.
I said I would give the mutant ideology a terrible name. It is: Nazism.
It's not enough to call it, generically, racism. Racism such as was practiced in South Africa had no perspective in time; it dreamt of an arrested state in which separate racial groups will remain themselves, without miscegenation or invasion of other's areas, for eternity. No South African ever imagined, I suppose, that the white race was rally meant to erase South Africa's black nations from the map, and they retained a sentimental regard, in particular, for the Zulus, the toughest warriors of them all; a favour no Nazi would have extended to any Russian or Jew, however brave. There was a sort of aesthetic tribalism about Afrikaner racism, that dreamed of black warriors untouched by white contact, waving their assegais and ox-hide shields for ever; but in a Nazi Europe, inferior races would have been subjected to a strict time limit - and as for romantically idealizing their past, well!
Nazism is the only ideology whose core is genetic advance. It exists for the sake of genetic advance. The whole Nazi party, the whole state structure, were dedicated to and justified by the purpose of genetic advance. To the Nazis, "superior race" did not just mean, as in South Africa, the race in which political power was vested; it meant the race that would ultimately supplant all others.
I assert that Nazi ideology views inferior races exactly as the Marvel/Claremont ideology views non-mutants. Inferior races - especially the nether race, the Jews - do no more belong to the same mankind as Aryans, than homo sapiens, Krees, Skrulls, and other races belong to the same mankind as homo superior. They subconsciously know this; they hate and fear the Aryans because of their innate genetic inferiority. So they plot against them, they persecute them, they try to prevent their numerical and political growth. Am I, or am I not, describing the Sentinel state of mind? Mutants are hated and feared because they exist. Any desire to control and regulate mutants is represented as persecution (and did anybody notice the sublime unconscious cheek involved in Claremont's use of such symbols as Auschwitz?). If anybody does not smell the reek of the ruin of reason in this, I do.
I'm not charging all the hundreds of thousands of X-fans with Nazi tendencies. Most readers, when I was involved in comics fandom, tended to love the characters and hate the concepts. And indeed, even in the offending X-MEN ANNUAL 11, we can find evidence of Claremont's talent. The progression from a howling drunk Wolverine, offensive to eye and nostril ("A real class act!" sneers the elegant, fair-haired Alex Summers when the Canadian throws a whole can of beer down his neck and belches) to the hero who alone can stand the test, would, in itself, be a fine, thought-provoking moral idea; the best of mankind may indeed be found among what seems the worst, sometimes.
But this loses itself in what is frankly a rape of the Christian story: mankind is genetically saved by Wolverine's blood, death and resurrection. As "Christian" Nazis raped the Gospels in the interest of their genetic ideals - you may know of the "nordic Christ" who "died to save us from Hebraic degeneracy" - so too Christ/Wolverine dies and sheds his blood to save mankind's genetic future. Alan Davis, artist on the story, looks damned unconvinced, as well he might; when Wolverine comes to his great-big climactic decision, the usually reliable Davis draws him with a "wot, no party?" expression that deflates the whole scene. He, at least, is not collaborating with this blasphemy.
This is the rake's progress of genetic evolutionism from its childish beginnings in ACTION COMICS 1 to its obscene flowering in recent X-titles. I do not think that anything can be done at this time of day to reverse it, but I intend, at least, to point it out.