(no subject)
As I wandered around the Internet last night, something nasty crawled out of it and took control of my browser. Now, not only does the browser point regularly at some stupid porn site or other, but even when I key in addresses I want, it from time to time forces me onto one of its porn sites anyway. It even happened when I was trying to access one of my own e-mail accounts.
Oh, I know. Old story. Happens to everyone. But it gave rise to a few thoughts. Why is it that spammers and virus-mongers are so peculiarly odious? At least, I find them so. The answer, I think, is that the relationship between users, their computers, and the internet, is something so personal that to interfere with it is like stealing the user's own voice or hands, meddling with their ability to express themselves and to relate with the world outside. This is why I, and, from what I hear, everyone else on the Internet, hates spammers with a deep hatred. And not only is the crime vile and personal, but it is also cowardly in the extreme. While a mugger or a bad boss are seen face to face, perform their vicious actions in person, and can be blamed as persons, most of us will never have the opportunity to personally thank the person who corrupted our browser or our computer systems as they deserve, with spittle in the face or a knee in the groin. The filth hide in cyberspace - or, more prosaically, in anonymous offices and private rooms in the four corners of the earth; and I have had my ability to interact with my fellow users damaged because of the stupid uncouth greed of some little moron who is probably on another continent.
It is self-destructive, too. The Internet relies for its own cohestion on all users, even if they hate each other like poison or lust for each other's money, to accept minimum standards of behaviour. Most people do; I myself, though I regard a certain member of Fiction Alley website as no better than a scoundrel and a liar, would not even think of using a virus against her, because there is immeasurably more to be lost in making the Internet dangerous for all users - even crooks - than in keeping it open for everyone. I feel certain that the number of spammers is small, even minuscule, and yet the action of perhaps, a few hundred greedy or mischievous pond scum pollute the whole on-line world and make the whole experience of netsurfing as safe as walking in a bed of snakes. As Jack Kirby said, "in a nest of snakes, nothing can survive. Ultimately, all the snakes kill each other. Ultimately, they also kill whatever gave them birth in the first place." It seems to me that the Internet is uncomfortably closer to this situation than we like to think.
OK, now for today's piece of writing. This one is about Marvel Comics' mutant mythology, and could mildly be described as controversial. If you are an X-MEN fan, stop reading right now.
CHRIS CLAREMONT’S MUTANT IDEOLOGY
The superhero genre has had the seeds of Darwinist-historicist nonsense as early as ACTION COMICS #1. Remember the nicknames of the first super-hero; the Kryptonian, the Last Son of Krypton, the Man of Steel... the Man of Tomorrow. The last one is probably the oldest. The first explanation of Superman's powers had nothing to do with red suns; in ACTION 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 Siegel and 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 fascination with mysticism. Iron Man's armour is as magical an artifact as Green Lantern's power ring; I happen to know that it is 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. No Kirby work shows any similar dichotomy.)
The world did not exactly stand still. 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 effect 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. Nobody loved Claremont's writing more than I have. 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 is also not irrelevant to point out that the story of Jean Grey was forced into its proper shape - the shape that shook so many of us that we felt that we had lost a friend - by orders from Marvel’s then editor-in-chief, 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 pseudo-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. 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. The core of the book became, what had not been (except in a couple of episodic stories, one by Lee and Kirby, another by Thomas and Adams) the fear, unconsciously underlain with hate and jealousy, with which the present looks at the future. 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.
An older King, returning to his evolution-theory concerns with SILVER STAR, did not include any indication of prejudice against "the next step", his point (a typical Kirby point) being rather 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". And even in the earlier title, 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. 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, but, raised to the centre of the X-universe, they proved deadly. The title degenerated into an epic of paranoia and persecution complex; the Sentinels became a state of mind.
The superhero is deliberately and thoroughly un-realistic. It is intended that his or her presence, power, and beauty, should not be credible in mere physical terms. This goes deeper than readers usually notice. Consider the famous Superman catchphrase, "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!". From the standpoint of realism, this is an absurdity: a human body - even a 6'6", 190-pound one - is too small to be visible while in flight "up in the sky", and the sight of a "something" that looks like a bird, or a plane, wouldn't arouse any particular emotion. If he could be seen close enough to stun the crowd, he would have to be hovering a few feet above them; but this wouldn't give the effect of awe that the catchphrase conveys. Superman is seen both with the detail of proximity, and with the awe of distance.
The only major superhero which is not innately unrealistic is the Batman; but the eerie aura that he carries puts him almost as far from possibility as the Kryptonian. Never mind that Bruce Wayne is supposed to have become the creature of the night by dint of study and self-improvement; we know that it is not within our power to become a cowled avenger any more than it is to fly, and that's that. And apart from him - Captain America became himself by drinking a magic potion (thinly disguised with a scientific veneer); Green Lantern has a magic ring; the Flash was struck by lighning; the Hulk and the Fantastic Four were exposed to rays; Spider-man, er, um... (guffaw-haw-HAW!); Thor is a myth come to life, as are Wonder Woman and the original Captain Marvel.
It is a fact of the same order - and a fact which we ought always to bear in mind - that there is no mutant humanity, super-powered or not; much less a "higher" human species to which homo sapiens is to give way. But Claremont, with incredible lack of discernment, threw himself into a furious condemnation of the real humanity for the fictional persecution of a fictional mutant race.
From this viewpoint, Claremont's re-orientation of Magneto's character is significant. 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 preceding appearances. Consider above all that he made him an old friend of Charles Xavier's - quite unnecessarily - and indeed had him replace Xavier as head of the School for Gifted Children, the heart of “good” mutant-dom on Earth. Previous writers, however modest their talents, 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. If you are a mutant working (or so you say) to protect mutants, then your deeds, however hideous, are excusable.
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 observation on the holders of potentially lethal powers would be, not liberal, but criminally remiss. The whole concept, in short, is presented with a surprising and 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.
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, as I said that there are no super-heroes, so too I must insist that there are no 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. But in fact we have no knowledge of life on other worlds at all; we may treat the idea as a fascinating thought, but we are not allowed to build socio-biological theories on the imaginary characteristics of imaginary races.
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 sins, small and great, 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 - not for any of those reasons that, in real life, actually made neighbours hate each other.
You cannot construct on this a story for which anyone will care. What is one of the main point of conflict stories? That the thing being fought over should be worth fighting 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. People will fight for a country, for people, 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.
Intellectually, genetic evolutionism 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 hate and to do evil towards a better genetic stock, and we should not blame them for it; however, of course, any manifestation of that innate evil must draw forth our forces. It must not be opposed for the sake of justice; that is an irrelevant concept here. It must be opposed because hostility between them and us is inborn in the nature of things.
This is how Englehart and Thomas imagined races other than human and their relationship with mankind. Claremont’s great step forward [this is sarcasm, by the way] has been to extend this inhuman attitude to the relationship between human groups.
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.
And from that point of view, the meaning is obvious. 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 that was the state of play before Claremont brought the poison of genetic evolutionism down from the distant galaxies to Earth and human life. In other words, now it is not even a matter of the mental, 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. And from that point of view, it is highly significant that when Claremont undertook his implausible and ideologically motivated whitewashing of Magneto, he soon placed him at the head of… the Old School, metaphorically the chief wearer of the Old School Tie.
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. 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. Nazism, on the other hand, is the only ideology whose core is genetic advance; it exists for the sake of genetic advance. The whole party, the whole state structure, came to be understood as 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. 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; something which 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!
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. To judge from such a 'zine as Mutant Media, most readers tend 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. The very words "mutant", "mutants", "X-" have become terns of scorn and bitter jest among most adult fans, and rightly so. There is a widespread perception that the monstrous growth of mutancy has ruined an once-brilliant series; although I doubt whether most fans would take criticism as far as I have, there can be hardly any who don't wish that the jungle of mutancy was pruned just a little bit, and that the paranoid obsession with persecution present and Sentinel-tyranny future was watered down a smidgen. More or less everybody admits that Claremont and his successors have gone too far in their depiction of near-universal prejudice against mutants; and very many people are disturbed by incredible brutality of the books, grown, if anything, worse since Claremont's expulsion. Why has nobody protested at that John Romita Jr. X-title which opened with Selene, half-naked as usual, screaming as she is flayed alive? On panel? On page one? This sort of thing is being read by pubescent male twelve-year-olds, for pity's sake! - in a country like the United States where there are as many guns as people, and street crime is at levels we Europeans don't even see in our nightmares!
I don't impute this murderous graphic sadism directly to the genetic evolutionist obsession; I do assert that the nightmare landscape formed by this villainous ideology allows all its writers to indulge their worst instincts. If there is one characteristic everybody recognizes in Chris Claremont's writing, it is self-indulgence. An atmosphere of paranoia gluts itself on images of pornographic violence; this, too, may be seen in such Nazi publications as Der Sturmer. These days, the chief attitude of the X-titles to their world is one of horror.
It is amusing, given how central mankind's supposed future is in this mythology, to see that the chief source of that horror is just the future. The future is where the worst, grinning monsters come from; the future is the home of omens of doom like Bishop and Cable, forerunners of a destiny of blood, sweat, tears, and dehumanization. Every X-title, even Alan Davis' now-concluded EXCALIBUR run, shivers with horror in the face of a future that seems to grow worse with every issue.
And yet the whole colossal structure hangs upon nothing at all; it is a string of false problems. There are no mutants; the future doesn't exist - if it did, it would be present or past. Even the obsession with the future as such is mistaken, because any future is not going to be a single process. As it always happpens, some things will become better and some worse, and we cannot know, now, which things will - history has a way of surprising people. Siegel and Schuster associated their splendid being with a highly evolved civilization because their time believed (especially among the not particularly educated, as Siegel and Schuster were) that the future would be an improvement on the present. We don't. "Man by any name is nothing more than his own sweet self" (J.Kirby).
And even if the future did exist; even if we knew as a matter of fact that mutants would inherit the Earth and the universe; this would still do nothing to give it any moral significance at all! The core of the mutant ideology is that it is criminal to try and control mutants (any control is represented as oppression) because mutants are the future of mankind; the future is as such to be respected. But there is an uncrossable abyss between "that's the way it will be" (forecast) and "that's the way it has to be" (moral dictate). To say anything else would be to say that the eventual (future) result of any act should be a moral consideration; that is, to make success a moral consideration. Do I even need to say it is not? Claremont's one masterpiece has Jean Grey deprive herself of any future at all (i.e. comitting suicide) on moral grounds. Morality may ask of us to go where we know we will lose and die.
There can be no doubt that Chris Claremont and his followers have dragged the super-hero genre to its lowest point, creating a mental environment that perverts, point by point, the very nature of super-hero comics. But just because of that, to analyze their offences against the genre should give us, as though in a negative, a list of desirable features in super-hero comics.
It's no good to just denounce the violence of mutant and post-X-Men comics. Violence as such, though certainly a detestable feature in a comic aimed mainly at male adolescents, is not the point; the point, as I tried to show, is the ideology, that forms a mental environment in which violence was an inevitable development. To just forbid the description of violent acts while leaving the basic mutant ideology unanswered would do no more than sugar-coat its basic Nazism. Trying to cover up the ideology's external symptoms (sexual and physical brutality) while not addressing its central ideas, would certainly make mutant books less consistent, and therefore less attractive; but it would do nothing to give a positive answer to the moral problem. We don't want bad comics or evil ideologies suppressed, we want good comics and positive morality promoted.
Where, then, do we find the right kind of super-hero comic, the one that reverses Claremontian corruption and fosters decent moral ideas? In a sense, nowhere. We are human beings, we are all open to sin, we are all under judgement. None of us is loose from the taint of corruption. No doubt the comic that I create with the idea of reforming the genre today will lead somebody else down a false path tomorrow; and while the other man will be in the last analysis responsible for his own error, he shall have responded to elements in my work which were really provocative, and so I will not escape censure. Siegel, Schuster and Kirby are incomparably less responsible than Claremont for the corruption of the genre; but they did introduce dubious elements into it, and deserve a little blame for that. Justice and decency are not fully given to any man.
But that does not mean that we are incapable of moral choices, or that, seeing goodness and justice, we cannot recognize them. None of us is totally just; but we know a good man or woman when we see them. None of us has perfect taste; but we know beauty when we see it. And I think that more than a few readers have turned from mutant books, not in revolt at their cruelty, but in disgust at their ugliness - an ugliness so deep that it has lost contact with the real world, not only in its beauty, but even in its real ugliness. The filth of the world is not the way Marvel or Image describe it.
Where did Chris Claremont go wrong? I think we may sum it up under three headings: which, being examined, yeld three basic rules for the writing of good superhero stories.
1) He took a concept which was, by its very nature, not only fictitious but impossible, not only not factual but to be recognized from the start as not factual; for we know of no mutants and no aliens, and if we did we could be sure that they would be different from the way we imagine them; and he treated it as a real view of the future of mankind. I don't mean this in the sense of developping a sequence of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-historical accounts of his fictional world, but of treating it as though it was morally the same as the real world, and that the real world, and the real mankind, deserved condemnation in the light of the fictional (and badly imagined) events in his own work.
This would seem, on the surface of it, a desperately troubling point. It's possible to say that we establish a fictional mankind in every story we write, even an autobiographical one. The work of so brilliant an autobiographical author as Lee Kennedy is clearly not about "the real world", but about "the real world as seen by Lee Kennedy". Nevertheless, I think the distinction is clear and visible: the Lee Kennedy world - and not only the Lee Kennedy world, but also the world of such authors of fiction as Andrew Vachss - is different in no fundamental fashion from the real world. It is, in fact, meant as a direct comment on the real world, and we are able to judge it, not only on its merits as a work of art (that is, of a particular kind of skill), but also according to the way we ourselves experience the real world. Andrew Vachss is not creating a fictitious world with its own rules, but accepting the rules of the real world as parameters for his own fiction, because what he is writing about is something that exists in the world as we know it.
What seems a problem in the broad land of theory - the distinction between the kind of "fictional world"of a Kennedy or a Vachss and the "fictional world" of a Claremont - is no problem at all to anybody who makes the experiment of reading LITTLE GIRL BLUE or HARD LOOKS and then reading any of the material that Claremont produced about the "mutant problem" or the Mutant Registration Act. It is simply obvious that Vachss and Kennedy are speaking about something, and Claremont is speaking about nothing. The whole problem is bogus: there are no mutants, and there is no inner logic to the behaviour of Congress or the American public as represented in the mutant books. Claremont has worked himself into a great froth of indignation over something that had not the least consequence. One feels almost indignant, when a Kennedy or a Vachss are expending genuine emotion over genuine tragedies, that so much effort is going into arousing ersatz indignation over false problems.
Two issues are involved, one being bad writing, and one more properly to do with the nature of the genre. The first I will deal with quickly: Claremont's Congressmen and Claremont's bureaucrats behave as no Congressman or bureaucrat ever behaved in real life. Claremont has no understanding of the mind of politicians, picturing them through a faded screen of conspiracy theories whose vaguely left-wing cast grows less and less credible as time goes on (it always troubled me that this supposed liberal was so profoundly influenced by the arch-reactionary immoralist Robert Henlein, the comrade-in-arms of Ayn Rand and Steve Ditko). His view of Congress is that of ignorant prejudice; not only the virtues, but even the vices of politicians are misrepresented.
The issue relating to the nature of the genre is that Claremont intended his fictitious mutant problems to reflect on the real world as directly as Andrew Vachss's stories of crime and child abuse. It cannot be done. Here is our first insight into the nature of the genre: it does not produce the same effect of moral proximity that realistic fiction does. By its nature the super-hero is necessarily fictitious. If it is to create a powerful moral effect, it has to do it the long way round, building on its own frame of reference. You cannot take short-cuts. What Claremont has done is on a par with somebody basing a claim on the throne of England on J.R.R.Tolkien's never-ceasing Elendilian dynasty.
2) He has started writing, not about individuals, but about groups. I have said that morality is always individual; but so is the super-hero genre.
Nothing is more central to the super-hero genre than the image of one or more towering individuals, outlined against the sky, dominating the landscape. This intensely visual image explains why the genre has worked well in visual narrative arts, comics, cinema and TV (I have even heard of a successful stage play about super-powered characters, Warp, but I have never seen it - only a somewhat inferior comic-book series), but not in prose writing. Movie and TV adaptations of super-hero characters have been frequently successful, and on a couple of occasions of landmark quality (I am thinking in particular of the first Batman movie), and there is one fine super-hero character - the Bionic Woman - produced for TV with no reference to any comic book series at all; but I know of no prose novel or short story about super-heroes that ever impressed anybody. (This is one reason why, in our caste-conscious intellectual environment, super-heroes are still regarded with contempt; prose writing is still regarded - on no good ground - as inherently superior to visual narrative, and a genre that lends itself especially well to visual narrative immediately receives the ignorant scorn of the snobbish.)
The super-hero is a significant image; significant, not in anything else that is outside him/herself, but in him/herself. And the potency and uniqueness of the image is inevitably accompanied, cannot help but be accompanied, by an equally potent and individual life history. It is born as an image; and more than once we have seen potent and exciting pictures of costumed men and women who seemed to demand equally potent and exciting stories to live in. To take an unexpected example, how many readers have been enticed to read ÂCry for DawnÀ by the strangely potent picture of J.M.Linsner's Dawn, the red-haired half-naked beauty with the three teardrops painted under her eye? How many of us have had our fantasies stimulated to imagine vast if often vague dooms for her to fulfil? Her presence was so fey and so telling that it seized our imagination even without a story to tell; we almost supplied the story ourselves.
(N.B.: this was written before Linsner himself set out to produce a few remarkable stories about the character.)
The significant image is one and cannot be multiplied. Each super-hero is only him- or herself. The pleasure there used to be in cross-overs, before greed and lack of imagination made them an agony to be endured rather than a pleasure to be awaited, was that of seeing two extraordinary individualities together - like the peculiar expectation there is when two great musicians who never played together before agree to do a jam session. The encounter is sometimes memorable (anybody here heard Ella Fitzgerald and Lous Armstrong singing Summertime?); there are peculiar possibilities that can only be realized by the encounter of two such people and that nobody else could achieve, moments in time that cannot be changed or improved on. Even when groups become permanent, they also are individual and unique. Some dimwit at Marvel tried to put Reed and Sue Richards in the Avengers; it never worked, not for one page.
Super-heroes live lives and die deaths that are related in the deepest way possible to their own individuality - that is, if the writer knows anything about his job. The supreme example of this is of course Claremont's own masterpiece, the life and death of Jean Grey: a work began in confusion, matured in disattention, and concluded against the author's own will by orders from a boss who could see, much better than the writer himself, where the story could not help but go; but ruled, from beginning to end, by the potency of the image of fire, death, resurrection, and Jean Grey's red hair. From the beginning to the end, the Phoenix was someone who stood at the threshold, who had crossed over from death and flown over the heart of the sun, possessor of powers that have nothing to do with humanity, powers that can only arise when barriers break down and the fire at the world's heart breaks through. Death and some immense doom were in her from the start; they depended from the visual impact of her fiery presence, and anything less lofty and less terrible than the doom she eventually underwent would have been a betrayal of her essence. Claremont does not seem to realize that any reputation he may have acquired depends largely on that one continuity; he has been apologizing for that perfect tragedy ever since he completed it. (Interestingly, Gerry Conway, whose only fine writing came about the time of Gwen Stacy's death, also never seems to have realized that he looked there, for once, almost like a writer. He, too, has always apologized for that story.)
To demand that we should take an interest in a given group of people, not because they are heroes, or because they are interesting in themselves, or even because they have colourful costumes, but because they are mutants, means to destroy the very basis of their appeal. It is also in point of fact doomed to fail; however much emphasis or stress the writers may lay on the group identity of the protagonists, the reader reads, not about mutants, but about Kitty and Kurt, Ororo or Rogue. There is a sort of fraudulency in the way the writer pushes the characters at us so that we, being interested in them, should also accept an ideology that negates our reason to be interested in them, making them, not themselves, but numbers in a statistic.
3) This racist and collectivist deviation is connected with an obsession with the future. We, the readers, are not interested in the future: our concern - and our pleasure - is with what Wolverine is going to do now, what Scott and Jean are going to say to each other, how Kitty Pride will react to some current bit of news, what Ororo's feelings are going to be - now; now; now. In the mutant ideology, however, all of this is subjected to the morally indifferent and imaginatively chilling notion that the importance of these characters is not in themselves, but in the genetic patrimony they will transmit to their descendants. We are invited to look forwards to a time when all our favourite characters will be dead - lost to us - and only their genetic patrimony will be present. How can this interest us? In the long run we are all dead, Keynes said; what is more, the future is beyond our control, and we have no great say in the way it will happen.
Claremont's one masterpiece in the "future history" genre - #141-142 - accepts, without admitting them, both these truths: the future it presents is entirely out of control, and most of the X-men (in a memorable scene) are shown to be dead. The story is dominated by unstated disenchantment with the progressive notion of the future that is supposed to motivate the strip - and that appears, in this story, quite beyond hope or possibility. For that matter, I cannot remember a single one of Marvel's possible futures that does anything to justify the assumption, either that the future will be better than the present, or that the growth of mutant mankind is assured, or yet that it will in any way improve or benefit the planet.
Now, to a sane man, this is simply unchallenged fact: the future is beyond our control, and the far future has little relevance to the moral choices we have to make now. But to the moral futurist, this is a ruinous, an apocalyptic admission. He cannot conceive of any open future, let alone any future in which things will be much as they are today, some better, some worse, but bound by no necessity to get better: having invested all the positive contents of his imagination in the progressive vision of the future, he has none left for any other sort of development. The only alternative he can imagine to constant improvement is constant deterioration; the notion that the human race will stay as it is, that "man by any other name is nothing else than his own sweet self", is intolerable to him, because (and this is essential) the human race as it is is intolerable to him. He will admit, in the abstract, that there are good and bad sides to mankind, but his vision of mankind as it is now is in fact a nightmare. Any good aspect of present reality is to him a forerunner of "the future"; he has, we remember, invested all the positive elements of his imagination in his image of the future, and therefore, by the kind of syllogism that feeds mental illnesses, he cannot conceive of any aspect of past or present as anything except inferior.
If you were to tell him (this has actually happened to me) that the future will have as many troubles as the present, that there will be no "evolution" in the moral being of mankind, that men will always be asked to choose good and will always be tempted to do evil, the futurist will be literally struck with horror: as to him the present is quite simply a nightmare, as his mind has unconsciously removed all positive sides from it, what you are telling him is not "man, morally, will never change, and there will always be bad sides to reject and good sides to cherish", but "all the things you hate in the world you live in will always prevail over the things you love". This is of course false, but until you understand that what you mean by "the present" is different from what he means by the same word, you are always going to be at cross-purposes. And even when you have got through to him that you do not think that things are to grow worse for ever, that in fact there is a good chance that many aspects of our lives will improve, that the world we are to leave to our children will not be doomed to futility, he will still feel that yours is a rather cold kind of comfort. His emotions and his affections are still placed in his "future", and he is completely out of sympathy with any view of the world that embraces all its aspects as equally present - the god, the bad, and the strife between them.
Futurism is false in general terms, of course; it is based on a vision of reality so askew as to be near to insanity; but it is particularly false to the super-hero genre. The pseudo-historical time frame that it imposes on reality is totally at odds with the core of the super-hero genre as I described it, the significant image; for that image is timeless. Linsner's Dawn, as much as Superman, has its significance independently of what she does. Superman became a smashing success, and remained a smashing success, almost without reference to the quality of the stories; readers would read anything about it, however crude, so long as it did not actually betray the power of the image itself. However poor the story, however crude the drawing, the image behind them sustained its appeal in the face of all the frustrated and indignant critics who raved, and still rave, at the sheer idiocy of it all; not understanding how the public, the great inarticulate brute mass, found its attraction not in the details of story of art, but in something that lay behind them - the image of Superman.
You might almost say that a super-hero steps into each of his or her stories from somewhere else; the image pre-exists any of the stories, and the stories serve only to bring it more into focus. The stories are a manifestation, each in its own time frame, of a figure that does not depend on time for its significance; and writers have invented devices such as time travel, alternate realities, imaginary stories, and possible futures, to create stories incompatible with the existing body of stories about the significant image, but suitable to the significant image. The time frame is secondary and changeable, the single vision is essential and unchanged. Superman is the same now as he was sixty years ago in the minds of Siegel and Schuster; and anybody who thinks this is a blemish simply does not understand the meaning of archetypes.
In the futurist mind, the central element is the flow of time. The significant image becomes only a part of the significant whole: Wolverine is not a deathless image of the unbreakable animal obstinacy in man, an image that was true as soon as conceived and remains true as long as there are men, but a stage of evolution, that is true today but not yesterday and not tomorrow. Tomorrow the truth will be different. The significant image loses its firm immutability, its being eternally silhouetted against a ceaseless sky; it is harnessed and de-individualized, placed at a particular stage of the process of evolution.
Oh, I know. Old story. Happens to everyone. But it gave rise to a few thoughts. Why is it that spammers and virus-mongers are so peculiarly odious? At least, I find them so. The answer, I think, is that the relationship between users, their computers, and the internet, is something so personal that to interfere with it is like stealing the user's own voice or hands, meddling with their ability to express themselves and to relate with the world outside. This is why I, and, from what I hear, everyone else on the Internet, hates spammers with a deep hatred. And not only is the crime vile and personal, but it is also cowardly in the extreme. While a mugger or a bad boss are seen face to face, perform their vicious actions in person, and can be blamed as persons, most of us will never have the opportunity to personally thank the person who corrupted our browser or our computer systems as they deserve, with spittle in the face or a knee in the groin. The filth hide in cyberspace - or, more prosaically, in anonymous offices and private rooms in the four corners of the earth; and I have had my ability to interact with my fellow users damaged because of the stupid uncouth greed of some little moron who is probably on another continent.
It is self-destructive, too. The Internet relies for its own cohestion on all users, even if they hate each other like poison or lust for each other's money, to accept minimum standards of behaviour. Most people do; I myself, though I regard a certain member of Fiction Alley website as no better than a scoundrel and a liar, would not even think of using a virus against her, because there is immeasurably more to be lost in making the Internet dangerous for all users - even crooks - than in keeping it open for everyone. I feel certain that the number of spammers is small, even minuscule, and yet the action of perhaps, a few hundred greedy or mischievous pond scum pollute the whole on-line world and make the whole experience of netsurfing as safe as walking in a bed of snakes. As Jack Kirby said, "in a nest of snakes, nothing can survive. Ultimately, all the snakes kill each other. Ultimately, they also kill whatever gave them birth in the first place." It seems to me that the Internet is uncomfortably closer to this situation than we like to think.
OK, now for today's piece of writing. This one is about Marvel Comics' mutant mythology, and could mildly be described as controversial. If you are an X-MEN fan, stop reading right now.
CHRIS CLAREMONT’S MUTANT IDEOLOGY
The superhero genre has had the seeds of Darwinist-historicist nonsense as early as ACTION COMICS #1. Remember the nicknames of the first super-hero; the Kryptonian, the Last Son of Krypton, the Man of Steel... the Man of Tomorrow. The last one is probably the oldest. The first explanation of Superman's powers had nothing to do with red suns; in ACTION 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 Siegel and 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 fascination with mysticism. Iron Man's armour is as magical an artifact as Green Lantern's power ring; I happen to know that it is 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. No Kirby work shows any similar dichotomy.)
The world did not exactly stand still. 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 effect 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. Nobody loved Claremont's writing more than I have. 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 is also not irrelevant to point out that the story of Jean Grey was forced into its proper shape - the shape that shook so many of us that we felt that we had lost a friend - by orders from Marvel’s then editor-in-chief, 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 pseudo-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. 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. The core of the book became, what had not been (except in a couple of episodic stories, one by Lee and Kirby, another by Thomas and Adams) the fear, unconsciously underlain with hate and jealousy, with which the present looks at the future. 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.
An older King, returning to his evolution-theory concerns with SILVER STAR, did not include any indication of prejudice against "the next step", his point (a typical Kirby point) being rather 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". And even in the earlier title, 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. 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, but, raised to the centre of the X-universe, they proved deadly. The title degenerated into an epic of paranoia and persecution complex; the Sentinels became a state of mind.
The superhero is deliberately and thoroughly un-realistic. It is intended that his or her presence, power, and beauty, should not be credible in mere physical terms. This goes deeper than readers usually notice. Consider the famous Superman catchphrase, "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!". From the standpoint of realism, this is an absurdity: a human body - even a 6'6", 190-pound one - is too small to be visible while in flight "up in the sky", and the sight of a "something" that looks like a bird, or a plane, wouldn't arouse any particular emotion. If he could be seen close enough to stun the crowd, he would have to be hovering a few feet above them; but this wouldn't give the effect of awe that the catchphrase conveys. Superman is seen both with the detail of proximity, and with the awe of distance.
The only major superhero which is not innately unrealistic is the Batman; but the eerie aura that he carries puts him almost as far from possibility as the Kryptonian. Never mind that Bruce Wayne is supposed to have become the creature of the night by dint of study and self-improvement; we know that it is not within our power to become a cowled avenger any more than it is to fly, and that's that. And apart from him - Captain America became himself by drinking a magic potion (thinly disguised with a scientific veneer); Green Lantern has a magic ring; the Flash was struck by lighning; the Hulk and the Fantastic Four were exposed to rays; Spider-man, er, um... (guffaw-haw-HAW!); Thor is a myth come to life, as are Wonder Woman and the original Captain Marvel.
It is a fact of the same order - and a fact which we ought always to bear in mind - that there is no mutant humanity, super-powered or not; much less a "higher" human species to which homo sapiens is to give way. But Claremont, with incredible lack of discernment, threw himself into a furious condemnation of the real humanity for the fictional persecution of a fictional mutant race.
From this viewpoint, Claremont's re-orientation of Magneto's character is significant. 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 preceding appearances. Consider above all that he made him an old friend of Charles Xavier's - quite unnecessarily - and indeed had him replace Xavier as head of the School for Gifted Children, the heart of “good” mutant-dom on Earth. Previous writers, however modest their talents, 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. If you are a mutant working (or so you say) to protect mutants, then your deeds, however hideous, are excusable.
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 observation on the holders of potentially lethal powers would be, not liberal, but criminally remiss. The whole concept, in short, is presented with a surprising and 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.
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, as I said that there are no super-heroes, so too I must insist that there are no 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. But in fact we have no knowledge of life on other worlds at all; we may treat the idea as a fascinating thought, but we are not allowed to build socio-biological theories on the imaginary characteristics of imaginary races.
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 sins, small and great, 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 - not for any of those reasons that, in real life, actually made neighbours hate each other.
You cannot construct on this a story for which anyone will care. What is one of the main point of conflict stories? That the thing being fought over should be worth fighting 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. People will fight for a country, for people, 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.
Intellectually, genetic evolutionism 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 hate and to do evil towards a better genetic stock, and we should not blame them for it; however, of course, any manifestation of that innate evil must draw forth our forces. It must not be opposed for the sake of justice; that is an irrelevant concept here. It must be opposed because hostility between them and us is inborn in the nature of things.
This is how Englehart and Thomas imagined races other than human and their relationship with mankind. Claremont’s great step forward [this is sarcasm, by the way] has been to extend this inhuman attitude to the relationship between human groups.
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.
And from that point of view, the meaning is obvious. 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 that was the state of play before Claremont brought the poison of genetic evolutionism down from the distant galaxies to Earth and human life. In other words, now it is not even a matter of the mental, 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. And from that point of view, it is highly significant that when Claremont undertook his implausible and ideologically motivated whitewashing of Magneto, he soon placed him at the head of… the Old School, metaphorically the chief wearer of the Old School Tie.
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. 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. Nazism, on the other hand, is the only ideology whose core is genetic advance; it exists for the sake of genetic advance. The whole party, the whole state structure, came to be understood as 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. 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; something which 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!
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. To judge from such a 'zine as Mutant Media, most readers tend 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. The very words "mutant", "mutants", "X-" have become terns of scorn and bitter jest among most adult fans, and rightly so. There is a widespread perception that the monstrous growth of mutancy has ruined an once-brilliant series; although I doubt whether most fans would take criticism as far as I have, there can be hardly any who don't wish that the jungle of mutancy was pruned just a little bit, and that the paranoid obsession with persecution present and Sentinel-tyranny future was watered down a smidgen. More or less everybody admits that Claremont and his successors have gone too far in their depiction of near-universal prejudice against mutants; and very many people are disturbed by incredible brutality of the books, grown, if anything, worse since Claremont's expulsion. Why has nobody protested at that John Romita Jr. X-title which opened with Selene, half-naked as usual, screaming as she is flayed alive? On panel? On page one? This sort of thing is being read by pubescent male twelve-year-olds, for pity's sake! - in a country like the United States where there are as many guns as people, and street crime is at levels we Europeans don't even see in our nightmares!
I don't impute this murderous graphic sadism directly to the genetic evolutionist obsession; I do assert that the nightmare landscape formed by this villainous ideology allows all its writers to indulge their worst instincts. If there is one characteristic everybody recognizes in Chris Claremont's writing, it is self-indulgence. An atmosphere of paranoia gluts itself on images of pornographic violence; this, too, may be seen in such Nazi publications as Der Sturmer. These days, the chief attitude of the X-titles to their world is one of horror.
It is amusing, given how central mankind's supposed future is in this mythology, to see that the chief source of that horror is just the future. The future is where the worst, grinning monsters come from; the future is the home of omens of doom like Bishop and Cable, forerunners of a destiny of blood, sweat, tears, and dehumanization. Every X-title, even Alan Davis' now-concluded EXCALIBUR run, shivers with horror in the face of a future that seems to grow worse with every issue.
And yet the whole colossal structure hangs upon nothing at all; it is a string of false problems. There are no mutants; the future doesn't exist - if it did, it would be present or past. Even the obsession with the future as such is mistaken, because any future is not going to be a single process. As it always happpens, some things will become better and some worse, and we cannot know, now, which things will - history has a way of surprising people. Siegel and Schuster associated their splendid being with a highly evolved civilization because their time believed (especially among the not particularly educated, as Siegel and Schuster were) that the future would be an improvement on the present. We don't. "Man by any name is nothing more than his own sweet self" (J.Kirby).
And even if the future did exist; even if we knew as a matter of fact that mutants would inherit the Earth and the universe; this would still do nothing to give it any moral significance at all! The core of the mutant ideology is that it is criminal to try and control mutants (any control is represented as oppression) because mutants are the future of mankind; the future is as such to be respected. But there is an uncrossable abyss between "that's the way it will be" (forecast) and "that's the way it has to be" (moral dictate). To say anything else would be to say that the eventual (future) result of any act should be a moral consideration; that is, to make success a moral consideration. Do I even need to say it is not? Claremont's one masterpiece has Jean Grey deprive herself of any future at all (i.e. comitting suicide) on moral grounds. Morality may ask of us to go where we know we will lose and die.
There can be no doubt that Chris Claremont and his followers have dragged the super-hero genre to its lowest point, creating a mental environment that perverts, point by point, the very nature of super-hero comics. But just because of that, to analyze their offences against the genre should give us, as though in a negative, a list of desirable features in super-hero comics.
It's no good to just denounce the violence of mutant and post-X-Men comics. Violence as such, though certainly a detestable feature in a comic aimed mainly at male adolescents, is not the point; the point, as I tried to show, is the ideology, that forms a mental environment in which violence was an inevitable development. To just forbid the description of violent acts while leaving the basic mutant ideology unanswered would do no more than sugar-coat its basic Nazism. Trying to cover up the ideology's external symptoms (sexual and physical brutality) while not addressing its central ideas, would certainly make mutant books less consistent, and therefore less attractive; but it would do nothing to give a positive answer to the moral problem. We don't want bad comics or evil ideologies suppressed, we want good comics and positive morality promoted.
Where, then, do we find the right kind of super-hero comic, the one that reverses Claremontian corruption and fosters decent moral ideas? In a sense, nowhere. We are human beings, we are all open to sin, we are all under judgement. None of us is loose from the taint of corruption. No doubt the comic that I create with the idea of reforming the genre today will lead somebody else down a false path tomorrow; and while the other man will be in the last analysis responsible for his own error, he shall have responded to elements in my work which were really provocative, and so I will not escape censure. Siegel, Schuster and Kirby are incomparably less responsible than Claremont for the corruption of the genre; but they did introduce dubious elements into it, and deserve a little blame for that. Justice and decency are not fully given to any man.
But that does not mean that we are incapable of moral choices, or that, seeing goodness and justice, we cannot recognize them. None of us is totally just; but we know a good man or woman when we see them. None of us has perfect taste; but we know beauty when we see it. And I think that more than a few readers have turned from mutant books, not in revolt at their cruelty, but in disgust at their ugliness - an ugliness so deep that it has lost contact with the real world, not only in its beauty, but even in its real ugliness. The filth of the world is not the way Marvel or Image describe it.
Where did Chris Claremont go wrong? I think we may sum it up under three headings: which, being examined, yeld three basic rules for the writing of good superhero stories.
1) He took a concept which was, by its very nature, not only fictitious but impossible, not only not factual but to be recognized from the start as not factual; for we know of no mutants and no aliens, and if we did we could be sure that they would be different from the way we imagine them; and he treated it as a real view of the future of mankind. I don't mean this in the sense of developping a sequence of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-historical accounts of his fictional world, but of treating it as though it was morally the same as the real world, and that the real world, and the real mankind, deserved condemnation in the light of the fictional (and badly imagined) events in his own work.
This would seem, on the surface of it, a desperately troubling point. It's possible to say that we establish a fictional mankind in every story we write, even an autobiographical one. The work of so brilliant an autobiographical author as Lee Kennedy is clearly not about "the real world", but about "the real world as seen by Lee Kennedy". Nevertheless, I think the distinction is clear and visible: the Lee Kennedy world - and not only the Lee Kennedy world, but also the world of such authors of fiction as Andrew Vachss - is different in no fundamental fashion from the real world. It is, in fact, meant as a direct comment on the real world, and we are able to judge it, not only on its merits as a work of art (that is, of a particular kind of skill), but also according to the way we ourselves experience the real world. Andrew Vachss is not creating a fictitious world with its own rules, but accepting the rules of the real world as parameters for his own fiction, because what he is writing about is something that exists in the world as we know it.
What seems a problem in the broad land of theory - the distinction between the kind of "fictional world"of a Kennedy or a Vachss and the "fictional world" of a Claremont - is no problem at all to anybody who makes the experiment of reading LITTLE GIRL BLUE or HARD LOOKS and then reading any of the material that Claremont produced about the "mutant problem" or the Mutant Registration Act. It is simply obvious that Vachss and Kennedy are speaking about something, and Claremont is speaking about nothing. The whole problem is bogus: there are no mutants, and there is no inner logic to the behaviour of Congress or the American public as represented in the mutant books. Claremont has worked himself into a great froth of indignation over something that had not the least consequence. One feels almost indignant, when a Kennedy or a Vachss are expending genuine emotion over genuine tragedies, that so much effort is going into arousing ersatz indignation over false problems.
Two issues are involved, one being bad writing, and one more properly to do with the nature of the genre. The first I will deal with quickly: Claremont's Congressmen and Claremont's bureaucrats behave as no Congressman or bureaucrat ever behaved in real life. Claremont has no understanding of the mind of politicians, picturing them through a faded screen of conspiracy theories whose vaguely left-wing cast grows less and less credible as time goes on (it always troubled me that this supposed liberal was so profoundly influenced by the arch-reactionary immoralist Robert Henlein, the comrade-in-arms of Ayn Rand and Steve Ditko). His view of Congress is that of ignorant prejudice; not only the virtues, but even the vices of politicians are misrepresented.
The issue relating to the nature of the genre is that Claremont intended his fictitious mutant problems to reflect on the real world as directly as Andrew Vachss's stories of crime and child abuse. It cannot be done. Here is our first insight into the nature of the genre: it does not produce the same effect of moral proximity that realistic fiction does. By its nature the super-hero is necessarily fictitious. If it is to create a powerful moral effect, it has to do it the long way round, building on its own frame of reference. You cannot take short-cuts. What Claremont has done is on a par with somebody basing a claim on the throne of England on J.R.R.Tolkien's never-ceasing Elendilian dynasty.
2) He has started writing, not about individuals, but about groups. I have said that morality is always individual; but so is the super-hero genre.
Nothing is more central to the super-hero genre than the image of one or more towering individuals, outlined against the sky, dominating the landscape. This intensely visual image explains why the genre has worked well in visual narrative arts, comics, cinema and TV (I have even heard of a successful stage play about super-powered characters, Warp, but I have never seen it - only a somewhat inferior comic-book series), but not in prose writing. Movie and TV adaptations of super-hero characters have been frequently successful, and on a couple of occasions of landmark quality (I am thinking in particular of the first Batman movie), and there is one fine super-hero character - the Bionic Woman - produced for TV with no reference to any comic book series at all; but I know of no prose novel or short story about super-heroes that ever impressed anybody. (This is one reason why, in our caste-conscious intellectual environment, super-heroes are still regarded with contempt; prose writing is still regarded - on no good ground - as inherently superior to visual narrative, and a genre that lends itself especially well to visual narrative immediately receives the ignorant scorn of the snobbish.)
The super-hero is a significant image; significant, not in anything else that is outside him/herself, but in him/herself. And the potency and uniqueness of the image is inevitably accompanied, cannot help but be accompanied, by an equally potent and individual life history. It is born as an image; and more than once we have seen potent and exciting pictures of costumed men and women who seemed to demand equally potent and exciting stories to live in. To take an unexpected example, how many readers have been enticed to read ÂCry for DawnÀ by the strangely potent picture of J.M.Linsner's Dawn, the red-haired half-naked beauty with the three teardrops painted under her eye? How many of us have had our fantasies stimulated to imagine vast if often vague dooms for her to fulfil? Her presence was so fey and so telling that it seized our imagination even without a story to tell; we almost supplied the story ourselves.
(N.B.: this was written before Linsner himself set out to produce a few remarkable stories about the character.)
The significant image is one and cannot be multiplied. Each super-hero is only him- or herself. The pleasure there used to be in cross-overs, before greed and lack of imagination made them an agony to be endured rather than a pleasure to be awaited, was that of seeing two extraordinary individualities together - like the peculiar expectation there is when two great musicians who never played together before agree to do a jam session. The encounter is sometimes memorable (anybody here heard Ella Fitzgerald and Lous Armstrong singing Summertime?); there are peculiar possibilities that can only be realized by the encounter of two such people and that nobody else could achieve, moments in time that cannot be changed or improved on. Even when groups become permanent, they also are individual and unique. Some dimwit at Marvel tried to put Reed and Sue Richards in the Avengers; it never worked, not for one page.
Super-heroes live lives and die deaths that are related in the deepest way possible to their own individuality - that is, if the writer knows anything about his job. The supreme example of this is of course Claremont's own masterpiece, the life and death of Jean Grey: a work began in confusion, matured in disattention, and concluded against the author's own will by orders from a boss who could see, much better than the writer himself, where the story could not help but go; but ruled, from beginning to end, by the potency of the image of fire, death, resurrection, and Jean Grey's red hair. From the beginning to the end, the Phoenix was someone who stood at the threshold, who had crossed over from death and flown over the heart of the sun, possessor of powers that have nothing to do with humanity, powers that can only arise when barriers break down and the fire at the world's heart breaks through. Death and some immense doom were in her from the start; they depended from the visual impact of her fiery presence, and anything less lofty and less terrible than the doom she eventually underwent would have been a betrayal of her essence. Claremont does not seem to realize that any reputation he may have acquired depends largely on that one continuity; he has been apologizing for that perfect tragedy ever since he completed it. (Interestingly, Gerry Conway, whose only fine writing came about the time of Gwen Stacy's death, also never seems to have realized that he looked there, for once, almost like a writer. He, too, has always apologized for that story.)
To demand that we should take an interest in a given group of people, not because they are heroes, or because they are interesting in themselves, or even because they have colourful costumes, but because they are mutants, means to destroy the very basis of their appeal. It is also in point of fact doomed to fail; however much emphasis or stress the writers may lay on the group identity of the protagonists, the reader reads, not about mutants, but about Kitty and Kurt, Ororo or Rogue. There is a sort of fraudulency in the way the writer pushes the characters at us so that we, being interested in them, should also accept an ideology that negates our reason to be interested in them, making them, not themselves, but numbers in a statistic.
3) This racist and collectivist deviation is connected with an obsession with the future. We, the readers, are not interested in the future: our concern - and our pleasure - is with what Wolverine is going to do now, what Scott and Jean are going to say to each other, how Kitty Pride will react to some current bit of news, what Ororo's feelings are going to be - now; now; now. In the mutant ideology, however, all of this is subjected to the morally indifferent and imaginatively chilling notion that the importance of these characters is not in themselves, but in the genetic patrimony they will transmit to their descendants. We are invited to look forwards to a time when all our favourite characters will be dead - lost to us - and only their genetic patrimony will be present. How can this interest us? In the long run we are all dead, Keynes said; what is more, the future is beyond our control, and we have no great say in the way it will happen.
Claremont's one masterpiece in the "future history" genre - #141-142 - accepts, without admitting them, both these truths: the future it presents is entirely out of control, and most of the X-men (in a memorable scene) are shown to be dead. The story is dominated by unstated disenchantment with the progressive notion of the future that is supposed to motivate the strip - and that appears, in this story, quite beyond hope or possibility. For that matter, I cannot remember a single one of Marvel's possible futures that does anything to justify the assumption, either that the future will be better than the present, or that the growth of mutant mankind is assured, or yet that it will in any way improve or benefit the planet.
Now, to a sane man, this is simply unchallenged fact: the future is beyond our control, and the far future has little relevance to the moral choices we have to make now. But to the moral futurist, this is a ruinous, an apocalyptic admission. He cannot conceive of any open future, let alone any future in which things will be much as they are today, some better, some worse, but bound by no necessity to get better: having invested all the positive contents of his imagination in the progressive vision of the future, he has none left for any other sort of development. The only alternative he can imagine to constant improvement is constant deterioration; the notion that the human race will stay as it is, that "man by any other name is nothing else than his own sweet self", is intolerable to him, because (and this is essential) the human race as it is is intolerable to him. He will admit, in the abstract, that there are good and bad sides to mankind, but his vision of mankind as it is now is in fact a nightmare. Any good aspect of present reality is to him a forerunner of "the future"; he has, we remember, invested all the positive elements of his imagination in his image of the future, and therefore, by the kind of syllogism that feeds mental illnesses, he cannot conceive of any aspect of past or present as anything except inferior.
If you were to tell him (this has actually happened to me) that the future will have as many troubles as the present, that there will be no "evolution" in the moral being of mankind, that men will always be asked to choose good and will always be tempted to do evil, the futurist will be literally struck with horror: as to him the present is quite simply a nightmare, as his mind has unconsciously removed all positive sides from it, what you are telling him is not "man, morally, will never change, and there will always be bad sides to reject and good sides to cherish", but "all the things you hate in the world you live in will always prevail over the things you love". This is of course false, but until you understand that what you mean by "the present" is different from what he means by the same word, you are always going to be at cross-purposes. And even when you have got through to him that you do not think that things are to grow worse for ever, that in fact there is a good chance that many aspects of our lives will improve, that the world we are to leave to our children will not be doomed to futility, he will still feel that yours is a rather cold kind of comfort. His emotions and his affections are still placed in his "future", and he is completely out of sympathy with any view of the world that embraces all its aspects as equally present - the god, the bad, and the strife between them.
Futurism is false in general terms, of course; it is based on a vision of reality so askew as to be near to insanity; but it is particularly false to the super-hero genre. The pseudo-historical time frame that it imposes on reality is totally at odds with the core of the super-hero genre as I described it, the significant image; for that image is timeless. Linsner's Dawn, as much as Superman, has its significance independently of what she does. Superman became a smashing success, and remained a smashing success, almost without reference to the quality of the stories; readers would read anything about it, however crude, so long as it did not actually betray the power of the image itself. However poor the story, however crude the drawing, the image behind them sustained its appeal in the face of all the frustrated and indignant critics who raved, and still rave, at the sheer idiocy of it all; not understanding how the public, the great inarticulate brute mass, found its attraction not in the details of story of art, but in something that lay behind them - the image of Superman.
You might almost say that a super-hero steps into each of his or her stories from somewhere else; the image pre-exists any of the stories, and the stories serve only to bring it more into focus. The stories are a manifestation, each in its own time frame, of a figure that does not depend on time for its significance; and writers have invented devices such as time travel, alternate realities, imaginary stories, and possible futures, to create stories incompatible with the existing body of stories about the significant image, but suitable to the significant image. The time frame is secondary and changeable, the single vision is essential and unchanged. Superman is the same now as he was sixty years ago in the minds of Siegel and Schuster; and anybody who thinks this is a blemish simply does not understand the meaning of archetypes.
In the futurist mind, the central element is the flow of time. The significant image becomes only a part of the significant whole: Wolverine is not a deathless image of the unbreakable animal obstinacy in man, an image that was true as soon as conceived and remains true as long as there are men, but a stage of evolution, that is true today but not yesterday and not tomorrow. Tomorrow the truth will be different. The significant image loses its firm immutability, its being eternally silhouetted against a ceaseless sky; it is harnessed and de-individualized, placed at a particular stage of the process of evolution.