GRIEVANCE IS NOT DIVERSITY'S GOOD BUDDY

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."-- Robert Frost.

“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."-- Ibrem X Kendi.

Whenever creators of "woke" popular culture indulge in the practice of swapping the established ethnicities of characters formulated by earlier creators, they often defend their actions by pointing at American pop culture's long tradition of privileging Caucasian characters and of stigmatizing "people of color" when such characters were depicted at all. Because of this history-- which wokesters do not hesitate to dub "white supremacy"-- they assume that any alterations they make are beneficial to the culture as a whole, and that only unregenerate racists would object to their idea of diversity.

This radical definition of racism was not born along with the so-called modern Progressives, who became increasingly prominent in the 2010s, not least by reviving the term "woke" to describe a recommended state of liberal hyper-vigilance against any opposing conservative values. Like "woke," the term "institutional racism," aka "systemic racism," had an earlier genesis, appearing in the 1967 book BLACK POWER by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. That decade saw the political articulation of the two dominant forms of Liberalism, meliorism and radicalism. The names say something about their ideological orientations. Meliorism stems from a Latin word for "better," and thus suggesting the overall betterment of persons influenced by the ideology. Radicalism arose from a Latin word for "root," and became associated with the ideal of theoretically hunting out the "root causes" of some conflict-- though with the added connotation of attacking whatever is alleged to be the root cause, often benefitting one group or ideology rather than society as a whole.      

Froom the 1960s on, American pop culture tended to favor meliorism. When, for example, Marvel Comics introduced Black characters to their universe, such as The Black Panther and the Falcon, the liberal writers involved wanted their readers to better understand the culture of Black Africans and Black Americans. This did not mean that the White readers were in any way expected to cease appreciating either American majority culture or any of the European, dominantly-Caucasian cultures from which America's majority citizenry had been derived.

In comics, this meliorist pattern reached its apogee in the creation of THE NEW X-MEN in 1975. GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 sidelined four of the older, entirely Caucasian-American members of the 1960s team and devised an excuse for the two remaining members, Cyclops and Professor X, to go on an international scavenger-hunt for new mutant heroes. Seven crusaders obligingly sign on: one White Canadian, three White Europeans, one Native American, one Asian, and one apparent Black African (later revealed to be of African-American extraction). In the ensuing series, Cyclops still remains the only member from the sixties comic, with the other four from that period being written out (though a slightly later plotline brought back Marvel Girl within the space of an issue or two). Two other members left and stayed gone, ostensibly to reduce the number of characters readers had to keep track of. As it happened, they were both POC, with Native American Thunderbird dying in action and Asian Sunfire leaving just because he felt like being a dick.

The larger point to be taken from these meliorist examples is that there was no trace of a radical ideal that anyone of any race was "owed" representation. Writer Chris Claremont most probably eliminated Thunderbird and Sunfire because he didn't have anything to say about them, while he ostensibly kept Wolverine because he offered more story potential. Yet he also arguably gave more attention to Black African Storm than to Banshee and Colossus, two of the three White Europeans. Narratively speaking, Claremont had three "favorite children" in Storm, Nightcrawler and Wolverine. He concentrated on them so much that even the Caucasian-American Cyclops probably would not have got much attention had Claremont not brought back Jean Grey, who would eventually become entangled in a romantic arc with Wolverine.

So successful was the X-MEN franchise that nearly all other superhero team books, both from Marvel and from its main rival DC, emulated Claremont's melioristic liberal template, all the way through the 1980s and 1990s. That said, larger forces in popular entertainment would eventually shift that melioristic tendency, as grievance-based radicalism began to assume a greater cultural role in the 1990s, specifically through the mainstreaming of hip hop music and of the New Black Cinema, spearheaded by Spike Lee and John Singleton.

 In contrast, so-called mainstream comics, whether about hero-teams or not, didn't show much of a taste for radicalism. However, the same economic forces that birthed the direct-sales comics market made it possible for the industry to market concepts with a more radical agenda. Ironically, though Marvel Comics had provided most of the first "diverse" superheroes, their main competitor DC Comics invested far more heavily in imprints aimed at adults, principally Vertigo. Some of these "adventures in diversity" had a meliorist orientation. But arguably the more radical ongoing titles attracted more attention, setting the tune for the mainstreaming of "woke comics" in the 21st century. And although titles like SWAMP THING and SANDMAN had their "woke moments," none of the ongoing Vertigo titles were more grievance-heavy than Peter Milligan's SHADE THE CHANGING MAN. The first issue, for example, opens with a sequence in which a noble Black Man intercedes when his White girlfriend is menaced by a White slasher covered in the blood of his victims-- only for the Black Man to be shot dead by a Racist White Southern cop. Edgy, right?

I mention Milligan partly because he seems to be the first writer to taint Claremont's even-handed X-MEN with grievance-based radicalism. This rather short run-- only 22 issues, X-MEN #166-187, from 2005 to 2006-- makes him something of a precursor to the flood of woke comics from Marvel and DC in the 2010s, though not necessarily any direct influence. The proximate reason for the "woke comics boom" was the initial, albeit short-lived, popularity of MS MARVEL in 2014. But if one wants to see an early example of the X's getting put through the grievance mill, the Milligan run is a great place to start.  

Here's Milligan introducing a mutant named "Boy," because his rich White masters think it's hilarious to call him that. You know Milligan's being edgy because he claims the richies are "liberals"-- though I suspect Milligan counts on his readers not to believe him.  

Here's Milligan having Boy rant about "colonialism" for some damn reason.

Here's some general and the President (wonder which one) showing ingratitude to the mutants for having saved the world again.

And finally, here's some villain dissing John Wayne, and the gung-ho American superheroes being deeply offended.

I imagine Milligan viewed his jejune grievance-baiting as "satire," but it's less insightful than even a nineties issue of MAD Magazine. These 22 issues don't show the heroes and their opponents relating to one another in interesting ways: it's all just superficial "head games," particularly the opening arc "Golgotha," involving an alien spore that causes all of the heroes to rail at one another. The only breaks I'll cut Milligan are (1) he probably didn't think he was going to be writing the X-title very long, so he may have just wrote some piddling stories while keeping the status quo stable, and (2) even Claremont wrote his share of "head game stories." But whenever Claremont did this sort of "Naked Time" schtick, the characters weren't only spouting grievances to attack America, capitalism or just overall White Culture, both European and American.     

Though I don't follow current comics, the few comics podcasts I follow don't indicate any major movements back toward an ethic of meliorism at either Marvel or DC. Possibly there aren't as many extreme examples of radicalism as "Gay Son of Superman" and "Captain America, Hydra Agent." But I suspect that the radical ideal of representation for all aggrieved groups-- rather than the ideal of seeking common ground-- remains entrenched. I consider this ideal, as per my Robert Frost quote, one equivalent to maintaining walls-- walls to be exploited by those who profit from divisiveness and so make it unlikely than diversity measures will ever succeed. It's ironic that as I write this, there's ARE indications that Hollywood, which exploited or even exacerbated the most radical tendencies of Marvel and DC, might be backing away somewhat from peddling grievance all the time.      

SLOTT RACING

 

I haven't been a fan, in the "fanatic" sense of the word, of hardly any comics-creator since the 1990s, which is pretty close to when I stopped buying new American comics. (I have continued to collect a handful of new manga.) And even in the 80s and 90s, I often resorted to quarter boxes to fill issues of magazines I was only mildly interested in following. But by the 2000s, I had so many comics I even stopped getting many used comics either. By then, TPBs had become profitable enough that public libraries carried a lot of them, and so I could sample newer books at no expense. And that's how I found Dan Slott's FANTASTIC FOUR, which began with "Volume 6, Number One" in 2018 to issue #46 in 2022. (Two issues later, the title rebooted for a new sheriff in town.)

I had already read a smattering of Slott's comics in titles like SPIDER-MAN and SHE-HULK. I thought those stories okay but nothing that compelled me to read everything he wrote for those features. I wouldn't have thought he would be the first writer I ever liked on FANTASTIC FOUR almost as much as I like Stan and Jack.

The last FF stories I read with any frequency was the Tom deFalco run, ending in 1995, and of course I'd read everything up to that point. Some contributors to the FF legend were extremely mediocre, like Thomas, Conway, and Byrne. Others, like Wein and Englehart, were able to work in a few interesting ideas. But as far as I could tell, none of the writers got the "voices" of the characters that only Stan Lee conveyed, and only a few artists, like George Perez, communicated some of the verve of Kirby. That said, I might have missed a lot of great stuff in the 2000s, when I only picked up a very small handful of secondhand books. I did see the introduction of Valeria Richards, whom John Byrne created as a stillborn infant and whom Chris Claremont retconned into a living teen girl, who eventually got retconned again into the legitimate daughter of Reed and Sue. Other characters, who would become important in Slott's run, debuted in the runs of earlier raconteurs, such as an intelligent version of the android Dragon Man. And of course, DeFalco deserves credit for undoing the whole "Johnny Storm marries his best friend's girl" thing from Byrne's run.

             

 Yet, despite my having hopped over a decade of continuity, I feel like Slott went in new directions. The above-seen "wedding of Ben and Alicia" was a welcome development, but far more incisive was Slott's reading of Johnny Storm as a "player," which he arguably was in some of his first appearances. First, he begins dating Sky, an alien female with wings, who believes that the two of them were born as soulmates. But in a few issues, Johnny manages to inveigle the affections of Zora Victorious, a Latverian soldier who idolizes her armor-clad monarch. Naturally, when Doom persuades the young woman to become his queen, this sets up a situation that will make Doom despise Johnny almost as much as he does Reed Richards. I also like Slott's handling of Reed, Sue and Ben as well, but over the years they've received quite a bit of character-buildup from various authors, while the Torch usually gets short shrift.

 

Now, though almost every writer who worked on FF had emphasized that the group was "a family," the only literal addition to that familial group in the 20th century had been Franklin Richards. Claremont's Valeria, after substantial tweaking, was brought into the title as a regular at some point in the 2000s, but I can't speak to how good the book might have been thanks to the original addition. But I can say that Slott captures the "teen-voices" of Franklin and Valeria quite well, and arguably he does even better by bringing in two younger kids, who provide considerable contrast when they're adopted by the newly married Ben and Alicia. This was a clever way of bringing in the ongoing history of the Kree and Skrull Empires, for one child, Jo-venn, is Kree while the other, N'Kalla, is Skrull. The heroes stumble across a space casino where these two pre-teens have been trained to fight one another for the entertainment of onlookers, a faux extension of the famous "Kree-Skrull War." Slott skillfully shows that even though the two kids have been trained to fight for the entertainment of audiences, they actually have a grudging respect for one another and become annoyed when the Thing and the Torch seek to liberate the two kids from the only life they've ever known. Once the Baxter Building has four kids on the premises, it seems more like a "family affair" than anything since Stan and Jack-- and one could even argue that the two creators might have done better on that score.

Not everything is golden. There are a few too many trips to outer space and/or alien dimensions where the inhabitants aren't all that interesting, and that includes the planet from which Sky hails. However, I'll deal with two other stories-- one a mythcomic and one a near-myth-- that should show why Slott's tenure deserves more attention.        

MYTHCOMICS: "DAYS OF FUTURE PAST" (X-MEN #141-142, 1981)

 

It's a mark of my long-retired investment in the seventies X-MEN franchise that I can still recall the experience of reading the first pages of DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. 

A few months earlier, Chris Claremont and John Byrne had concluded the ambitious "Phoenix Saga," which, despite its tragic climax, also sported a couple tons of "sense of wonder" elements. Then came X-MEN #141, depicting how, thirty-six years later (than the comic book's cover date), all of America would be reduced to a doomed world bereft of wonders. In the future, the robotic mutant-hunters known as The Sentinels, whose potential had never really been tapped in their first stories. took control of the United States (at the very least) and killed all the Marvel superheroes and most of the X-Men. Only a tiny handful of the mutants survived, kept in power-dampening collars and dressed in jumpsuits designed to evoke the sufferings of real-life WWII Jews. DAYS OF FUTURE PAST addresses the desperate attempt of the survivors to cancel out their dreadful future. Not until re-reading DAYS, however, did I perceive one reason why this dystopian fantasy seemed so much better grounded in reality than dozens of others. 

The two issues are cover-dated January and February 1981, though the whole adventure as such is internally dated as occurring on "Friday, October 31, 1980... the final Friday of one of the closest, hardest-fought Presidential elections in recent memory." To be sure, since one might argue that Marvel-reality may not always line up with our reality, one can't be entirely sure that Claremont is talking about the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. But even had Claremont wanted to address a real political situation, it's unlikely that any Marvel Comics editor, least of all Jim Shooter, would have allowed a Marvel writer to editorialize about a living political figure. That said, given the lag time between comic-book production and the comics' availability to customers, it's not impossible that Claremont plotted DAYS before he actually knew of Reagan's victory-- which may be a reason why, when the new President does appear in the story, he's only a shadowy figure with no name or distinguishing characteristics. In fact, DAYS might be Claremont's projection of what might happen if America went down "the wrong road" that most liberals of the time associated with the Republican Party.

From the conception of the Sentinels, they incarnated the idea of isolating a subgroup of human beings from the rest of humanity. This science-fiction motif was pointedly compared to the human history of racism and chauvinism by many comic-book readers and creators, not least Claremont himself. To my knowledge no one from 1976 to 1980 accused Ronald Reagan of wanting to impose some version of the Nuremberg Rules upon the United States, though at least one of his campaign speeches back in 1980 was accused of recrudescent racism. But it's still interesting that on the very day that the new President of Marvel-Earth was announced, a set of circumstances arise that will bring about the destruction of civil rights-- not only for mutants, but for all human beings.

In 2013, there are six surviving mutants. Five are older versions of Storm, Wolverine, Magneto (now crippled and out of the action), Colossus and Kitty-- now "Kate"-- Pryde. The sixth is a new character, a psychic named Rachel, whom Claremont will explore in great detail over the next decade. The X-survivors intend to erase their doleful era by using Rachel's mind-skills, projecting the consciousness of 2013 Kate to inhabit the body of 1980 Kitty. Then, rather than simply watching over Kate's comatose body to see what happens, Storm, Colossus, Wolverine and Rachel-- joined by the last surviving scion of the Fantastic Four, Franklin Richards-- plan a frontal attack upon the Sentinels.

The mind-transfer succeeds. Kate Pryde takes over Kitty's body and informs the X-Men that a new incarnation of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is out to assassinate Senator Robert Kelley, a politician obsessed with legally restricting the activities of mutants. Kate informs the heroes that in her world, this murder doesn't cow humanity, as the Brotherhood intended. Instead, in 1984, a new President-- carefully unnamed-- approves the creation of a new set of Sentinels, who carry out their draconian plan to corral all mutants, which extends to keeping all humanity under control as well. Kate also asserts that the Sentinels in her era plan to extend their control to other countries, which will certainly bring about nuclear Armageddon. After overcoming a natural reluctance, the X-Men-- then consisting of Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Colossus, Kitty and guest-star Angel-- zoom off to prevent the Brotherhood's dirty deed.

The battle of the X-heroes and the Evil Mutants isn't particularly mythic in itself, though it's in this narrative that Claremont and Byrne decided to give the ranks of the villains a makeover. The new roster includes only one old-time X-foe, The Blob, and debuts three new malcontents, Pyro, Avalanche, and the oracular Destiny. Lastly, Claremont re-purposes a character he created for the MS. MARVEL series, Mystique, as the new leader of the Brotherhood. Mystique's reasons for believing she can intimidate all of humanity with one assassination are not explored at all, possibly because Claremont, following up on a plot-thread introduced in a 1980 story, was preoccupied with suggesting a connection between Mystique and Nightcrawler. (Eventually she's revealed to be his long-lost mother, FWIW.) The heroes triumph, Kate departs the body of Kitty (who has no memory of the events). and Robert Kelley's life is spared. However, the concluding clincher is that the heroism of the X-Men means nothing to the obsessed politician. In a coda, Kelley is seen conferring with the President-elect-- as said before, given no name and depicted in shadow-- as the new President does what his 1984 successor originally did: authorizing a new series of Sentinels. 

The fact that 1980 present-day events are only partly rewritten may have been Claremont's rationale for not erasing the Sentinel-future from Marvel continuity. I don't remember what happens when Kate's mind returns to 2013, by which time the future-versions of Storm, Wolverine and Franklin Richards have all been slain-- though I have a feeling that the threat of nuclear doomsday somehow gets taken off the table. Unlucky 2013 has to continue, though, because Claremont has introduced the telepath Rachel for the purpose of having her time-travel back to Marvel-present. In due time it will be revealed that she comes by her psychic talent honestly, for she's the child of Cyclops and the recently-deceased Jean Grey a.k.a. Phoenix. For many years to come, Claremont will get a lot of mileage out of Rachel Summers, though DAYS is probably more notable for all the stories Claremont and other Marvel writers generate from Kelley's "Mutant Control Act," which will morph into the Superhuman Registration Act underlying the CIVIL WAR continuity of the 2000s. 

One last myth-point: though a lot of superheroes are mentioned as having been slain by Sentinels by 2013, only the Fantastic Four and their mythos has any direct impact on DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. I've noted that the survivor-mutants are briefly aided by Franklin Richards, but not that he's also the boyfriend of Rachel, and that he's killed early in the story, His presence seems to be nothing more than a foreshadowing of the revelation that Rachel too will prove to be the offspring of superhero parents. The Sentinels, when attacked by the 2013 mutants, have made the Baxter Building their HQ, which would carry a sense of irony were the occupants not unfeeling robots. Finally, a scene in which Kate walks by the tombstones of dead superheroes displays only the names of either X-Men or FF-members. Much later, Kurt Busiek's MARVELS would comment on how the transformed foursome of heroes were lauded by the public while the mutant crusaders were despised for being fundamentally different from the rest of humanity. But Claremont anticipated the same contrast. The Fantastic Four is the "first family" of Marvel-Earth, and the fall of those heroes could be interpreted as the demise of Silver Age Marvel. In contrast, though most of the 2013 mutants also perish, the future of Marvel turns out to be more aligned with the children of Xavier than the buddies of Reed Richards. Claremont was at the top of his game when he plotted out this challenging opus. The downside, though. was that he kept churning out less resonant visions of nightmare realities, most of which were as bad as DAYS OF FUTURE PAST was good. But such is the conundrum of talent: praise a writer for doing one thing well, and nine times out of ten he'll run the same idea into the ground.

MYTHCOMICS: “PUBLIC ENEMY/LIFEDEATH” (X-MEN #185-186, 1984)

 

Though the X-Men character Storm was not the first Black superheroine, she became, within the subculture of comic book readers, the first one to gain fame both within the medium and in both live-action and animated adaptations. As one of X-MEN’s faithful readers, I wasn’t always happy with the directions long-time writer Chris Claremont took with either Storm or most of the other protagonists. Nevertheless, whatever status any of the seventies X-Men might have as literary myths comes principally from Claremont, even though said heroes had been created by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum.

At least one of Claremont’s virtues as a writer of superhero melodrama might be seen as a vice from the vantage of formulating mythic discourse. In my essay STRIP NO-SHOW I advanced the notion that comic strips, even though they started off with a better reputation for quality work than did the rival medium comic books, labored under restrictions of format presentation that inhibited their mythic potential. Most comic strips remained satisfied with a simple lateral plot-progression, wherein the only “subplots” were usually introductions of future new plotlines. In the sixties comic books revealed a far greater capacity for what I’ve termed “vertical meanings,” some of which arose out of the ability of comic book authors to explore their concepts of character and society more than had their comic strip forebears.

Stan Lee was a pivotal figure in taping this potential, making him the Father of the Soap Opera Comic Book, and even if he didn’t hit one out of the park every time, he and his collaborators comprehended how to give the readers enough satisfaction that they kept coming back for more. Claremont didn’t deliver on satisfying wrap-ups quite as often, but he exceeded Lee in quantity, as an average issue of an eighties X-MEN might be juggling at least four plotlines at a time. True, sometimes the plots were editorially imposed. This fact is evident in the two X-issues I’m examining here, which coordinated one X-plot with developments in the “Rom Spaceknight” continuity. But Claremont also kept his readers coming back for more, and it’s in these stories that he took one of his most daring steps: to divest Storm, one of the group’s most popular members, of the very powers that made her unique.

“Public Enemy” places its focus on two of the group’s X-Women, Storm and Rogue. Unlike Storm, a charter member of the seventies team, Rogue had been introduced as a villain. After bouncing around various features, always being misunderstood like Marvel’s other outlaw-heroes, she switched teams and joined the X-Men roughly a year prior to “Public Enemy.” The cover teases the reader with the idea that Rogue may have returned to villainy, showing the image of Rogue grinning as she clutches the jacket of an apparently defeated Storm. In truth, the perception of Rogue as a public enemy is a false one fostered by two government officials, both hostile to mutantkind: familiar support-cast faces Henry Gyrich and Valerie Cooper. Rogue has been accused of killing a SHIELD agent, and that’s enough reason for Gyrich to lead a task force in order to hunt her down. Because Rogue is especially powerful—having assimilated the powers of the more celebrated heroine Ms. Marvel—Gyrich takes along with a special power-neutralizing ray-gun, invented by government-employed inventor Forge (introduced the previous issue).

By coincidence, Rogue, though unaware of the charges against her, suddenly gets antsy about her association with the X-heroes and flees their company without explanation. Storm, despite having been less than taken with Rogue when the latter joined the team, has conceived a respect for the newbie’s “sense of honor and decency,” and so she tracks down the fugitive heroine, concerned that she may suffer a “relapse.” Rogue, a Mississippi girl, has sought surcease of sorrow at a familiar old haunt: a section of the state’s most famous river, where Rogue first learned of her mutant powers. (One can tell that the issue was written pre-PC: Claremont writes elegaically of the Fall of the South without once mentioning the Evils of Slavery.)

Storm finds Rogue, and they talk, with Rogue expressing her continued concerns, that she could endanger her teammates because her ability to absorb others’ powers could hurt them. Storm proposes an experiment, giving her consent to let Rogue assimilate Storm’s powers and memories. (Later, in “Lifedeath,” Storm mentions how she had to cultivate mental serenity to keep her emotions from affecting the local weather, so in effect Storm seeks to give the tormented Southern belle a taste of the equilibrium she so desires.) After the transfer has been made, Storm passes out, but Rogue does experience an oceanic sense of connectedness to the elements, without any concomitant danger to herself or others. (To be sure, Rogue does suffer the temptation to vampirize Storm for more serene memories, but the better side of her personality wins out.)

However, Gyrich’s team tracks down Rogue and attacks. Rogue’s attempt to wield Storm’s powers forestall the agents but also imperil some bystanders. While Rogue and a recovered Storm seek to help the innocents, Gyrich draws a bead on Rogue with his anti-power gun. Forge, by some contrivance, arrives on the scene to avert Gyrich’s fire, though the ray ends up hitting Storm (possibly because of Forge’s interference, though Claremont doesn’t say so). An explosion stuns Rogue, who gets washed away in the river’s current. Forge recovers the similarly stunned Storm and takes custody of the heroine victimized by the illicit use of Forge’s own technology.

Though “Public Enemy” concentrates most of its narrative on Rogue, arguably Storm plays the more mythic role: that of the elemental goddess who gives all things to her friends/acolytes (even if this is more the province of Earth-deities than sky-gods). Rogue surfaces in a subplot to “Lifedeath,” confronting Valerie Cooper and almost immediately getting entangled with the “Rom Spaceknight” subplot. But most of the issue is devoted to the interactions of Storm and Forge, between a man who could make miracle-weapons and a woman who “once upon a time” could fly.

Storm risked her life to let Rogue temporarily emulate her powers and identity, but it’s quite a different thing to lose the powers that she associated with her identity. At the start of “Lifedeath,” Storm has been languishing in the scientific citadel of Forge for at least a day, since the reader first sees Forge trying to make the disconsolate former superhero take some nourishment. Apparently, Storm is so disassociated that she hasn’t even appealed for help to her friends at Xavier’s school, and they can’t locate her because she no longer has mutant powers.

Nevertheless, though Storm has never met Forge before, and is unaware of his role in removing her powers, she rallies somewhat, needing to talk to someone about her crisis, even as Rogue needed her earlier. “I was one with all creation,” she protests. Forge responds with his version of tough love, replying, “The goddess has become just plain folks.” He later reveals that he understands her impulse toward suicide because the injuries he sustained in Vietnam made him desire self-termination as well. The bond of shared suffering sparks the possibility of romance, though both of them find it difficult to communicate their emotions accurately. Storm does confess how her extreme self-enforcement of serenity constituted a sort of “spiritual celibacy,” which is her reason for having put off her original “regal” appearance in favor of “punk Storm”—though Claremont also implies that there’s another “celibacy” that can’t be fixed via fashion. However, their tentative romance comes to an end when Storm serendipitously finds out who’s responsible for draining her powers. Though in the next issue the two of them will be forced to make common cause against a greater threat, Storm leaves him, telling Forge that he is “hollow, form without substance” and that sooner or later, “I shall fly again.”

Without even looking, I feel reasonably certain that Storm’s de-powering made the list on the nineties site “Women in Refrigerators,” with the implication that the heroine was nullified in the service of repressive patriarchy. Of course, losing her powers did not strike Storm off the list of the X-Men, even though she didn’t regain her abilities for some years. Clearly Claremont’s basic intent here parallels a dozen or so Superman stories in which that hero loses his powers and has to prove his heroism using only his courage and intelligence. But Claremont, drawing upon the spadework of Stan Lee, deepened the sense of trauma associated with a loss of power or prestige. Thus, in these two stories, both heroines—one who fears connection and one who has always felt connected-- are subjected to extended suffering. Claremont used this trauma-trope a lot, and not always to mythopoeic ends. Sometimes, the agonies only served to keep the plot-pots boiling. But in these stories Forge the isolated scientist becomes an overreaching version of Rogue, the isolated heroine. And in reaction against the scientist’s solipsism, Storm’s struggle to regain her own identity takes on mythic stature. And she achieves that stature not because the character is Black, but because she’s a well-written character who happens to be Black.

MYTHCOMICS: “WHY DO WE DO THESE THINGS WE DO” (NEW MUTANTS ANNUAL #2, 1986)

 

In this story—hitherto abbreviated as “Things”—the roster for the New Mutants included Mirage, Cannonball, Magma, Sunspot, Wolfsbane, Magik, Warlock and Cipher—though to be sure, the narrative strongly emphasizes the actions of the last two. A three-page prologue sets up the action when two of the villains of the LONGSHOT universe, Mojo and Spiral, capture Betsy Braddock, the blind-but-psychically-endowed sister of Captain Britain. (Mojo, by the way, is the first to bestow the name of “Psylocke” upon Betsy, foreshadowing the intent of either Claremont or his editors to bring the character into the Marvel mainstream.) “Things” then shifts to the New Mutants’ training academy. Doug Ramsey, a.k.a. Cipher, complains to his team-leader Mirage about the problem that most assails Marvel heroes: a discontent with their existential status. In Cipher’s case, he feels alienated not only by virtue of being a mutant, but also for being unable to talk to anyone about his experiences but his fellow mutants. Mirage counsels him to avoid self-pity and “make the best of things.”

Ironically, though the other mutants on the team have much more power than Doug, they appear to be more vulnerable than he to a psychic seduction via that most insidious seducer: the idiot box. Most of the New Mutants, as well as the younger siblings of Karma (who’s not in the story proper), are caught up in a TV-show called Wildways, starring Mojo, Spiral, and a brainwashed Betsy, now given the name of Psylocke. Over in England, though, Captain Britain recognizes his missing sister in the program and jets over to the former colonies to investigate, though he’s quickly nullified by an unseen foe.

For the New Mutants, life seems normal, though only the reader sees it when Mojo and Spiral manifest to young Sunspot and seduce him to enter Wildways, like a couple of extra-dimensional Pied Pipers.Then, in the midst of a mundane task, Cipher—who has learned how to wear the metamorphic Warlock as a suit if armor—accidentally kills Sunspot. Almost all of the young heroes mourn their loss, but Warlock points out to Cipher that the body is a fake, a “changeling” of sorts.

A shift to Mojo’s dimension shows that he’s also managed to kidnap Wolfsbane, three kids from the LONGSHOT series, and the two grade-school siblings of Karma. All were lured into the Mojoverse by the seductive Wildways program, and Mojo remakes all of them into hyper-sexualized adults, implicitly unleashing their own latent fantasies to serve the madman’s purpose. The two siblings, despite coming from Vietnam, take on a sort of “Siamese twin” image—albeit without being literally bound to each other—and are given the shared name of Template. When the New Mutants show up at the same site that Britain explored earlier, Mojo causes Psylocke to make the heroes quarrel with one another. The brainwashed pawns appear and rough up the good guys, after which Template, acting the part of a disappointed father and mother, also mindwipe most of the heroes into thinking they’re naughty children. Magma alone proves able to resist Template’s power, so Template regresses Magma into a literal child,

Warlock spirits his best friend Cipher away from the villains before the two of them can be suborned. Moments later they come across Captain Britain, also regressed to childhood, and half-brainwashed into thinking that he really is a rebellious child. Cipher has to give Britain the same “buck up and hang tough” speech that Mirage gave him earlier. Britain then rushes forth to rescue the fugitive Magma, and Cipher/Warliock invade Mojo’s sanctum to nullify Psylocke’s influence. Psylocke retaliates, drawing the two heroes into her psychc matrix. There Cipher must fight not only the mental defenss of Psylocke, but also the influence of Spiral, who has somehow bonded herself with Psylocke’s inner self. Cipher’s heroism gives Psylocke the power to disassociate herself from Spiral, though once again Spiral speaks the language of the seducer:

The Wildway offers wonders beyond comprehension, adventures beyond imagining, eternal youth and beauty, the fulfillment of every heart’s desire.

Not surprisingly, Psylocke, being a hero, rejects Spiral’s offer and brings all the good guys back to the real world. As a nice touch, though, Betsy still retains one of the bounties given her by the devilish Mojo—a pair of bionic eyes-- and she can’t quite give up this particular gift—which for all I know may have presaged a later plot-thread. Cipher gets to wind it all up, reflecting that all the things that happened to the heroes and their allies could have happened to “the souls of innocent kids.” Claremont’s trope of Faustian seduction applies particularly well to teenagers, discontent with their lot by virtue of burgeoning hormones, but even better to real children. Indeed, one of Alan Davis’s outstanding images in the Psylocke-world is that of artificially grinning New Mutants riding a Wildways carousel. I don’t think the majority of journeymen artists could have pulled off the seductive horror of the Wildways world, so “Things” is one story which absolutely required both artist and writer to be giving their utmost to the project.

NEW MUTANT ROUNDUP

 

I’m halfway through a reread of Marvel’s first NEW MUTANTS series, and I want to sum up the series at the point where my forthcoming mythcomics review becomes relevant. I’ll probably try to reread the whole series, though I may or may not blog about everything.

Since NEW MUTANTS was not a favorite of mine, aside from the one mythcomic I reviewed years ago, I hadn’t read most of them for thirty years. Further, I probably collected all of them from the quarter-bin and read them out of order. Originally my only motive for the re-read was to ground myself in the “Demon Bear” sequence, since this narrative plays a role in the 2020 NEW MUTANTS movie. Yet because writer Chris Claremont scripts most of his features with multiple soap-operatic plotlines, I thought I had better chart the feature’s course from the beginning. I did find that Claremont foregrounded the heroes’ encounter with the Bear as early as NEW MUTANTS #1, so my approach proved justified. As it happened, while the Bear-story was visually memorable thanks to the art of Bill Sienkiewicz, it didn’t meet my standards as a mythcomic.

In the course of the re-read, though, I found I was more forgiving of the series’ formulaic stories, if only I’ve seen so many later Marvel comics unable to master even the rudiments of good formula. The New Mutants debuted in 1984, as a spin-off from the enormously successful X-Men, most of whom were full adults and did not precisely need Professor Xavier’s “school for mutants.” Four of the fledgling heroes—Cannonball, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, and Psyche (later renamed Mirage)—were created by Claremont and Bob McLeod, while the fifth, Karma, had already appeared in an issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP. Karma was for whatever reason quickly shuttled out of the series, making only minor appearances up to the point of my current re-read. Claremont devoted much more space to such new members as Magma (a lady able to command volcanic phenomena), Magik (a mutant sorceress), Warlock (a techno-organic teenaged alien), and Cipher (a young mutant with no abilities beyond being able to decipher any language of man or machine).

Having been a strong X-Fan since the relaunch of that title in the 1970s, I found the New Mutants to be weak sauce, with stilted characterization by Claremont and poor decision-making with respect to the heroes’ powers, which did not complement one another in battles as did the powers of the X-Men. The New Mutants did not have colorful individual costumes as did the X-Men, but rather wore rough imitations of the dull yellow-and-black school uniforms worn by the first X-Men in the 1960s. However, with one exception (that of Iceman) all the 1960s uniforms came equipped with masks, the better to guard their identities when they went out crusading for justice. The New Mutants, who almost never wore masks (much like the majority of the New X-Men), weren't supposed to be running around playing superheroes like their elders. But of course they did. Thus it would seem the "school uniform" notion was counter-intuitive in terms of the logistics of identity protection, and probably didn't elicit all that much nostalgia from Marvel Comics readers.

The most interesting aspect of the early issues is Claremont’s use of the “Faustian seduction” trope.Not a few fans noticed that Claremont’s X-Men, despite having been born as mutants, frequently underwent further changes, sometimes aimed at making them into physical travesties of themselves, and sometimes oriented on their giving in to the forces of evil in their own souls. I haven’t counted how many times the X-Men experienced such melodrama-filled alterations, but the New Mutants’ quantity of such shifts must at least come a close second.

As with any trope that gets overused, many, of Claremont's Faustian seductions were contrived, even chintzy. However, he did do better in the NEW MUTANTS/X-MEN crossover, reviewed here, wherein the evil Loki becomes a stand-in for the Christian “lord of lies.” And around the same time, Claremont and Alan Davis wove a memorable nightmare from another crossover: NEW MUTANTS ANNUAL #2, which not only brought some of the continuity of Ann Nocenti’s LONGSHOT concept into “mainstream Marvel,” but also imported two characters from Marvel’s British comics-line, Captain Britain and his sister Betsy Braddock, later to go though her own tumultuous changes under the name of Psylocke.

NEAR MYTHS: "NIGHTCRAWLER'S INFERNO" (X-MEN ANNUAL #4, 1980)

In the midst of his birthday celebration amid the other X-Men, Nightcrawler’s soul is stolen from his body. With the help of Doctor Strange, the X-Men conjure forth the spectre of the entity responsible for their friend’s “death:” a sorceress named Margali. She pulls Strange and the X-Men into the same other-dimensional prison to which she’s condemned Nightcrawler's soul: a world fashioned to resemble Dante’s Inferno.

Once the mutants and the master magician find their quarry, his “soul” has the same solidity as his body, and the heroes battle against the various demons as they follow Dante’s course of escape: descending to the center of hell. Once there, Margali reveals herself, but claims that she had nothing to do with the other heroes appearing in her other-dimensional world.

Her daughter Jimaine appears, attesting that she was actually responsible for bringing the other heroes to the hell-world, to help Nightcrawler. Margali relates that she became Nightcrawler’s foster mother when he was an orphaned infant, and that she raised him beside her natural children Jimaine and Stefan. However, Stefan apparently went mad and slaughtered people, forcing Nightcrawler to slay the young man. Margali, upon learning the truth, forgives her foster son and returns everyone, including Jimaine, to the real world.

At this point Jimaine reveals that she’s been watching over Nightcrawler for some time, disguising herself as a young woman, Amanda, whom Nightcrawler has been dating. This revelation—that Nightcrawler has been dating his foster sister—and perhaps more than dating, since he references “all we’ve done together”—raises the possibility that Nightcrawler might have had romantic relations with Jimaine while still living with her, Margali, and Stefan. Indeed, the tenuous explanation allotted to Stefan’s madness suggests that author Chris Claremont might have tossed in that rationale in place of some variation of “the Laertes trope,” in which a devoted brother seeks to kill his sister’s lover, whether out of sexual jealousy or mere protectiveness.

MYTHCOMICS: "GOD LOVES MAN KILLS" (MGN #5, 1982)

From the debut of the "All-New, All-Different" X-MEN, I've always regarded it as the serendipitous creation that made possible not only a "second wave" of Marvel superhero comics, but also the very idea of "cool mainstream comics" that non-hardcore readers might "get." It took the "mutants as minorities" concept that had been circulated-- but not with great aesthetic or financial success-- by the 1963 X-MEN, and gave it far more verve and relevance. Crisp visuals by artists like Cockrum and Byrne sold the book, but writer Chris Claremont provided the intense blend of action and soap-opera that made the book a solid success.

Glancing over the early issues of the Claremont tenure, I found a lot of rousing action and strong melodrama. Yet the central sociological myth-- that of the marginalization of minorities, even those with superpowers-- wasn't any better developed in those early issues than it was in the 1960s. Claremont consistently touched on the myth, particularly with his first Sentinels continuity, but 1982's GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS was his first sustained meditation on the cause of persecution.

In contrast to Bolivar Trask, the scientist who invented the Sentinels out of the fear that they might dominate mankind, the villain of GOD LOVES views mutants as a personal encroachment upon his view of what is "natural." Reverend William Stryker is an Christian evangelist whose ministry conceals a secret society, the "Purifiers," whose goal is the total eradication of mutants from humanity. The Purifiers' absolute villainy is graphically portrayed on the first pages, when Stryker's goons kill a pair of children, whom they have targeted as mutants. An adult arrives too late to help, but it's not one of the X-Men, but their sworn enemy Magneto, who aspires a separatist goal for mutant-kind. Magneto's first use of his magnetic powers is to liberate the young corpses from the humiliating position in which the killers left the bodies.

Though the X-Men as a whole aren't initially aware of the threat, Stryker's public denunciations of mutants have apparently become widespread, causing the youngest X-Man, Kitty Pryde, to get into a fistfight with one of her classmates. However, after a few pages devoted to character interactions, three of the X-Men-- Cyclops, Storm, and Professor X-- apparently perish in a flaming car-wreck. The announcement hits the heroes hard, but by the next day, they begin to figure out that the deaths were faked. This leads them into a battle with the Purifiers, and an alliance with Magneto against the common enemy. Though Wolverine initially tries to persuade one of the thugs to talk with a death-threat, Magneto gets to show his stuff by torturing the man to reveal all.

While the heroes mount their plan of attack, Claremont shifts the POV to the inner sanctum of Stryker. There it's confirmed that the three "dead" people are all alive, but are being subjected to torture, with the long-range goal of breaking the Professor. Stryker's plan is to brainwash the mentally-powered mutant so that he can use his far-ranging powers to exterminate all of mutant-kind (essentially the plot borrowed for the second X-Men movie). The Professor's sufferings are, perhaps inevitably, given a quasi-Christian resonance.

The X-Men stop the plot, of course, and I won't go into the specifics of the resolution. But the story's most mythic aspect is that it concretizes all of the author's trepidations about evangelical Christianity into the figure of Stryker, who considered mutation a pollution of "natural" man. As the following scene shows, when his wife gave birth to a misshapen child, he assumed it was a mutant, and killed both the child and his wife. This grim origin is the key concept of GOD LOVES, depicting a "man of God" who justifies a program of genoice to salve his own fears and sense of inadequacy. 

In addition to the clear sociological motifs, I believe the story also comments on the metaphysical motifs of Christianity, which have in some (though not all) versions depended on lockstep conformity. Not to mention its own history in looking for scapegoats of a devilish form.

ADDENDUM: I'll add that when I first read GOD LOVES, it was one of the few times I felt irate against a fictional comics-character. I haven't had any Christian sentiments since age 13, but I found it abominable that an alleged servant of God could actually look at another living creature-- something spawned within the matrix of his alleged God's creation-- and deem it "unclean." In contrast to the attitude of Job, who comes to realize that God is beyond any mortal expectations, Stryker believes that his definition of humanity is the same as God's.

In addition, Claremont gives Stryker a motive of sexual and generative inadequacy. This is a fair call given the hostility of the Christians against sex-for-fun, though Claremont doesn't succeed in making this greater connection.

 It might have made more religious sense had if Stryker believed that mutants were direct creations of Satan, for then it would make sense, from a religious standpoint, to "exorcise" them. Such an exorcism appears in James Blish's novel A CASE OF CONSCIENCE. And Stryker also doesn't resort to the usual reasons for considering living creatures "unclean," for he's not speaking of his followers either eating or intermarrying with mutants.

Claremont wasn't trying for an in-depth treatment of any religion, Christian or otherwise, of course, and ultimately Stryker isn't entirely convincing as a three-dimensional human being. But he does convey one basic myth-theme: that of the religious overreacher.

REDUCTION DERBY

In my last post I said:

...there remains a tendency for many critics to ignore the contributions of the unconscious/"primary concern" functions to art, in favor of those that seem to be conscious/"secondary concern" (and therefore ideological) functions. It's even more important in the criticism of the comics medium insofar as most critics of the medium are unable to think outside the ideological box.

Ideological critics, by their nature, must depend on the narrow reductionism of Marxist aesthetics or of so-called "cognitive science." These tools are not without proper use within the total sphere of literary criticism, but they are useful only in limited sociohistorical circumstances, and are useless for understanding what Jung called the constructive or amplificative abilities of the human mind.

I decided that I should cite at least one example from the myriad of critics whom I consider too reductively smart for comics' own good. Appropriately enough, I remembered the winsomely-titled "Let's Pretend This Makes Sense," by longtime COMICS JOURNAL contributor R. Fiore. The essay itself,a broad dismissal of the Chris Claremont/Milo Manara one-shot comic X-WOMEN, is nothing exceptional for Fiore, who's been writing pretty much the same sort of review for Thoth knows how many years now. Two things went through my mind as I skimmed it:

(1) That if Fiore didn't like it, there was a chance I ought to support it. I didn't end up doing so, though, because I glanced over X-WOMEN and didn't find it interesting enough to support, largely because I've never cared much for Manara.

(2) The reductionism of the following Fiore quote appealed to me as summarizing everything that's wrong with the majority of comics criticism today:

Not that contact with a Manara woman is a possibility, even in your dreams. The Manara woman is out of your league, that league being the human race.

So, as the rest of the "review" makes clear, the only reason that one might buy the comic is because it features naked or near-naked women. But these aren't just representations of glamorous human women. They're-- outside "the human race." One wonders, then, how Milo Manara ever got garnered a lucrative career, if his drawings of women lack all humanity. To the best of my knowledge, the only audience Manara has for said drawings are, well, humans.

What a conundrum! How can humans be attracted to a depiction of that which is non-human? Does that not fly in the face of the rational principles behind evolution? Or perhaps attraction to things outside the norm is confined only to those sad freaks of nature called "superhero comics fans?"

No doubt that's a tempting proposition for a Journalista to make.

Here's another take on the idea of attraction to things outside the norm of the species, if not the "race:"

"A suggestive analogy is to be seen in the case of the grayling moth, which prefers darker mates to those actually offered by its present species. For if human art can offer to a moth the supernormal sign stimulus to which it responds more eagerly than to the normal offerings of life, it can surely supply supernormal stimuli, also to the IRMs [Innate Releasing Mechanisms] of man..."-- Joseph Campbell, PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY.

I've discussed the concept of Campbell's ethologically-derived "supernormal signs" in an earlier essay. The concept makes a useful tool not in the purely scientific sense (science itself being only broadly relevant to the project of pluralistic literary criticism), but in the phenomenological sense of understanding what emotional cathexes are aroused by things that seem to exceed a particular form in nature, as with the male grayling moth's preference for phony "dark meat" moth-babes
contrived by human experimenters. Within this phenomenological concept it becomes possible to address why artifice has such a substantial appeal to real (or mostly real) human beings; to come to grips with what I call above the constructive powers of the human mind.

To be sure, X-WOMEN (which I did not read) is not likely to be the best example of those powers. For that, I'm mulling over another example of said constructive powers, which are perhaps seen to best effect when they appear in low-grade popular entertainment, where the pop-culture raconteur has no vested interest in going beyond a proven formula-- and yet, he does. That will wait for a future essay.

In closing, I can't help but wonder why any reductivist who desires "sense" would be reading any sort of literature, whether good or bad. Wouldn't the fellow who wants pure representationalism be better off poring over something like a pie chart?

SUGAR AND SPICE NEED NOT BE NICEY-NICE

In reaction to a review of Chris Claremont's X-WOMEN, Sean Collins remarks:

Calling Chris Claremont "one of the more notably feminist writers of superhero comics" is, uh, one way of characterizing the author of the Hellfire Club saga, I guess.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong-- but wasn't the Claremont X-MEN, particularly of the Byrne era that includes the Hellfire Club, a feature particularly popular with fangirls in that time-frame? Indeed, wasn't the Claremont X-MEN the first new creation of the 1970s to boast a substantial female fandom, including later fans-turned-pros such as the late Carol Kalish? Didn't that period of the feature provide the bedrock on which Marvel capitalized for its X-MEN cartoon, which Hope Larson notes was a "gateway drug" for female fans of the 1990s?

If all of these impressions are correct, then wouldn't it be fair to say that the fangirls who bought the feature did not deem the White Queen's bustier to be especially offensive (even though it played to the iniquitous desires of horny fanboys)? Indeed, bustiers seem to be fairly common in the genre that, from year to year, sells best in North America: ye olde romance genre.

So when Sean Collins expresses dubiousness over whether or not Chris Claremont ought to be styled a "feminist writer," I reply, "It depends on the type of feminist you mean."

For instance, this 2009 article by Rosalind Gill suggests that some branches of feminist have moved from "sexual objectification" to "sexual subjectification."

Gill sees the latter cultural movement as an outgrowth from the earlier one:

... the focus on 'harking back' may miss what is new about contemporary sexualised depictions of women. I want to suggest that what we are seeing is not just a harking back to a safe, bygone or mythical age when 'men were men and women were women', but rather the construction of a new femininity (or, better, new femininities) organized around sexual confidence and autonomy. Indeed, what is novel and striking about contemporary sexualised representations of women in popular culture is that they do not (as in the past) depict women as passive objects but as knowing, active and desiring sexual subjects. We are witnessing, I want to argue, a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification in constructions of femininity in the media and popular culture.

I for one would not hesitate to consider Claremont's depiction of his most heralded X-women of the 70s and 80s-- that is, Storm, Phoenix, Rogue and the bustier-clad White Queen-- as "knowing, active and desiring sexual subjects," within the bounds of their being fictional characters, of course. Over time this even extends somewhat to Kitty Pryde, the juvenile femme introduced in the Hellfire Club sequence, who as I remember eventually becomes an "active sexual subject" even without being a Hot Chick like the other four I've named.

Now, truth to tell, after Gill offers this interesting analysis she then critiques it in much the same terms used by early feminist critics of sexual objectification:

The figure of the autonomous, active, desiring subject has become -- I suggest -- the dominant figure for representing young women, part of the construction of the neo-liberal feminine subject. But sexual subjectification, I would argue, has turned out to be objectification in new and even more pernicious guise.

I don't share Gill's pessimism. The communication of one's sexual nature *as* a sexual object is a physical aspect of life that won't be put aside just because it offends moral standards of either liberal or conservative persuasions. I won't say that there can't be a shitload of problems with "subjectification" of the type Gill describes, most significantly young women who purchase T-shirts that come with the written admonition that onlookers should "squeeze here." But along with these missteps comes a greater awareness of self, not just one's cultural expectations.

I agree with Camille Paglia here: a hierarchy of perceived beauty, not "real" except in the consensual sense of one's cultural parameters, will always be with humanity. That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that the act of one's choosing to wear a tight T-shirt or a bustier is in itself a concession to some "phallocracy" (that's not from Gill). And as Gill observes, with this "subjectification" of femininity has come a greater consciousness of its application to masculinity. Such aspects of male sexual subjectification weren't precisely non-existent in popular culture prior to feminism, but said aspects were often obscured by other factors. (In comic books, this would relate to the "but it's not the same when guys wear tight costumes" meme.)

In addition, I feel that Gill is entirely wrong with one of her attempts to disprove the beneficence of subjectification:

...there is the problem of the exclusions of this representational practice. It is clear from looking at media representations that only some women are constructed as active desiring sexual subjects. Only women who desire sex with men -- except when lesbian women 'perform' for men -- but, equally crucially, only young, slim and beautiful women. As Myra MacDonald has pointed out, older women, bigger women, women with wrinkles, etc are never accorded sexual subjecthood and are still subject to offensive and sometimes vicious representations. Indeed the figure of the unattractive woman who wants a sexual partner remains one of the most vilified in a range of popular cultural forms.

I disagree with this quite as much as I disagree with Collins' implicit characterization of the Claremont X-MEN as no more than a haven for horny fanboys. Since the rise of subjectification there has been a consequent upsurge in which The Princess Is The Frog (and The Frog Ain't That Bad), most notably the animated cartoon SHREK, as well as my earlier example of the merely cute-but-not-hot Kitty Pryde. There will always be jokes involving men or women being mortified by the attentions of those they find unattractive, but current society is a long way from taking sadistic pleasure in the frustrations of a homely spinster a la Miss Hathaway of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES.

Objectification of the kind Collins critiques hasn't vanished, of course. But IMO it's clearly fighting a losing battle.