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.      

MYTHCOMICS: [“ORIGIN OF A SPECIES”] (THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX 1-4, 1996)

 

       

 

I wasn’t regularly reading Marvel’s line of X-books in the late eighties. I did purchase secondhand issues, so I was vaguely aware of the debut of two major X-villains, “Apocalypse” in Louise Simonson’s X-FACTOR and “Mister Sinister” in Chris Claremont’s X-MEN. But few such developments had any personal resonance for me once I was no longer reading with a sense of total involvement. I even scoffed at the latter villain, since his design seemed derivative of the X-Man Colossus. Eventually I came to understand that Sinister was some sort of clone-maker, which became significant in the long and winding “Madeleine Pryor saga," and that Apocalypse was an immortal badass dedicated to “the survival of the fittest.” Most of the stories collected in the TPB “X-MEN: THE RISE OF APOCALYPSE” didn’t make me any more invested in the two villains. The one exception, though, was the mini-series THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX, written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by John Paul Leon and Klaus Janson. The four issues possess no over-arcing story-title, so I’ve chosen one of the intertitles to designate the whole narrative: issue #2’s “The Origin of a Species.” The cover-copy promises the reader a more specific origin—that of Mister Sinister—while the cover itself shows the figure of Apocalypse, Sinister’s sometime partner-in-evil, looming in the background.

 

Origin-tales require their authors to turn back time’s winged arrow figuratively, but in “Species” the time-shift is literal. With the help of your basic “time lord intervention,” X-heroes Cyclops and Phoenix are charged with journeying back to 19^th-century England to prevent the immortal Apocalypse from wreaking havoc in that timeframe. The heroes are dropped Terminator-style (i.e., buck naked) into 1859 London—which date Milligan clearly chose because it was the year in which Charles Darwin published ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES. It’s also a time-period when Marvel-Earth harbored no mutants except Apocalypse, who was spawned in ancient Egypt. In effect Cyclops and Phoenix have entered a “terra incognita” for their kind, a singular era in which the scientific idea of mutation was first codified—as well as one in which the conflicts between humanity and inhumanity took on new dimensions.

 

Coincident with the arrival of the heroes, Apocalypse awakens from hibernating in a time-capsule beneath the sewers of London, without much detail about when and why he chose that site for his big sleep. Upon awakening, the villain doesn’t seem to have any particular big scheme in mind, though as always, he’s raring to unleash the dogs of war upon humanity as part of his personal eugenics program. But by dumb luck he happens to learn the name of a scientist named Essex—and thereby hangs the story of the first collaboration of Apocalypse and Sinister.

 

The reader meets Nathaniel Essex and his wife Rebecca before either Apocalypse or the heroes. Following a two-page teaser which takes place in “real time,” Milligan and Leon send us back one extra month, to show us the background of the Man Who Will Be Sinister. Essex, a prominent English biologist, is seen at his estate reading the recently published Darwinian magnum opus. He complains to Rebecca—who is pregnant with the couple’s second child—that Darwin is “still shackled by too many moral constraints.” Rebecca, a mother-to-be who’s already lost their previous child to illness, defends the need for morals to structure society. But Essex, despite never having seen a super-powered mutant in his life, intuits that “some humans might, in time, evolve into gods,” and so he has no use for anything reminiscent of a Christian god and his restrictions.

 

Later, Essex unveils his radical theories to a conference of the British Royal Society, which the celebrated Darwin himself also attends. The obsessed scientist confirms the influence of “incremental changes” upon the flow of life, but also argues for the position we now call “saltation theory,” which allows for sudden, rapid transformations as well. To illustrate his almost religious conviction, Essex imitates one aspect of the Frankenstein mythos—constructing a hybrid organism out of corpses, apparently “mutated” by the addition of angel-like wings—though he stops short of the Full Victor, since the corpse-construct is no more alive than any other medical cadaver. The gathered scientists are revolted by this mix-and-match approach to biology, and Darwin opines that Essex has been addled by the loss of his son, broadly implying that the new theory is compensation for that loss. 

 

Essex’s reaction to this rejection is precisely that of Frankenstein: he buries himself in experimentation on unfortunate “freaks” taken prisoner by a local band of cutpurses, “the Marauders” (figurative ancestors of a similar group of henchmen Sinister will use in the 20^th century). Rebecca sees her husband more and more consumed by his inhuman crusade, and by the end of this jaunt into “one month ago,” she intuits that he may even have defiled the grave of their first son for his experiments. This is the resolution of the two-page teaser I mentioned earlier, wherein pregnant Rebecca is seen feverishly digging up her first child’s grave—and finding an empty coffin. A reader might reasonably expect that Essex exhumed the corpse to revive it, but Essex doesn’t do resurrections, and Milligan doesn’t ever say what the scientist did with the boy’s remains—though the fact that the kid was named “Adam” brings in yet more Shelleyan overtones.

 

Around this same time, Apocalypse wales up and just happens to question one of Essex’s Marauder-henchmen, which makes the villain eager to talk with the scientist. Cyclops and Phoenix not only arrive naked, they also get separated into very different venues. Cyclops manifests in the depths of the sewers from which the Marauders cull their deformed quarry, and, despite an early contretemps, he ends up making allies of London’s quasi-Morlocks. Phoenix gets to make a more celestial descent, crashing through the roof of Westminster Abbey during services. Leon and Janson (whose inks here are some of his best work ever) get quite a bit of visual mileage out of the contrast between the “upper” and “lower” worlds, which contrast is of course something Milligan exploits throughout the SPECIES script.

 

Milligan explicitly refers to the relationship between Essex and Apocalypse as a “Faustian bargain,” but like Faust, Essex hasn’t completely given himself over to evil. Essex does put Apocalypse (deftly wearing a human disguise) in contact with a society of corrupt aristocrats whom the mutant can manipulate, and these sordid rich guys are also an X-reference, for they make up the 19^th century Hellfire Club—albeit long before it was taken over by the full-time villainous club-members who make life difficult for the X-heroes in the 20^th century.

 

When Cyclops and Phoenix finally encounter Essex, they recognize him as the man who caused them endless suffering with his cloning science, and Cyclops is mightily tempted to play “kill baby Hitler,” even though Essex has not yet become Mister Sinister. Apocalypse fights with the duo and spirits away Cyclops, after which he binds the hero and makes him listen to screeds like, “You cannot combat strength with goodness and loyalty, only with greater strength.” Meanwhile, Essex regains a little of his humanity by succoring Phoenix when she’s injured. However, it’s too late for the Man of Science. Rebecca dies in childbirth, taking her second child with her, and leaves her husband with his new identity, that of being entirely “sinister.”

 

Apocalypse continues his plot to make Earth into a “modern Golgotha” (by which one assumes he means a “hill of skulls,” not the site of a transcendent savior). Phoenix tries to rescue Cyclops, but the villain subdues both crusaders. Apocalypse then confers super-villain status upon Essex, so that he becomes “forever branded” as Mister Sinister. However, the machinations of the high and mighty are laid low when some of Cyclops’ lowlife-allies venture into Apocalypse’s lair and free the X-heroes. By that time Apocalypse is off to foster the, uh, apocalypse. Phoenix manages to restrain Cyclops from killing the nascent super-villain Sinister, and to some extent Sinister responds by telling the heroes where they can find Apocalypse. The two of them prevent Apocalypse from one of his dastardly deeds, but the time-spell starts wearing off, drawing them back to their own era. Apocalypse, his plans foiled by both Sinister and the X-Men, returns to his hibernation chamber, the better to set up continuity with whatever Marvel writers had him do next.

 

In my review of GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, I noted that only rarely had X-writers managed to use the implicit themes of the X-concept to best effect. “Origin of a Species” can take its place as one of the few times an author managed to use those themes to meditate on the divided nature of humanity. There are no super-powered mutants, but our myths of exaltation and damnation are as real as the proverbial Berkleyan stone. “Species” concludes in 1882, as the mutated Essex attends the funeral of his former colleague Charles Darwin. The story ends with the villain reaffirming his commitment to inhuman experimentation—and yet, the last image is that of a music box that once belonged to Essex’s wife. Sinister discards the trinket, trying to put the past behind him. But the “camera’s” focus on the box, uttering its bell-like sounds, may be sounding the toll for the eventual overturning of his evil devotions—to the extent, that is, that any comic-book super-fiend’s destiny can ever come to an end.

MYTHCOMICS: CATWOMAN DEFIANT (1992)

CATWOMAN DEFIANT followed 1989's 4-issue mini-series as a further attempt to promote the character to starring status, probably because her popularity had been received something of a boost from Frank Miller's two BATMAN mini-series, DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and BATMAN YEAR ONE. I haven't read the 1989 series, but the only thing CATWOMAN DEFIANT took from Miller's version of the semi-heroic villainess was the ugly grey costume.  However. CATWOMAN finally vaulted into a monetarily successful series the next year, which then lasted for ninety-odd issues until 2001.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

DEFIANT isn't a great story by any means, but scripter Peter Milligan and artist Tom Grindberg pave the way for the ongoing series by painting Catwoman as a playfully immoral master burglar, sans Miller's prostitute angle. Further, Millgan's script emphasizes her as the embodiment of feline-- and feminine-- unpredictability.

In fact, Milligan attempts to inject this unpredictability into the story's big revelation. The narrative begins with Catwoman having a heist interrupted by a bunch of fashion-plate hirelings. They want to abduct her in the name of their crime-boss, Mister Handsome, who has a reputation of stealing valuable art-objects and destroying them.

Batman rescues Catwoman from the thugs, and then makes her an offer. Instead of busting her for her attempted burglary, he'll let her go if she'll help him catch the elusive Mister Handsome. Catwoman, who doesn't want to go to jail and would like to get the crime-boss out of her hair, agrees. It's not clear whether or not this adventure takes place around the same time as  Miller's YEAR ONE, but some of Batman's dialogue suggests that he has yet to get used to Catwoman's amoral attitude, or to the effect she has on him.

However, the plan fails. Batman gets decoyed, and Catwoman is knocked out and taken to the lair of Mister Handsome. He places her in an abandoned mine-shaft, chaining her to a stone statue of Venus, Roman goddess of love, and then speaks to her through a closed-circuit TV. He reiterates his desire to see all forms of beauty destroyed, ostensibly because of the death of his beautiful wife, and rants about the pleasure he'll take in seeing Catwoman's good looks destroyed by the "beast" he's also set loose in the mine-shaft. However, there's one other inhabitant down there with Catwoman: a time-ravaged old woman named Mary. Mary identifies herself as the supposedly dead wife of Mister Handsome, and says that when she began aging, her husband cast her down into the shaft, intending to let her die at the hands of "the Beast," a mindless freak of nature.

Mary promises to aid Catwoman's escape if the master thief will kill her husband for her. Catwoman demurs at the prospect of assassination but accepts the help. The two women manage to reach one of the upper levels, but Mary then falls back down into the shaft. Angry at the older woman's apparent death, Catwoman broaches Mister Handsome in his lair. There she finds him admiring his face in a hand-mirror, despite the fact that he's wearing a face-mask that merely makes him look handsome. Milligan has thus set up the reader to expect that the crime-boss is ugly beneath the mask, but when Catwoman whips off the mask, it's actually Mary, who faked her death in the shaft so that she could force Catwoman to kill her. She also reveals that she killed her betraying husband and took over his identity, seeking to use his crime-organization to castigate the beauty that Mary had lost. Catwoman refuses to kill Mary and even keeps her from being killed by the Beast, though she does so only by sending an unwitting Batman into danger-- thus punishing him for using her in his crimefighting schemes.

Milligan loads the script with numerous references to the "Beauty and the Beast" story, and the tale even ends with Catwoman looking into Handsome's hand-mirror, as if to invoke another fairy-tale mirror, one that could pronounce its holder "the fairest of them all." But what makes DEFIANT mythic is that, even though the script deals with such feminist issues as men tiring of women victimized by the ravages of age, the author plays off the issues of beauty and ugliness as symbolic entities, rather than as elements for some predetermined allegory.