Atomic Comics Meltdown!

Ever since sitting through “Swamp Thing” recently I’ve been a bit focused upon comics and the concerns of the four-colour world. I’ve unearthed my comics collection to give it a bit of sprucing-up and care, and re-familiarized myself with the contents thereof. I’ve also tuned in to various YouTube presenters who make their living discussing the offerings of Marvel and DC and I’ve encountered a bizarre thing. You might also have met up with it. It concerns Marvel, specifically, and its new offerings for 2020. According to the amount of heat that the issue has generated, there’s a lot of anger and disappointment out there in the world and frankly, I can see why.

Everything New is Old again…

The source of the discombobulation is the release of two titles – “X-Men: Children of the Atom” and “The New Warriors” (which is actually a re-launch of an older title, after a hiatus). The first title is an “X-Men” offshoot, or perhaps a “New Mutants” re-launch, as much as it is anything. It involves a group of younger characters who all seem to be descended from earlier mutant heroes – specifically, the headline stars of the “X-Men” franchise. The players of this piece are all exactly the same as their previous iterations in terms of their abilities – and to some extent personalities – but they’ve all been race- or gender-swapped to make them ‘different’. My initial reaction was concern about how they were going to explain how some of these old-guard characters managed to procreate (if that is the rationale behind them, which seems unnecessarily obscure at this point). I mean, sure, most of us would be onboard the notion that Gambit had an unacknowledged child hanging around out there somewhere, but Nightcrawler? The upright Catholic and sometime priest? Not so much.

The main issue here which seems to have been deliberately overlooked, is that regardless of race and gender, a person with the same powers as, say, Cyclops, is going to travel pretty much the same road that Cyclops has trod over the last – what is it? – almost 60 years. Whatever you’re going to say with a female version of the character, guess what? You’ve already said it. Can Marvel be this tone-deaf? It seems so. It doesn’t matter that you’ve taken the characters and given them a new coat of paint; it doesn’t matter that there’s some kind of deeply-hidden rationale for why these characters should exist, lurking in some fan wiki somewhere; no amount of a patronising gloss of Gen-Z patois and consumerist hooks (“Look! He’s on TikTok!”) makes any of this new. If you look deep behind the glossy cover art, you can see that this is all just the cynical Big Corporate financing of a safe option.

We’ve always liked the “X-Men”, right? Then we’ll like them again. Or else.

The other launch is even more problematic and has caused even more frothing online, with the result that it seems to have been canned even before it hit the stores. Let’s investigate…

High Concept: the Problem with Altitude…

“The New Warriors” is a title that has come and gone across the last 30 years and was imagined as a second-string “Avengers” support group much as the “New Mutants” were designed to support the “X-Men”; it was also partially intended to showcase new characters in the Marvel Universe, in order to gauge fan reactions. The last time it appeared was in the 90s where it was headlined by such individuals as Night Thrasher (who sounds like he has an issue with night terrors, but that’s just me), Nova and Namorita, among others, before being cancelled. Now, it’s been re-launched with a completely new line-up… and people aren’t happy.

It’s easy to see why. There are two unequal halves to this new superhero team and each of them is problematic, leading to fans crying out that Marvel is “pandering”; or setting inflammatory “bait”; or that it is just being “patronizing”. Whatever merits these accusations may have (and that last one is pretty unassailable) there are other, more pressing, reasons why this should have been strangled at birth. Let’s take the first half:

Meet twin superheroes, Snowflake and Safespace. Actually, don’t think of them as ‘superheroes’ at all – that’s a problem with these two, because they aren’t; they’re actually figures of sullen pity, dressed up in sackcloth and ashes so that we can clearly see their shame. Don’t worry – they’re proud to be on display like this; it fuels their inner passions. These two are designed to break the stereotypical superhero image; they are not heroes in any traditional, certainly not in a superhero comics, sense. They have been created to be iconoclastic; a slap in the face and a “take that!” from their writer and artist, both of whom are on record for having been “intimidated” by traditional superhero fare. So, why are they working in the industry at all, one wonders?

Putting aside the gender-bending and concepts of passive heroism, the main issue with these two is that they are (for all their protestations about being “non-binary”) a duo. This is problematic. It has never satisfactorily worked throughout comics history: the “Wonder Twins” was an iteration of it that was more accurately a TV show, teaching kids the benefits of co-operation, before being drawn into the four-colour world, but other two-step characters have always been fraught. Think of Northstar and Aurora from “Alpha Flight”; think of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch from “The Avengers”; think of “Cloak and Dagger”. These high-concept, ‘we two are one’ imaginings have always been difficult to pull off. Why did Marvel think it would work this time around? Let’s re-cap:

Northstar and Aurora had similar powers – superspeed, flight and an energy strike – and costumes to go with it; when they combined their powers, they could create a massive power surge. As characters they were both arrogant and abrasive. Their character arc saw a wedge driven between them that would force them apart: Aurora changed her outfit and distanced herself from her brother who fell from grace and discovered he was gay. This is really all that there is to say of consequence with these types of characters: if together we are ‘X’; individually, who are we? With Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, the same issues were discussed, but they were ramped up unnecessarily (and ickily) by the Ultimate Universe’s incestuous take on them. In the case of “Cloak and Dagger”, these same issues were compounded by notions of socio-economic distance, wherein one character was wealthy and entitled while their counterpart came from the “wrong side of the tracks”. And they threw in commentaries about drugs and inter-racial relationships as well, just to beef it all up.

Here again we see two characters bound together by their concept – an offensive capability teamed up with one that is all defense (but qualified) – and a unity of purpose. What do you do with it? Well, personally, I don’t think that the writer has really thought about it all that much, but my guess would be that, at some point these two will be driven apart somehow. There’s a ‘poor me!’, Morrissey-esque quality to these two that’s just itching to be addressed: a “non-binary” figure who shoots ice shurikens and another who can create force-fields but only to protect others? They seem to me to be 1) lame; and 2) set up to take a fall, crying ‘woe is me!’ all the way with Boy George singing “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” in the background. And the way that they’re always drawn clinging on to each other is off-putting: did we learn nothing from the “Ultimate Avengers” fiasco? Apparently not.

Back to the Kindergarten…!

The rest of the team is similarly problematic and, despite there being no immediately obvious over-arching concept encapsulating them, there actually is one. And it’s patronisingly offensive. Let’s look at the characters individually…

First off there’s Screentime. Commentators have said that he looks like “Ben 10, all growed up” and they’re not wrong. His superpower, gained from inhaling his uncle’s illegal “internet gas”, is to have instant access to the world wide web at any time. So, he’s a kid with a smartphone? What the-? Somehow the concept of ‘superhero’ got completely lost while this guy was being thought up.

(And it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for such a character in the Marvel universe. The “New Mutant” Cipher was a very interesting character that covered the concept of ‘what if I have a superpower, only it’s not really useful?’ very well indeed. And useful is relative here: Cipher should have been shipped off to museums worldwide to crack Mayan glyphs, cuneiform, Rongorongo script - everything that researchers have been busting their heads against for decades. I’d even point him at SETI except that in a Marvel universe, extra-terrestrial intelligence is pretty much a given. In the case of Screentime however, it’s a case of ‘been there; done that’ all over again.)

Next, there’s B-Negative who is (wait for it) a vampire! What, is it the 70s again, when Marvel comics were awash with vampires? To refine, he’s a “living vampire”, an offshoot of the same experimentation that created the 70s Marvel antihero “Morbius, the Living Vampire” which – given that there’s a film version of that comic coming to big screens soon, starring (groan!) Jared Leto – seems like a cynical marketing hook to me. Further, he’s defined as a Goth. When did the writer and artist of this series last go to a high school? Are goths still a thing? I’m pretty sure they died out with the 80s, so I’m not sure just to whom this concept is being targeted.

Finally - and here’s where the over-arching concept comes into play to tie these three together – there’s Trailblazer. She’s a racially diverse young woman (her ethnicity is confoundingly obscure for some reason) of a less-than-athletic physique (not judging; it’s just notable in a universe where Heroic Proportion holds sway). Her superpower is that she has a Bag of Holding (looking at all of you D&D players out there) which manifests as a “magic backpack”. In short – and even her name is a giveaway here – this is Dora the Explorer all grown up. Once this piece of the architecture has been identified, it’s not hard to read Screentime as a kind of ‘Google-Mappy’ and B-Negative as ‘Boots the Vampire Monkey’. I rest my case.

I actually think that – if this comic has been pulled – it wasn’t done so because it’s calling its readers childish, it was done so for litigious reasons - concerns over infringement of copyright - more than anything else. Disney is nothing if not gun-shy…

Think of the Children!

I’ve watched a lot of bearded, bespectacled, baseball-capped commentators recently, stridently complaining about these titles and what it means for Marvel in the future. I’m guessing – since it’s likely that these titles won’t make the cut, or, if they do, they won’t stay the distance – the only people they will offend will be adults. Seriously, the only people who buy comics these days are grownups, so whether these concepts will even be exposed to children is a moot point. Let me explain:

When I was a kid, comics looked like this (above). They were cheaply printed on cheap stock, licensed from the US by local companies and put together in Singapore, or Hong Kong. They were black-and-white with few ads, and they were sold in stacks alongside the daily newspapers and other magazines, like “Beano” and “The Broons”. The upside was that they were large – 48, 64, or 96 pages long – and could keep you entertained for a week, or a summer holiday; the downside was that they weren’t continuous, so you inevitably got only one or two instalments in a story arc before they petered out, leaving you hanging. When import restrictions were lifted in the early 80s, the only shops that sold the imported original comics – Minotaur Books in Melbourne, or Kings Comics in Sydney, for example – were elite establishments with moneyed clientele: no kids allowed. It’s still the case today. Comics are “collectibles”; not “children’s entertainment”. That’s what television is for.

Still, this material is being - self-confessedly - targeted at “Zoomers”, the shudderingly bad moniker being applied to members of the so-called “Generation Z”, who quite likely, won’t be the ones buying this stuff and crying in outrage (although they might form a second-wave of purchasers coming to see what the fuss is all about). Old bearded, bespectacled, baseball-capped commentators (along with black, female and non-binary commentators) will be reading this stuff and bellowing about how being “woke” in this fashion is ruining all of their comics material. On the one hand, all I can say is, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it – Marvel will feel the pinch and move on. On the other hand, if writing and drawing this stuff has been done deliberately to aggravate this sector of the Marvel audience, then claims that this stuff is just there to “bait” the readers seem to be justified. That’s not ideal, but again, we can turn to history.

Where To From Here?

When they re-created Spider-Man as a mixed-race youth, we saw a lot of the same issues that this stuff is causing today – outrage; despair; alarm. What happened? Well, the Spider-verse happened, and everyone got to have their cake and eat it as they saw fit. This seems to be a more egregious outbreak of this malady though and might need some more diligent oversight.

First, comics has a history. We have seen a Golden Age, a Silver Age, and a Bronze Age of comics covering both Marvel and DC; it’s a full-time job just trying to keep track of who was doing what and where with whom. There have been some critical moments of rationalization and re-imagination – Crisis on Infinite Earths; Secret Wars I & II; the New 52; the Civil Wars – and not everyone enjoys what happens to their favourite titles or characters along the way. Much of what happens though, is built upon the preceding history and good writers and scripters take from the past to build the future. What’s happening here is different:

The architects behind these two aberrations (and they are aberrant) have no desire to look backwards or to generate story from the back-catalogue. This betokens either willful ignorance, or petulant disregard, for the form. In the case of Children of the Atom, the writer appears to have quite a bit of game in comics generally; perhaps the importance of all the history hasn’t been brought to their attention? Maybe they think they’re working in some kind of a vacuum? As to the (New) New Warriors writer, his hidden agenda seems clearly to be a spiteful ruination of the superhero comics form, at the same time that he seems to be taking a prissy swipe at the comics-reading community. If the cancellation of this title has been authorized then it’s just deserts; if not, then I’m sure that the readership will vote with their feet.

*****

I’m not saying that there is no room for these kinds of stories. Representation is a fine ideal and is needed now, more than ever: I’m just not sure that many people are going to see things they can relate to in these two offerings. That being said, if you look at the pile of 70s comics above, you’ll see one second from the right in the bottom row that clearly shows Tyroc, a black character from 1976 who ran (eventually) with the Legion of Super Heroes, making him the first black superhero in DC’s roster. Sure, the character is not looked-upon that favourably nowadays, but it was a clear and heartfelt attempt (maybe not so much by the artists) to build a character within the DC canon that the black readership could relate to. Clunky, but it got the ball rolling. Maybe this will too, I don’t know (it’s certainly just as clunky!).

Both DC and Marvel have created spin-off imprints from their main lines to accommodate differently-orientated, slanted, graphic and adult content, and maybe this where these two titles would sit more comfortably. Are Marvel saying that such fare should be moved to the mainstream? If so, I think they’ve read their readership incorrectly. It’s time to fire up these niche publishing arms and push this type of content into those laps rather than downsizing the companies out of operation. The mainstream comics continuum is just that – mainstream – ‘edgy’ is for elsewhere. As hellishly conservative as America is, you’d think they’d’ve realized this by now…