Yep, it’s there. Gonna be interesting to see how it’s done.
Well, no, not really. There’s no real evidence that Lee and Kirby intended the X-Men to be a racial metaphor, and the early comics really don’t support that read very well. Despite the “Protecting a world that hates and fears them” tag line, prejudice and oppression were not major themes in the early X-Men comics. I’ve not seen any strong evidence that anyone at the time even perceived this metaphor in the book. It’s not until Christ Claremont took over the title in the late '70s and '80s that the theme of mutants as victims of widespread social injustice took hold, at which point a lot of the race metaphor was effectively retroactively grafted onto the franchise.
There’s some serious problems with the X-Men as race metaphor, too, particularly in the earlier issues. Comparing MLK, a committed pacifist and social integrator, with Professor X, who keeps his mutants secret while training them as a paramilitary group is problematic, but not half as much as comparing Malcolm X to a terrorist who literally has tried to destroy the Earth. But, really, the biggest problem with this interpretation is that it gives you a book that’s supposed to be about race, that features an entirely white cast. There were similar problems a few years back, when some writers tried to shoehorn the X-books into a gay rights metaphor, without (again) having any significant gay characters in the books. It’s also hard to argue against a stereotype that a particular minority are a danger to society, by using stand-ins for that can shoot laser beams from their eyes. Acting like blacks or gays are some special threat to society is profoundly ignorant and bigoted. Acting like mutants are some special threat to society is just being observant. If Malcolm X had the ability to reverse the magnetic poles as an act of will, thereby causing a global extinction event, then comparing mutants to black people would make sense. But if black people regularly had those sorts of abilities, treating them different under the law is arguably a reasonable course of action.
The X-Men work best as a generalized metaphor for oppression, without expressly tying it to any real-world social issue. If a black kid sees Colossus as an inspiration for how to deal with assholes, or a gay kid deals with being rejected at home by really getting into Nightcrawler, or a bullied kid likes to pretend to be Cyclops* to make himself feel better, that’s great. But when you take some people who looks like this, who were created by guys who look like this, and say they’re supposed to be a stand in for these people… that’s getting a little patronizing.
*I’m joking here, of course. Nobody looks up to Cyclops.
Tom Holland, who plays Spidey, is 19. I dunno what he sounds like, though. But the character is supposed to be high school aged.
cough Storm, cough.
And Iceman is gay, fyi.
No, Spiderman’s *origin *was when he was in HS. He’s also a college student alter, etc.
Which was why his behavior in A vs X was so badly written: he was insisting on taking up Hope Summers without a trial! One of the grossest mis-portrayals of a character ever.
(Another was in Civil War where Reed Richards was happy sending people to the Negative Zone as a prison.)
(By the way, I’m really grinning at “Pleasant Hill,” Maria Hill’s informal prison for super-baddies. At least it’s in character for her!)
First introduced in 1976, 13 years after the book that “was about race since it was first published” came out.
Yeah, as of last year. The gay metaphor thing is a little bit older than that.
Two things…
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Holy crap, that’s a great line. I will shamelessly steal it from this point on.
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Say what you want about X-Men comics but when Bryan Singer had Bobby Drake’s mother say, “Have you tried NOT being a mutant?” in X2 he was on target. It may not be the best mapping on the gay experience but I bet there were some parents out there who heard themselves in that line. Maybe it helped.
The comic was hardly known in the 1960’s.
Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were Romani from the start.
Yes. And?
Yes. And?
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Thanks! Help yourself!
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Yeah, that was a good line. I don’t have a problem with drawing referrents to real world civil rights issue, it’s just when the story as a whole is taken as a metaphor for one of these struggles that it tends to devalue not just the real world struggle, but the fiction itself.
Sort of like how Tolkien was adamant that Lord of the Rings was not a metaphor for WWII, despite having some aspects of it that were clearly inspired by contemporary events when Tolkien was writing it.
Hey, they’re not all white! Beast and Nightcrawler are blue.
Fantastic. Now Tony Stark is Bender. Cap is Andrew. Banner is Brian. Black Widow is Claire. Scarlet Witch is Allison.
Or maybe Vision is Lisa from Weird Science and Stark and Thor are Wyatt and Gary.
I’m not completely disagreeing with you but you missed the point here. If mutants were a metaphor for race, it would make sense to use a group of mutants who are white. The point would be to make the typical white male comic book reader think about what it would feel like if people who looked like he did were the subject of oppression.
No no no.
If Tony Stark is Bender, then Cap is Fry, Banner is Zoidberg, Black Widow is Leela, Scarlet Witch is Amy - and Nick Fury is the Professor.
It’s funny because it’s true.
Luis Bunuel did something like this with That Obscure Object of Desire. He cast two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, in the role of Conchita and then switched back and forth between them during the filming. Sometimes he would even switch them within a single scene.
Bunuel said that this was supposed to show that Mathieu’s love for Conchita was internal - Mathieu is concerned with his own emotions and doesn’t really pay much attention to the actual Conchita, the supposed target of those emotions.
Bunuel may have proved his point. Many people supposedly watched the movie and didn’t notice that two women were playing the part.
Romani are persecuted minorities. fyi.
Yes. And?
No they weren’t. Not ever. At one time they were raised by a Romani couple, but they were never Romani by blood. Even that was a retcon from the 90s.