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So Robin Laws once divided stories into three genres. Dramatic (people talk to each other about feelings—these can be awesome), iconic (tune in next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel), and transformative (go to Dagobah and be forever changed).
Batman is an iconic hero. He needs to be restored to status quo constantly.
What makes X-Men my favorite comic is that it’s a framework for telling transformative hero stories. Storm went from a pickpocket in Cairo to being the leader of The Brotherhood of Mutants on the planet Arakko and her journey is still not over. Characters die and are gone from the comics for years and years. Logan was dead for four years. One of Marvel’s most popular characters and he didn’t show up for four whole years. Things change and things matter and the story doesn’t reset. Even when people come back it’s in a new context.
And now, in the context of the House of X, even resurrection itself is recontextualized and deconstructured. A nation of mutants who cannot die. X-Men is a non–self-similar Penrose tiling of a story that just keeps sprawling in all directions, whereas Batman is a spiral that keeps circling around the same iconic core.
Mystique is a better detective than Batman. Do not fight me on this. It’s canon that she was Sherlock Holmes in the 616 19th C.
Marvel, please do not retcon that.
Just got around to reading X-Men Blue: Origins (my stack of comics piled up as I was moving). Is that comic good literature in a vacuum? No. But as an old Claremont fan it was super awesome. It restored his original vision for Nightcrawler’s origin story while still paying some sorta surface service to the weird 2003 story.
This is also why I can’t even DC for very long; when Marvel retcons things it does that by building on top of the hyperlink palimpset. In this case it adds that Irene Adler and Mystique asked Xavier (for unknown reasons) to brainwash them and himself so they would instead believe the 2003 story were true while in all actuality the original Claremont idea (that was shot down by heteronormative editorial policies) was secretly true all along. I get how silly that is, but it makes the stories and continuities super rich.
Marvel has had a couple of “resets” but way fewer than DC with their cosmic life-shattering events and crises and hours and timeskips. I feel like I can’t even get invested in a DC character because:
1. I don’t know what part of their character’s past is still true
2. I don’t know what part of their character will remain in the future
It all adds up to a sense of meaninglessness. Now, where DC shines is individual stories that are expliticly out-of-canon. Red Rain, The Dark Knight, Bizarro Comics, The Long Halloween, Red Son. Or runs that are canon but isolated somehow, like Far Sector or Shade the Changing Man or Animal Man or Doom Patrol.
But if they’re doing that anyway, why do they need to mess up their main continuity all the time with rebirths and primes and new earths and fifty two pickup. Fifty two pickup is what I play with my DC comics collection since it’s all lolrandom anyway!
Spider-Man gets some of that; like Batman and Superman he is an “iconic hero” and they go back to basics every now and again (more seldomly than DC does). But X-Men is a dramatic story that just keeps unfolding and changing.
As literature, it’s not tight or focused. It’s not about literature, about story for story’s sake. It’s about getting to hang out in this world with these characters. It’s an experience more similar to D&D or Star Wars in that sense (although it came before either of those two things).