The X-Men are being reappropriated. Miles Morales has all but replaced Spider-Man. Modern books in the comic industry are mostly glorified fan fiction. Learn how to treat them that way.
No matter how much officially sanctioned garbage gets dumped on a tried-and-true franchise, some core stories are so good that no amount of corporate-approved dog-piling could ever ruin my enjoyment of them.
You can give Wolverine boobs, show Rogue bullying and beating up normal citizens for daring to express opinions in a world where random mutants can turn you into a pretzel, or have Iceman licking other men like popsicles all you want.
It will never spoil my enjoyment of such classic X-storylines as The Dark Phoenix Saga or Days of Future Past.
To this day, I can crack open these issues and reliably be swept to different worlds far, far away. Places full of imagination and wonder without the taint and baggage that Current Year brings.
Maybe that’s why 1977’s Star Wars’ opening crawl was so compelling, a promise to carry viewers “far, far away”, and even “long, long ago” from the drug-addled, depressing, corrupt, and smarmy 1970s. Escapism like Star Wars provided Western culture with the timely adrenaline boost it needed, aptly dubbed “A New Hope”.
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These classic stories featured characters with near untouchable beauty, strength, and grace to reflect their real and timeless virtues, helping us aspire to become something more.
Now don’t get me wrong — Fan fiction can be fun. It can even be great. But the odds of finding a diamond in the rough are rare. Many comic book pros are loading their stories with self-inserts, plot holes, and strawman arguments at levels you’d expect from typical fan fiction. It’s gotten to the point where the attention-grabbing gimmicks dished out by comics are statistically likely to be narcissistic tantrums.
That’s why they obsess over what is and isn’t canon. And they love your complaints because you being upset at them acknowledges what they’re doing as canon.
But their attempts to undermine, retcon, and erase the heroes we all know and love are not part of my accepted lore and never could be. Because it doesn’t fit, like trying to hammer an ill-shaped puzzle piece that doesn’t belong. I’m not willing to transmute narrative gold into poop in my headcanon, and neither should you.
This is Superman.
This is not.
Image Source: Superman: Son of Kal-El issue 5
This is Mary Jane Watson.
This is not.
This is Spider-Man.
This is Ben Reilly.
This is Miguel O’Hara.
This is Miles Morales.
Image Source: Wallpaper art by Richy Blacktower
The game has changed. It’s not enough to accept Miles Morales as a separate entity from Spider-Man like we did with Miguel and Ben and all the spider-clones from the clone wars and multiverses. No, this time you must accept Miles as the one and only Spider-Man. Because it’s Current Year.
That’s why you constantly see “Spider-Man” prominently paired with the name “Miles Morales”. You can’t dodge it: It’s plastered all over Wal-Marts, busses, you name it. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
While most fans don’t want Miles to completely replace Spider-Man, they do at least like Miles.
That’s the foot in the door writers needed because lately, they’ve taken it a step further, dropping the façade by removing the “Miles Morales” part altogether and just plain calling Miles “Spider-Man”.
Because they want Miles to be Spider-Man. And they want that to be canon. Usually, they’ll create some pretense that it’s being done “out of respect”, sugar to help the medicine go down.
New characters borne of new concepts? Nah.
Let’s disgrace and replace the old ones, instead.
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BREAKING THE SPELL
I didn’t let bad fan fiction posted on Geocities in the 90s taint my opinion of the original Star Wars trilogy, so why should I let today’s Kathleen Kennedy-fueled fan fiction ruin my enjoyment of it today?
You wouldn’t believe how freeing this mindset is.
The decisions these characters are making are not their own, not informed by their pasts, and not written by the talented folks who made these characters household names in the first place. So none of it should matter.
If you were asked to write even one comic book, I’m sure you’d do your homework to ensure you respect each characters’ histories while taking them in new, interesting directions the fans would likely appreciate.
I can tell where we’re headed right now is the wrong direction, though, because 1960’s Magneto would smile at the behavior of mutants on display in comics today. He’d believe that he and the Brotherhood of Mutants had somehow long overcome Professor Xavier and that his evil philosophy had won.
But I wonder if today’s state of moral decay would even give someone as ruthless as Magneto pause: As a product of the 1960s, his character couldn’t have possibly foreseen the full extent of the evil he was perpetuating upon his world, let alone ours.
Looks like he has no regrets after all. Magneto’s had his ups and downs, even becoming leader of Xavier’s X-Men. But looks like today he’s still doubling down in comics even though he’s already gotten his way and even gotten his own ethno-state. I guess more is never enough for people like ‘ol Maggie.
Modern writers opened Pandora’s Box when they decided to side with Magneto. Getting it closed again will be quite the feat.
THE DEMOLITION OF OUR BELOVED FRANCHISES
It’s hard to deny that the full potential of staple franchises are not being realized by current industry professionals. I don’t expect things to get better anytime soon because farming your rage has always been their goal.
They enjoy the idea that they’re actively destroying Western culture by dismantling everything we love, and that it upsets us. They have ulterior motives, and their cult religion have deemed these goals superior to profit margin. There’s only one effective way to market such a strategy.
They want you to ragewatch current product and ragewatch next product.
White knights and their fellow bots will always ride out and do the rest. Viral marketing is an intentional mechanism of our downfall.
Fortunately, the tide seems to be turning. A little bit. For some studios.
But it’s not because they listened to reason.
I suspect it’s more because borrowing money at low interest rates isn’t as easy as it once was, and using tried-and-true intellectual properties as collateral is far more risky than it used to be. Folks like Bob Eiger are having a harder time using liquidity and creative accounting to cover for bad profit margins. At the moment.
Meanwhile, our beloved franchises came out of this harrowing weather-beaten, but still standing. Perhaps some foundations are too stable to fully destroy. The rock-solid foundations these characters and stories were built upon are safely archived in the collective unconscious, in the many curated collections maintained by dedicated fans, and of course they live on strongly within our memories.
That’s why physical media is important. And that’s why they want to take it away.
But we won’t let people forget that these characters were once everyone’s heroes, beloved by all.
It’s more difficult to destroy a building by dismantling it from the top than it is to blow it up from the base, but these writers weren’t around in the beginning to sabotage things.
They only think they’re blowing the whole thing up. The base is indestructible so long as we hold it dear in our hearts and perform our due diligence to preserve the past.
When we rage-consume, we’re watching buildings topple over and over again, each misguided reboot a more spectacular fall than the last. And that can be admittedly entertaining.
But when the dust clears, the core still remains. Hopefully. This is less a danger to heavily established properties like Lord of the Rings, and more dangerous to properties that never got a proper swing at pop culture, like Wheel of Time.
As latecomers to the franchise, these bad actors have to make due with either planting strategic bombs in the foundation through retconning, or by building the franchise out so high and tall and lopsided and convoluted and distracting that future generations won’t even think about the original foundation it rests upon, making all the “additions” glorified dirt upon its grave.
This is what happens when you heap corrupted characters, corrupted storylines, and the weight of an entire multiverse upon a franchise. It might even start out looking beautiful, but eventually, it will wind up ridiculous and M.C. Escher-esque, to a point where it’s a wonder the structure still stands at all.
It’s a stress test. A testament to the strength of the foundation.
Responsible stewards of a franchise understand they stand on the shoulders of giants. Irresponsible stewards topple said giants and wonder why they’re unable to reach similar heights.
By warping beloved characters and story meaning to the point where the characters–and everything they stood for–are no longer recognizable, these bad actors can achieve the next-worst thing to toppling the building altogether.
Of course, the best way to combat such childish behavior is by ignoring it, going back to the series’ roots, reminding people of the truth, and using that knowledge to build new, superior buildings.
What it would take to correct course and revitalize the comic industry is self-evident to most: Start hiring based on merit and reboot each title to a point where the story was still salvageable.
Someday, I’m confident that will happen. But today is not that day.
In the meanwhile, our culture is in desperate need of new monoliths of truth inspired by the strong foundations we know and love. We need to create works that help us escape, dream, and rediscover hope. We need new works that inspire and help us escape to “far, far away”.
Pay attention to the creators who still respect the giants who came before them. They have a lot working against them and need your help.
CHARACTERS REAPPROPRIATED
We’ve got the series creators themselves quoted on multiple occasions stating that, on no uncertain terms, the stories found in Uncanny X-Men were never intended as civil rights allegories.
“I’ve always tried to do our stories so that it didn’t matter if you were of the white race, the black race, the brown race, or whatever. Social issues I try to get in the background or underlaying plot, but never to the point of letting it interfere with the story or hitting the reader over the head.”
-Stan Lee
So what we’ve got now is a hostile takeover to retrofit and use the X-Men for a completely different purpose than what they were intended for.
It’s like if the spoiled, bratty children of a self-made millionaire took over his beloved tool company after he died.
The children, now drunk with power, declare it is no longer canon to use screwdrivers the way they were originally intended. From now on, they’re the hip, new utensils for eating tofu noodles.
That… won’t go over very well with their target audience. Nor will it stop folks from using screwdrivers for their intended purpose, and buying replacement screwdrivers from alternative manufacturers who still understand what screwdrivers are used for.
New Biracial Spider-Man Inspired, In Part, By President Obama
Alonso said he and the powers-that-be at Marvel had “been talking about this for a while,” noting that the first discussion of a biracial replacement for Peter Parker’s character took place before the president was elected in November 2008.
The artist who created Morales, Sara Pichelli, said the new character’s multicultural background could lead to more revelations in the future — including Spidey’s sexuality.
“Maybe sooner or later a black or gay – or both – hero will be considered something absolutely normal.”
Source: Radar Online
Source: ss from hdqwalls.com
Because the thing is, no matter how fervently they try to redefine the use of that tool, no matter how “canon” they claim it to be, the truth of that tool’s functionality and its purpose remains immutable and self-evident. Anyone can still unravel the true purpose and usefulness of a Phillips-head screwdriver by glancing at the imprinted x-shape atop a slotted screw.
Spider-Man was a creation borne of passion, art, and truth. His purpose was to inspire us to become something more. Muster the bravery we need in an emergency. Find the strength to become real-life heroes. A state-approved puppet simply can’t have that same effect. Not on a universally accepted scale.
For better or worse, we, as a society, have accepted Sara Pichelli’s creation. We have accepted Miles.
But that is not enough. We are now expected to see him as a complete replacement. He may have started out likeable, but they are going to keep pushing and pushing with this character until he crosses a line you don’t like (if he somehow hasn’t already within the absurd script of the Playstation 5 video game Spider-Man 2.
But what do you think? Is Spider-Man 2 more than bad fan fiction? What are some recent comics, games, and movies that have proven themselves exceptions to the rule? Should Miles completely replace Spider-Man, and should that “lead to more revelations in the future” regarding his sexuality?
Whatever the answers, it’s nice knowing I can take solace from Current Year shenanigans by reading some indie, vintage comics, and manga.
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