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Bryan Bove
Professor Kimon Keramidas
CEH-2165 Science Fiction: Humanity, Technology, the Present, the Future
December 22, 2018
Trolls, Toxicity, and (In)Tolerance: A Twitter Conversation With the X-Men
When Marvel released the first issue of X-Men by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in September of 1963, America was at an intersection of change. The civil rights movement was in full swing—Brown vs. the Board of Education ruled that separate-but-equal education for children was unconstitutional in 1954, and Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech a month prior to the comic’s release to an enormous crowd of civil rights supporters in
Washington D.C. (“Martin Luther King, Jr.” 1). Seven months before X-Men’s release, The
Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published, which had a significant impact on the women’s movement. In the article “The 1960s: A Decade of Change for Women,” Kenneth T.
Walsh describes how that “same year, an American woman, the physicist Maria Goepper-Mayer, won a Nobel Prize for the first time…While Lesley Gore’s hit song ‘You Don’t Own Me’ climbed the charts…One in 5 women with children under 6 and nearly one fourth of women whose children were over 16 held paid jobs” (Walsh 1). As African Americans fought for their civil liberties, and women fought for their own equal rights, the war in Vietnam raged on. The
U.S. became involved in the war in 1954, but by 1963, “the U.S. military presence in South
Vietnam had reached some 9,000 troops” (“Vietnam War 1”). The Cold War between the United
States and Russia had also been building since the end of World War II, leading to a series of atom bomb tests between the two nations and “the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation”
(“Cold War History” 1). Bove 2
The turmoil and change of the era inspired a significant amount of reactions and questions from people. As Jewish-Americans, Lee and Kirby could empathize with other minority groups and were fully aware of the platform they had and the message they wanted to send to their readers. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of
American Comics, Ramzi Fawaz states, “These primarily Jewish creative producers were shaped by the dual experiences of being second-generation immigrants as well as witnesses to, and sometimes active military participants in, the battel against Nazism. These experiences led them to espouse the ideals of religious and ethnoracial tolerance, as well [as] a broader commitment to universal political freedom and equality” (Fawaz 20). Fawaz supports this with Lee’s own words from the December 1968 edition of “Stan’s Soapbox,” a monthly editorial that appeared in the back of all of Marvel’s comics while Lee was editor-in-chief. In the column, Lee declares,
Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills
plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed supervillains, they can’t be
halted with a punch…The only way to destroy them is to expose them—to reveal them
for the insidious evils they really are…Although anyone has the right to dislike another
individual, it’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race—to despise an
entire nation—to vilify an entire religion…Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of
his destiny, we must fill our hearts with tolerance.” (Fawaz 20)
Given this historical context, it seems only natural that Lee would draw inspiration from his own experiences and the experiences of the other minority groups around him to create a team that was an all-inclusive champion of outsiders. Rather than getting their unique abilities through a serendipitous accident like Lee’s creations Spiderman and The Fantastic Four, Lee wanted the characters in X-Men to be “people who were born the way they are, who had mutant powers” Bove 3
(Pitts, Jr. 96). This concept of mutants, as Joseph J. Darowski points out in his work X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor: Race and Gender in the Comic Books, allowed future X-Men writers “to explore how society treats “others,” be they racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual” (Darowski 6).
One writer in particular that he mentions is Mike Carey, author of X-Men: Legacy. Carey “calls the idea of mutants an “informing metaphor” for the series” and “positions the mutant metaphor as analogous to real-world issues” (Darowski 6). He quotes Carey as saying,
Readers coming to the series recognize the echoes of real-world prejudice—racism,
homophobia, and so on—and that in turn makes the series seem just that little bit more
grounded in reality, despite the fact that it’s essentially sci-fi. The difference between
mutants and other heroes is that mutants are identifiably a human sub-species, marked by
their possession of the X-gene. This provides a narrative rationale both for their solidarity
and for the attacks made on them by groups and individuals with an agenda based on the
psychology and politics of race hatred. (Darowski 6-7)
However, throughout much of the X-Men’s initial 66-issue run from 1963 to 1970, it is difficult to truly position the mutant characters as a ‘sub-species’ or see their connection to or their reflection of real-world outsiders. The original team members—Scott Summers (Cyclops),
Warren Worthington III (Angel), Hank McCoy (Beast), Bobby Drake (Iceman) and Jean Grey
(Marvel Girl)—are all white, middle or upper-class, possible Christians attending a boarding school for “gifted youngsters” run by another white, upper-class professor, Charles Xavier. The young men on the team are all physically fit, with the “magnificent new he-man-muscled body” that the very first advertisement in the premiere issue boasts (Lee 2). Jean, the lone female lauded for being “a real living doll” (Lee 11), is the only one on the team who is regularly treated like a sub-human, and this is often at the hands of her own teammates. When they’re not trying Bove 4 to kiss her or watch her undress (both of which happen in the very first issue), they’re treating her like an object to contend over:
(Panels from X-Men #3, “Beware the Blob!” (1964)) Even Professor Xavier was not immune to Jean’s feminine wiles, which is awkward considering their age difference and his position as her mentor:
(Panels from X-Men #3, “Beware the Blob!” (1964)) I wanted to create a project that would highlight the obvious sexism and toxic masculinity in the narrative, because that’s not something that’s usually associated with the X-Men franchise.
At the same time, I wanted to also imagine what the series could have looked like had it more accurately reflected the message it was preaching. I used Alpesh Patel’s Productive Failure as a model for my own methodology. Although Patel’s critical work mostly focused on queer South Bove 5
Asian transnational art histories, I found his discussions on the failure of art history as an institution to properly represent non-Western artists to parallel Marvel’s failure to properly reflect the historical context within which it was generating these works with messages of tolerance, inclusion, and equality. I also found Patel’s notion of the “slipperiness” of the journey of queer South Asian art histories similar to the “slipperiness” of X-Men’s storylines, particularly because of how often creators revised past narratives through time travel. For example, in the series All New X-Men, writer Brian Michael Bendis brought a version of the original X-Men team into the present, where the teen Bobby Drake was outed as gay by his teammate, Jean Grey.
In re-writing the history of the teenage X-Man, Bendis allows Iceman to renounce the hetero gender norms he once inhabited and gives him the agency to become a more complex, fully realized individual. In order to incorporate the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff and to create more fully realized, contextualized characters in Jean Grey and Bobby Drake, while also highlighting the toxic masculinity of the others, I decided to transform the first three issues of the original X-Men series into a Twitter feed, where the characters could interact with each other and also post their own thoughts and feelings.
When I started this project I planned on transforming the entire 66-issue original run of the series into a Twitter feed, until I printed out the first twenty-five issues—which was more than five hundred pages—and realized that would not be an achievable goal. Instead I decided to only use the first three issues, but I re-read more than that to get a good sense of Lee and Kirby’s portrayals of the characters. When deciding what the project should look like, I turned to my own
Twitter page for layout and design ideas:
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(Above: My Twitter page. Below: Bobby’s Twitter feed)
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The home page features “Trends for you” relevant to 1963, including references to the song “My Boyfriend’s Back,” the Kennedys, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the “Who to follow” section, there are references to other X-Men characters, such as Lorna Dane (Polaris),
Freddy Dukes (the Blob), and Kitty Pryde (whose username is @Sprite, which is one of her earlier X-Men codenames before she settled on Shadowcat). I made it Bobby Drake’s Twitter feed as opposed to Jean’s for three reasons. First, Drake is introduced earlier in the first issue than Jean is; second, having it be one of the male characters’ Twitter feeds reflected the sexism of the source material; and third, as a white gay male from Long Island who uses humor to mask his insecurities and depression, I feel the most personally connected to Iceman, who is also a white gay male from Long Island who uses humor to mask his insecurities and depression.
In thinking about how to portray Drake and the other characters in an online platform, I had to take into consideration what usernames they would choose, their language, tone, if/how they would use hashtags. In Bobby’s case, I gave him the username “The_Iceman_Slayeth”, a reference to the Eugene O’Neill play The Iceman Cometh. “Slayeth,” a reference to the term
“slay” that is commonly used among the modern gay community, is an anachronism meant in part to reposition Iceman’s queerness to the forefront of his identity. At another point in the
Twitter feed Bobby uses the hashtags “#ClearEyes #FullHearts #CantLose,” a reference to the television series Friday Night Lights, because to me it would make sense for a closeted male teen to like a show with a bunch of hot guys who wear tight pants and get shirtless every so often.
Bobby is also the one who makes the most references to memes and modern internet speak. In one post, he uses the “Hold my beer” line when he’s talking about how Professor Xavier could defeat the villain the Vanisher when the X-Men couldn’t:
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In another post, he mocks Jean in the style of a popular Spongebob meme:
I also made him a fan of Lesley Gore, because tremendous pop hits like “It’s My Party” and “You Don’t Own Me” helped make her the Ariana Grande of 1963. I saw Lesley Gore as the intersection of Bobby and Jean’s interests. As a queer and as a feminist, they both see her as a figure of empowerment. For Jean’s Twitter, her username is simply “Marvel_Girl” after her X-
Men codename. Rather than using a picture of herself for her profile and emphasizing her vanity,
I used the quote “The Future Is Female,” which felt contextually accurate and appropriate for her character. Her first tweet is about her first day of school, comparing the sexism she had to deal with with Gloria Steinem’s experience in writing “A Bunny’s Tale,” the journalist’s exposé about Hugh Hefner’s New York Playboy Club. Bove 9
Jean makes another Gloria Steinem reference later in the feed when she’s defending herself against a negative comment from Bobby. In general, I made my best efforts to give her more of a space to defend herself and speak her mind, because her voice is often lost in the initial run of the comics, or she’s placed in the role of a damsel in distress, which is ill-fitting for a mutant with her level of power.
The remaining three team members –Cyclops, Angel, and Beast –serve to exemplify three different kinds of masculinity. Scott is the more reserved, well-mannered of the three. He joins the Twitter feed later than the others because he’s frequently behind the times with what is popular, and he writes people’s names before tagging them with their username because of his lack of knowledge of how technology works. He’s quick to jump to Jean’s defense, which isn’t necessary and is a kind of sexist act in itself; but he also doesn’t objectify her the way his teammates do. Angel, on the other hand, is an in-your-face bro type who’s not afraid to flaunt his Bove 10 wealth or his status. He bullies his other teammates and sees Jean as a prize he has a right to.
Beast, whose username is @Brainy-Beast because he can’t go five minutes without proving his intelligence, mostly piles onto whatever Warren or Bobby say. It was interesting to see how
Bobby and Jean would interact with the three. Of course, some of the dialogue was taken directly from the comics, as I explained in my Power Point presentation. However, some of the language was modernized or changed, but the spirit of the words was preserved.
Overall, I am pleased with how the project turned out, despite the numerous hurdles along the way. I do wish I was able to create real Twitter accounts for each of the characters, because it would have been interesting to see how the outside world interacted with these fictional beings. I’m also curious what it would’ve been like to put these characters into a computer simulation that would’ve carried out the interactions on its own. Would the conversations still have devolved into something sexist or intolerant, or would it have gone better? I’m about 1000000% positive it would’ve turned into something horrible (but hilarious).
While the X-Men series may not have been inclusive and feminist from the outset, it has since become one of the most notable franchises for the disenfranchised and underrepresented.
The first comic I ever picked up was Giant Size X-Men #1, featuring Wolverine, Storm,
Colossus, Nightcrawler, and others—and I remember connecting with it on a level incomprehensible to me at the time. Now I realize that I saw myself in the mutants, these creatures deemed other by society, because of my queer identity and family history. Today the X-
Men is even more clear in its inclusivity, and the representation of all types within its pages allow fans of all types to feel seen.
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Works Cited
“Cold War History.” History, history.com/topics/cold-war/cold-war-history. Accessed 19 Dec.
2017.
Darowski, Joseph J. X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor: Race and Gender in the Comic Books.
Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American
Comics. New York University Press, 2016.
Kistler, Alan. “How the “Code Authority” Kept LGBT Characters Out of Comics.” History, 28
Apr. 2017. www.history.com/news/how-the-code-authority-kept-lgbt-characters-out-of-comics. Accessed 1
Oct. 2017.
Lee, Stan. “X-Men.” X-Men vol. 1, issue 1. Marvel Comics, 1963.
“Martin Luther King, Jr.” The National Archives at New York City,
archives.gov/nyc/exhibit/mlk.html. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1993.
Patel, Alpesh Kantilal. Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art
Histories. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017.
Pitts, Jr., Leonard. “An Interview with Stan Lee.” Stan Lee Conversations, edited by Jeff
McLaughlin, University Press of Mississippi, 2007, pp. 85-100.
Thomas, Roy and Roth Werner. “The Power and the Pendant.” Uncanny X-Men, vol. 1, issue no.
25, Marvel, 1966.
“Vietnam War.” History, history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history. Accessed 18
Dec. 2017. Bove 12
Walsh, Kenneth T. “The 1960s: A Decade of Change for Women.” U.S. News. 12 March 2010,
usnews.com/news/articles/2010/03/12/the-1960s-a-decade-of-change-for-women.
Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.