The Truth About Stan Lee’s X-Men

I need to get my posting schedule back on track after yesterday’s lateness. So I’m tagging in some help from the Literature Devil.

As much as I try to avoid political discussions here, as my focus is on how the activists took over, it gets tougher and tougher as they replace the traditional superhero narratives with their own. Instead of physical action they’d rather get into social conflict, one-sided sociopolitical pandering born of stereotypes, and the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd in general insisting anything popular must be made for them. As “geek media” grows in popularity the anti-geek Hollywood types try to wrestle superheroes away while the businessmen who don’t understand or care about superheroes are ignorant of the whole failure, wondering why what used to be huge profit is taking such huge hits.

As the cool cliques and activists try to defend their position, the new warcry is “but it was always like this”. This falls on its face when you realize “if this is how it always was then why is it only now being ridiculed as it fails miserably and ruins both pop culture icons and the very marketing they wanted to use to push their agendas, whether it was money, ego, or politics?”, which the usual suspects have no actual answer for. Now the claim is that Stan Lee always meant for the mutants of the X-Men to reflect not just outcasts in general but the specific outcasts of the latest cause du jour, that Professor X was a stand-in for Martin Luther King, Jr and Magneto for Malcolm X (the wrong guy got the “X” in his alternate name?), and that it was always political or “woke”. So if it was always “woke” why do the anti-woke crowd or general people of all political views, races, genders, and orientations suddenly upset with what’s come out the last few years to what was escapist entertainment that maybe made them think about the world around them without heavy-handed preaching a one-sided narrow view ridden with stereotypes and false understandings?

In the following video by Literature Devil, he disputes these claims not only with the history of the X-Men but Stan Lee’s own words and the words of other creators who came after him, including the one who leaned more into the bigotry allegory when he took over. He also looks at depictions of the Hulk and She-Hulk in light of the differences between the MCU and the comics and what both messed up in recent years.

I hope this started on the right spot for you. For some reason, every time I started this video to watch it, YouTube was a few minutes ahead, right during the Kelly Sue DeConnick nonsense.

I’ve mentioned in past articles that the X-Men are poor stand-ins for bigotry because it doesn’t make sense. In a world with aliens who have abilities humans don’t, super-serums, radiation-induced powers, and even being hit by a lightning bolt on a particular Wednesday, why does being born with powers stand out? Lee created the “X-Gene” because he wanted an easy way to explain superpowers. Other critics has noted that controlling people with powers could make more sense as a gun control allegory given the reasons for gun control by advocates matches people who have powers rather easily.

The X-Men, like Spider-Man, is a story about outcasts. Peter was an outcast as a science geek with a specific interest in chemistry and to a lesser extent engineering, which served him well in creating his web-shooters and spider-tracers among other gadgets and various situational formulas for his webbing. When he gained his powers he turned his back on a world that rejected him, until it affected the only two people he saw as accepting him for who he is. I’ve been an outcast for my imagination, temper, and poor social skills, so I can relate to Peter and the X-Men on that level. It may be why the only X-Men series I ever got into was X-Men: Evolution, which leaned into that as much as the oppression of mutants because of how they got their powers versus other Marvel heroes and villains.

Remember this morning with the Justice League Unlimited episode “Patriot Act”? Like General Eiling, Magneto’s problem is that he’s become what he hates, a consequence of the retcon that his powers made him old enough to be a child during World War II and was trapped in a Nazi concentration camp. Hitler saw himself as the “master race”, the…superior race. Mutants are called “Homo Superior”, in the same way normal humans are homosapiens, “wise man”. Stop laughing, it’s a general description versus previous genuses. Homo Erectus…I said stop laughing…is man standing upright. However, Magneto doesn’t treat it just as the next stage of human development, but as the master race, that other humans are less than them, including the heroes and villains who got their powers from science and magic. Magneto is a warning against extremism and becoming what you hate, two messages the modern activist writer ignores because they’ve bought into both.

Allegory only works when you don’t make the side you’re pushing look like the baddies. Did Nature Girl ever wonder how a grocery bag from Nevada ended up in the Pacific Ocean so close to their island home? I worked in a grocery store for probably far too long, and now I get to be “represented” as the villain for using plastic. Linkara of Atop The Fourth Wall read this comic the riot act, and justifiably so.

Stan Lee wasn’t an activist, he was a storyteller, and you can’t be both. For Lee, bigotry wasn’t part of some social message but for the storytelling, a further obstacle for the X-Men in their mission to protect humanity like the non-mutant heroes. He was interested in the drama, not the preaching, and he remembered that kids and adults needed heroes and could agree on general morality if not specific perspectives. It always bugged me when at every Election Day someone came onto the alt.toys.transformers newsgroup asking whether Autobots or Decepticons represented Republicans or Democrats. Ignoring that Cybertronians couldn’t care less about human politics unless it affected them (and technically Optimus and Megatron’s groups were the first Americans, even before the Native Americans so they should be able to vote), the Autobots represented American values and based on their tech specs bios some of them would lean conservative while others would lead liberals, while characters like the Dinobots would be their own thing. Meanwhile the Decepticons represented the bad parts of humanity, as I’ve gone over before. They were the anarchists and fascists, the criminals and the conquerors. The same is true for superheroes and supervillains respectively, not to push a point of view but people who come together because of their similarities and in spite of their differences. In the case of heroes, they all want to protect others on a general sense, and will argue the specifics, like Green Lantern and Green Arrow.

Even if you’re trying to make a point about the world around you and warn of where we can end up if we don’t change course or let the wrong people take charge of our lives, it only works if the story is good. I read Animal Farm in high school, and it also touches on becoming that which you most hate, as the pigs become the humans. The goal may have been for the pigs to take charge of the farm, but the other animals followed them thinking the pigs were on their side only to be betrayed by them as they became as bad as the farmers they chased off. It’s an important message, but its told through an interesting story. Some stories, even showcasing views I agree with, fail because of how those views are presented and that the story wasn’t as important as the message. At that point it might as well not even pretend to be a story. Just do a commentary and let the storytellers tell stories.