I’ve never been a huge X-Men fan. Even the original Fox Kids cartoon didn’t do much for me, so the relaunch didn’t make me miss Disney+. I hope that’s not a theme this week, but I saw an article from Bounding Into Comics where Tom Brevoort, incoming editor to the X-Books took a shot at the “Krakoa era” finale and showed that he may understand superheroes whatever his current political commentary may say. I haven’t heard anything direct, but TwitterX had turned everyone into cultural experts and activists.
Anyway, the article. Brevoort voiced his disproval for what outgoing editor Jordan D. White allowed to happen during the Krakoa Era, where all the mutants went to a private island (which is a leftover from an old horror comic story from Marvel about a living island) to get away from humanity and slowly lost their own in the process. In short, the X-Men became the Inhumans, born with great powers and cutting themselves off from society. Brevoort’s specific argument was on how the X-Men responded to an attack by some group called Orchis, an anti-mutant fantic group that tried to wipe them all out. That’s the limits of what I know outside of Just Some Guy and Comics By Perch videos on YouTube because I only watched those out of curiosity.
I’m here less to talk about the specifics about the era I didn’t pay attention to and focus on what Brevoort said about the choices made by the editor before him and the writers about why he opposed the X-Men’s gleeful killing of the extremists regardless of what they did to the Krakoan mutants. He was not happy with the turn of events, but critics of the Krakoa period didn’t like anything they did, from the “plant clones” of killed mutants to that one-shot story with Nature Girl killing a store clerk in Nevada after finding a turtle in the Pacific Ocean choking on a bad from that store and blaming the landlocked bagger…and the comic insisting she was in the right. That’s the worse crime I know of from this period, but Brevoort has other opinions.
Despite receiving pushback for his recent criticisms, current Marvel Comics X-Men line editor Tom Brevoort is standing by his belief that one of the biggest narrative failings during the team’s Krakoa Era was their portrayal as gleeful and wanton killers.
As previously reported, asked by a fan as to whether or not he intended “to make your tenure on the X-Men less morally gray than they’ve been written as for the last 45 years?”, Brevoort opined “My philosophy boils down to this: I don’t think that the X-Men should be casual or gleeful killers.”
“While they have certainly been in situations where lethal force was called for and appropriate over the years, I don’t think that this should be their default setting,” he argued via his personal Substack blog, Man With A Hat. “And one of my big complaints about the end of the Orchis War was in how readily and even joyfully some of the X-Men murdered their foes. That’s fine for some characters—nobody is going to question Wolverine killing a bunch of people (though I feel that even he has certain rules of engagement which he will honorably try to follow). But seeing Nightcrawler teleport a couple of hapless Orchis goons into deep space and leave them to die just felt wildly out of character and wrong to me.”
That does seem rather harsh. The article also has Magik and Kitty Pride putting goons to the sword with a level of glee even Xena would tell them to calm down, the aforementioned space teleport (apparently they were on a space station at the time), and Emma Frost disintegrating dudes with magic brass knuckles or something.
“If our heroes are going to be heroes, then they have to be held to a higher standard than that,” Brevoort posited. “We said it a lot back in DEATHLOK thirty-plus years ago: you’ve got to do what’s right, not what’s easiest. I’m sure that we’ll have plenty of moral grey area that we can explore, but I do think that the days when the X-Men would casually throw around lethal force and laugh about it thereafter are over now.”
Deathlok was a man forced into a cyborg killing machine and he still tried to stop the killing once he got control of his cybernetic body, or at least the versions I’m aware of. The killing machine refused to kill. That’s like a Terminator just trying to knock John Connor out gently. And his name literally starts with “Death”.
I think this guy has as much if not more reason to kill people but doesn’t. He has to fight his body every day to not kill his enemies. And the Catholic minister is spacing people?
The X-Men primarily fight two groups of people: mutants out to wipe out normal humans, and normal humans out to wipe out mutants, the two extremes. Since they employ armies of goons, I can see that occasionally they might not have a choice. It’s why Cyclops formed a strike team led by Wolverine, to do the dirty deeds that needed deeding. Sometimes the police kill in the line of duty, and it’s even more necessary for soldiers. They don’t celebrate it, they celebrate surviving since that’s usually because they people they killed were just trying to kill them before they were shifted to corpse mode.
Fast forward two weeks, and Breevort has yet again been pressed by a fan to explain his position regarding the recent kill count of Marvel’s Merry Band of Mutants.
In the most recent entry into his aforementioned blog, the X-editor was asked by a fan to detail how he would have specifically written the aforementioned teleporter considering he “had just witnessed, all at once, his species murdered, displaced, imprisoned, psychologically and physically tortured, experimented on, mutilated, brainwashed, depowered, enslaved and put into camps.”
“It’s easy to preach how you wouldn’t have Kurt killing,” they posited, “but bless the writers who decided to put some stakes and pressure into a rushed event out in order to not have ANOTHER AvX-level fiasco.”
You mean the one where two supposed bands of heroes fought each other, or just another Wednesday in the Marvel universe? Who were you rooting for to die?
Straight forward in his response, Brevoort in turn asserted, “I wouldn’t have written him as suddenly being an unrepentant killer after years of him being the X-Man who most held all life sacred.”
There are two things about Kurt Wagner I’ve always known about him. He’s the fun seeking one, and he’s a former Catholic minister. Unless those goon suits double as space suits, Nightcrawler just broke “thou shalt not commit murder”. That doesn’t feel right to me.
UPDATE 8/22/2024: I’ve been corrected on Tumblr about some details. Nightcrawler was a priest, not a minister, and apparently that turned out to be some kind of mind control situation. My point still stands that unless he tossed his whole religion out the door it’s not right for Kurt to be killing people in such a cruel manner. Back to the original article.
“But beyond that, I tend to find the larger argument here totally slanted by those who use it,” he wrote. “I heard a lot of this kind of sentiment over the years from Zack Snyder fans who try to convince me that Superman breaking the neck of Zod in Man of Steel was a necessary and inevitable action.”
“And I think it’s off-base for a couple of very simple reasons,” Brevoort opined. “1) These are stories, which means that all of the rules of engagement are controlled by some writer somewhere pulling the strings. So there isn’t any no-win scenario possible except when a writer contrives to make it so. And 2) we’ve published fifty years of comic book stories in which Nightcrawler has overcome far more potent enemies that a bigot with a gun without needing to toss them into a void to their deaths. So clearly it is possible for him to do so.”
Teleport all the guns into space and knock them out. That was easy. Or, lock the airlock doors and leave them in the various space station airlocks, or the ballroom or something until SHIELD can come get them.
“The only reason for him not to do so is a desire for revenge and catharsis on the part of the character, the creators and the readers—and I don’t think that particular catharsis is a healthy thing. I tend to subscribe to the idea that super heroes are intended to embody a higher morality than that, and if they just go around killing anybody they don’t like, they cease to be heroes and instead become the kinds of people that they’re fighting and killing. There must always be a line.”
Emphasis added by me. That’s my philosophy and one of the things I like about superheroes. Normal law enforcers can’t risk being shot and killed by a perp so they have to use lethal force at times, and despite what you hear there are rules and investigations anytime an officer fires his gun, even if he wounds or misses the perp. Some say those rules are too strong, others not strong enough. Not my point either way. The point is superheroes, especially the ones with powers, have the luxury of coming up with non-lethal solutions. Then Brevoort drops this image from Uncanny X-Men #140, back when you were allowed to let volume numbers go that high.
Remember also that what violent tendencies Logan had thanks to his long lifespan and feral instincts was supposed to be something that he was trying to control, which is why he was with the X-Men in the first place. Even when Cyclops formed his version of X-Factor to be the hit squad, I’m betting Wolverine still followed this rule or else they did it wrong. Again, not really an X-Fan, but seeing how often we still get brooding loner Batman and “Bruce Wayne is the mask” nonsense, plus the fact they have a character whose sole purpose of existing in the comics is to regress Wolverine when the next writer wants to write the angry feral version he used to read, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me X-Factor Logan was all about the snikt bub snikt.
“Here, Logan explains under what conditions he feels that it’s appropriate to use lethal force against his foes, and it’s a set of rules that make sense for that character.”
“But even then, Nightcrawler doesn’t agree with Wolverine’s philosophy,” he pointed out. “His position is more hardline on this issue, and he makes no bones about saying so.That’s part of what makes characters different and the stories interesting.”
Again, Kurt is Catholic and a minister. He would be more likely to find a nonlethal solution than Logan, and even Logan has rules for when he breaks out the stabby limbs. Leaving someone to die in space, a horrible way to die no matter how the science puts it, is way against everything Kurt believes in.
Bringing his thoughts on the matter to a close, Brevoort ultimately declared, “You are certainly welcome to disagree with any or all of this. But it’s my X-Line now, and that means at least for the time being, the X-Men are going to kill only when it is absolutely necessary and there is no other option available to them.”
“And as much as possible,” he concluded, “we’ll try to see the after-effects of those instances when somebody is killed, so that the taking of life doesn’t become just a spectacle of bread and circuses.”
That’s the kind of superheroes I’m into, even if the X-Men specifically never really caught on with me. Deadly force even for soldiers comes with rules. The battlefield is one thing but you don’t go running into an enemy location firing blind unless you’re surrounded by snipers or something. Even breaking the rules…comes with rules.
What it sounds like to me (again, haven’t read it) is that the editor and writer wanted to kill “bigots” and made a situation where they could. This is after the X-Men segregate themselves, live on an island that allows a teenage girl to kill a man over something he had no control over, suddenly created a three-way to make shippers happy, made death immaterial thanks to clones (Perch’s biggest problem with the run, and when it comes to X-Men he’s the opposite of me), and just overall made them a bunch of jerks who couldn’t prove they were innocent of killing people with a drug that was supposed to help others because some mutant-hating lunatic poisoned the supply, the kick-off to the era. Basically, they put their politics ahead of the characters’ histories, turned the mutants into the Inhumans by having superpowered being sequestered…which is funny when you remember Disney tried to turn the Inhumans into the mutants because they hadn’t bought Fox yet…and while Jordan D. White would have loved for this period to be the new normal, according to ScreenRant, meant the X-Men were apart from the other Marvel heroes…except for Tony Stark marrying Emma Frost for some reason.
I don’t even like the X-Men and I’m glad to see they’re getting out of this period.
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