After a weekend of thinking far too much about Scott Summers and catching up with developments in the X-Men universe(s) during the last 6 years (a great deal of them! the graphic novel industry has been revolutionised!), all because of the Wolverine movie (the reverie was quickly brought to an abrupt end by the start of working life), I remembered the original reason that I stopped being too passionate about X-Men. (I used to like it a great deal – enough to have 2 volumes of the original, YES the old old comics, plus Mutant Massacre, and I’d dipped a little into Ultimate X-Men also, in the first days of its conception. I’ve also watched nearly all of Evolution.).
It’s because X-Men is actually very sad, too sad for me to dwell in it for too long. I’d forgotten just how sad. The deeper one goes into it the more obvious it becomes that there can never be a happy ending, because it is based on the premise that the mutants are people who’ll never fit into society. The series starts in the 1960s – as of now, in the main continuity, then, it’s 40 years later, and nothing has been achieved – characters who have stayed the course have simply been put through the mill of suffering and loneliness, broken on the wheel of moral failure, had the best ideals but could not hold to them or carry them out – again and again and again. It’s Le Morte D’Arthur, without being able to die. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
They’ll always be fighting the humans and each other, ranged variously on the sides of good and evil, and even the most iconic ‘good guys’ will have endlessly messed-up personal lives (Scott himself being one of the most depressing examples). There’s no “light at the end of the tunnel”. Like the two heroes of the Mabinogion doomed to keep a rendezvous to fight a duel with each other every May Day till the world ends, there will never be an end to the battles in X-Men, whether the epic showdowns or the personal vendettas – Scott and Wolverine, Wolverine and Sabertooth, Magneto and Xavier, the Brotherhood, the Hellfire Club, etc etc. Doomed to tread the same weary track, not just till Judgement day – but in all the different universes too! And never being able to settle into any relationship permanently, to boot. Jean, Madelyne, Phoenix-Jean, Jean again, Emma Frost… Argh… Betrayals and betrayals, and this is Scott himself, these are the ‘good guys’. I find it very depressing!
And for the same reasons I was drawn to it, just as I was drawn to Le Morte and to the French Revolution in various phases of my life – the best of ideals (it’s no coincidence that “The Once And Future King” plays such a big role in the movie X2 – it’s a perfectly fitting stroke of poetic GENIUS!), let down by human nature (and even by superhero nature). In some ways it’s even sadder when it’s superheroes who fail, and superheroes who die, and superheroes who sleep around. And of course, because X-Men are a lot harder to kill off even than knights etc, storylines play out in greater dimensions – and the emotional fallout (for both characters and readers) is a lot worse. No – who am I kidding? REAL LIFE is a lot worse, but this is simply a fictionalisation of real life – a documentary (coded as fantasy), and a warning.
Ultimately, what makes X-Men stand out as a series (or rather, a series of alternate realities) that people can identify with a lot – namely, the fact that its heroes are all ‘real people’ with flaws and failings – is also what makes it a dark series – simply because not only does it reflect a lot of the evil in the world (prejudice, rejection, the seduction of power, hate and intolerance), it also showcases the evil within people – the breakdown of communication and trust, loneliness, lust, unfaithfulness, despair and jealousy – reflected even more so in the relationships of the “good guys” – the X-Men themselves – than in those of the bad guys. It has a great deal of the ugliness of life and human nature in it – metaphysical struggles anthropormorphised – and I cannot hope not to be troubled by this. So – once again, I will have to limit my contact with it to small quantities at a time – as I did too with King Arthur, and la Revolution.
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I suspect heroes like Hornblower, of course, would have gone much the same way, if he’d had the lifespan and supernatural attributes of an X-Man.
Glad she gets such a big role now in Astonishing X-Men.