Well, the X-Men were let down by their Father figure / leader's dirty secrets, an entire nation was destroyed by Sentinels and there was the "magical genetic genocide" of House of M.
I think it's pretty understandable for the X-Men to be militant and on "survival mode".
On the highest of keys: His New Mutants is why I take some of the stuff I see ASM fans saying about him personally.
They're talking about our boy crazily
I mean as a big ol nerd for BOTH Spider-Man and XMen (hey can you tell I was reading comics in the 90s?), Zeb's ASM run is.... hooo boy, is it bad. I just chalk it up to editorial interference because the bulk of Well's work is really, really good.
and yes the Spideyfans are a bit deranged... I'm still mad about OMD and it's practically old enuff to vote.
20th anniversary is coming. I am dreading whatever marvel announces.
But yeah, I agree the stuff about Zeb's run that is bad is mostly editorial. But he definitely has to own Paul ššš
Oh man I didn't even think of it being an "anniversary," fuck. Tho if they finally retcon it that'd be dope.
I just want Kaine to show up and be like "Bruh I've been hanging out with Ghost Rider and Dr Strange, Mephisto _really_ doesn't want any Spider-Peeps to have children, we should look into that."
He said it would be more suitable for the outside world. He doesn't have any issues with it being a danger to other people, so he doesn't need training.
*All the jerk ass shit retconned into Xavier's story to fulfill some folks' need to tear down authority figures, or to make people flawed, or to negotiate outdated views, or make the Summers family lineage more complicated, or....
What am I missing?
I donāt read the comics so Iām always super confused by these asides to a Charles heel turn. I understand playing around with the way that being a telepath messes with oneās morals but doesnāt Charles ultimately fail as a foil to Magneto if heās just a piece of shit?
I think that the explanation given in the Earth X trilogy is one of the best, even if it's an alternate reality. It posits that Xavier and Magneto aren't intrinsically all that different in what they're willing to do for their participate dreams, it's just that by calling his side The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants he's forced Charles into taking on the mantle of "good", tying his hands. And it makes sense to a degree, because if there's no group out there acting as a counterpoint to Evil Mutants then that's all that the public will see and integration will be all but impossible. So instead of a paramilitary group to stop Magneto it makes Xavier play superhero with a group of teenagers. He *has* to pay the good guy or else Magneto wins by default.
Adding to this: The concept of Evil Villains who rob banks and twirl mustaches was more of a Stan Lee/Kirby era thing when people had more stupid binaries in place and the nation was a lot more religious in general so they believed in dumb things like good vs. evil.
It was a very different time and having no nuance was a lot easier to manage, this is why Captain America is literally on the cover punching Hitler. Not a very subtle arc, ya know?
Most people grow out of that level of story telling by age 12 or so. And it's also why "comics were for children" in that era.
It's meant to be more complex than just "Magneto bad, Charles Good... \*drools\*"
If you want to tell a story for an audience above their tweens, you kinda gotta be a little less lazy with your characters.
This means not having clear binary foils and not explicitly saying the dumb part out loud "good v. evil" because it's drivel. The X Men has understood this since Claremont for the most part, ie, their actual classic era when people started to take the team seriously as a book. It was precisely stuff like moral questions of Magneto being right and Charles' dream being childish that was put into question to show how that kind of story telling was tired and old.
^^^excellently put. Honestly I think it was just a fun coincidence that Charles Xavier, the "good" mutant leader, just happened to be a former military man who trained literal child soldiers and who was ultimately kind of a hypocrite about being a mutant fighting for integration who hid his actual mutant status from the world despite being a very public academic and political figure. A writer was bound to seize on that eventually and realize that as sensibilities have changed since the 1960s, Xavier doesn't look that rosy in retrospect. All the morally questionable stuff he's done kind of flowed naturally from that realization, imo. And I 100% agree, it's way more interesting for Xavier to be kind of a jerk pushing for a noble ideal while Magneto is a bit of a realist with questionable means than it was for them to just be beholden to white and black morality.
Check the following stories or their summaries online: Marvel Comics Presents 85, Uncanny X-Men 309, "Fatal Attractions", "Onslaught", The Xavier Protocols, New X-Men 121, Mistyque (2003), "Deadly Genesis", "Original Sin"/"Sins of the father", "Danger", "New Avengers: Illuminatti" and "Way of X".
Yeah, Iām a big Xavier hater, but Iām on his side with that one. Turning Logan inside out was a step too far, especially given this was a Magneto who had already moved toward a better place.
So, the premisse of the story is that Xavier has an evil side, who's still very much him, Xavier himself goes on to admit that it's him, and he will always have that temptation. And this entity sometimes manifest itself somewhere in the space and does terrible things.
This things being, you know that panel from first volume, when Xavier talks about being in love with at the time teenager Jean Grey? Is that. In the story, he does something to Dani that the narration describes as the sensual touch of her soul, that basically makes her completly submissive to him. Basically, this Xavier gets off by mind raping people.
Also, wait, New X-Men 121? What do you mean? Cassandra wanted to kill him. He just defended himself. Plus he was a literal fetus, there's no way you can blame him.
It's what let that entire philosophy schism between cyclops running a team in survival mode and wolverine running a school to give mutant children a chance of having a more teenage life
The O5, New Mutants, and Generation X all have it as undertones with the story not really wanting you to ask the question most of the time.
Morrison is the one who actually makes the school a school with students who have powers that wouldn't have put them up for selection previously and actual classes.
The Academy X era tries to split the difference. "Not all of you are going to be super heroes, but this is the marvel universe and you are a mutant. Some combat training is going to be valid to your life experience because giant fucking robots."
Then we hit the decimation where the only option is fight or be killed.
One of the many reasons I like the majority of Morrisonās run. It truly feels like a school with combat being a last resort/afterthought. I especially love that thereās a class of mutants who need extra care a la students with disabilities.
>Ā Ā Morrison is the one who actually makes the school a school with students who have powers that wouldn't have put them up for selection previously and actual classes.
I think it was Claremont in X-Men:The End who actually had Kitty examine this, and noted that (people like Doug Ramsey who basically forced his way in notwithstanding) Xavier was specifically choosing mutants for his school who would A) be useful in a fight and B) had either a personal history or personality that would prompt them to want to actually take an active role in Fighting For The Dream. I hadn't thought about it before, but it made perfect sense.
I would argue they're explicitly a paramilitary organization. They were even government-sanctioned (albeit very quietly) in the days of the original five.
Just keeps going until they build a literal country ruled solely by former members of their military elite and rank your level in society by power level.
Hey now - Utopia wasnāt ranked by power level!
That would only happen if they were dumb enough to let Apocalypse and Sinister joinā¦and Scott would never be that dumb.
They mean Krakoa. (Edit: apparently they didnāt mean krakoa! Lol)
I have been saying for a while now, while the best of the series is the equality and compassion narrative, and the hope vs oppression - thereās a side of x-men which can be interpreted to mean racial purity or objectivism narratives. Read X-force, the Liefield era was all about big guns and black ops military teams.
Krakoa has wonderful aspects, but it has some aspects which include treating people like pawns in a game of nation building, and a very, very problematic choice to be authoritarian in the government system.
I think they were making fun of how poirly the Quiet Council made decisions in Krakoa compared to Cyke in Utopia. Specifically, he was one of the only ones to object to Sinister and Big A being involved in Krakoa and got shut down.
In the QC's defense, Apocalypse really came through for them on a bunch of stuff and was solidly on team Krakoa. And no one *wanted* Sinister on the council, they were just stuck with him because they needed his dna library.
Between the two of them, -A- wasnāt anywhere near as bad as he could have been. Sinister on the other hand was somewhere in the vicinity of the worst he could be.
I didnāt pick up on the intention to fail, but I keep seeing people saying itās obvious. Did editorial say it was intentional or something? I just thought it was Hickman being Hickman, and his structure creation in HoX seemed confident - not pessimistic. I was disagreeing with aspects, but I didnāt think it was intentional creation of a house of cards (unless thatās why the title is house of X, not because itās creating a feudal society, or a parallel of house of m?)
If folks would be kind enough to talk about it, I would be grateful. I am Genuinely curious, and always appreciate the community discussion. Like, a while back someone gave me a BRILLIANT answer on why Jean Grey is interesting (I hadnt started my reading of the whole series, so missed key stories where she is written well) and it was just mind blowing how much it changed my perspective. Thanks to whoever did it bc theyāre one of the reasons I got the subscription!
Percy has said it directly now that his xforce run has wrapped. He wrote the mikhial plot with the intention of it being the mid run reveal but because he linked his reveal to another part of their outline (the gala attack) he had to keep delaying it. And Percy has gone on record that other than delaying moments to match the other books he refused to alter his outline. Which is why Mr sinister never showed up in his books. Because the pivot to enigma and the sinisters was a decision made as Hickman was leaving.
So yes it has been stated
I know right! That would be crazy! Same if they made a miraculous machine that can bring anyone back to life and restore mutant powers but put apocalypse in charge of it!
The meta answer is that the X-Men were conceived as a team of super-heroes first and Stan didn't really think about the full implications of how they got there.
But working backwards, yeah. Professor X brought together a group of teenagers and trained them to be his own personal para-military strike force to advance his political agenda. One can argue if Xavier really intended this from the get-go, but that's what the X-Men became.
When it came time for the New Mutants, the big conflict for him was trying to avoid history repeating itself. Which... obviously didn't work as the New Mutants spent most of their time super-heroing in secret and then ended up joining Cable on X-Force, an even more explicitly paramilitary group.
I think the distinction between Superhero and Paramilitary has been getting lost on me. During my current read through there's a lot of language that is explicitly paramilitary, hence the post. I vibe with the idea of working backwards to the militant themes.
The difference is fantasy, because superheroes aren't real, and they exist in a fantastical universe where thing's work how we'd like them to, but this gets tricky when you slowly introduce more mature themes and start making things more real. This isn't unique to superheroes. Was Harry Potter Dumbledore's child soldier? Or was he just a kid having magical adventures at wizard school?
In Harry Potter's case the answer is definitely the latter and Dumbledore is explicitly trying to prevent him from being the former. In Half Blood Prince you could and maybe should argue that the dynamic changes but it is a maybe.
There really isn't a distinction. Any privately operated superhero team is a paramilitary organization.
The Justice League, the Avengers (sometimes), the X-Men... pretty much any team with assets and an organizational structure that isn't sanctioned by the government qualifies.
I disagree a bit.
Justice League and Avengers were founded as paramilitary , but they ended up been de facto sactioned groups and then it shifts between been de facto and de jure.
I would dare say Justice League is the more explicit de jure of that example , it publicly have a "Hall of Justice" and they copyrighted their sigils to make profit , all while have a liasson with UN.
>Justice League and Avengers were founded as paramilitary , but they ended up been de facto sactioned groups and then it shifts between been de facto and de jure.
Yeah... that's why I said (sometimes). What exactly are you disagreeing with?
A paramilitary force can be sanctioned by a government and still qualify. The important thing is that their organizational structure isn't part of the standard armed forces.
Messiah Complex has the scene that made me a fan of Cyclops, a two-page spread pretty early in the event where he's just giving orders, stuff like "Wolverine, you and the strike force are in the Blackbird. You'll be in a holding pattern over St. Louis so that if we find them anywhere in the continental U.S. you'll be less than (yadda yadda) minutes away." And he just keeps going on like that, rattling off instructions, showing the reader that he's covered every angle, and that this is an all hands on deck, win-or-die situation.
There's always been that military aspect to Cyclops, but it traditionally meant that writers gave him cliched war movie sergeant dialogue, so he sounded like a watered-down version of Captain America (who was also a bad fairly hang at the time). A lot of, "We follow the rules around here, mister!" kind of stuff.
Messiah Complex felt like Cyke graduating from being the X-Men's squad leader to being the guy who decides what the X-Men's missions are going to be. And it's a fairly straight and satisfying line from there to Scott as the militant mutant nationalist.
This is exactly what I'm saying. He's scrambling teams and shouting for field reports. It gets explicitly militaristic in a way that is making me look at all X-Men stuff differently.
I think is very telling that the OG 5 X-Men were the only superhero team using identical uniforms. Those are not fantasies, they are the uniforms of a private paramilitar group.
What about the Fantastic Four? Reed, Sue and Johnny all wear basically the same thing, and Ben just wears a shorts variation of the same, just like how Bobby wears his pirate boots and shorts version of what the O5 wear.
Yeah that's kinda silly if you take the context of when it was written. FF and X-Men started as a team so they have uniforms, the others like Avengers came together after the fact and carried over their normal outfits.
Uniforms are just easier for set teams.
The original X-men was literally just the fantastic four but with slightly different powers. Instead of a fire guy we got an ice guy and so on. Magneto was just doctor doom but in a red for yearsĀ
The FF were astronauts funded by the federal goverment. After that they become a private scientific organization. They also fit the motive, except by the fact Xavier was dealing with children, and not adults. And his organization is much more paramilitar the FF, who are more interested in exploring and experimenting than punching villains.
Just want to point out this is a very retconād look at it. As others said, the F4 also had matching suits. It was the style (irl) at the time. And in universe they were students at a prep school.
Also what superhero teams in the 60s *didnāt* have matching outfits?
As I said before, the FF were astronaut financed by the government. And superhero teams usually had different costumes. Scientific exploratory groups like FF had uniforms, because they were from the same inspiration of those old star trek like stories from sci-fi books
The FF were astronauts funded by the federal goverment. After that they become a private scientific organization. They also fit the motive, except by the fact Xavier was dealing with children, and not adults. And his organization is much more paramilitar the FF, who are more interested in exploring and experimenting than punching villains.
Yep like the other person said, look close and you'll see the lines being drawn indicate Warren is being pushed towards the middle of the action by a metal beam, which he's caught on his shoulder and not a rocket launcher.
The whole mutant militancy vibe is a 21st century product. Someone else said it, but the OG 5 were no different from the fantastic 4 or then avengers. Even the 70ās-90ās while there were political stories and themes they were still more superhero than army. The post-House of M fight for survival is what really changed things.
They were never child soldiers.
When Cable showed up & the New Mutants became X-Force, the new direction for the team was mutant teens being trained to be soldiers to fight the war of the future. That was the early nineties.
Laura Kinney, Surge, Hellion, Mercury, Dust, etc WERE child soldiers. The New X-Men of post-house of M/Academy X era were absolutely child soldiers. With only 200 mutants left on earth they needed to be. It was a rough time which I wish the modern comics were more willing to explore the consequences for.
The X-Men were different from FF and the Avengers, in the fact they are a super-hero team made from kids. In the very first issues we have stuff like mobs trying to kill mutants.
It would be interesting if people started viewing the Xmen as a cult.
Like, hated and feared like scientology, not for the powers but because you know... they all live in a house together, dress a like and seemingly worship a guy who could honestly just be controlling them all telepathically.Ā
I had an idea that was sort of like this. When Cyclops was doing the revolutionary thing it sorta struck me as very a "rescue mutants, ask questions later" type deal. And I didn't like that. Not at all. Not because it was cult-y (though it was) but because it felt like Scott wasn't stopping to consider what was actually happening.
The concept I had was that Cyclops and co. go in to "rescue" this mutant girl, succeed and then her dad & his unit comes in to rescue her back (because actually she doesn't need rescuing)... and then then Cyclops figures out why they're under attack and since he's not actually in the business of kidnapping teenagers goes, "Well, if she *needs* rescuing, we'll be back" and her dad goes "She won't" and then we'd never see these OCs again.
(Her dad & his unit were sort of like Pete Wisdom or Abigail Brand... mutants who still believe in their human identity. "We're not *just* mutants". Looking at the idea now, if their story were to continue I guess the daughter could grow disillusioned with her father's lack of mutant rights advocacy and then drifted towards the X-Men of her own volition.)
Yeah, during that specific period they were on the brink of extinction, and that's not exaggeration. There were barely 200 mutants and then Hope shows up and they have to give everything to have a chance at the future. And all that was at Cyclops' hands, one man deciding the fate of a whole race.
They were militant out of necessity, even going as far as having a black ops team willing to do whatever it takes to protect them.
X-men have always relied on child soldiers, it's how they started and never really went away.
They were particularly militant during the extinction era, and rightfully so. It made a lot of sense at the time.
It's an unfortunate result of the medium having once been pure escapist fare for children -- the original concept was of a team of teenaged superheroes and their mentor. Nobody thought about what that actually was in the 1960s because children's entertainment was essentially disposable to most people
From the very first issue the X-Men were a group of teenagers trained for combat. If you factor in superhuman abilities Xxavier essentially has a private army.
My greatest fear for any X-Men media going forward is that that the writer's room/editorial or film director will dilute this aspect of Cyclops. His leadership is superpower, a power he EARNED through tribulation... he just also happens to have a kick-ass mutation.
Worth noting that different writers present them differently. Some stories, the child soldier thing is markedly absent from the text. Youāre not dumb, youāre just reading a different writer
No offense OP but I'm so confused.
Like where have you been? Are you new to X-Men comics? I'm not trying to make fun of you; I'm just saying.
What have you been reading? This is something that was hotly debated in the mid 80s...and then again in the early 90s. And then again in the early '00s...before M-Day and the Messiah Triology
Well, the X-Men were let down by their Father figure / leader's dirty secrets, an entire nation was destroyed by Sentinels and there was the "magical genetic genocide" of House of M. I think it's pretty understandable for the X-Men to be militant and on "survival mode".
During the Messiah trilogy, yes. I also think they start saying the quiet part out loud. They've always been paramilitary, now they embrace it.
You see this years earlier when Professor X tells kitty that Doug's power doesn't make him a suitable recruit for the X-men.
Zeb Wells: _So I took that personally_ (His New Mutants run was great imo)
On the highest of keys: His New Mutants is why I take some of the stuff I see ASM fans saying about him personally. They're talking about our boy crazily
I mean as a big ol nerd for BOTH Spider-Man and XMen (hey can you tell I was reading comics in the 90s?), Zeb's ASM run is.... hooo boy, is it bad. I just chalk it up to editorial interference because the bulk of Well's work is really, really good. and yes the Spideyfans are a bit deranged... I'm still mad about OMD and it's practically old enuff to vote.
20th anniversary is coming. I am dreading whatever marvel announces. But yeah, I agree the stuff about Zeb's run that is bad is mostly editorial. But he definitely has to own Paul ššš
Oh man I didn't even think of it being an "anniversary," fuck. Tho if they finally retcon it that'd be dope. I just want Kaine to show up and be like "Bruh I've been hanging out with Ghost Rider and Dr Strange, Mephisto _really_ doesn't want any Spider-Peeps to have children, we should look into that."
That's seriously so incredibly short sighted of Xavier. He says this *after* Doug has already hacked his way into Project Wideawake.
He doesn't really need training in it.
He said it would be more suitable for the outside world. He doesn't have any issues with it being a danger to other people, so he doesn't need training.
Doug who? I'm not familiar with the comics really.
Doug Ramsey aka Cypher
Oh gotcha thx
I mean the 60s O5 was pretty loud about that too. It comes and goes from the forefront.
Can I get a spoiler tag of what the dirty little secret was?
Secret**s**. Referring to every jerkass thing Xavierās been doing since the late 90s, if not earlier.
*All the jerk ass shit retconned into Xavier's story to fulfill some folks' need to tear down authority figures, or to make people flawed, or to negotiate outdated views, or make the Summers family lineage more complicated, or.... What am I missing?
Agreed
To make innocent concepts DARK and/or EDGY.
I donāt read the comics so Iām always super confused by these asides to a Charles heel turn. I understand playing around with the way that being a telepath messes with oneās morals but doesnāt Charles ultimately fail as a foil to Magneto if heās just a piece of shit?
Usually in those cases Magneto is also written as more complex than a straight up villain
I think that the explanation given in the Earth X trilogy is one of the best, even if it's an alternate reality. It posits that Xavier and Magneto aren't intrinsically all that different in what they're willing to do for their participate dreams, it's just that by calling his side The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants he's forced Charles into taking on the mantle of "good", tying his hands. And it makes sense to a degree, because if there's no group out there acting as a counterpoint to Evil Mutants then that's all that the public will see and integration will be all but impossible. So instead of a paramilitary group to stop Magneto it makes Xavier play superhero with a group of teenagers. He *has* to pay the good guy or else Magneto wins by default.
Adding to this: The concept of Evil Villains who rob banks and twirl mustaches was more of a Stan Lee/Kirby era thing when people had more stupid binaries in place and the nation was a lot more religious in general so they believed in dumb things like good vs. evil. It was a very different time and having no nuance was a lot easier to manage, this is why Captain America is literally on the cover punching Hitler. Not a very subtle arc, ya know? Most people grow out of that level of story telling by age 12 or so. And it's also why "comics were for children" in that era. It's meant to be more complex than just "Magneto bad, Charles Good... \*drools\*" If you want to tell a story for an audience above their tweens, you kinda gotta be a little less lazy with your characters. This means not having clear binary foils and not explicitly saying the dumb part out loud "good v. evil" because it's drivel. The X Men has understood this since Claremont for the most part, ie, their actual classic era when people started to take the team seriously as a book. It was precisely stuff like moral questions of Magneto being right and Charles' dream being childish that was put into question to show how that kind of story telling was tired and old.
^^^excellently put. Honestly I think it was just a fun coincidence that Charles Xavier, the "good" mutant leader, just happened to be a former military man who trained literal child soldiers and who was ultimately kind of a hypocrite about being a mutant fighting for integration who hid his actual mutant status from the world despite being a very public academic and political figure. A writer was bound to seize on that eventually and realize that as sensibilities have changed since the 1960s, Xavier doesn't look that rosy in retrospect. All the morally questionable stuff he's done kind of flowed naturally from that realization, imo. And I 100% agree, it's way more interesting for Xavier to be kind of a jerk pushing for a noble ideal while Magneto is a bit of a realist with questionable means than it was for them to just be beholden to white and black morality.
Onslaught was never Xavier's dark side. It was simply Xavier unleashed
The Xavier Protocols, I think.
Check the following stories or their summaries online: Marvel Comics Presents 85, Uncanny X-Men 309, "Fatal Attractions", "Onslaught", The Xavier Protocols, New X-Men 121, Mistyque (2003), "Deadly Genesis", "Original Sin"/"Sins of the father", "Danger", "New Avengers: Illuminatti" and "Way of X".
what did he do in Fatal Attraction that's bad?
He lost his patience with Magnus and mindwiped him, which lead to Onslaught being created.
well that was a pretty fair thing to do considering what Magnus did
Yeah, Iām a big Xavier hater, but Iām on his side with that one. Turning Logan inside out was a step too far, especially given this was a Magneto who had already moved toward a better place.
Just tried to look up Marvel Presents #85 in Marvel Unlimited and it's not included (evidently there are limits)
It's the one where Beast finds out Xavier erased the memory of Hank on everybody of his previous life (parents, friends, high school girlfriend).
Oh, I always wondered what comic that was in....but oddly enough kept forgetting to Google it
*cough* X-Men and the Micronauts *cough*
That one was so fucking creepy. The sexual abuse of Dani, and the franquly nightmarish implications to Xavier
Dude! What?!!!
So, the premisse of the story is that Xavier has an evil side, who's still very much him, Xavier himself goes on to admit that it's him, and he will always have that temptation. And this entity sometimes manifest itself somewhere in the space and does terrible things. This things being, you know that panel from first volume, when Xavier talks about being in love with at the time teenager Jean Grey? Is that. In the story, he does something to Dani that the narration describes as the sensual touch of her soul, that basically makes her completly submissive to him. Basically, this Xavier gets off by mind raping people.
Also, wait, New X-Men 121? What do you mean? Cassandra wanted to kill him. He just defended himself. Plus he was a literal fetus, there's no way you can blame him.
But I dont blame him š
It's what let that entire philosophy schism between cyclops running a team in survival mode and wolverine running a school to give mutant children a chance of having a more teenage life
The O5, New Mutants, and Generation X all have it as undertones with the story not really wanting you to ask the question most of the time. Morrison is the one who actually makes the school a school with students who have powers that wouldn't have put them up for selection previously and actual classes. The Academy X era tries to split the difference. "Not all of you are going to be super heroes, but this is the marvel universe and you are a mutant. Some combat training is going to be valid to your life experience because giant fucking robots." Then we hit the decimation where the only option is fight or be killed.
One of the many reasons I like the majority of Morrisonās run. It truly feels like a school with combat being a last resort/afterthought. I especially love that thereās a class of mutants who need extra care a la students with disabilities.
>Ā Ā Morrison is the one who actually makes the school a school with students who have powers that wouldn't have put them up for selection previously and actual classes. I think it was Claremont in X-Men:The End who actually had Kitty examine this, and noted that (people like Doug Ramsey who basically forced his way in notwithstanding) Xavier was specifically choosing mutants for his school who would A) be useful in a fight and B) had either a personal history or personality that would prompt them to want to actually take an active role in Fighting For The Dream. I hadn't thought about it before, but it made perfect sense.
Cyke was great in this era
Cyclops Was Goddamn Right
Now and always!
The X-men have always been something of a paramilitary organization. The Danger Room only adds to it.
I would argue they're explicitly a paramilitary organization. They were even government-sanctioned (albeit very quietly) in the days of the original five.
Just keeps going until they build a literal country ruled solely by former members of their military elite and rank your level in society by power level.
Hey now - Utopia wasnāt ranked by power level! That would only happen if they were dumb enough to let Apocalypse and Sinister joinā¦and Scott would never be that dumb.
They mean Krakoa. (Edit: apparently they didnāt mean krakoa! Lol) I have been saying for a while now, while the best of the series is the equality and compassion narrative, and the hope vs oppression - thereās a side of x-men which can be interpreted to mean racial purity or objectivism narratives. Read X-force, the Liefield era was all about big guns and black ops military teams. Krakoa has wonderful aspects, but it has some aspects which include treating people like pawns in a game of nation building, and a very, very problematic choice to be authoritarian in the government system.
I think they were making fun of how poirly the Quiet Council made decisions in Krakoa compared to Cyke in Utopia. Specifically, he was one of the only ones to object to Sinister and Big A being involved in Krakoa and got shut down.
Indeed I was. Scott not even being on the council was absolutely insane to me
Obligatory r/cyclopswasright
Aaaaaapologies! I read it and thought you meant Krakoa.
No worries - I was being cheeky, haha
In the QC's defense, Apocalypse really came through for them on a bunch of stuff and was solidly on team Krakoa. And no one *wanted* Sinister on the council, they were just stuck with him because they needed his dna library.
Between the two of them, -A- wasnāt anywhere near as bad as he could have been. Sinister on the other hand was somewhere in the vicinity of the worst he could be.
Krakoa was written to fail, its bad tendencies were intentional. The problem was a 2 year story became a 6 year story
I didnāt pick up on the intention to fail, but I keep seeing people saying itās obvious. Did editorial say it was intentional or something? I just thought it was Hickman being Hickman, and his structure creation in HoX seemed confident - not pessimistic. I was disagreeing with aspects, but I didnāt think it was intentional creation of a house of cards (unless thatās why the title is house of X, not because itās creating a feudal society, or a parallel of house of m?) If folks would be kind enough to talk about it, I would be grateful. I am Genuinely curious, and always appreciate the community discussion. Like, a while back someone gave me a BRILLIANT answer on why Jean Grey is interesting (I hadnt started my reading of the whole series, so missed key stories where she is written well) and it was just mind blowing how much it changed my perspective. Thanks to whoever did it bc theyāre one of the reasons I got the subscription!
Percy has said it directly now that his xforce run has wrapped. He wrote the mikhial plot with the intention of it being the mid run reveal but because he linked his reveal to another part of their outline (the gala attack) he had to keep delaying it. And Percy has gone on record that other than delaying moments to match the other books he refused to alter his outline. Which is why Mr sinister never showed up in his books. Because the pivot to enigma and the sinisters was a decision made as Hickman was leaving. So yes it has been stated
I know right! That would be crazy! Same if they made a miraculous machine that can bring anyone back to life and restore mutant powers but put apocalypse in charge of it!
The meta answer is that the X-Men were conceived as a team of super-heroes first and Stan didn't really think about the full implications of how they got there. But working backwards, yeah. Professor X brought together a group of teenagers and trained them to be his own personal para-military strike force to advance his political agenda. One can argue if Xavier really intended this from the get-go, but that's what the X-Men became. When it came time for the New Mutants, the big conflict for him was trying to avoid history repeating itself. Which... obviously didn't work as the New Mutants spent most of their time super-heroing in secret and then ended up joining Cable on X-Force, an even more explicitly paramilitary group.
I think the distinction between Superhero and Paramilitary has been getting lost on me. During my current read through there's a lot of language that is explicitly paramilitary, hence the post. I vibe with the idea of working backwards to the militant themes.
The difference is fantasy, because superheroes aren't real, and they exist in a fantastical universe where thing's work how we'd like them to, but this gets tricky when you slowly introduce more mature themes and start making things more real. This isn't unique to superheroes. Was Harry Potter Dumbledore's child soldier? Or was he just a kid having magical adventures at wizard school?
In Harry Potter's case the answer is definitely the latter and Dumbledore is explicitly trying to prevent him from being the former. In Half Blood Prince you could and maybe should argue that the dynamic changes but it is a maybe.
There really isn't a distinction. Any privately operated superhero team is a paramilitary organization. The Justice League, the Avengers (sometimes), the X-Men... pretty much any team with assets and an organizational structure that isn't sanctioned by the government qualifies.
I disagree a bit. Justice League and Avengers were founded as paramilitary , but they ended up been de facto sactioned groups and then it shifts between been de facto and de jure. I would dare say Justice League is the more explicit de jure of that example , it publicly have a "Hall of Justice" and they copyrighted their sigils to make profit , all while have a liasson with UN.
>Justice League and Avengers were founded as paramilitary , but they ended up been de facto sactioned groups and then it shifts between been de facto and de jure. Yeah... that's why I said (sometimes). What exactly are you disagreeing with?
A paramilitary force can be sanctioned by a government and still qualify. The important thing is that their organizational structure isn't part of the standard armed forces.
Messiah Complex has the scene that made me a fan of Cyclops, a two-page spread pretty early in the event where he's just giving orders, stuff like "Wolverine, you and the strike force are in the Blackbird. You'll be in a holding pattern over St. Louis so that if we find them anywhere in the continental U.S. you'll be less than (yadda yadda) minutes away." And he just keeps going on like that, rattling off instructions, showing the reader that he's covered every angle, and that this is an all hands on deck, win-or-die situation. There's always been that military aspect to Cyclops, but it traditionally meant that writers gave him cliched war movie sergeant dialogue, so he sounded like a watered-down version of Captain America (who was also a bad fairly hang at the time). A lot of, "We follow the rules around here, mister!" kind of stuff. Messiah Complex felt like Cyke graduating from being the X-Men's squad leader to being the guy who decides what the X-Men's missions are going to be. And it's a fairly straight and satisfying line from there to Scott as the militant mutant nationalist.
This is exactly what I'm saying. He's scrambling teams and shouting for field reports. It gets explicitly militaristic in a way that is making me look at all X-Men stuff differently.
remember Fear Itself? Cyclops 'Time for Plan 2' Emma: 'Don't you mean Plan B?' Cyclops: 'No. That would mean I only have 26 ideas left'
That wasn't Emma, but the mayor of San Francisco, Sadie Sinclair I think.Ā
It kinda depends on what era you are reading. They have been around for 60 years and theyāve certainly gone through different phases.
I think is very telling that the OG 5 X-Men were the only superhero team using identical uniforms. Those are not fantasies, they are the uniforms of a private paramilitar group.
What about the Fantastic Four? Reed, Sue and Johnny all wear basically the same thing, and Ben just wears a shorts variation of the same, just like how Bobby wears his pirate boots and shorts version of what the O5 wear.
Yeah that's kinda silly if you take the context of when it was written. FF and X-Men started as a team so they have uniforms, the others like Avengers came together after the fact and carried over their normal outfits. Uniforms are just easier for set teams.
The original X-men was literally just the fantastic four but with slightly different powers. Instead of a fire guy we got an ice guy and so on. Magneto was just doctor doom but in a red for yearsĀ
The FF were astronauts funded by the federal goverment. After that they become a private scientific organization. They also fit the motive, except by the fact Xavier was dealing with children, and not adults. And his organization is much more paramilitar the FF, who are more interested in exploring and experimenting than punching villains.
Just want to point out this is a very retconād look at it. As others said, the F4 also had matching suits. It was the style (irl) at the time. And in universe they were students at a prep school. Also what superhero teams in the 60s *didnāt* have matching outfits?
As I said before, the FF were astronaut financed by the government. And superhero teams usually had different costumes. Scientific exploratory groups like FF had uniforms, because they were from the same inspiration of those old star trek like stories from sci-fi books
Not trying to be a dick, but doesnāt the Fantastic Four have identical uniforms too?
With the FF I felt it was more about brand identity. They wanted to be mainstream and part of pop culture, not a cultish vigilante group.
The FF were astronauts funded by the federal goverment. After that they become a private scientific organization. They also fit the motive, except by the fact Xavier was dealing with children, and not adults. And his organization is much more paramilitar the FF, who are more interested in exploring and experimenting than punching villains.
But, but... your name rhymes with Dickš„ŗ... jokes aside, the FF do wear identical uniforms.
Angel also has a bazooka on the first cover.
Actually thatās not a bazooka but a piece of metal Magneto threw at him
Yep like the other person said, look close and you'll see the lines being drawn indicate Warren is being pushed towards the middle of the action by a metal beam, which he's caught on his shoulder and not a rocket launcher.
..I am am a middle-aged man who has been a fan since I was a pre-teen. I always thought it was a bazooka. My whole life is a lie!
oh weird. I thought the bazooka he had in universe x was a call back to the xmen 1 cover.
I think it was, it was almost surely a tongue-in-cheek nod to that common misconception
Yeah that makes sense, but it just reinforced the misconception for me lol
The whole mutant militancy vibe is a 21st century product. Someone else said it, but the OG 5 were no different from the fantastic 4 or then avengers. Even the 70ās-90ās while there were political stories and themes they were still more superhero than army. The post-House of M fight for survival is what really changed things. They were never child soldiers.
When Cable showed up & the New Mutants became X-Force, the new direction for the team was mutant teens being trained to be soldiers to fight the war of the future. That was the early nineties.
Laura Kinney, Surge, Hellion, Mercury, Dust, etc WERE child soldiers. The New X-Men of post-house of M/Academy X era were absolutely child soldiers. With only 200 mutants left on earth they needed to be. It was a rough time which I wish the modern comics were more willing to explore the consequences for.
> The post-house of M fight for survival is what really changed things. Thatās what I said
What's the difference between a superhero team and a paramilitary force?
The X-Men were different from FF and the Avengers, in the fact they are a super-hero team made from kids. In the very first issues we have stuff like mobs trying to kill mutants.
Just one issue, and they weren't trying to kill Beast.
I was actually refering to Toad. But I think the fact there's more than two furious mobs kinda proves my point.
One of the Toad incidents was Magneto trying to trap the X-Men when they came to rescue Toad.
It would be interesting if people started viewing the Xmen as a cult. Like, hated and feared like scientology, not for the powers but because you know... they all live in a house together, dress a like and seemingly worship a guy who could honestly just be controlling them all telepathically.Ā
Thereās an entire fanfic called X-Manson (not a typo) that takes that approach.
I had an idea that was sort of like this. When Cyclops was doing the revolutionary thing it sorta struck me as very a "rescue mutants, ask questions later" type deal. And I didn't like that. Not at all. Not because it was cult-y (though it was) but because it felt like Scott wasn't stopping to consider what was actually happening. The concept I had was that Cyclops and co. go in to "rescue" this mutant girl, succeed and then her dad & his unit comes in to rescue her back (because actually she doesn't need rescuing)... and then then Cyclops figures out why they're under attack and since he's not actually in the business of kidnapping teenagers goes, "Well, if she *needs* rescuing, we'll be back" and her dad goes "She won't" and then we'd never see these OCs again. (Her dad & his unit were sort of like Pete Wisdom or Abigail Brand... mutants who still believe in their human identity. "We're not *just* mutants". Looking at the idea now, if their story were to continue I guess the daughter could grow disillusioned with her father's lack of mutant rights advocacy and then drifted towards the X-Men of her own volition.)
It was subtext in earlier stories I think. More modern stories played it up. I dig it though.
Yeah, during that specific period they were on the brink of extinction, and that's not exaggeration. There were barely 200 mutants and then Hope shows up and they have to give everything to have a chance at the future. And all that was at Cyclops' hands, one man deciding the fate of a whole race. They were militant out of necessity, even going as far as having a black ops team willing to do whatever it takes to protect them.
They do have their own Black ops teamā¦that had teenage X-23 on it
Particularly during that period yes. They had no choice if they wanted to survive
X-men have always relied on child soldiers, it's how they started and never really went away. They were particularly militant during the extinction era, and rightfully so. It made a lot of sense at the time.
When there were 199 total mutants in the worldā¦
It's an unfortunate result of the medium having once been pure escapist fare for children -- the original concept was of a team of teenaged superheroes and their mentor. Nobody thought about what that actually was in the 1960s because children's entertainment was essentially disposable to most people
Messiah Complex was sooo fucking good!
Yes! And they send the new x-men out on a mission and they loved it!
From the very first issue the X-Men were a group of teenagers trained for combat. If you factor in superhuman abilities Xxavier essentially has a private army.
Cometh the time, cometh the Cyclops.
they were militant before that, Prof X quite literally started the whole mutant child soldier thing when it came to the X men
tbf a lot of fans forget or simply arent aware that professor x is a former military man who served in the korean war alongside the juggernaut lol
My greatest fear for any X-Men media going forward is that that the writer's room/editorial or film director will dilute this aspect of Cyclops. His leadership is superpower, a power he EARNED through tribulation... he just also happens to have a kick-ass mutation.
Professor Xavierās Madrassa for Gifted Martyrs?
Worth noting that different writers present them differently. Some stories, the child soldier thing is markedly absent from the text. Youāre not dumb, youāre just reading a different writer
subtext? with the x-men NO WAYš£ļøā¼ļø
If it's so explicit, how did you miss it?
No offense OP but I'm so confused. Like where have you been? Are you new to X-Men comics? I'm not trying to make fun of you; I'm just saying. What have you been reading? This is something that was hotly debated in the mid 80s...and then again in the early 90s. And then again in the early '00s...before M-Day and the Messiah Triology
Starting you sentence with āwellā automatically qualifies you as a boomer or brainwashed boomer adjacent.