Merry X-Mas

I’m going to hate myself for doing this, but the hell with it. I seem to want to do it.

I’ve been busy lately. Preoccupied. Stressed.

Over the years, writing at length about trivial pop culture has become my substitute for video games as a means of procrastination, distraction, or otherwise idly stewing in my own solipsistic juices. The fare I ordinarily serve up here doesn’t serve that function: usually what I’m trying to do is challenge myself. Writing about, say, video games is easy. That’s why I started with it way back when (at this point a substantially long ways back), and that’s largely why I stopped doing it.

Over the last few months—since about August, I guess—I’ve slouched beneath a heavy, fatigued I’d prefer not to mood. And when I’m in these moods, I temporize and procrastinate and find things to fiddle with instead of working towards fulfilling my obligations (or playing video games into the night, as I used to). And the principal thing I seem to have been fiddling with is a series of fragmentary writeups about various X-Men comics, which I figured I might as well go ahead and elaborate on.

Not just any X-Men comics—but the various “teen team” books that have been published over the years.1

You might be asking: why focus on the teen teams? Are you some kind of puerile weirdo?

Maybe. But I can think of a few other reasons.

1.) In the world of X-Men comics, the launch of a junior team series is most often (but not always) the only occasion where brand new X-characters are created and enter into the narrative continuum en masse. This usually occurs in a generational cycle, and the books are periodically revisited or revived in the same manner. This makes them as good a lens as any through which to not only examine the general vibe of the X-Books and of “mainstream” comics during a given period of time, but to track the decades-long decline of superhero serials as a concatenation of senescence, external competition, corporate enshittification, cultural shifts, and changes to the media ecosystem took a steepening toll. It may also be an opportunity to at least touch upon the evolving ethos of a comic book franchise about a fictional group of marginalized persons that was first published against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, enjoyed a period of mainstream cultural cachet that happened to coincide with the liftoff and flight of the post-AIDS Gay Rights movement, and underwent a truly fascinating (but of course temporary) reinvention during the “woke” years.2

2.) Unlike daytime soap operas and professional wrestling (television’s closest analogues to DC/Marvel superhero schlock), comic books need never concern themselves with the eventuality of She-Hulk “hitting the wall” or Nightwing growing more prone to injury and fatigue in his middle-age. Their stars can be young, gorgeous, and in peak physical condition for as long as someone can draw them that way—and this advantage of the medium can and has become a long-term problem. If there was ever a window of time in which DC Comics could have set up Batman to be like Doctor Who, getting fans accustomed to seeing the cape and cowl passed on to a new character every decade or so, that window slammed shut ages ago.

While there have been intervals where somebody else filled the role of Batman for a time, only new and naïve readers believed the mantle had permanently changed shoulders. It never can. In Batman, Detective Comics, and other mainline DC titles, Batman must always be Bruce Wayne, Bruce Wayne must always be somewhere between thirty and forty-ish years old, and the ongoing monthlies must continue until the publisher is forced to close up shop.

Since 1940, Batman has taken on five preteen or teenaged sidekicks as his Robins. The first and second of these are now written as being in their twenties, and have developed their own costumed secret identities. The third and fourth seem to be in their very late teens. The fifth was written as being ten years old when he debuted in 2006, and is now about middle-school age. This sort of thing imbues Batman serials, from time to time, with the semblance of progress. Maybe things are moving, readers intimate. Maybe Batman comics aren’t permanently locked in the interminable second act of a three-part drama.

In X-Men comics, this narrative trick of the light could be convincing indeed, given the franchise’s continuously evolving status quo and ever-expanding, ever-revolving cast. A longitudinal view of the X-Men’s “new generation” books will also be a look into the illusion of progress in superhero serials.

3.) While I can’t be sure how many cash-strapped kids in the 1980s actually prioritized buying the latest issue of The New Mutants over Uncanny X-Men, the business sense of having a “teen” book associated with an “adult” one is obvious: a lot of younger readers will more easily identify with characters of middle- or high-school age than with a cast whose members are in their twenties or thirties. It is interesting to try to infer from such books what their writers, editors, and marketers imagined a young-ish audience might want—and who they imagined that audience to be.

4.) If you’ve never read any X-Men comics (and I can’t blame you), there is something you need to understand: there are so god damned many X-Men comics. You have absolutely no idea. I have not read them all. I don’t think I ever can. Whenever I revisit the franchise, I always discover some ongoing monthly or limited series I hadn’t known about before. Having gotten it into my head to write about X-Men comics at some length, I needed to devise some sort of filter. Looking at only the “junior team” books (and their periodic “All Grow’d Up” reunion series) is as good a limiting parameter as any—and in the event that you’re unfamiliar with but vaguely interested about comic book esoterica, it might be a fun to visit a few sections of the X-Men mythos that get less retrospective attention than Dark Phoenix, Days of Future Past, Age of Apocalypse, E for Extinction, etc.

5.) Nobody seems to blog about stuff like this anymore. It’s all on YouTube now. And if I miss reading longform writeups about pop cultural ephemera from time to time, perhaps somebody else does too.

6.) This will also be a brain de-worming procedure: writing about this shit at length (hopefully) means I’ll never have to think much about it again.

These are going to be spergy fluff pieces. I wanted to write unseriously and at an unreasonable length about something that isn’t serious. If I end up making cultural commentary here and there, so be it—but the point of this exercise is to play around with writing about X-Men comics and maybe give people something fun to read on a dull afternoon. What I mean is: I’m taking the existence of a culture industry and a spectacular society as a given, and not critiquing the economic and social conditions that allowed or necessitated comic books to become corporate entertainment for the stultified masses and a site for cultivating valuable IPs that can be leveraged to sell T-shirts, toys, video games, 7-Eleven Big Gulps, etc. If you’re here for more of that kind of content, forgive my inconsistency. I’ll probably get back to something like it later.

We’re going to go through six decades, one by one, and look at two things: new ongoing teen-team series (and limited series, if I feel like it), and teen-team revival books. Under the (probably misguided) assumption that anyone who’d scroll through these isn’t necessarily a nerd who already knows all about this stuff, I’ll try to keep the in-universe arcana to a minimum, and provide snappy exposition where necessary.

These turned out to be long. I’ll post the first one in a week or so, and then the second and third in January and February. The last three are still fragmentary and garbled, and I’m not going to do anything with them until the spring or summer.