Seeking Ferret

Days of Future Past is a Chris Claremont X-Men storyline from the mid-80s, widely considered one of the greatest X-Men storylines.

It opens in a dystopian future where mutants are enslaved by a fearful human dictatorship. Kitty Pryde is part of a faltering resistance that has unified the X-Men with their erstwhile enemies in the Brotherhood of Mutants. The major figures we see in the fight against the humans are Kitty Pryde, Rachel Summers, Colossus, Wolverine, and in a surprising twist, an aged, unhelmeted Magneto, Erik Magnus (once Lehnsherr). The resistance has figured out a way to send someone back in time into their younger body to warn the mutants of that time that if a particular Senator is assassinated, this dystopian path will be unavoidable. Kitty Pryde is sent, and after some setbacks she successfully achieves her mission, destroying her timeline.

It's a story about what-ifs, as most time travel stories are. In particular, it's a story about what if Magneto was right that mutants and humans cannot coexist. The dark future we see is the Holocaust recapitulated, with Magneto welcomed back into the fold as a vindicated and yet broken man because his prophecies have sadly proven true. His worst fears realized, he serves as a father figure and mentor toward Kitty Pryde. Meanwhile, Kitty is young and visibly Jewish, the person that Magneto and his whole generation had relied upon to transmit his message. It was a message she has failed to learn from, as she mistakenly aligned herself with the naive forces of liberal universalism*, but she has learned now, and she has it in her capacity now to make sure that the Holocaust really never repeats itself.

Charles Xavier is dead. His message of coexistence is not for the world of Days of Future Past. He's one of the fools sacrificed to the false idol of hope. Kitty and Erik are not unwary enough to fall into that trap, and this story is dedicated to their narrative of transmission of Jewish ideas from generation to generation.



So of course in the movie it's Wolverine who goes back in time instead of Kitty, eh? Of course in the movie Charles is still alive to speak to his younger self. The trailers make me despair of sitting through this movie.


*Of course we know that I'm a cynic about liberal universalism in general, but it's significant that DoFP is a challenge to liberal universalism from within a comic book that for decades has been a thoughtful champion of universalism.

My thoughts on Iron Man 3


-I still would have rather they hadn't done the Mandarin, but if they felt they had to, that they couldn't gloss over the man who is inarguably the most important figure in Tony Stark's rogues' gallery, this was the best way they could have done it. It was a complete deconstruction of the Western media tropes about the East that can make East-West confrontations so toxic.

And it did set up some meaningful Iron Man/ Mandarin foil dynamics. Tony Stark as the avatar of American consumerism, confronted by an enemy who literally embodies the worst habits of American mythbuilding. And Tony Stark as a man who is always uncomfortable in his own body and forced to pretend to be a public version of himself that he doesn't really like, against an enemy that doesn't have any substance underneath the acting. Tony's worst fear about himself is that he is just like Trevor underneath.

But it eliminated the most vital Iron Man/ Mandarin contrast: Tony as the avatar of reason and science and progress against the Mandarin and his mystical powers, his resistance to progress, his resistance to futurism and new ways of doing things. Because the Mandarin was just a front for a scheme that fits clearly within a progress narrative, that part of the foil relationship is gone entirely, and at a certain point I wonder whether it's still meaningful to tell a Mandarin story if it's lacking the essential question that Mandarin stories are designed to ask. I think I would have rather they concluded that the Mandarin was just an irredeemably racist concept and rather than undertaking the deconstruction, they should just leave him out of the canon of the movies.

-I loved the version of Tony this movie was interested in telling stories about. He was in a committed relationship for the entire movie, he was sober, he was vocal and open and honest in communicating about his emotions, he was open to criticism, he was surrounded by meaningful friendships that he didn't take for granted... and he was still, maddeningly, beautifully, Tony Stark with all the brokenness that implies. This movie managed to show incredible growth in Tony without it ever seeming like unrealistic wishful thinking.

-I liked the version of Pepper this movie was interested in telling stories about, though I was frustrated with some details. OMFG Pepper getting Extremis is better than Tony getting Extremis. I reread the Extremis storyline yesterday after watching the movie, and I still like it, but I think the movie's changes to it were almost all for the better.

I really loved that the movie validated Pepper's feelings of jealousy toward Maya, that she wasn't portrayed as being an irrational crazy bitch, but she had feelings and it was Tony's fault for not being attentive to her feelings. That is an incredibly rare approach to that kind of story.

-I'm not sure how I feel about AIM being introduced here. Obviously it's a set-up for a future movie in some way, right? Presumably AIM will be relevant to Captain America 2 or Avengers 2. I'm hoping it's Captain America, not Avengers, since AIM spun off from HYDRA in the comics, and AIM isn't epic enough to make a great Avengers foe. But I thought this was a fairly boring version of AIM because all the crazy was kind of frontloaded on the Mandarin story.


-Harley was great. We're all in agreement about that, right?

-I'm not sure entirely how I feel about it, but Rhodey and Eli Bradley need to have a conversation about the whole Iron Patriot thing, and I might have to write it. My lord, that suit was originally worn by Norman Osborne in the comics. Giving it to an African-American soldier raised my eyebrows at the least.

-People in the theater who weren't comic book people were complaining afterward that they didn't follow the details of the Extremis tech, and why it led to people being melty and blowing up. Having read the comics, both the Extremis storyline and the Ezekiel Stane "Five Nightmares" storyline that were being merged here, I didn't really have trouble following, but they probably needed a little more handholding for non-super-nerds.

-And I was a bit disappointed with the Bruce appearance at the end, because it showed their continued friendship but it didn't show their friendship being about SCIENCE.


Today is the forty first day of the Omer

I may have mentioned it before, but one of the comics I've been reading a lot of on Marvel Unlimited is the recent run of Avengers Academy, which has really pleasantly surprised me in its thoughtfulness. I'd expected it to just be teen drama, but that's not at all what it's about. Instead, it's an entertaining essay on the distorted value of heroism in the Marvel Universe.

What do I mean by that?

Well, to begin with, at some point Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin, took over SHIELD, because Marvel is stupid like that. And as head of SHIELD, he tortured young children with powers to try to force their powers to activate, and despite my frustration in general with the silliness of the Dark Reign concept, I think this is a clever play on the old superhero comic joke about the character who throws himself into a vat of toxic waste to try to become a superhero.

Eventually Osborne is overthrown and SHIELD and the Avengers try to go back to normal, but they don't know what to do with Osborne's successes- teenagers who have had powers activated through torture. They are angry, dangerous, and volatile, and the Avengers want to make sure they don't grow into the next generation of supervillain. So they invite these students to a newly constituted Avengers Academy and tell them they're in training to be the next generation of Avengers. So that they can legitimately train them, and instill moral values in them, but also so they can keep an eye on them and learn their weaknesses and keep them under control. It is deeply creepy, and the moment in the first issue when the students discover the plan is the linchpin moment of the series.

At that point they have a decision to make. Or so it seems. Do they continue to train as heroes, or do they rebel against their creepy superhero masters and get interpreted as villains? But this is only the apparent choice, and what I love about this series so far is that they keep showing that this is a false binary. The series keeps butting these characters up against different models of heroism, different motivations for heroism, different styles of heroism, etc. They meet Captain America. They meet Luke Cage. They meet Norman Osborne. They meet the Hood. They meet Magneto. They meet the X-Men, the Runaways, the Initiative. In all cases the message seems to be that the important question is not about choosing to be a hero or choosing to be a villain. It's about people being faced with hundreds and hundreds of non-binary choices in their lives and struggling to make choices they can live with.

Veil, one of the students, eventually rejects Avengers Academy not because she wants to become a villain, though the Avengers fear that she does. She rejects it because she doesn't want to be an Avenger, doesn't want to be limited in her choices to being that kind of hero. She wants to try to tackle problems she finds important, instead of reacting to supervillain threats. Not because stopping supervillains is unimportant, as this kind of statement sometimes comes out. In Batman comics this theme sometimes resonates in the question of whether Batman has inadvertently created the supervillains in his own image, but Avengers Academy assumes that there will always be supervillains because there are evil people in the world. It just refuses to accept that stopping supervillains is the only or best way to find meaning and make the world better. It cuts right to the heart of brokenness in the Marvel ethos, this idea that people with powers and capes are the real heroes, the only people whose stories are worth telling as epic sagas. And it's a great character moment, too, because it is Veil leaping out into the unknown without a net to try to carve out her own path.

Meanwhile in an amazingly ambiguous gesture, another student who has been blackmailing Quicksilver into giving her lessons on how to be like Magneto tells Quicksilver that she now aspires to learn how to be like him. I've always hated Quicksilver's narrative arc, because after the thirtieth time he betrays you you ought to stop falling for it, but here in Avengers Academy it's working perfectly to show that some people are evil, but some people just mix evil choices in with their hero choices. The Avengers aren't trusting Quicksilver because they believe that *this time*, he has really reformed. They're trusting him because they know that most of the time he is fighting to do good in his own eyes, even if this may hurt them. And Finesse's choice to reject Magneto's path isn't about her moving from the villain's path to something greyer. She was always living in the grey. It's about recognizing that Quicksilver's version of the grey has enough power and meaning to satisfy him. She doesn't need to be a combination of supervillain and superhero. She can just be a combination of a good person and a flawed person.

And in one of the best resolutions to a time travel story I've seen in a long time, a future version of Reptil, traveling back, determinedly pursues the murderous path he believes is necessary to save the world, but when he is thwarted by his conscience and his friends, he discovers that his act of failure has not broken the timeline because it was motivated from the same place as success would have been. It demolishes the Butterfly Effect trope with incredible surety and again dissects false binaries of good and evil.

It is not a perfect comic. The choice to make Hank Pym the head of the Academy is in some ways a great insight. He is a man who has always been less comfortable with Marvel-style heroism than other heroes, who has repeatedly stepped back from the costume, favoring to change the world with scientific discoveries. But it is also a problematic choice because Hank is such an ugly, fucked up human being. He is such a tool of the patriarchy, such a creature of his own id, such a, at this late stage, completely broken man. There are times when I've really enjoyed the way Hank's fuckups can drift into the background of the story, important to the theme but not the point of the story. There are also times when Hank's fuckups have insistently refused to not be the main point of the story, and I get frustrated with those times because I do not particularly want to read a story about Hank Pym and his hangups. I also think AA greatly illustrates how Marvel's onslaught of company-wide stories has hamstrung comics. Whenever a storyline gets moving, having to stop so everyone can fight a bunch of insane Asgardians or Skrulls kills the movement. I'm getting close to the point where AvX is going to disrupt AA and I'm dreading it because I've been enjoying the character-driven storylines it's been telling particularly.

But despite these uneven patches, I would recommend checking out this comic.


Today is the sixteenth day of the Omer.

This post is me fucking with sanguinity by pretending I got matched with her for Kaleidoscope. Or else it's me faking sanguinity out by being more forthcoming than you'd expect to throw attention away from the fact that I did match with her. Or it's just me reading lots and lots of Marvel comics because the Unlimited subscription is great and I've been reading piles of comics for months.


I read the first few issues of Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos yesterday. It is super-weird to see Nick Fury as a white guy with two eyes. It is also super-hilarious that Stan Lee's liberal fantasy in the 1960s of how to write a black soldier was to make him carry his trumpet into war to play jazz whenever he's not fighting. It is also fascinating to have a counterhistorical integrated commando unit with nobody saying anything about it. (Dear people who were annoyed with the integrated unit in the Captain America movie: They stole it from here. It was just as strange back in the sixties.)

I desperately want the Izzy Cohen / Inglourious Basterds crossover, where he tells Fury "It's been real, sir, but I'm a Basterd at heart." Then marches off to kill Hitler!

Also Nick Fury/Ilsa?????!!!! To bring in my other WWII fandom of the moment. Since I don't believe Nick Fury can sustain a stable romantic relationship, but I do believe he can sustain for quite a long time an unstable one.

Also, in issue 2 the Howlers lured the guards away so the US Navy could bomb a u-boat base, liberated a concentration camp, and stopped the German atom bomb project. So Badass.

I really love that Stan Lee was unafraid to tell a story about World War II soldiers that was incidentally a Holocaust story. I was really angry at the Captain America movie for not doing likewise. It's so easy to pretend that World War II was a battle among White European powers for land and money, that Hitler was evil because he refused to honor treaties, that he was, as Steve put it in that movie, 'a bully'. It's a seductive lie because it's a half-truth. But telling the story of the War without acknowledging the parallel march of the Holocaust is a horrific act of forgetting. That's something I can never tolerate. And it's something the Howlers can't tolerate, either. They have orders to disrupt the German war machine, but choose to interpret their orders in a way that lets them liberate the concentration camp on the way there, because as Fury puts it, "This is part of why we're fighting, too." Oh, my heart.

There was something very The Escapist about that moment, for those Chabon fans out there. Yes, these are American heroes. But they're also an Italian-American hero, a Jewish-American hero, an African-American hero, a Southern American hero, and whatever the hell Dum Dum Dugan is. And while that is totally tokenism, there have been manifestations of those ethnic identities that I find stirring and compelling. They're fighting for their country, but also for ethnic pride, and sometimes there is more at stake than that. Izzy is fighting for his family's safety. Gabe is fighting to break down barriers. And all of them are fighting because the Nazis aren't just the enemy, they are an evil in the world that must be fought until it is gone. And they're unified in purpose despite the cultural differences- can you believe Gabe fights happily in a group with someone who calls himself Reb?

It would be interesting to thrust this against Isaiah Bradley, wouldn't it? :P Truth: Red White and Black presents an entirely different view of America, an entirely different view of the US Army in World War II. Both are fantasies, but both do hold kernels of truth, both aspirational and real.