House of X, Powers of X, and Rubber Band Storytelling

I began reading Marvel comics in the early 1990's, drawn in not by the books themselves but by the series of Marvel Universe trading cards my 5th grade classmates were swapping around between classes. I gravitated immediately to Spider-Man books, and the white-hot stars of Marvel Comics of the day: the X-Men.

Anyway, I started reading weekly comics, yada yada yada, and in 2008 I stopped because they were giving me anxiety.

It wasn't the CONTENT that was stressing me out. Superhero stories have always been and remain an integral part of my own storytelling DNA. It was the NATURE of weekly comics that I no longer found appealing. In 2008, the year I began to phase out of reading comics week-to-week, Marvel published Secret Invasion, a universe-wide crossover tale that had been set up slowly over the course of several books beginning in 2005, when it was first intimated that shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls had been slowly infiltrating the Marvel Universe of superheroes for years and years, and some of the characters readers had loved forever had *gasp* actually been Skrulls all along!

A piece of Secret Invasion promotional art.

The lead-up to Secret Invasion was enthralling: hints and whispers dropped in among the many various monthly Marvel titles about which characters may or may not be Skrulls, a new line of comics introduced for no other purpose than to offer a retcon of Marvel history that included the subterfuge of the Skrulls. (Retcon is an abbreviation of the term retroactive continuity. It is the storytelling act of offering new information for the purpose or re-imagining or re-interpreting a previously established fictional history.)

The actual Secret Invasion miniseries, on the other hand, was a dud. In it, the following characters were revealed to have been Skrulls for an extended period of time: Hank Pym, Spider-Woman, Dum Dum Dugan, Edwin Jarvis, Elektra, Black Bolt, and a bunch of random S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

In other words: nobody.

Secret Invasion had promised upheaval to the stories of the Marvel Universe. It also promised the conclusion to a years-long set-up. In the end, the promised upheaval was at best mild indigestion, and the "conclusion" was nothing more than ANOTHER cliffhanger that led into a bunch of new books that shifted characters around from one team to another. It was then that I really, really realized I was investing extensive amounts of time and money on stories that would never end about characters that could never change.

If you're a fan of comic books, you're thinking: well, duh. That's what comics are, and you know what? You're absolutely right. I suppose what I'm trying to say is: it's not you, comics. It's me.

The latest massive re-imagining and upheaval of a Marvel Comics property is happening right now in Marvel's line of X-Men books. Again, to be clear: I've been reading weekly comics only sporadically over the past decade, but the last one I read was an X-Men book, one that saw a time-displaced version of the original X-Men team brought into the "current day" Marvel Universe to interact with the older versions of themselves.

They have since been sent back from whence they came, of course.

So I'll grant you: I may not be entirely up-to-date on what's going on in the X-Men's world as the characters enter this new era, but I'm willing to bet that doesn't matter much, as all of the characters who are central to this new story are characters who were created twenty to thirty to fifty years ago.

Earlier in 2019, Marvel Comics cancelled all of their X-Men books and re-launched the line with two titles designed to set up the all-new status quo of the X-Men: House of X and Powers of X (written by Jonathan Hickman with art by Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, and Martin Garcia). The X-Men were created in 1963, and the long, convoluted, massive story spun out of that initial team has always been, at its core, about the plight of mutants: people born with superpowers that manifest around the time they hit puberty. The X-Men have long been trotted out as a thinly veiled metaphor for the civil rights movement, and their struggles as metaphors for the obstacles faced by most any of society's many marginalized groups. At the core of the series is the lifelong struggle between Charles "Professor X" Xavier and Erik "Magneto" Lehnsherr. Professor X, the leader of the X-Men, strives for peace between mutants and humans; he is often represented in analysis as the series stand-in for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Magneto, leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants, believes in mutant domination over humans and is supposedly a (very broadly painted) stand-in for Malcolm X.

The covers to House of X #1 and Powers of X #1, respectively.

Whether or not these comparisons were intentional on the part of series creator and Marvel impresario Stan Lee is the subject of some debate, but nevertheless: the comparisons persist.

House of X and Powers of X ran for 6 issues apiece, 12 issues total, and they concluded just this past week. They set up a new world for Professor X, Magneto, and the entire X-Men mythos. There are a lot of details involved in the story they tell that would be awfully confusing to anyone who is not a long-time fan of the franchise and familiar with dozens and dozens of supporting characters, but to sum up: the telepathic Professor X has teamed up with Magneto (not for the first time) and summoned every mutant in the world to Krakoa, a living island in the Pacific Ocean, for the purpose of forming a sovereign mutant nation from which mutants can assume their rightful place as the planet's dominant species.

That is a vast oversimplification of a fascinating and gorgeously rendered (but very convoluted) science fiction story that involves the massive retconning and super-powering of a longtime X-Men supporting character, four concurrent storylines running across four time periods spread over 1,000 years, at least 10 alternate timelines worth of history, the death of several key mutants followed by their immediate resurrection, and the burying of the hatchet among enemies and friendly rivals alike for the good of a unified mutantkind.

It also asks us to accept that the X-Men have, without pause, given up on Xavier's decades-long dream of co-existence with humanity and embraced voluntary mutant isolationism and eventual mutant dominance over humans.

Obviously, there isn't a chance in hell that any of this is going to be permanent.

Comic books run on an engine of rubber-band storytelling. Marvel Comics and DC Comics, the industry's giants, are both stuck in an endless cycle. They must allow their characters to do what characters in stories must do: grow and change. This works, in the short term. Superheroes, though, are template characters. They are broad, mythological, good vs. evil, white hat/black hat characters. The most popular ones are the most popular ones for the simple reason that they are who they are, and while the audience wants the characters they love to grow and develop and change as all characters do, there is only so far that a publisher can walk a character away from the thesis statement at the core of that character's being. Change a popular character too much for too long and the audience will rebel; superhero fans want simultaneously for the characters they love to evolve over time but also to forever remain the same. 

If Spider-Man ever stopped believing that with great power comes great responsibility, that would be a betrayal of the core tenet of who that character has been since 1962. His fans like Spider-Man largely BECAUSE of that belief. If you take it away from him, you change what the character has been fundamentally, at its core, for almost 60 years. Batman must always believe that criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot, or he is no longer Batman. Superman can die, but you'd better believe he has to come back to life and continue to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

Similarly, there is only so long that Marvel is going to be able to get away with a Professor X who does not believe in the peaceful co-existence of humans and mutants.

This is the rubber band storytelling at the core of comic book superheroes. As far away as a creative team may move a legacy character away from who they have always been, eventually the character will snap back to the baseline. These are characters, certainly, but they are also symbols of specific beliefs and philosophies. Captain America was created in 1941 to punch comic book Nazis. A recent storyline "revealed" that Captain America has actually always been a sleeper agent of the evil organization Hydra; essentially, he had been retconned into always having secretly been a Nazi. People were outraged, which would have been justifiable had that story remained the permanent status quo for Captain America. It did not, of course. The whole "Cap was always a Hydra agent" thing was revealed to be a nefarious super villain plot and Captain America has since snapped back to being the selfless patriot and soldier that he has always been.

The X-Men's new status quo as established in House of X and Powers of X opens up a world of storytelling possibilities, all of which promise to be explored in the six, count 'em SIX, new ongoing monthly titles spinning out of HoX/PoX because, you know... comic books. It's a business, man. No matter your taste, Marvel's got you covered. Among the six titles, there's a traditional X-Men superhero book, a magic book, a pirate book, a space book, a mystery book, and an action-adventure book, all starring characters X-Men fans know and love. Sometimes twice. (Wolverine will be featured in at least three Dawn of X titles.)

The covers of the #1 issues in Marvel's new Dawn of X initiative.

In the end, it honestly doesn't matter that the events of these stories aren't going to be permanent. Ongoing superhero comics use familiar characters to tell interesting new stories, and House of X, Powers of X, and Dawn of X all certainly do that. Truth told, it is the familiarity of the legacy characters that ultimately draws readers in to superhero comics. There is a comfort in knowing that, whatever meat grinder creative teams may put them through over any given story arc, Spider-Man will always be Spider-Man, Batman will always be Batman, and the X-Men will always be the X-Men.

Although one question does bear asking: no matter how far they stretch the rubber band, how difficult can any writer possibly make the lives of make-believe eternally young super-powered supermodels? No wonder comics began to stress me out in my late twenties: Batman was created in 1939 and he's somehow still just 36 years old and just keeps getting richer.

Seriously: it ISN'T you, comic books. It's definitely me.