X-Men & Activism

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. When people think of the X Men, they often think about the political or social illusions that are often used in them. Is Magneto Malcolm X and Professor X Martin Luther King? Is the whole thing a metaphor for queer rights, or for racism or for anything else like that? What would they be like as activists or or

the like as a meme that is going around now? Well, we're talking about more than fifty years of comic books, and so we're easily going to answer those questions in ninety minutes or less. And I'm doing all that with good friend of the podcast, Steve Sorman. Steve has been on this podcast

a bunch of times, and I've been on his. He is a comic book expert extraordinaire, but also has a large background in politics and activism and love to talk about the kind of things that we talk about on this podcast. So Steve, welcome and tell us about yourself. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm really excited. So in addition to having read most every X Men comic that's ever been printed, probably about ninety percent of them, it's not a feat that I'm particularly proud of, but you

know, we roll with it. Yeah. My previous life was as a activistic community organizer, starting from about age sixteen, you know, I was a junior in high school in nine to eleven. Happened and kind of got throw you know, grew up pour into the punk scene and kind of got thrown into politics that way and started learning just like how to be specifically, my background comes in politics in activism, comes from the sort of like Saul

Alinsky in school of community organizing. So you set a goal a group of people, you go out, you create confrontations with the system and confrontations with power that sort of like help you achieve your goal essentially, and and understanding political power and the types of community power that normal people can can gather and wield. And so that's that's kind of like, uh, you know,

I come from the anti war movement against the war in I Rock. I've also you know, both as a freelance organizer or or a self directed organizer, but also working for nonprofits. I've worked in the antinuclear movement. I've worked for trying to get better access to mental health UH services, and been

in the occupy movement, et cetera. I've been all over the place, but generally I think the important part is is that I really I believe in this sort of the community or organizing model as as sort of a method, and and I think that because we see all the movements and injustices as as

very intertwined. The in my opinion, is like you know what you work on, like as long as you understand that you have allies and fellow travelers, and you know people in in other movements are working towards the same goals as you. I think which movement or which part of the movement you happen to be a part of is is kind of a smaller part than or is. It's more interesting to me how you're what you're doing, how you're doing, what your outlook is. So that's kind of what I bring to the

table. No, that's awesome, And you don't actually have connected over this before. Yeah, I come very much in the same school. I trained as a community or organizer read a Lensky back to front, and a lot of my career first in you know, uh in you know, pro choice, pro choice doctor of justice work and they now more recently in some other

work all comes from that community organizing background. And part of what inspired this particular discussion that we're having today is there was a meme that was going around and I forget you sent it to me, or I sent it to you, or our friend will send it to both of us. But it basically was about, like, you know, there's a canard often that goes around about, you know, why is it that the right is so incredibly well organized in their activism but the left, you know, you take a bunch

of leftist activists and it's like trying to herd cats. And someone put up this meme that was like the best metaphor to explain leftist activism or even liberal activism or whatever is the x men, you know, in terms of how they are all generally wanting to go in the same general direction, but they all have different ideas, and they're always fighting with each other, and they're always like disagreeing, and everyone's sleeping with each other all the time, and

it's a giant interpersonal mess and yeah, yeah, yeah, quick quick aside. Because I was working for a politician at the time, I I couldn't get involved more directly with occupy than I wanted to, but I was, you know, it was a fairly left wing politician, and so I was

asked to kind of keep an eye on it. I made friends with a lot of people and some of the occupy movements, and I, unfortunately just have resting therapist face, and so if I make friends with someone, they're probably gonna want to talk to me about what's going on in their life. Sure, so I would have all these conversations with Occupy people i'd met, and I'd want to be talking to them about how things were going in the

movement. But and I got some of that, but a lot of what I got was, oh, yeah, but you know, I was sleeping with this person in the movement and then this other person started sleeping with him and this other thing, and I don't know how to feel. And so yeah, that statement of that Steve made is not just a joke. But I love the meme of it though, because it's a great way to look

at them. But also I think it is really interesting to think about how, you know, we can have all these debates about like how much politics was there or wasn't there in comic books, and you know, you get who will be like, no, why why are they? Why is it

also awoke now? Why is it all the politics now? Which is somewhat ridiculous, but I think, you know, there's a lot of ways in which the the political ideas or the social ideas of the authors have often been fairly subtle in a lot of the comics, and a lot of them it's it's it's turned from being more left wing to more right wing to you know, all over the map. With the X Men, it seems there's always been this, you know, much more in your face kind of social ideology,

a metaphor for oppression, a metaphor for being different. And so I've wanted for a while to get my hands around this, and this is just such a great opportunity to do it. And today, just as we're still doing this under the strikes, we're mostly gonna be talking about what happens in the comic, some of the stuff that happens on screen. I'm sure we'll

come up we'll be talking more about general trends. And let me kind of start there with Steve, Given that we have when fifty years of comic books that we're talking about, can you say exactly like what Wolverine's politics are or

Professor X is a metaphor for a real life figure in American politics. Yeah, so, yes, and no, I think these the like you said, there's been sixty one sixty years encounting of X Men comics now, although fifty is more accurate because there was ten years where there are nearly several years

where they're nearly canceled. Whatever the point is, Uh, there, You can't you can't go through with a fine tooth comb of every single thing that they've done in all the storylines and say this is you know, morally and politically consistent character that's out the window. And so I might draw from examples here and there, but generally I want to stick to like kind of the

conceptual true north of these characters, because that is pretty sticky. Right when you do a new adaptation in film, in television, Uh, they character usually has like a consistent like what makes them tick? What's important about this character? That's what we're going to to uh focus on in the adaptation or in a new comic story most often. Uh. And that's kind of what

I would like to talk to more about here on the show. So why is it that you think the X Men in particular is so often seen as the one that is the most social justice he focused or the most kind of activism focused. What is it about the X men as a comic idea that

lends itself to that? Well, I think there's there's two things. The first is that, uh, you know, the characters of X men or mutants, Uh, they are a separate class of people, you know, in this in this case it's genetically, but you can you can kind of transpose that idea. And you know, many many creators of the comics and the adapted media have always do right that this is and transpose that onto different classes of people that are set apart, whether it's a black community or whether

it is queer community. Uh, you know, these this concept of this being a people rather than and the X men or the representative like mutants who villains or heroes or whatever are rarely they are the most visible ones, but they they kind of like stand out from or speak for or kind of represent publicly a much larger base of just like regular people who are mutants whose mutation might be like they're they have a funny color skin, or they burp butterflies,

or just like something that doesn't translate to like you shoot laser blasts from your eye, like nine of mutants have these extremely uh you know, much more subtle, less flashy mutations, and so it is designed as the combat mutation someone would take when building a character, to a lot of points for

yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it ends up being because you have this as a separate class of people, it ends up being you know, always always about difference and how difference get you know, gets dealt with in society, right, and so so that's one part of it, I'm sorry. The other part is that the most superhero groups I like to think of superheroes as activists, the closest analog to activism that we have in uh, in a lot of popular media, because they are there are people

who want to work for community benefit for altruistic reasons. And I think if you look at like a lot of popular media right now, like we're kind of just exiting the goal this sort of like peak TV, Golden prestige TV, that's the word, this prestige TV era of like difficult male protagonists who have you know, uh, complicated morally gray lives and all of that, and and that you know, it's kind of like the classic hero of literature

is a much more The conflicts are internal, they don't deal with the outside world, and they are largely trying to contextualize a hero's actions or protagonist actions through their psychological factors rather than like a genuine desire to do good for the world. And these are things that are not represented in a lot of pop

culture except through superheroes. However, superheroes also are extremely conservative as a cultural formation, and the fact that when you go out to save the world, you're basically trying to save the world as to continue to exist as it does. You're not trying to change anything. And the way that the X Men set themselves apart is inherently they are trying to change something. Their goal, their mission isn't save the world. They do that to build credibility. They

do that to build sort of like goodwill towards the human world. But their ultimate goal is utopian or progressive. They want to work for an equal society where you know, humans, mutants have equal rights, live alongside each other, et cetera. I love it, and I think it's really true. I think it's it's funny because again, you know, all the discussion about wokeness and which I bring up as a way to understand what's happening in politics.

I tend to think that to me, people when someone says like, well, are you woke or I generally think is like, I don't think I'm woke because I think that word doesn't have any meaning anymore. But the people who are afraid of people being woke, I'm probably what they're afraid of, yes, But also I don't want to. I don't want to,

uh. I don't want to demean anybody else by saying that their politics that don't agree with me are unwoke, which to me connotates like they haven't woken up to the truth yet they can have their truth that's different from mine, right, exactly exactly, And yeah, there's so much to say there, but it can help a shorthand for the kind of exactly you know what I

mean? Yeah, totally know. It's a good yeah. But to me, I love the way you talk about that because although I think we're going there, that originally is the yea that like, there's often a perception that all these superheroes are now seen as so woke or whatever the heck that right, I think You're making a good point that there is something inherently kind of conservative about the idea of the not only fighting for the status quo, but

also of you know, the one strong person, often but entirely a man today, but most of superhero history, a man who can use violence to do what they think is right in the world. Absolutely, yeah, obviously I mean it. I say a critique like that, which is often then used to dismiss superheroes entirely, Ie, like I have this podcast. That's not my position. I think superheroes are great, and I think can take

on all sorts of different social or political or cultural meaning. But I just said it's important to name that as one lens through which that can be understood. And I love looking at that as the X Men being different from that, And I want to get more into this. But there's two kind of questions I want to throw it you. First. One is because this is the part that I've always stumbled a bit with it, and I think the

X Men to address this. But I want to hear you talk more about how there's a great metaphor there clearly for the way we humans will look at a group and say you are different and so we're going to treat you as though you are bad or skinned and often like that, there's a lot of fear of you. Yeah, and then a lot of the times that fear is based on stereotypes and mythology and other ideas of difference that are wildly overblown.

Yeah. And you can look through history to you know, all the myths that were believed for so long and some people still believe about, you know, people of African descent being stronger but less intelligent than all the other kind of racist canards or the ideas through history and that where we see right now about queer people or especially trans people being groomers or coming for your children

or all these things that have literally no basis in fact. And that same thing with the libels against Jewish people or Muslims or any of those things. That the reality is in almost all these cases that the people were afraid of are a lot more like us than we than than the fear would like to have us believe. Yeah, with X men, it would seem that for

the most part that's not true. That the you know, this is a group that is significantly different from humanity, at least on the surface, and does have powers that you know, uh, you know in you know the like well, but what if you know I played poker a lot and Paul Hoppy, my regular one of my regular guests, is also a big poker

player. We've talked about like what would the ethics be around, like if someone could read your mind at the poker table, or someone who like couldn't get arrested by the police because they have like all the powers they do.

The police are terrible, you know what I mean? But how how do you how is it you think that X men is able to square that circle of they're a metaphor for all these groups that we're afraid of without any legitimate reason, even though they are a group that is fundamentally different in a lot of ways from the rest of humanity. And is there some justification to the fear people have X men in a way that's not true for oppressed groups in

our own world. I think you come up on an incredible point here. Yeah. No, they don't handle that well at all. Uh. It's it's it's a it's an absolute mess. Uh. And it's a big hole in contradiction and storytelling of trying to you know, it comes up sometimes but it all it does is give the villains justification for like, yeah, we

are afraid of you. You're powerful. Is somebody, you know, one of your guys almost blew up the world the other day, you know, and so it's like, uh, and they're like, well that was the bad mutants and we're the good mutants and they're like, I don't care. So at this point, like it earns X Men, And this is one of the things I want to argue later is it ends up turning the X Men comics. They're not really about social justice. They don't do anything.

They're not activists in the traditional sense. They have this utopian goal, but most of what they do is either policing other mutants essentially, like another mutant is going off and planning some you know, terrible plot to hurt an inflavor whatever, and they go and intervene, right, or they are reacting to, uh, you know, the government just made new sentinels that are going to round up all the you know, things that are are very uh.

They react to when whenever they have uh, whenever they conflict with the human world and the bigoted world. Right. The their role is essentially reactive. They're not out there doing lunch counter protests or you know, or organizing mass support in sort of this Lynskin model that we're both familiar with to change power relations with the human world, you know, and and actually work for mutant

equality. And I think that's mostly a fault of well, it comes from sort of the background of most creators of superhero media not being of the oppressed class or not being familiar with social justice movements and what actually creates change. And so there's a lot of you know, uh, you mentioned the comparison between Martin Luther King and Xavier at the top of the show, and I think a lot of that comparison comes from the fact that they're both referenced as

having a dream. And if you look into the and and this is such a like white liberal society reading of what Martin Luther King was, what he stood for, what he did. I was like, Oh, he's just a guy who made some speeches and he had a dream. It's like, no, he was an organizer. He was creating confrontations with with white society that he would win, and he knew he would win in order to advance

a larger goal of equality. All of that is completely missing from X Men media, and it's it's a shame I remember to get where you're coming from there. And in some ways it's the same complaint that I have about the movies and the like of all superheroes. But it's like, in the same way that you know, I would want Marvel Civil War to be Tony says, we need accountability. Steve says, maybe, but your version of accountability and the Zacovie chords really sucks. And in the next hour is the two

of them debating how the Zacovia A chords should be right. But that doesn't sell tickets. You need somebody to punch somebody in the face at some point. Yeah, yeah, And I'm guessing gets the same thing in an X

Men. I would push back though a little bit in that And maybe this is just more what's on screen, but doesn't Professor X often like characters like Professor X and Jean Gray, aren't They often like going to testify to Congress, or meeting with the president, or or speaking out in ways they are

meant to allay the fears of the wider public about mutants. In the other kind of way that like you're right, Martin lu King or any other activists did so much more than that, but that is a part of that activist work. Sure, yeah, you show up on you know, the news talk shows or you give speeches, so it's more like an Al Sharpton, you know, or adjust Jackson. Then while Jesse Jackson was pretty involved in

the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, so maybe more Sharpton was too. But basically, you know, it's that kind of public figure role rather than like the organizer, which is fine, Like the movement needs everybody. The movement needs people with all sorts of skills to do everything that they do. It's important to speak to the public and give them a face of what you're fighting

for, what it's all about. But yeah, the generally when you're making these comparisons, it there are also historically contingent based on how history views these civil rights figures, you know, at different points, and that when you're straining for the analogy, that also changes the characterization of somebody like Magneto over years, where it's like, no, he's a villain, No he's a

hero. No he's a villain, No he's a hero. Right, they are changing understanding through history of who these civil rights figures are often effects how they are how the fictional characters are portrayed as well, and so Billy on that, and I want to talk about Martin Luther King macam X think in a second. But is it fair to say then that, because I do think there is still obviously, and this is why we're talking about it, there is still a lot of social justice to be found in the X Men

stories. But it's not that they are acting in the same way there's groups would act in our own world, and so it's not a perfect analog, but that they're meant to be a metaphor. It's meant to be that the way that other people treat them is very similar. Even if you have maybe

the fear has some more justifications. But still, because as you said, and I think there's something doesn't appear on screen anywhere near as often as it does on pay and on the page, like if you just watch the X Men movies, I think it's a fair statement to be like, huh,

it's kind of weird that genetically all the patients are deeply combat relevant. Yeah, but you know, as you're saying, because that's actually not the case in the comics, that there is all these people who are act that maybe the the idea that all mutants are something to be feared and anything like that is actually very much not true, that there are some standouts perhaps, Yeah, so so do you think it is fair to say that like that?

That's where we find the social justice messages is when it's being used as a metaphor, and when it's being used as like a person can say, like, oh, even with all the powers they have, the way the mutants are treated is really not fair. Oh wait, that is actually kind of like the way oh wait, that's actually kind of like the way this other group and in my own world is being treated. Yeah. And I think there's one more thing that particularly resonates with the sort of the metaphor for the

queer community. And because like I said, the X Men have kind of been stapled onto every social justice uh you know community that U anybody who's working for equal rights, you've got you've got an analogy there. And and you asked one time, I think it was on I forget Who's pod, but you asked, particular particularly what is the difference between the X Men and other

superheroes? Why do we expect why do we accept that? You know, the fantastic for the Avengers are universally beloved by the human population and the X men are feared and hated. Right, what's this gap? How how are they different? And I think the difference is it's because mutants are our children are the humans children like it. And it's this sort of like the the closeness that breeds fear and distrust. Anybody could be a mutant. Anybody,

these kids can end up being a mutant. And it taps into this H metaphor with sort of lgbt q UH acronym plus uh uh communities where yeah, you don't know, there's a theory called social reproduction right uh from sociology where when you you know, the society reproduces itself by keeping people like in a

sort of familiar space from largely what they're used to growing up. If you are a worker, you're going to continue be It's it's you know, had it had its origin in marks and so it is largely viewed in class terms, but essentially, uh it it's a counterpart to physical or you know, like physical reproduction where you're making babies, and this is this is its counterpart in sociology where society produces itself. And part of this is that you expect

your children to be like you in certain ways values. You know, if your children have different, largely, wildly different values than you, that could cause major strain. And for people who view a core part of their identity as this sort of like white heterosexual cis gender. You know, you want your kids to look like you, or act like you or in a certain

way. Right like, you have this expectation of of the social reproduction that you're able to pass onto a future generation in order to essentially see yourself in the world in the future. And mutants subvert that in the same way that the queer community subverts that in a lot of ways. Right like, your kids are going to have a wildly different life than you. They're going to

have these these these different experiences. They are not they might be less likely to make more kids who are more like you, And and sort of it throws a spanner in the works of human white straight humanity is conception of building this future that they can support and recognize. And I think that is in both cases can be a source of tremendous bigotry. I really like the way

you phrase that. I think it's really helpful model because I think, as you said, like that fear of social reproduction is there with all these things, you know, if it's the reason why people are afraid of, you know, their children marrying someone who's not in the same race they are, who doesn't worship the same god they do, or who has different values, you know, who isn't you know, of the same economic class that they are, or whatever it is. And then with the queerness, there's that

additional factor of a lot of time you know that it And then with queerness

there's a factor of there's this fear of recruiting. And I one thing I remember distinctly from some of the movies, and I know it also came out in the comics, especially in the nineties, was that, you know, one of the fears was that like well, you know, parents saying to two kids, like, have you just tried not being a muted you know, as I said to Bobby in one of the movies, or as uh, you know, this idea of that the fear is that Professor X or

any of them are are spreading you know, uh mutantism, which is very much the fear you hear today about like grooming and stuff like you know it absolutely yea, and so yeah, I think that's such an important way of

looking at it, of how that metaphor can be there. And we've talked a lot about the and we kind of touched on the whole like the way they're viewed that the the original kind of like oh, it's Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I don't want to talk more about that because I think now there have been a lot of memes and other information going around like to debunks that theory to some extent or another, and especially just in that like

the public perception among white America of who Mary King and Malcolm X were in the sixties, but all the way through history has always been like the actual real figures has been very different, and if anything, they were seen as a metaphor of the way the media portrayed those two characters. There are two factors though that I wonder if it's fair to say that, because I know now when some of it, when I hear people say, oh, but

there's so these metaphors make no sense whatsoever. I don't want to push back just a little bit to say, is there a way in which there is some element of it, and part of it is it may also just be like writers who are viewing it through those lands or seeing it. And what I'm getting at is that I think often in activism, and this is a trend throughout any activist movement, but Martin, Luther King and Malcolm X were

kind of slotted into these social roles. With groups like that that you're talking about, there's often these two different perspectives, one of which is what's often referred to as assimilationism or something like that, which is like, hey, no, we are just like you. You need to stop being afraid of us and let us be a part of what you are, because you know, we want the two point three two point three kids in the white picket fence just like h and that and also that the idea is and sort of

do that. We're going to confront your hatred, We're going to run your fear, but we're gonna help try to understand that we are not scary in the way that you seem to think that we are, that we should be. Yeah, And on the other side there is the like, no, fu, if you're scared of us, you should be scared of us because we're going to fight back. We're not the same as you, We're different,

but we deserve the same seat at the table as you do. And I'm taking two massive social movements and hugely generalizing them and hugely running them down. But that I think like there's something I really study in school that you see that kind of dynamic within a lot of social movements. And so it's definitely in you know, Martin the King and Malcolm X are somewhat stand ins for those two things. But to reduce those two actual historical figures to that

is very reductive. But you also get it within you know, feminist movements

or within queer movements. At the time of the nineties, there was very much there was kind of like the even today we talked about how the Human Rights Campaign does great work but seems to be very much like don't be afraid of us and some other groups that are like as opposed to other groups that are like, no fu, We're here to help you tear down you know, the traditional ideas of you know, what generals should be and stuff like

that. Sure, yeah, so is it fair to say that there's some element of that within the Professor X Magneto of one perspective is more on that side of I we want to be like you. We want you not to be afraid of us. We want to just be a part of your world. Sorry for the little her maid quote and the other there is more, No we are different, putting aside the supremacistness that Magneto sometimes gets into, but just that more idea of no, we are different, and you're going

to stop treating us badly because well, we're going to fight back. Yeah, We're We're gathering power that we we will use in self defense for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I think there is, uh, that is definitely a key difference ideologically between Professor X and Magneto. I wouldn't say that that necessarily maps on particularly well to the difference between uh, doctor King and for example, Malcolm X. Uh, but yeah, I think that there's well, yeah, is it fair to say that it maps on not entirely,

but somewhat to the public perception of those two figures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and which, like we said before, changes, uh you know, historically, based on how we are viewing these historical figures at any given time. Totally agree with that. But I think if you were to want to I want to make some comparisons now between the Civil Rights movement, historical civil rights movement figures, and X Men characters meant to be

in good fun. I'm not a tremendous expert on the history of the Civil rights movement. If this is meant to provoke discussion, please, if you have another idea of like where you can find commonalities and metaphors, please, you know, respond with them in the comments or whatever. Hit me up on social media. I would love to discuss it. But I want to do this in a way that is villain hero agnostic, because those constructs, both in the comics and in history, is so contingent based on the historical

moment or what perspective you're viewing from. Right, Like, one group can look at the Black Panthers and say, well, they killed a bunch of cops. You know, we're involved with a bunch of shootouts with cops, so like, you know, we see them as villains. And then another group would be like, they fed free breakfast to thousands of kids and lifted people out of poverty using only shootouts were often dam acting in defense, not exactly exactly exactly, So I want, yeah, before you get into the

individual characters I do. I just want to use what you're saying just to make I think you're kind of implying this, but I just want to state it directly and see if you agree that part of how the character of Magneto has changed quite dramatically from pure villain in the original too often seen as anti

hero or even like no, Magneto was right. Yeah, mirrors the way you know, in the sixties Malcolm X was the boogeyman, was the like the fear, whereas today I think for a lot of people, not all, but for a lot of people, there's much more of like No, Malcolm X was right about a lot of things, and yeah, or you know, was a great leader and did one under full things and whether or not you agree with all of his ideology, and I think there's a lot

to nitpick in there. You know, was was an incredible figure for first civil rights and leadership and uh, you know, black power in a way that was a strong positive for the world. And the doctor King and Malcolm X we were actually and that Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were actually much closer than is generally believed, in the same way that now Magneto and Professor

X are getting closer. Uh. Anyway, so she's wanted to yes, yes, yes, yes, thank you for scalling it out because I yeah, I kind of like brushed past it a couple of times, but it needed full elucidation totally. But yeah, let's talk about some of the other specific characters and where they fit. Yeah. So I think if you're going to look for I think the sort of like Nation of Islam uh uh comparison to Magneto's group kind of make does make sense in a in a in a

way like separatist and maybe a undercurrent of supremacist in there. I'm who's to say. It's not for me to particularly critique, but the sort of like there's a strong almost religious following around a character or a figure like Elijah Muhammad that you know, can kind of mirror somebody like Magneto, although he has

a tragic backstory that's closer to Malcolm X's, So there's something there. I don't think that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was Martin Luther King's organization, is a very good comparison for the X Men, because, like I said before, like they're not designing confrontations with power. They're not going out there with a with a particular a set of goals and campaign in mind for

how to achieve equal rights. I think really not using non violence as a organizing principle or yeah, yeah, you wouldn't have the fun fight scenes that everybody loves exactly exactly. So if you if you kind of look at like community defense and providing services to your people as the core organizing principles of what the Black Panthers were, I think that translates well to the X Men as well. So that would put you know, uh, Eldritch Cleaver as Moira

McTaggart as sort of like a visionary. It's close to the Founders who kind of goes a very hard different direction later in life. And maybe uh puts like h Charles Xavier Moore is a Healey Newton kind of figure, which I think is an interesting uh uh you know thing comparison. And then maybe like the Fred Hampton is like Kitty Pride, like the somebody from the younger generation who everybody just really really likes and it is brilliant and able to do wonderful

things over and then I don't know, there's a specific figure. I would name this too, but I think it's a part of the movements a lot. Yeah. You know, you go to any union move you go to any organizing movement, and the word organizing essential there because there will often be lots and lots of people who are affected by a social justice issue. But when you say, okay, so come to this rally at this point, at this time and place, are gonna say, uh, come on,

I don't want to be bothered. That's not gonna come to anything. Yeah, I'm not a joining or whatever. Yeah, and I say that somewhat. You know that sounds kind of derogaty of tory. I don't mean it as that. Oh No, A lot of a lot of those rallies don't do anything it it's not necessarily a reason to not show up. They're they're they're organized to do different things. Most rallies are not directly the tip of

the spear for actually accomplishing social justice goals. And a lot of even putting aside the rallies, a lot of social justice movements don't meet their goals. And so I think the cynicism of a character like Wolverine is super important as because to me, one of the goals of organizing is to helping. Like it's the moment that Professor X, or often Jean Gray or someone else like that is able to convince Wolverine to join the movement, to be a part

of what they're doing. And as you said, the fact that like, sometimes he does it because he's convinced of the rightness of their cause. Sometimes he does it because he thinks Cyclops is an a hole and he wants to show him any better. Sometimes he does it because he wants a chance to get closer to Jean Gray. And you know, a lot of people of my dad's generation went to peace marches because that's where you found people who had

a lot more sexually liberal ideas. Like I'm not doesn't find it, I think, but I'm saying sure, Yeah, the fact that Wolverine and a lot of the others often have like it's not that they become diehard idealists, no, dieheart idealists, but they still sign up and come involved. It's actually a great part of the metaphor as well. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I was having trouble finding a good civil rights analogy for Wolverine,

so I didn't try too hard. But I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but yeah, like I think if you were to try and again, hero

villain agnostic tactics agnostic. Who is the set of characters in the X Men world who is trying to design these confrontations with the system, who is doing big flashy public of you know, sort of confrontations to advance human mutant rights, and uh, you know, has a history of sort of like cooperating with the government when it suits them and working completely independent and being targeted by the government when when it suits them. I would say that's Mystique's brotherhood called

the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. But again we're going agnostic here, and their tactics are often things like assassination, which obviously wasn't what the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference was up to. But there's nobody else really in the X Men world who is like I'm going to do this big flashy event that or or like act up for example, like we're going to do something extremely public and extremely like h targeted in a way that you is not only going to gain us visibility, but is going to directly accomplish our goals and put the system that we are in confrontation with put them in sort of a crisis point where they

have to respond to our demands or lose legitimacy. And just to further clarify that for folks who might not know, act UP was a group of queer and queer line activists who were really focused on the utter lack of attention to a to HIV AIDS and how no research was being done in the eighties and nineties and no attempt you know, there were no really and then it was often beings written off as a gay disease or a drug drug user disease.

So we didn't care about it, and so act UP did, among other things, because the Catholic Church in New York City and accruitt the world, but especially in New York City where act UP was focused, was very one of the strong people pushing against any attempt to look into this because like, oh, you know, not that this was the official Catholic position, but you know that that you know, if this is God's punishment and all that

kind of stuff, And there were definitely some high Catholic saying things like that, and so they did things like die ins, like they went to a st the cathedral Saint Saint Patrick's Cathedral in the heart New York City and just took over the services in a lot of ways. And I think you're right Mystique to me when I said about how like the the you know, the two different polls of activism are replicated not only in civil rights but other things.

Act UP versus the more traditional gay rights movement is exactly what I'm talking about, because in the same you know, because like a lot of the more you know, traditional gay rights movement was horrified by act UP and they

thought what act UP was doing was terrible. But but a lot of the others, you know, and there's been some great like histories of act UP that were that were written in oral histories, and I love listening to some of the people saying things like I had to publicly condemn act UP, but I always knew that I needed Act Up to be scaring people enough. I look reasonable enough that that that the society would would negotiate with me. And

I think that's such a thing. And so I love that idea of like, yeah, that there's a way in which Professor X needs Magneto and Mystique and others doing the more extreme things is a way to be like, hey, talk to me, or they're going to bring the house down. Yeah. No. And but also that like what act that would often do is to and you said challenge the moral legitimacy in ways that I think mystique and

the others definitely do. Yeah cool, I'm glad. And like when we're saying like villain agnostic or whatever, like if we take it from the standpoint of the movement, where it's like the people who are working towards you know, within the within social justice movements, they may have disagreements oppositions with each

other. This is the leftist in fighting, the herding cats that everyone's sleeping with each other, the chaos ball that we were talking about before, Right, But there is an opposition, there is a villain, there is an enemy, and that is like the j Edgar Hoover, right, the ku Klux Klan, like the people from outside your society who do hate and want to kill you, and are you know in the in these and are lynching normal people or lynching you know, the the non uh, the people who

are not part of your movement, who are not organizers or who are in like j Edgar Hoover's case, actively assassinating and murdering your leaders. And so you know, there's like we're not physically assassinating assassinating their character, or assassinating their finances or do one of things to undermine their power and stuff like that.

Yeah, but also plenty of literal assassination as well. Like I'm going through all these histories and I was doing all of the the you know, the comparisons of all these characters, and I'm like, man, I wish Fred Hampton got you know, fifty years of continuity, like like uh like

Kitty Pride. You know, I wish that we would would had the opportunity to see, you know, later in life Martin Luther King or or Malcolm X, and that these that these that these historical figures, these leaders would be able to be revived and grow and change and continue to influence the world. But you know, in real life they were just murdered by mostly by the government. Well, and so let's talk about Yeah, I want to acknowledge that more mportunate topic. No, And I think that's such a good

point. And I think that's in some ways one of the things that comic books can do is they can tell. The reality is a lot of the social justice movements that we have in throughout our society either flat out lost or felt like they lost at the time, but they wound up having like some degree of victory, you know that they don't only really showed up, you know, through social reproduction and these kind of thing decades later. And I think it's one of I know that as an activist I often needed hope,

and like West Wing was a show that I watched all the time. And funny how today it's West Wing is viewed as a liberal utopia that by leftists often looked at. It's like, this is all the problems with with liberalism and with like the Clinton takeover of the Democrats and all that kind of stuff. At the time the show was coming out, I was working for, as I said, a much more left wing politician, and for those who know, it was Tom Dwayne who was the first openly gay and openly should

be positive politician. I think I'm one of the first elected office of any kind after Harvey Milk, but but certainly one of the first in the New

York City Senate and all that. Yeah, and I am a number of the other like you know, staff aids from other or people who knew through occupy or activism would often get together and watch West Wing because for us it was a it was a fantasy, because there were so many times when the president in that was faced with a choice that Clinton was faced with because coming out like at the end of Clinton and then during Bush where you know, he has the chance to say the era of big government is over, the

way Clinton did, and this fantasy president chooses not to, and so a, I think it's funny and relevant discussion about how the way something can be viewed its cultural context changes so much later twenty years later, so much twenty much years later. But the point also was that it gave me. It gave us hope, Like there were times when like it because it was an inspiring show, and part of that's caustic. Is very good at right,

great characters, snappy dialogue. Yeah, and you analyze it war and you're like, Okay, this doesn't make so much sense, but in the moment, yeah, I'm fired up, and yeah I love Toby and I love CJ and etcetera, etcetera. Absolutely, yeah, and I think there's some value in the same way when an X men like, Yeah, maybe the social justice movement wins an awful lot more of the time, and that's good. You know, it gives us the kind of hope and inspiration there.

I want to shift to it because we've kind of also been touching on this idea of like the historical evolution of things. One of the things that I think we've been talking about. You know, as I said, one of the reasons why the King Malcolm X breaked one of the reasons why the King Malcolm X metaphor idea breaks down a lot is that, you know, as socially liberates as is because you know, someone like stan Lee and Jack Kirby, like they were people who were trying to be as as aware as they

could at these movements, and they cared about them. They were also trying to sell comics and make money. I think you could say Jack Kirby a little more than Stanley, but yes, absolutely think that's very fair. But still it was also it was white guys trying to do their best to understand a black civil rights movement, or then straight guys trying to do their best to understand the queer movement. Yes, that's changed and to I mean not

just like in the last two years. But you know, over the last fifty sixty years, the representation of who is writing X men comics has shifted a lot and is not just white, straight sis men as much still much more than maybe it should be, but not as much. Do you think that has if we can talk about general trends over you know, eight different

comic book lines over sixty years. But do you think that there are ways in which you can see that more and more these are stories being written, that if the stories are a metaphor for oppressed groups in the United States or in the world, that more and more it's being written by people who are

in those oppressed groups. Yes, absolutely, and and that it's slowly starting to do a better job of kind of taking these metaphors tackling them much more intelligently rather than you know, from the outside, like engaging overly much in respectability politics or trying to trying to say that somebody gave a speech was the

turning point for an entire social movement or something like that. Right, So, like, for example, a couple recent one one recent book in particular that I would love to highlight, if you don't mind me giving a comic recommendation on here is New Mutants by Vita Ayala, and that just wrapped up last year. All those run went for a couple dozen issues something like that. Easy to pick up and read relies it draws heavily from continuity of knowing

these characters. I don't because I also have that continuity in my head. I don't know how much the story relies on the reader already knowing these So it might be a difficult one to pick up. But it's so good because so Vita Yala is a non binary, black queer writer and they are they you know, got put they got the job on New Mutants and completely upended

the entire tradition of how character development happens in comics. And I don't want to understate how momentous that is, because most going back to the days of you know, Chris Claremont, who is sort of like the the most influential

writer on X Men and actually in comics in general. I would argue from the seventies, eighties into the nineties, Claremont had a theory of character development, which was you just punish your characters, you just subject them to horrendous torture all the time you push them past their breaking point and in where they become, where they go, where they become in that sort of torture,

in that pushing, that is where your character development happens. And Iala and some other contemporary mostly female and femine queer creators are saying, like, no, that's trauma. Trauma isn't how you how you grow. Healing from trauma

is how you grow. And so they take all of these like horrible things that have happened to these characters, and they do it within a lens of conflict that makes them fun, compelling, readable stories, but they actually show their characters confronting trauma, healing from it, changing based on the healing.

And uh, this is the kind of like smaller piece of perspective maybe that you're talking about, of like how storytelling can change and how how these stories can can be better developed from more diverse creators who know a little more what the hell they're talking about when they take on, uh, you know, writing the stories of characters from these oppressed, oppressed and underprivileged groups and draw from personal experience in them, and it ended up in some really spectacular stories.

So you contrast that with something like, uh, even just ten fifty, like ten years ago. Uh, there's a white guy named Rick Reminder who wrote a run combining like X Men and Avengers. They're called the Uncanny Avengers, and it had hav giving a speech about how he hates the word mutant and you know he's going to be a leader, but just don't call him a mutant and was wild widely reviled as just like totally tone deaf,

just the worst kind of tone deaf politics. And so, yeah, it's comics is getting more diverse, and it really reflects well in a franchise like X Men, where it the intent was there all along to to speak to these issues, they just didn't let themselves do it. Well. Yeah, I hear that. I hear that. We've gone with an hour and there's kind of there's so much more we can talk about this. This is I become a series we do more of because I'd love to analyze individual characters or

like small groups within the larger things. And by the way, we are going to talk more about the everyone's sleeping with each other section member section,

stay tuned for that. But the last thing I want to kind of touch on it, and I'm curious how much do you think this plays in I think one of the reasons why a lot of superheroes are often seen as kind of like speaking to a more and we say conservative, I don't mean in the kind of way it's defined today in terms of like Republicans democrats of today, but like one of the kind of like essential ideas of like American history often but often just the way we view history is, you know, like

the one great man of history, Like there's one person who, as you said, one person gives one great speech and everything changes or one part. And in superheroes it's more often like one person defeats one evil person InCom punished guy in the face hard enough that it, yeah, and everything falls apart.

Yeah. And I actually had Becky Allen on the Star Wars podcast a while ago to talk about the significance of Star Wars moving towards more of ensemble shows with things like rebels and uh one and stuff like that, or about

like a team working together instead of just one individual person. Interesting, yeah talk, And I'm curious how you if you see kind of a similar dynamic in that one of the like that, because it seems to me that another way the X Men is kind of a standout from a lot of other comics is that, you know, in some cases, like you have one strong person who has their team of like you know it's Arrow and the Arrow Team, or like you know, Batman and the Robins and Overwatch or something like

that. But then The X Men is much less the story of one strong individual and much more the story of this large ensemble of people. And it alone feels like it's a big challenge to like kind of overall mythology of the one strong man. How you see that? Oh, I totally agree. That's a fantastic point, and I would say that it's not even it even goes bigger than that, like the ensemble cast that you would expect in like a super like Avengers, you know you've got like a seven person team or

something. You've got like a much more bounded limit. X Men are just notoriously messy for like they because they just they were so popular in the eighties and nineties that they just kept and the team concept is so core to it that the team books have always done much better or have been a much stronger like part because like you said, this is you're practicing solidarity you're part of

a family. You're part of a found family, which is another important part of the queer metaphor, and and and so it's in your in your like cooperation, your confrontation, your your interactions with other mutants that you develop sort

of like who these characters are and what they stand for. And then they just kept adding more and more and more and more teams, so you know, and then they wanted to keep everybody gets invested in these minor characters that get added to one team back in nineteen eighty five, and then now they're like, okay, we need to make sure that all of our characters are

accounted for in some books. And now you have like a hundred two hundred different mutants who have been part of a team at some point and they're part of this, and then like hundreds more like recently in the comics, all of the mutants have created a nation called Krakoa. We've talked about it on this pod before, where it's kind of like a mutant separatistic nation that wants

to deal with other other contemporary nation states to establish equality. So it's kind of a fusion of Xavier and Magnetos visions and apocalypse as well, but that's for another time. And and it's uh, it's huge. They're just hundreds of thousands of residents of Krikoa, and and it they really done their work into making this feel not just like an ensemble, but a society like this is this massive group of people who disagree in fight, have to come to

consensus, need to build solidarity with one another. They've been you know, enemies for most of their lives and are figuring it out. And and that is unique because it goes even beyond sort of the team ensemble and into full social like it's not uncommon in this Krocoa era to just have cameos from people who are outside of the main team of the comic all over the place, and you're like, wait, am I supposed to know who this person is?

I do, because I've read all the freaking comics. But you know, they come in, they fill a purpose, they represent a particular point of view, and then they might drop out for another, you know, a dozen issues or so, and and it really builds a vision of of this as as a full society, as as something far beyond just even the small group unit of a family or an ensemble. Yeah, And I just

think that's so important. And I think that that's one area where I am so glad that you're so knowledgeable about the comics because I think that, you know, for me, as someone who's mostly watched the X Men on screen, yeah, I think that they definitely capture some of the kind of social justice aspects. You know, you watch X two and it's so clear that it's yeah, it's so clear that it's about gay rights and queer rights and things like that, and you know, that's where that parental scene I was

talking about comes from. But like I was trying to do the math in my head, and I'm probably gonna be wrong, and please don't yell at

me ask Paul about how good my math is in general. But if you were to take every named character who's a mutant in every single live action X Men production that's been on, probably maybe like three dozen at the most, you know, in any individual movie, just because of the nature of the movie, like maybe you have like six to ten, you know, and and I think you'd be I think it'd be easy to watch those movies and think the primary characters of every X Men movie are Professor X Magneto, Mystique,

Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Gray Rogue, and maybe one or two others, and then the rest just kind of come and go. Is bit players and hundreds of main characters in X Men comics, and and they're they're all great. There's so many great characters. And as you said, also like yes, Iron Man and Captain America and all them do team up into the

Avengers, and there's a lot of other team ups that happen. But whereas like I'm gonna get guess here, and you can coming if I'm wrong, but I would guess that like if you count up the total number of appearances that that that Tony Stark and Steve Steve Rogers have had Captain America and iron Man, that the overwhelming majority of times they appear is in a Captain America comic or an Iron Man comic, with a small but growing number being when

they appear in stuff that's under the name Avengers, where it would say would it would be closer to fifty fifty or slightly an Avenger is favor just because you can turn it. They published so many freaking Avengers books. You know, they'll usually only have one like one Captain America iron Man book going at once, but they'll have like three or four Avengers books, so it's fair.

Yeah, yeah, well, I guess my question though, would you say that like the number of individual Wolverine comics versus times Wolverine appears in an X Men comics in a similar ratio, because my guess is that the ratio Wolverine or a Cyclops or Jean Gray has going much higher to well, maybe let's say Wolverines maybe the bad example, but for like a Magneto or a

Cyclops or Jean Gray or total. Yeah, Cyclops has been you know, a member of the X Men most of its existence for you know, fifty sixty years whatever, and he's he's very rarely had a solo title at all, you know, like you could, I would guess that he's had maybe two dozen issues of solo titles m and he's you know, yeah, his poster child for this sort of like found family aspect of of of the X Men. Cyclops a very interesting character that doesn't get translated into into adapted media

ever. But that's fine. Earlier, if we're looking at protest movements, Psyclops to me as the person who's like okay, but we have to make sure that we have every permit and that our protests never jay walks, and that, like, I would disagree with that, but that's a that's a

comics reading. I would I would characterize Cyclops as the march tactics organizer that is also is absolutely making sure that both the Black Block and the street medics are extremely well organized and prepared, as well as the you know, the

police lady is on or whoever. Okay, here's a character I'd love for us to talk about more about at some point, because I think in the movies at least, Yeah, my impressions a stick in the he's normal, he's normal, Vanilla white guy is stick in the mud, represents rules, he's the contrast to us. He's just Wolverine's foil essentially. Yeah, exactly.

He's the person who's there to make it clear why Jane Gray should choose Wolverine instead of him, which in the comics I know is because I remember we talked about this and you were like, yeah, I kind of like Socbops and I was like, what, he's such a dork, but like anyway, yeah, we weren't talk about there, all right. Uh. One thing I want to mention, by the way, because I was thinking about this as I said it and then didn't get a chance to put it

in. I earlier said that, you know, stan Lee and Jack Kirby, like often were writing about they were writing metaphors from movements that they weren't a part of. Yeah, I do want to say that they were white, they were cists, they were straight, least as far as we all know. They were Jewish at a time when I don't want to minim is

anti Semitism. Today it still very much exists, and I'm not going to get into debates about like, you know, we are Jews fall exactly, but I think it is important to understand that at the time they were writing, being Jewish was a much more overtly oppressed you know, non favored group vanity is today in some parts of today, et cetera. Again, Jack Kirby would go out and find neo Nazis and beat the hell out of them for fun. Right, But it's not even mean Nazis like actual Nazis.

Well, yeah, yeah, that's right, it was. It was the time in which they were actual Nazis. Yes, But I just wanted to say that say that thing anyway. Are there any other last comments you want to make or throw in here? Uh No, I think we had a great conversation and we touched on. Anything else that we didn't touch on,

we can always come back and talk about again. And of course, listeners, if you think there's something we didn't touch on, or something you want to argue us about or tell us you agree with, or tell us about your own experience as any of these things, please let us know. If you go to the website, the Ethical Panda, or just find us on the True Story FM web page, or just look at the show notes, you'll find all the ways to contact us. You can reach out on Facebook,

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No, Just well, okay, I'll definitely make sure you get connected one of them, because I think they just do great analysis of Marvel movies. Again, you know, wait till after the Strike. But on the True Story FM, there's so many other great podcasts and things like that. But if through there you can become a member of this podcast. It's basically the same as Patron just with a different different people running it less overhead costs,

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Okay, sounds good. Sounds good? Well do you? Thank you as much for being a part of this. Hello over fans, Thank you so much for listening. We have spoken. Thank you so much for having me on. This was a great time and I really enjoyed this conversation.