X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor (21 page)

In the story, Scarlet Witch, the second female mutant to appear in Marvel Comics, goes insane and demonstrates new unheard levels of power that threaten all creation. This is similar to previous events in which a formerly good character becomes evil and loses control of her powers, including “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” “Inferno,” and “Onslaught.” Scarlet Witch re-creates the world into a reality in which mutants are the majority and normal humans the minority. Her father, Magneto, is one of the most powerful men on the planet, the leader of the so-called House of M. When the Marvel universe is put back to “normal,” she causes almost all the mutants to lose their powers. The mutants are not killed, but their DNA is changed so that they no longer have powers. Concerning the storyline, Quesada has said:

Part of what is inherently important about the metaphor of the X-Men is that they are a minority. The reason in the past that fans have been able to relate to these characters is that we all see a part of ourselves within them, whether it be that you were the lonely kid in school, the gay kid in school . . . or the kid who got beaten up in school because you were different. Whatever it is, we all have that. Part of it is that there aren’t supposed to be a lot of these guys . . . they never really should’ve been in the forefront. That kind of message got lost over the years, to the point where we ended up with a mutant island where there were over six million of them, and every time you’d turn a page, you’d see a mutant on every corner. We even had “Mutant Town.” So, one of the things that we wanted to do was put the genie back in the bottle. (“Stuff”)

In the years since the X-Men were created, the number of mutants increased dramatically. Even after the 1975 relaunch it was the start of a major storyline when two new mutants were detected, but as Quesada noted, by 2005 there was an entire mutant nation, and New York City had its own region call Mutant Town. Quesada felt that the prevalence of mutants in the Marvel universe diluted what made the X-Men special.

The decision to make the X-Men special again by removing the majority of mutants has not gone without criticism. Andrew Wheeler writes a column about social issues in superhero comic books called “No More Mutants,” quoting the phrase used by Scarlet Witch at the conclusion of
House of M
. In his first article, Wheeler wrote:

Faced with a problem minority, Marvel’s response was a fictional genocide. In the story House of M it was presented as the Scarlet Witch’s way to undo the miseries of her life, which included a failed marriage, a monstrous father, two dead children, a nervous breakdown and a spiral into villainy. Faced with those problems, wiping out an entire race seems like a baffling and inelegant solution. Seen as a solution to editorial concerns that mutants were overrunning the Marvel universe, it makes a lot more sense. (It certainly wouldn’t be the first or last time that a character behaved strangely in order to serve an editorial agenda.) (Wheeler)

Wheeler goes on to criticize Quesada’s expressed reasoning behind the decision to decimate the mutant population of the Marvel universe. Quesada argued that the result of the
House of M
would make mutants unique and, indeed, a minority again. Wheeler countered:

Such rhetoric suggests a misunderstanding of the challenges faced by real minorities. The invention of a mutant nation and a mutant neighbourhood really enhanced the metaphor, rather than undermined it. After all, the existence of almost four billion Asians in the world doesn’t make life easier for one Asian kid in a town in rural America. The existence of gay neighbourhoods in almost every major city in the Western world has not made coming out to one’s parents any easier. More than half the world is female, but women still don’t have full equality in the first world, let alone in the developing world. The claim that “there aren’t supposed to be a lot of these guys” is not likely to be well received by anyone who has ever been a victim of prejudice. (Wheeler)

Following
House of M
, Marvel moved the X-Men to San Francisco, identifying that city as one that embraces social minorities.

It is a bit disappointing that this final period has some of the most problematic portrayals of females and that the goal of heightening the impact of the mutant metaphor in the Marvel universe resulted in narrative genocide. The early 1960s Marvel stories contained stories of mostly men and one overly domesticated female who was the object of affection. These stories from the 2000s tend to be about a team of mostly men and overly sexualized females who are objectified or, in the case of Stacy X, who choose to present themselves as objects (there’s really little other potential interpretation of the video she left for Angel). The difference between the stories in these fifty years is not as great as one would have expected or hoped to see.

Chapter Seven

By the Numbers

Having done close readings of stories and characters to examine the portrayal of race and gender, how do the literal numbers reflect the themes found in the stories? That is, how are the characters actually used across nearly five decades of comics?

To determine this,
The Official Index to the Marvel Universe: The Uncanny X-Men
was used to identify every character who has appeared in the series. The characters were coded into one of three categories: X-Men, villains, or supporting cast.
The Official Index
includes a plot summary and cast list for every issue of the series. As often as possible, official Marvel publications were used to verify a character’s gender and race and ethnicity, and these were coded as well. The resulting statistics tell the literal story of how race and gender are used in
The Uncanny X-Men
.

The Official Index
divided characters into feature characters (usually members of the team), supporting cast (established characters in the Marvel universe making a brief appearance in this series), supporting characters (regularly appearing characters who are not part of the team), villains (anyone the team fights), and other characters (background characters in a story who are not recurring and have little prominence in the issue). For the purposes of this study, guest star and supporting character categories were combined into the single category of supporting cast. There were occasions in which a group was listed (usually as a villain), without any individualization of the members of the group. For example, it may say that “Hand ninjas” may be listed, but none of the members of the group identified. In these instances, the groups were noted, but not added to the statistics regarding race and ethnicity or gender. A discussion of how the numbers worked out for each period follows.

Overall
Numbers

As has been seen in the close readings, the X-Men do explore the mutant metaphor overtly within the series. The X-Men, as a franchise, is one of the most diverse in all of superhero comics. Also, the number of heroic female characters who have appeared in the series is significant in a genre and industry that is dominated by male characters. This willingness to embrace a socially relevant metaphor actively is significant especially within the comic book industry. As Andrew Wheeler explains:

Minorities in general do not have the best time of things in comics’ superhero mainstream. The superhero genre is dominated by the straight, white, male majority, and so is the creative community. Convention has it that this is true of the audience is as well, but there are plenty of readers who don’t fit that model, and these readers are used to the idea that they won’t see themselves reflected in the media they consume. That’s not something that we should be complacent about, in comics or in any other medium. (Wheeler)

However, despite actively embracing the mutant metaphor, as will be demonstrated in the numbers analysis, the X-Men is a team that has been dominated by white male characters. White characters are the most common of any race or ethnicity in the X-Men, the villains, and the supporting cast in every era. Similarly, there are more male characters than female in every category in every era. Even while the white male characters dominate the numbers, problematically the most diverse group of characters are the villains, whereas the group that is most balanced in terms of gender representation is the supporting cast. So, despite the thematic importance about tolerance and rejecting prejudice, the series is frequently about a group of white male heroes battling minority villains with a supporting cast of females.

Charts 1–4 examine the number of male characters who appeared as X-Men, villains, and supporting characters.

The proportion of male characters for each issue was calculated and then averaged across the different time periods. These averages are provided as a total and by character type: hero, villain, and supporting character. Done this way, one can easily assess both male and female inclusion in any given time period. For example, looking at Chart 1, the proportion of male villain characters for the time period 1–66 was 0.89. This indicates that in the average issue of this time period, 89% of the villains were males and 11% were females.

Chart 1

As can be seen, the percentage of male characters was very high in all the categories in the first period and fell below that level thereafter. In every category the percentage of male characters dipped down in the second and third periods of comic books and then increased in the fourth and fifth periods. In each period the villains either have the highest percentage of males of any group, or they are tied for the highest percentage males. The supporting cast has the smallest percentage of male characters of any category in all five periods. The supporting cast is also the only group ever to have less than 50% male representation in any period, with periods two and three having more females on average than males guest starring. The heroes begin the series with over 80% male representation but drop to almost 50% by the third time period before spiking in the fourth and fifth time periods to almost 70% male representation.

Because white characters represented the majority of every category in every time period, the following chart represents the percentage of white characters through all the time periods. The heroes have the highest percentage of white characters of any group in every time period, whereas the villains have the lowest percentage of white characters in every single time period.

The proportion of white characters for each issue was calculated and then averaged across the different time periods. These averages are provided as a total and by character type: hero, villain, and supporting character. Done this way, one can easily assess both white and other race inclusion in any given time period. For example, looking at Chart 2, the proportion of white villain characters for the time period 394–500 was 0.54. This indicates that in the average issue of this time period, 54% of the villains were white and 46% were other races.

Chart 2

Charts 3 and 4 illustrate how each gender is broken down amongst the three groups, heroes, villains, and supporting characters. “Gender and Character Type by Number of Characters” reflects the proportion of female or male characters who took the role of hero, villain, or supporting character. In terms of number of characters, most male characters are villains and most female characters are supporting characters.

Chart 3

Chart 4

“Gender and Character Type by Appearance” breaks down the roles each male character and each female character had by total number of appearances. While a character is only counted once toward the total number of characters, the character may have appeared fifty times across all of the issues. In terms of appearances, the most male characters appear as X-Men, and the most female character appearances are also as X-Men.

What these numbers reveal is that although the X-Men does deal openly and often with the issues of prejudice and discrimination in the storylines, the characters who appear most frequently are white men. Following this, fictional groups such as aliens make the most appearances. Thus, whereas on the one hand the series does deal with issues facing real-world minorities, on the other it remains a series dominated by social majorities and fictional minorities. However, because so much of the prejudice is rooted in the idea of being a mutant, the metaphor inherently allows interpretation by the reader that does not limit the meaning to the race and gender of the characters on the page.

As was pointed out by writers such as Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza, everyone at some point can associate with the alienation the X‐Men endure, even if the source of their alienation has nothing to do with the larger social concerns of race and gender.

Period 1

Nine characters appear as members of the X-Men in these sixty-six issues. All nine are white. Beyond simply looking at the number of characters who appear, this analysis will consider the number of appearances each character made. So if, for example, Iceman had an appearance in all sixty-six issues, even if only for a single panel in an issue, that would count as sixty-six appearances. In total, there are 378 appearances by members of the X-Men in these sixty-six issues, and all 378 appearances are by white characters.

The villains the X-Men fought were a slightly more diverse group, though fictional identifications such as aliens, demons, and robots played a larger role in diversifying the X-Men’s enemies than minority representation. The X-Men fought 123 different villains in this period. Of these, 54 (43.9%) were white, 49 (39.8%) were robots, 4 (3.3%) were Latino, 4 (3.3%) were aliens, 4 (3.3%) were Middle Eastern, 3 (2.4%) had unknown race or ethnicity, 2 (1.6%) were Asian, 1 (0.8%) was Jewish, 1 (0.8%) was a demon, 1 (1.6%) was Irish, and 1 (0.8%) was a subterranean being.

The numbers are slightly different when considering the number of appearances these villains had versus simply the number of villains. In total, there were 263 appearances by villains. Of these, 139 (52.9%) were by white characters, 77 (29.3%) were robotic characters, 13 (4.9%) were by a Jewish character, 9 (3.4%) were by Middle Eastern characters, 8 (3.0%) were by alien characters, 8 (3.0%) were by Latino characters, 4 (1.5%) were by characters with unknown race or ethnicity, 2 (0.8%) were by a subterranean character, 2 (0.8%) were by an Asian character, 1 (0.4%) was by a demonic character, and 1 (0.6 percent) was by an Irish character.

There were 23 characters in the supporting cast in these issues, and of these 36 (92.3%) were white and 1 (2.6%) was black. The lone nonwhite guest star was the Black Panther, the king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda in the Marvel universe. There were 114 appearances by characters in the supporting cast: 113 (99.1%) were by white characters, and 1 (0.9%) was by a black character.

From these numbers it is clear that during this period the vast majority of characters were white, but the most diverse group was the villains the X-Men fought. The X-Men were 100% white and the characters in the supporting cast 99.1% white, but the villains were only 43.9% white. There were 168 total characters who appeared, and 99 (58.9%) of them were white. In the first sixty-six issues, there were 753 appearances by characters in
The X-Men
, and 630 (83.7%) of them were by white characters.