What I would have done with the X-Men


 


One of the great pleasures of my Christmas trip was sharing Christmas dinner with my old friend Peter Sanderson . We had not sat together and talked for a very long tim, and there's nothing like it.
When we were both part of the Marvel/DC/New York comics community, people often got the two of us confused--which was odd to the point of hilarity, since we looked about as alike as Laurel and Hardy, and Peter S. had a rich Bostonian accent on top of it. But we were possibly the two most over-educated wights in comics at that point, with my cicatrices from the University of Chicago and Peter's oak-leaf clusters from Columbia. He was the only person who wouldn't blink when I mentioned Northrop Frye , or invoked Schiller's Naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung when talking about who is stronger, Alan Moore or Frank Miller. (And yes, I'm the guy who put Northrop Frye into the Defenders. No costume, just a cameo with the Beast.)
Peter's and my perspectives have diverged a bit over the years, although our opinions are very close: I've become a distant observer of the industry, while Mr. S (as one might expect from someone who writes reviews and whole big fat book s about comics) is stilll mentally engaged in the ins and outs of the business. I remain blissfully unaware of lots of developments: thus it came as an unsurprising shock when he talked about the latest Spider-Man storyline in which Spider-Man gets his eyes gouged out. (My immediate snarky reaction was to ask whether he sleeps with Aunt May first: Spider-Man at Colonus, anyone?) (See, that's why I don't trust myself to write reviews.)
But the whole rambling conversation had me thinking more about Marvel and DC, as opposed to Comics In General, than I had in quite a while. Specifically, We both shook our heads over the increasingly monstrous and desperate corporate efforts to breathe life into venerable and becalmed strips, and to the baluchitheria of their interlocked universes.

This is a madness not restricted to comic books. Any continuing media faces the same challenges--and any corporate media tends to fall into the same trap, whether it's Spider-Man, Doonesbury, Stargate SG-1, or James Bond. And I use the word 'corporate' advisedly, because it's that aspect that tends to make things go bad.

As a writer, I'm of the sullen opinion that if a continued property (let's call it a 'strip') goes stale, the answer is to write better stories. Period. And if writer A can't seem to come up with new stuff, fire him or her and get writer B (by which I mean, me) to take it over.
Yeah, yeah, easier said than done. But I'm entirely serious: Any strip that's worth doing in the first place does not have a half-life. There's always more stuff to be mined from that combination of human action and myth that is real story. It's not easy, and it can involve Red Smith vein opening, but it can be done, if not by one person, then another.
Comic books, from early on, tended to work under the old pulp stricture Not To Muck WithThe Premise. This tended to be based on the desire to let the casual reader/viewer/listener jump in with a minimum of fuss. Given that stricture, hack writers wrote the same stories over and over again--and good writers used those limits as a challenge to their invention. And if you're Milton Caniff, or Garry Trudeau, or Will Eisner, you get a long long series of fresh and amazing work.
But that's only if the decision making stays with the creator. Once you get removed from the day-to-day toil of storytelling, and you start to look at the strip as a 'property', things change. And once you feel you're liberated from the don't-muck-with-the-premise commandment, then, if you're up in the hierarchy, the obvious way to get a becalmed strip going is to Muck With The Premise.
Almost inevitably, these muckings are un-storylike. Even those who came up with it admit that they jar and shake--but that's thought of as a good thing. (And good writers can take them annd make it so--sometimes.) And, while it isn't necessarily so, often the mucking does not take the form of a wonderful new good thing added to the strip, but a yanking away by the roots--or the optic nerves--of some good, familiar thing. Adding, refining, enlarging--that's what writers tend to do (when they're doing it right)--so it's almost never a change of that sort. Instead, in comics, it's Lose The Powers! Kill the Girlfriend! Make the character hunted/disgraced/alcoholic/amnesiac! Kill them (in a comic book non-fatal way)! And so on. And so forth.

So, having said all that, what would I have done with the X-Men? Well, muck with the premise, of course.

(Let me say here that I'm doing this post only because there's absolutely no chance of Marvel ever handing me the franchise: I'm enough of a cynical practical guy that I don't give away story ideas for free if there's any way I can make money with them. But there isn't, so voilà.)

There are two reasons: a) because what I was talking about was not Not Changing Anything. No, no, no. And b) because the X-Men have had about as many artificial violences done to the premise as humanly possible. Deaths, rebirths, disgraces, wholesale mucking with history, contnuous shufflings of memberships, heroes becoming villains, villains becoming heroes, losing powers, gaining powers--and all made infinitely worse by alternate timelines. Is there any part of the X-Men premise unmucked?

Well, yes.

Let me tell you my idea in the most efficient manner possible: the mad scientist expositional rant.

"You see, there was something that always bothered me in my study of mutants: the fact that the mutations were so radical, so diverse--and so uniformly successful. By all laws of probability, the group of successful mutations should have been surrounded by a much larger crowd of unsuccessful mutations: simple deformities, various protein and enzyme aberrations, stillbirths. But we weren't seeing any of that. "
"What struck me not too long ago was a very simple fact: that there is more than one way for new genes to show up in a genome: mutation--and infection."
"What if these new genes--genes for wings, for pyrokinesis, for accelerated healing, and so on--what if they did not simply pop up, but were introduced into the human genetic code?"
"It made dazzling sense: instead of a bewildering series of mutations, all of which succeeded, I postulated an entity--a virus, a prion, or other plasmid-like structure--large, complex parts of which found themselves in the cells of humans, giving rise to the legion of mutants we have today?"
"But then the question arose--what must that virus be like, to contain all that radical code? What further powers might that original structure contain? What possible function might that quasi-organism be performing?"
"That is why, my friends, I have been seeking out every successful human mutant on Earth, and sampling their DNA. It has, in many cases, involved both duplicity and force--which I regret. But it all turned out to be worth it."
"Restricting out every anomalous DNA sequence in each mutant--some millions of pairs long--and combining them into one viral structure was not the haphazard process I had anticipated. Instead, the DNA segments fell together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And this is why you are here--whether voluntarily or no."
"For you see, this quasi-virus--the one source of the bewildering variety of mutant powers so prevalent on Earth today--has four characteristics."
"One: it is not native to Earth."
"Two: it was deliberately engineered."
"Three: when reassembled, it contains a message."
"Four: that message is an alert."
"My friends, my X-Men: it is coming. The thing that destroyed the builders of this message in a bottle is coming. It is unlike anything we have ever faced."
"And it is by no means certain that the genetic armaments you have been given will be enough."
"I am now ready to entertain questions from the floor."

Come on, don't it make ya want to read what comes next?

Posted: Tuesday - January 02, 2007 at 03:54 PM        

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