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Disney, Bring Back The X-Men

By Christian L. Guzman 

During Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president, he and his appointees have tried to criminalize immigrants, compromise the environment and indigenous rights for industry, and disregard science and truth.

This is uncanny. America need heroes trained to lead us against that sort of hatred and fear. America needs the X-Men.

Since their creation by Stan Lee in the 1960s, the characters and plots in X-Men comics have successfully, and uniquely, dealt with large and small scale socio-cultural phenomenon. While readers were astonished by the X-Men battling the Brotherhood of Mutants, they were also exposed to commentary on the horrors of genocide, nuclear weapons and racism. Magneto and Professor Xavier respectively are allegories of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Members of mutantkind are known as Children of the Atom, with some of their existence and abilities being a product of nuclear war.

X-Men stories continue to resonate with fans and moviegoers, but their presence and influence have been muted. This has been a deliberate strategy by Disney. The multinational entertainment conglomerate owns Marvel Comics and therefore, the publishing rights of all super-mutant comics. But Disney does not own the movie rights; those are owned by Fox.

The result of this has been Marvel Comics significantly cutting their support for the mutant race in their books. A plot device, known as Terrigen Mist, has made X-Men sterile. Comic creators have been instructed to no longer create new mutants. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who were once the children of Magneto, the master of magnetism, have been retconned into not being mutants.Worst of all is that the top writers and artists of today are no longer writing for the X-books.

This a very different state of affairs from the comic industry of the past 20 years. Throughout the 1990s, X-Men comics and their related books were often the best selling books each month. In 2001, X-books were the top books for every month except December, which were overtaken by Batman. The X-Men were being written and drawn by the Eisner-Award winning team of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely in that year. Joss Whedon, Mark Miller and Chris Claremont have also written X-Men comics in the past.

But in the subsequent years, the X-Men were focused on less and less in comics. Meanwhile, film companies produced more and more comic book-based movies. This year Disney, which has owned Marvel Studios since 2009, is producing three Marvel Comics-based movies. Comic fans, and even most business-savvy journalists, know that this decrease of X-Men comics and increase of Marvel movies is linked. Marvel Senior Vice President of Publishing Tom Brevoort admitted this to a comic fan on his blog."If you had two things, and on one you earned 100% of the revenues from the efforts that you put into making it, and the other you earned a much smaller percentage for the same amount of time and effort, you'd be more likely to concentrate more heavily on the first, wouldn't you?"

Apparently, Disney earning a net income that exceeds the gross domestic product of several countries is not enough to satisfy the company's leaders. (In 2015, Disney's net income was about $8 billion. That’s after all employees and taxes get payed!)

More importantly though, Brevoort's logic is flawed. While it does cost Disney to pay writers and artists to make all Marvel comic books, it does not cost the company to make all movies based on those comics. Fox is solely responsible for movie production costs. Yet, Fox must still pay Disney a fee to use Marvel characters. So Disney benefits from Fox’s hugely successful movies, such as this year’s Logan, which made more than $500 million at the box office, or Dead Pool, which is the highest grossing Rated R movie of all time.But even if Fox’s movies weren’t commercial successes, that wouldn't affect the sales of the comic books much. Throughout history, quality writers and artists have been the driver of sustainable comic sales. In 1991, long before any blockbuster Marvel movies, apps or video games, the X-Men were the No. 1 selling comic for 11 months out of the year.

Part of what has made the X-comics so successful is that despite their extraordinary powers, X-Men deal with ordinary problems. What love triangle is more well known in comics than the one between Wolverine, Jean Grey and Cyclops? At Professor Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, students come of age and encounter bullying and isolation, but they also gain team-building skills, and are mentored by devoted teachers. Readers of various ages and interests identify with these themes.  

The school and the team have also been a beacon of cultural and ethnic diversity. Cyclops, an American, Wolverine, a Canadian, Nightcrawler, a German, and Colossus, who was born in the Soviet Union, fought side-by-side in comics, while the world outside of the comic pages was experiencing a Cold War. The major characters, Bishop and Storm, are black. Kitty Pryde is Jewish. Jubilee is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. They all accept and work with each other because of their actions, not what they look like. It’s not hard to see the intention behind the comic authors’ writing: encourage people in reality to do the same.

A devout X-Men fan will probably attend more funerals for mutants than for their own family members. Sure, this is in part because in the world of X-Men, one character, usually Jean Grey, often dies, comes back, and then dies again. But it is heavy on the hearts of fellow mutants, and fans every time. This and other traumas have caused mutants to break down and question the point of going on, just as we sometimes do. Following this though, comic readers will witness and feel how X-Men comfort their grief-stricken and reinvigorate them with the will to fight for peace.

In their publication history, the X-Men fought for such peace during the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic and in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Due to the discord of President Trump, it’s time for the X-Men to fight on the forefront of America’s struggles again. Whenever Trump breeds hate and fear, the X-Men can be there. They will defend immigrants, religious freedom, the LGBTQ community and science. They will help us chose if our country should ban human beings and keep them out with walls, as Magneto might do, or if our country should follow Xavier, and strive to understand other cultures and to educate them about our own.

Disney, you own Star Wars, your money problems are over. Put your ego and profit-motive aside, something that Donald Trump will never do, and let the X-Men help America triumph over an age of apocalypse. To me, my X-Men.

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