Mind Candy. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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      Alas, Marvel has never managed to maintain that focus; over and over, writers have recognized the appeal of the school setting and tried to drag the stories back to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, but time after time they have slipped away again, to New York and Genosha and a thousand other places, chronicling the struggles of mutant against mutant, and mutant against human. The X-Men have not just been another bunch of superheroes, I’ll grant them that; they’ve served as a metaphor for discrimination and oppression of every kind, and that’s a good thing.

      But it isn’t what I found in the first issue. I wasn’t black or gay or Jewish, I wasn’t oppressed or discriminated against, but I still sometimes felt like an outcast, a weirdo, a mutant. I didn’t particularly want to be a hero, or save the world; I just wanted to be accepted despite being who I was.

      Xavier’s school was initially, for me, a fantasy of a place where everyone, no matter how weird, was accepted for who they were. No one tried to make them normal. No one pretended they were all alike. The students were all pushed to perform to the best of their ability, no matter how bizarre those abilities might be.

      And I wonder whether that might explain the curious sales history of the X-Men titles.

      X-Men was not a hit in its original incarnation. When Stan Lee recreated Marvel Comics in the 1960s he threw a lot of ideas out into the market; some clicked, like Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, and some didn’t, like Ant-Man and Captain Marvel. Hard as it may be to believe now, the X-Men were one of the less-successful creations; they didn’t have anything close to the sales figures of the FF or ol’ Webhead. The title struggled on for a few years, then went to reprints for a few more, before being reinvented and relaunched in the mid-1970s.

      But once it was relaunched, it quickly became a hit, and by the mid-eighties was Marvel’s top-selling title by a fairly wide margin; it made up such a large part of the business that some comic book shops considered Uncanny X-Men (as it had been retitled) to be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. What had changed in there? Why was the concept a flop in 1963 and a major hit in 1975?

      Oh, there were changes in the comic itself—the addition of Wolverine and Nightcrawler and Storm certainly didn’t hurt, as they’re great characters. The art, especially during the Byrne/Cockrum period, was better than it had been for most of the early issues. I don’t think that really accounts for it, though. What had changed was the rest of the world.

      In the summer of 1963 the 1950s were still lingering. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated yet, the Beatles weren’t yet on the charts, the Vietnam War was a matter of a few military advisors in a country most Americans still hadn’t even heard of. People trusted the government—after all, our leaders had seen us safely through World War II and were fighting the Cold War to protect us all from Communist tyranny. Conformity was seen as one’s patriotic duty. And most kids read comic books—those stacks at Dunham’s turned over pretty quickly, and every kid I knew had a few comics at home, even if they were just Archie or Richie Rich titles.

      A comic book where the heroes were mutant weirdos did not suit the temper of the times, to say the least. Remembering those days, I think most kids probably found the X-Men to be pretty creepy. I didn’t, I loved them—but I was an oddball, a suspected mutant.

      There were enough oddballs like me to keep the book going, but not enough to make it a success.

      But then the phenomenon known as “the Sixties” happened. The counter-culture began setting its own standards, with Zap Comix existing alongside the mainstream fare like “Gilligan’s Island.” Long-haired kids took pride in being called “freaks.”

      And except for a temporary surge during the “camp” craze triggered by the “Batman” TV show, comic book sales plummeted. When I started reading comics in 1959, every kid read them; by the time X-Men sales peaked in the 1980s, if I mentioned that I collected comics I would sometimes be asked, “Are they still publishing those?”

      Comics went from being a mass medium to being a specialized taste; by 1975 reading comics marked a kid as something of an oddball.

      And the natural audience for the X-Men was always oddballs and misfits.

      Furthermore, the counter-culture had spread the idea that conformity was a trap; the Vietnam War had destroyed faith in authority. More people were admitting their differences, rather than trying to suppress them. People who were different from the norm were no longer automatically seen as creepy and threatening.

      That comic book I fell in love with in 1963 had just been a dozen years ahead of its time. The world caught up with it eventually, but X-Men was there first.

      I’m glad it was, because when I was eight going on nine, reading about the Beast and the Angel and Iceman and Cyclops and Marvel Girl, I took great comfort in its existence—in knowing, because this comic book was being published, that I wasn’t the only kid in America who felt as if he were growing up mutant.

      Sgt. Fury’s Family Affair

      Originally published in North Carolina Veterans’ News

      This article is about Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, heroes of a couple of hundred comic books back in the 1960s and ’70s.

      If you haven’t already turned the page in disgust, stay with me for a moment. I am not a fan of Sgt. Fury. I’m not a fan of war comics in general, although I do read them sometimes.

      However, I recently acquired, cheap, a stack of Sgt. Fury, all in very nice condition. I think I originally intended to sell ’em at a profit, or maybe I just bought them because I can’t resist cheap stuff, but as a matter of policy I read them, all in one sitting. I read every comic I acquire, no matter how stupid it may appear, in hopes of turning up unsuspected gems. That’s how I came to read eighteen issues of Sgt. Fury all at once, which brought me to a realization.

      These are not war comics at all.

      Marvel always advertised them as being “the war comic for people who hate war comics”, and they meant it. Despite the presence of hordes of Nazis and the occasional Italian Fascist or Imperial Japanese, these are not stories about World War II.

      What are they about, then? They’re about the Howling Commandos. And no, I’m not just playing with words. Some of the Sgt. Fury annuals were set in other times and places. It didn’t matter if the Howlers were in occupied France, South Korea, Vietnam, or outer space—all that changed were the backgrounds and the enemy uniforms. The stories are not about the war, but about the camaraderie among the men who fought. Doesn’t matter where they fought; you could do the same stories about Roman Legionnaires. The Nazis aren’t characters, for the most part, but just part of the background, the constant threat that the Howlers face. Not much of a threat, either. As people who did like war comics pointed out, Sgt. Fury’s adventures never bore any resemblance to reality whatsoever; they were pure macho fantasy. Any one of the Howling Commandos could easily fight his way home through anywhere up to three German divisions—two, if he’s sick, and just one if he’s seriously wounded and slowly bleeding to death. The German army is never any real danger except by pure dumb luck. Howlers are too stubborn to die.

      (One did get killed very early in the series, but that was before things had settled down to a pattern. Besides, it gave the others something to feel guilty about, and an excuse to hate the enemy.)

      In ordinary war stories, the basic conflict is between Our Guys and The Enemy, and people do get killed, or at least hurt. Sure, we all know Sgt. Rock is going to pull through, but his men do get killed, innocent civilians do get СКАЧАТЬ