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Mutant Readers, Reading Mutants:

Appropriation, Assimilation, and the X-Men1
Neil Shyminsky

“We [the X-Men] need to get into the world. Saving lives, helping with disaster relief…
We need to present ourselves as a team like any other. Avengers, Fantastic Four—
They don’t get chased through the streets with torches.”
- Cyclops, Astonishing X-Men #1 (Whedon, 2004: 16)

“[A]lways preeminent is the drive to affirm the humanity of individuals and groups
in the face of restrictive often violent social realities. Historically, however, this process of individual
or group affirmation has often entailed an objectification or vilification
of ethnically or racially defined others.”
- Aldo Regalado, “Modernity, Race, and the American Superhero” (2005: 86-87)

The best-selling American comic book of the past 25 years, as well one of
the highest grossing film franchises of all time, Uncanny X-Men and its related titles
are driven by a metaphor and message – that of tolerance and acceptance – that
has been written of with glowing praise by fans and critics of all sorts2. “Feared
and hated”, as the cliché goes, by regular humans for their freakish difference
and/or perceived advantages, the X-Men consist of a race of super-human
‘mutants’ who were granted powers by an accident of birth. As with the victims
of racist, sexist, or homophobic violence, the X-Men are similarly unable to reject
or deny their powers but are nonetheless punished by family, friends, and
government for possessing them. X-Men creator Stan Lee explains simply that
“people fear things that are different”, and the comic’s various writers and fans
argue that its anti-oppressive message can be applied to any person or peoples
suffering from one or another form of oppression within a hegemonic political
system (Meth, 2005:1). Ian McKellan – best known by X-Men readers for his
portrayal of Magneto in the X-Men films – explains that the comic book
consequently carries an incredibly broad appeal: “I know, speaking to Marvel
Comics, that it’s not just gay people who identify with mutants – it’s other
minorities, too, religious minorities, racial minorities” (Singer, 2002). Former X-
Men writer Joe Casey notes that the X-Men appeal to “every oppressed minority
and disenfranchised subculture”, and various critics have extended interpretations
of X-Men beyond the usual fields of race, gender, and sexuality in order to
interpret the comic book through the lens of McCarthy-era Hollywood and with
regard to the anti-Semitism that its creators faced within the comic book industry
itself (2006:16) 3.
However, there is a considerable difference between the ideal reader of X-
Men – as described by Marvel Comics and repeated by McKellan – and the actual
reader, and this disconnect is both problematic and under-theorized.

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Erik Dussere characterizes the majority of comic book readers, and X-Men in
particular, as “mostly people like me: boys, mostly geeks, weirdos, smart kids - in
a word, mutants” (2000:1). Dussere explains that young, male readers are taught
to associate their own hardships with those represented in X-Men, as “the comics'
evocation of the ordeal - and the hostile rhetoric - that many gay men and women
face allows the adolescent reader to see his or her own alienation in the
experiences of these characters” (2). But while the X-Men metaphor appears
socially progressive in its inclusivity, the company and creators’ refusal to suggest
that some identifications are closer to the mark than others – and indeed, that one
person’s unique ordeal can be easily substituted for or appropriated by another –
implies an equivalence between all of the various readers’ oppressions.
Though adolescence is often traumatic, the implication that being a
“geek” brings with it oppressions that are akin to those of racism, sexism, or
homophobia seems wholly overstated, especially when the majority of X-Men’s
readers are white, male, and heterosexual. It is useful to think of the advantages of
being male and/or white in North American society not simply from the
perspective of educational and professional opportunities, but as an “invisible
knapsack” of unearned assets, advantages as simple but important to one’s sense
of safety and well-being as “the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you,
or that your race will not count against you in court” (McIntosh, 1988:11). It is
this suggestion of equivalence that is the key problem underlying the politics of
mutanity in X-Men: If being a straight white “weirdo” or “geek” is equated with
being a gay and/or racial minority reader and all can claim mutanity, what kind of
reader is X-Men actually soliciting and how is it empowering them? As a
substantially young, white, and male group of heroes within a genre whose
creators and reader are nearly uniformly white males, the X-Men actually solicit
identification from a similarly young, white, and male readership, allowing these
readers to misidentify themselves as the “other”. Rather than reflecting
McKellan’s suggestion that disempowered minorities are reading about and
identifying themselves in the pages of the comic book, most readers are being
taught to identify with oppressions that are unfamiliar and, I would argue, unequal
to their own. Additionally, the use of racialized and gendered victim positions by
white male readers is particularly troubling when one considers that, despite the
obvious difficulties associated with being a teenager or a geek, these readers still
often benefit from the “unearned advantage… of our arbitrarily awarded power”
(McIntosh, 1988:12).
While the popularly accepted suggestion, as described above, is that X-
Men espouses a progressive politics of inclusion and tolerance, a deeper textual
analysis would seem to reveal the opposite. The first section of this essay
examines some of the ways in which the writers of X-Men associate the X-Men
themselves with privilege; the second suggests that the X-Men’s battles are
presented as normative white versus transgressive non-white,

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where difference is punished and conformity rewarded; and the third considers
Wolverine, the most popular X-Man, as a celebration of white masculinity. The
allegorical affinity that mutants are supposed to share with oppressed peoples
allows otherwise privileged white males to appropriate a discourse of
marginalization. To quote sociologists Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack,
it allows the readers who identify with mutants to “race to the margins” and
assume marginalized positions in relation to the authority of the dominant culture
– where no other obvious claim to these margins and victim positions exist
(1998:339). While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of
all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it
actually reinforces inequality.

1. “Black” Heroes and White Readers

A brief survey of comic books fans, critics, and authors produces a

numerous colorful descriptions of the liberating potential and utopian mission of
super hero narratives. Sociologist Gerard Jones characterizes the work of comics’
first creators as one “a fantasy tomorrow” which “spoke to the anxieties of
modern life more sympathetically, more completely, more acutely than they could
have foreseen” (2004:xv). Likewise, novelist and comic book writer Michael
Chabon suggests that superhero comic books are endowed with a mission “to
redeem the suffering and helpless of the world” (Weich, 2005). Though Aldo
Regalado’s analyses of super hero comic books are more skeptical of their racist
underpinnings, he suggests nonetheless that super heroes “express popular
longings to challenge and overcome the potentially atomizing, rationalizing,
dehumanizing, and oppressive forces” of modernity industrial society (2005: 85).
As persecuted minorities themselves the X-Men appear well positioned to
redeem the suffering and the helpless. Within the universe of the X-Men movies
and comic books, mutant super-humans are able to utilize racially charged
discourses of oppression and victimization because they are commonly figured as
normative humanity’s racial other4. Implicitly, this metaphor often situates
mutanity as black and non-mutant humans as white – a relationship that has been
made explicit in Peter Milligan’s recent X-Men spin-off, X-Force. Directly likening
the social oppressions faced by a mutant to those faced by an African-American,
The Anarchist explains to a reporter that, “I’m a black mutant. In this country,
that’s like being black with a little black added” (Milligan, 2001:8). It is unsurprising
that no mutant hero before the Anarchist describes mutanity in such specific and
blunt terms, and telling that Milligan put the words in the mouth of X-Force’s
only black member. While it is tacitly understood by many of X-Force’s – and X-Men’s –
readers that to be mutant is to be a minority, a white man claiming to be “a little black”

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would likely produce a jarring or discomforting effect.

More commonly, the plot of the X-Men has revolved around the more
subtly racialized machinations of the mutant terrorist Magneto and the heroic
peacemaker Professor Charles Xavier. Magneto, a Jewish-gypsy survivor of the
Holocaust, and his Brotherhood of Mutants see race war with non-mutant
humans as inevitable. As such, the Brotherhood denies the potential for
compromise and champions the creation of a mutant state as preferable to the
only other alternative: mutant enslavement. Conversely, the benevolent
Professor Xavier and his students at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters –
the X-Men – are Magneto’s reluctant opposition, and would prefer to work with
both their mutant enemies and non-mutant humans toward peaceful co-
existence. In an interview with Premiere Magazine, director Bryan Singer explains
that Magneto and Professor Xavier should be read properly as analogues of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.: “They both embrace mutantkind.
Magneto has a very separatist view. Professor X believes that all men and
mutants are created equal” (Meigs 1997:55). Beyond these sweeping
philosophical parallels, however, Xavier and Magneto’s connection to the
African-American civil rights leaders seem dubious. An upper-class white
American who inherited a substantial family fortune, Xavier does not simply
pass as a regular human – he even hides the purpose of his school and his own
mutanity until he is “outed” by an enemy. While Magneto’s identity is far more
wrought by the violent realities of racism, the frequency with which he
proclaims himself monarch of one country or another and callously murders his
enemies hardly make him a consistently desirable point of identification for
readers. The disturbing association of non-whiteness or otherness with
undesirable and evil behavior will be expanded upon in the next section of this
essay.
Promoting a team that, like Xavier, is largely white and upper or middle
class, X-Men publisher Marvel Comics appears to favor and even interpellate a
similar sort of reader. While the company suggests that their outsider heroes are
meant to solicit identification from readers of any demographic, the company’s
online Media Kit suggests that their audience is incredibly homogenous. The
publisher classifies 100% of their sales as either “Kid/Tween Male” or “Young
Adult Male”, and while their accuracy can certainly be questioned – surely,
women buys Marvel comic books – other sources suggest that these statistics are
still fairly accurate (Marvel, 2004). In his study of Milestone Comics and its fans,
Jeffrey A. Brown states “the largest bulk of comic book fans are males between
the ages of eight and twenty-two” (2001:93). Brown also suggests that as much as
two-thirds of Toronto’s comic book specialty store shoppers are white – a number
that might even seem low, except that Toronto’s white citizens account for only
half the total population of the city. The results of a survey that I conducted on
Comicboards.com’s X-Universe Message Board (XMB) tell an even more

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lopsided story. A staggering 95 percent of the XMB’s 87 respondents identified

themselves as male, while another 83 percent identified as “white” or
“Caucasian”5 (Shyminsky, 2005:1). While any detailed study of readers would
require more thorough research than can be provided with reference to a single
city or internet forum, it seems clear that X-Men appeals largely to an audience
that cannot share in the experience of being either female or black in a
socioeconomic system dominated by white men.

Fig. 1. Page 8 of X-Force #116, penciled and inked by Mike Allred. Throughout the
interview depicted here, the Anarchist is ambivalent about his position on the team – he
suspects that he has been hired to be a black mutant martyr rather than a black mutant
role model.

Rather, the readers form an appropriative relationship to the X-Men and

their experiences. Appropriation – a process whereby subordinate cultures are
robbed of aspects of their identity by a dominant culture – occurs in every
instance where, as described earlier in this paper, these privileged white male
readers are allowed to collapse the distance between their own experiences of
marginalization and the experiences of those who have been are historically outside
and have been marginalized by institutions of white masculinity. While the
possibility that a reader can lay claim to both the socio-economic privileges of

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white masculinity and the victim positions of women and people of color may
seem a contradiction in terms, it is a feat managed by the X-Men themselves.
Indeed, Charles Xavier is not the only member of the white upper class among
the X-Men. Of the six founding X-Men, all are white Christians, five are men, and
they count among their “feared and hated” ranks no less than two doctors and
two millionaires. The lone woman, Jean Grey, is a red headed swimsuit model
whose mutanity manifests only in her invisible psychic powers. Paraphrasing the
Anarchist then, is Jean Grey to be understood as a politically sincere attempt by
the X-Men’s creators to write a white woman “with a little black added”? As with
X-Men’s readers, it is difficult to imagine how a beautiful white woman – not
visibly othered and as unable to totally distance herself from that “invisible
knapsack” of privilege – might actually lay claim to the same socio-political
oppressions that an average black woman might.
Patricia Williams explains that the sort of literary “blackness” implicit in
the mutant metaphor is based on representations or performances of blackness that
have no necessary connection to a biological blackness. According to Williams, the
performance of blackness "depends upon a dynamic of display that ricochets
between hypervisibility and oblivion", and, in the case of a white body performing
blackness symbolically, becomes a vehicle through which the other is
metaphorically visible while literally invisible (1997:17). As such, Williams’ model
describes the ease with which blackness – and its connected politics – can be
easily appropriated by savvy writers. Indeed, despite the implication that mutants
are just like African-Americans, it was not until twelve years after X-Men began
publication that the team welcomed a visible minority to its roster. Of the ten
mutant X-Men to that point, the character of Cyclops – who can only control his
own destructive super-power with the use of conspicuous ruby glasses and
suffered the loss of his parents as a child – is aligned more closely with Chabon’s
“suffering and the helpless” than any of his teammates. However, just like the rest
of the X-Men, Cyclops still has access to Xavier’s money, mansion, sprawling
countryside, and private jet.
Mutanity aside, characters like Cyclops and Xavier – and accordingly, the
readers who identify with them – can be understood as simultaneously
privileged and oppressed because of a recent “crisis” in white masculinity. While
science has located little definitive evidence in asserting a biological or otherwise
necessary difference between various races or genders, traditional assumptions
of biological proof are still pervasive and their supporters are constantly
articulating new grounds for asserting divisions. According to sociologist and
cultural critics, the politics of movements such as masculism – which seeks to
reinforce the essential differences of men and women – have been created in
response to the threat that progressive and anti-oppressive politics pose to
institutions of white male privilege: Stephen Ducat (2004) describes the
anxiety associated with the loss of privilege as “the wimp factor”,

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Thomas Dipiero (2002) as “masculine hysteria”, John MacInnes as a “psychic

insecurity” (1998), and David Savran as “white male paranoia” (1996). Whether a
loss of exclusive control over socioeconomic power can be understood rationally
as victimization, these writers suggest that anti-racist and anti-sexist politics are
often perceived as victimizing by the white men who have come to take their
privilege for granted.
What these writers identify is often more commonly described as “reverse
racism” and “reverse discrimination”, a response which seems all the more
remarkable in light of the continued dominance and privilege of white men within
global economic and political arenas. Though this consideration of “white male
paranoia” may seem extraneous to an analysis of the X-Men, it is actually integral to
any such consideration. X-Men allows these sorts of white males to claim
oppression and a victim status even as they continue to enjoy the privilege of
white male power, effectively robbing the other of their gains. Rather than
accomplishing the goal – as stated earlier by McKellan and Dussere, repeating the
company line – of reaching a diverse readership and spreading tolerance, the
conceptual framework of X-Men leads its white, male readership to empathize
uncritically with the “feared and hated” mutant heroes. Identification with the X-
Men feeds into a “masculine hysteria” and “psychic insecurity” in its young, white
and socio-economically privileged male readership, allowing those same readers to
appropriate a marginalized identity (Dipiero, 2002; MacInnes, 1998).

2. Acculturation and Resistance

In “X-Men as J Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie”,

Lawrence Baron argues that,
the cartoonists who created X-Men and the director of the film are
all Jewish Americans who champion acculturation as a strategy for
minority groups while simultaneously condemning bigotry and
ethnocentrism. The creators of the X-Men comic book series
belong to the generation of American-born Jews who sought
acceptance and social mobility through assimilation. (2003:45)
Indeed, even the most optimistic reading of X-Men need account for the
benevolent acculturation agenda expressed by the comic book’s creators through
Professor Xavier. Differing from assimilation – which describes a process
whereby one distinct cultural group is fully absorbed into another – by degree
rather than type, acculturation characterizes the less severe exchange in which a
cultural group retains its distinct identity even as its cultural patterns become
more like those of another group. In fact, while Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are
credited as creators of the X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four,

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and the Incredible Hulk, their ethnically distinct birth-names – Stanley Lieber and
Jacob Kurtzberg – are meaningless to most readers. Just as the topical issues of
racial oppression in X-Men were literally “white-washed” by Lee and Kirby, Lieber
and Kurtzberg’s new names made the Jewish creators more palatable to their
mostly Christian market.
Likewise, Matthew J. Smith suggests that creators like Lee and Kirby are
guilty of projecting their own insecurities as minorities on to the characters they
write, forcing monsters and non-humans to reject "their heritage, in part or in full,
for assimilation into the American melting pot" (2001:147-8). For characters like
the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm –The Thing – this meant leaving the character’s
Jewish heritage implicit, while the Norse god Thor and extra-terrestrial Silver
Surfer were bound to Earth and forced to adapt to human society. But while
Grimm’s Jewish connection was often alluded to through particular cultural
references and allusions – suggesting that, while acculturated, his Jewish heritage
is still a significant part of his identity – there is little in the characters of the white
X-Men to suggest their allegorical connection to the Jewish or black sources that
critics have suggested. In fact, there is little space within which any sort of
minority reader can easily identify with a Cyclops or Jean Grey. Given that most
of the X-Men so closely resemble their white male readership, it is fairer to
suggest that they have been fully assimilated by, and are indistinguishable from,
normative white America.
Given that X-Men debuted in the early 1960s – and that the great majority
of its North American sales into the 1980s were still made in grocery,
confectionery, and drug stores – it is perhaps fair to suggest that the inclusion of
an ethnic minority character prior to 1975 would have “added” a little too much
“black” to the mutant metaphor for consumer comfort6. With the mediated
successes of civil rights and women’s movements over the first twenty years of X-
Men’s run, as well as the average age of readers climbing and comic books
moving into more exclusive and adult-oriented specialty stores, writer Chris
Claremont introduced the mostly non-white and often gender ambiguous
Morlocks, a community of sewer-dwelling mutants who described themselves as
“deformed, despised, deserted” (2001:9). In an issue which explicitly questions
Xavier’s philosophy of peaceful co-existence, the Morlocks criticize the “pretty”
X-Men for peddling their hypocritical, egalitarian platitudes among mutants who
cannot pass for regular humans and, as such, are not even shown “dignity an’
respect” by the X-Men themselves (14). Disappointingly, the accusations do not
move the X-Men in the least. The X-Man Nightcrawler, a blue-furred mutant
with demonic features, rhetorically undercuts the Morlock’s victim claims by
explaining that he lives by the creed that he be “judged by my deeds instead of my
looks” (14). Aligning himself with a conservative ideology of meritocracy,
Nightcrawler accuses the Morlocks of being victims of their own prejudices first
and foremost, chiding them for their own intolerance of non-mutant humans.

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Fig. 2. Page 14 of Uncanny X-Men #170, penciled by Paul Smith and inked by Bob
Wiacek. If there is an irony to be found in this confrontation, it is in the X-Men’s eventual
victory – the Morlocks are defeated by breaking Xavier’s commandment to never kill.

Despite the poverty in which the Morlocks live and their inability to pass
for non-mutants as most of the X-Men can – among the most prominent
Morlocks is a green child with no nose and a four-foot tall albino, neither of
whom have hair – these mutants are figured as villains as a direct result of their
refusal to conform to non-mutant norms. As a mutant success-story, and
especially as a similarly deformed mutant himself, Nightcrawler attacks the
Morlocks’ almost pathological reliance on their oppressions as a source of
identity. Indeed, the title of “the Morlocks” is itself an obvious allusion to the
underclass race of creatures in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. While this connection
might lend itself to a more complex recuperation of the wayward group of mutants,
their refusal to conform marks them indelibly as other in the X-Men’s universe – an
act which further legitimizes the X-Men as an acculturating force for good.
Speaking to the transgressive potential of super hero stories – especially those

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in which super heroes appropriate the language and imagery of racial minorities –
Regalado suggests that the “process of individual or group affirmation has often
entailed an objectification or vilification of ethnically or racially defined others”
(2005:86). Indeed, the personal goal of characters like the demonic Nightcrawler
or animalistic Wolverine is the denial of their mutant power’s resulting
freakishness and affirmation of their humanity. Importantly, this sense of
humanity is defined relative to the non-mutant norm, and their struggle to accept
themselves and be accepted by others also requires the rejection of the extreme
mutant otherness that the Morlocks embrace.
Internet critics Morpheus Reloaded and Julian Darius suggest that the X-
Men do not simply fail to achieve the political goals of social justice, but actively
oppose them. Rather than working diplomatically to resolve human-mutant
tensions, Morpheus and Darius criticize the X-Men for almost exclusively battling
“evil” mutants, thus restricting themselves to reactionary strikes against militant
mutant radicals like Magneto or the Morlocks. Describing the early X-Men stories
by Lee and Kirby as displaying a distinctly “white perspective” on black civil
rights-era politics, Morpheus notes that the X-Men are “at times more interested
in protecting humans from fellow mutants than dealing with that which oppresses
them…more interested in protecting their oppressors than fighting for their
freedom” (2003). Sounding a similar objection, Darius suggests, “the X-Men were
not revolutionary. In fact, they were explicitly counter-revolutionary. They were not
created to fight for civil rights; rather, they were created to fight against those who
did so” (2002). Indeed, while the X-Men have faced a number of non-mutant foes
and their racist offensives, the majority of their enemies are other mutants who
are punished for their refusal to participate in non-mutant society. The vilification
of characters like the Morlocks is an unavoidable result of the X-Men’s anti-
revolutionary, and even anti-mutant, politics.

3. Wolverine and the Model Reader

More so than any other mutant, James “Logan” Howlett – better known
as Wolverine – functions most explicitly to solicit and structure identification
from X-Men’s adolescent male readers. Appropriately, the character is also a fertile
site upon which to analyze the anxieties of race and gender at play in X-Men’s lead
characters. Self-described as “the best there is at what I do. But what I do
best...isn’t very nice”, Wolverine is a samurai-trained martial artist, a specially
trained military operative, and a drunken lout (Claremont, 1990:1). An Executive
Producer on the X-Men films, Tom DeSanto describes Wolverine as “the fan
favorite, in a lot of ways…Cut from the same mold as Steve McQueen, Clint
Eastwood, and that ilk, because he’s such an emotionally torn character, such a

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reluctant hero” (X-Men 1.5, 2002). DeSanto’s claim that Wolverine is “the fan
favorite” is not simple hyperbole. While there are currently three monthly X-Men
titles, Wolverine is the only character to have a starring role in each, as well as the
only X-Man with his own solo title and the only mutant on Marvel Comics’ all-
star super-team, the Avengers7.
Judith Halberstam suggests that “current representations of masculinity…
unfailingly depend on a relatively stable notion of the realness and the naturalness
of both the male body and its signifying effects”, and nowhere is this realness and
naturalness more super-humanly apparent than in the character and body of
Wolverine (1998:234). The writer of Uncanny X-Men and X-Treme X-Men for 23
years, Chris Claremont singles Wolverine out as the strongest point of
identification for his readers. Explains Claremont, “Wolverine is what every
adolescent wants to be. Strong, sure of himself, a sense of honor, a defined moral
code. I know what’s right, I know what’s wrong, I won’t take bull from anybody,
and I have the moxie, the ability, the character, and the body to pull it off” (X-
Men 1.5, 2002). Wolverine’s appeal is grounded in nostalgia for a morally absolute
brand of dangerous masculinity. As suggested by DeSanto’s invocation of
McQueen and Eastwood, Wolverine gestures toward the Hollywood era of “the
roving cowboy, bound to early libertarian codes of social action” and “augmented
by family or spouse substitutes”, and is nomadic, private, and self-sufficient (Ross,
2000:89). Appropriately, his out-of-costume attire resembles “Western wear” and
typically features bolo ties, jeans, and cowboy hats.
In the thirty-two years since his introduction, Wolverine’s character and
goals have changed very little. A mysterious loner with unexplained emotional
baggage when he first appeared, Wolverine is still in search of inner-peace and
self-actualization8. Claremont characterizes that which motivates Wolverine as “a
primal, elemental need that’s always been at the core of Wolverine’s being”
(1996:11). In fact, there is little reason to believe that any character or reader can
recall a time in which he was not Wolverine. At the end of Origin, a limited series
that revealed the untold story of Wolverine’s childhood, it is suggested that
Wolverine’s unchanging personality and incomplete memory are a function of his
mutant “healing factor”. A super-power that typically rescues him from physical
injuries, the healing factor can also mend emotional scars and psychological trauma.
Wolverine’s entry in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Wolverine explains
that “his healing factor ultimately eradicated most if not all of his memories of the
first eighteen years or so of his life”, and notes that his mind reacted similarly at
least once thereafter (Ronald and Moreels, 2004:2). Indeed, though he has been
killed, resurrected, and brainwashed since his introduction, Wolverine’s
personality remains largely unchanged. For all intents and purposes, Wolverine
has always been – and will always be – the rogue wanderer of Westerns.9
Wolverine’s absolutist world extends far beyond his sense of moral
action and cowboy ethic – as exemplified by the healing factor, biological

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absolutism similarly inflects his mutant super-powers. While the most obvious,
outward display of Wolverine’s power is in the retractable metal blades that
emerge from between his knuckles, these “claws” would cause Wolverine to bleed
to death if not for his ability to heal. The healing factor functions as a super-
human auto-immune response, granting Wolverine “the ability to regenerate
damaged or destroyed areas of his cellular structure at a rate far greater than that
of an ordinary human” at a speed varying “in direct proportion with the severity
of the damage Wolverine suffers” (Ronald and Moreels, 2004:10). Wolverine’s
body reconstitutes injuries according to an essential genetic template, a physical
form so particular in its specifications that removed or burnt body hair grows to
its prescribed length within moments. While Wolverine’s body has never been
required to regenerate entire limbs, Claremont’s narration explains that, “given
sufficient power, [Wolverine’s] entire body could be regenerated from the genetic
data encoded in a single cell, or drop of blood” (Claremont, 1987:36). His metal
skeleton the one exception, Wolverine’s healing factor rejects any surgical
alteration to his body, always restoring him to the form encoded in his DNA. As
such, Wolverine’s super-power also serves to essentialize his biological male-ness:
he is in peak physical condition, a natural hunter with heightened physical senses
and instincts (improved senses being another super-power), must constantly train
to be patient and keep his temper in check, and – thanks especially to the recent
X-Men movies – projects an animal magnetism that renders him irresistible to the
opposite sex. In other words, his very powers reinscribe the singular, biological,
and essential notion of traditional white maleness – a muscled, animalistic body
that, in addition to his moral code, serves to appeal directly to the desires of
adolescent male readers.
While it is important to recall that Wolverine’s masculinity is
dependent on his mutant biology and impossible to achieve outside his
fictional realm, the existence and success of characters like Wolverine confirm
the culturally pervasive desire for such essentialized representations of
maleness. In The Wimp Factor, Ducat suggests that “men’s fear of the feminine
is a conscious or unconscious psychological reality” for many men – a fear
that is alleviated through identification with Wolverine’s naturalized mutant
maleness (2004:25). This is not to say that Wolverine’s own identity cannot be
destabilized. Indeed, in the rare stories where Wolverine’s mutant powers have
been removed by artificial means and the stability of his uber-masculine body
disrupted, the effects are disastrous. Wolverine’s skeleton is surgically laced
with Adamantium metal, a highly toxic substance that would quickly poison
him if not for his mutant healing factor. In fact, it is only because the
Adamantium is constantly poisoning Wolverine that his healing factor cannot
operate at full capacity and his full mutation cannot be realized. Already super-
masculine, Wolverine mutates into an even more masculine, animalistic version
of himself when the metal is removed: faster healing, hairier, longer claws, and

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with less self-control.

Given the descriptions of anxious white masculinity as earlier listed, it also
seems appropriate that the villains who have twice bonded the metal to his
skeleton are themselves non-white: Lord Darkwind, a Japanese crime lord, and
En Sabah Nur – code-named Apocalypse – a Darwinian, would-be world
conqueror from Egypt who advocates the eradication of the human race. Indeed,
the Adamantium appears to function symbolically as a restriction placed on white
males by villainous minorities, aimed at denying the natural attributes of his white
masculinity. As such, Wolverine does not simply appropriate victim status from
ethnic minorities through X-Men’s mutant metaphor, as already described, but is
literally a victim of the minority characters that try to interfere with his hyper-
masculine mutant biology. Through Wolverine’s ordeals, the oppression of white
men is able to move beyond the abstract and highly dubious – for the reader, it
becomes truth undeniable.

4. Mutant Activism and the Reflexive Reader

In Grant Morrison’s 2001 “reboot” of New X-Men, the team abandons

their bright-colored superhero spandex and adopts black and yellow leather
uniforms that “look as if they were designed by Tommy Hilfiger” (Klock,
2002:175). Morrison’s change extends beyond the superficial, as in his first issue
Professor Xavier openly considers “better ways to encourage people to trust
mutants” (Morrison, 2002:14). Among these “better ways”, the X-Men expand
their mission to include mutant safe-houses and response teams around the globe,
outing the school and the X-Men’s mission with the understanding that “human
protests will fade when they see we have nothing to hide and much to offer
them” (2002:12). One of the original X-Men, the Beast questions why Professor
Xavier ever “had us dress up like superheroes anyway” – suggesting that the X-
Men have never been superheroes at all – to which Cyclops replies that “the
Professor thought people would trust the X-Men if we looked like something
they understood” (2002:14). The “people” to whom Cyclops alludes could be
either those regular humans that fear mutants or the readers who misidentify the
mutants as if they were exactly like the geek-turned-heroes Spider-man or Captain
America. Ironically, Xavier comes to recognize that he has contributing to the
misunderstanding of mutants by actively (mis)representing them as something
familiar and easily understood.
Appropriately, the artists hired to work with Morrison – especially Frank
Quitely and Igor Kordey – are reputed for drawing “ugly characters”. On the
discussion forum at Morrison’s website, Barbelith, a poster named deletia voices
a common criticism of Quitely’s work, charging that “his characters

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have these absurd faces, and increasingly seem to have one of a finite number of
absurd faces…I want my X-Men to be Sex-Men, darn it!” (2001). Accused of
deglamorizing beautiful characters like Jean Grey, Quitely and Kordey fill X-Men
with physically deformed, discolored, and visually unsettling mutants, perhaps best
exemplified by the mutants of the “Special Class”. The mutants of the Special Class
– not simply othered by their physical appearance but distanced from the other
students at Xavier’s because each has a power that is considered useless or wholly
undesirable – purposely resist identification from those readers who are used to
appropriating a romanticized mutanity through the beautiful characters drawn
previously by “pin-up” artists like Jim Lee or Marc Silvestri. While it is folly to use
the freakish – even by mutant standards – students in Morrison’s Special Class as a
representational standard to which all mutants must adhere, this decidedly
unromantic and unsexy approach provides perhaps a more fair allegory by which to
represent the effect of being “feared and hated” for deviance from the cultural
norm. This is not to equate the physical unattractiveness of these mutants literally
with the attractiveness of actual minorities – or, for that matter, to exoticize the
other in some grotesque way. Rather, it is to equate the treatment given the Special
Class by those regular humans and other mutants that deem them losers and
embarrassments with the treatment given those who are disempowered by those
who have privilege and power.
Morrison’s critique of his privileged readership does not end with the
representations and subsequent discourse on his new mutants. In critique of the
suggestion that being simply an intelligent and socially awkward comic book fan is
equivalent to being a mutant, Morrison’s fourth issue introduces the U-Men, an
organization whose members are regular humans that murder mutants and steal
their super-powered organs. As the issue opens, a self-described “geek” has shot a
classmate in order to steal his x-ray eyeballs. Dressed provocatively in a Magneto t-
shirt, the student holds an auditorium hostage while he describes the affinity that he
feels with mutants:
Anybody else want to sneer at my comic book collection? Anybody else
want to call me a geek? How about mocking my anime DVDs? Well?
Anybody want to complain about all the time I spend on the internet, or
my so-called ‘obsession’ with mutant culture? …See, I’m proud to be a
geek. …When I join the U-Men and have them [the eyeballs] implanted,
they’ll be my eyes. Welcome to a world where the weird are kings (Morrison,
2002:1-3).
The character John Sublime, CEO of a successful pharmaceutical company and
founder of the U-Men, explains that his organization is “about empowering the
different, celebrating the strange, and about taking that step into a new world”
(19). While Sublime’s benevolent rhetoric is undermined completely when his
U-Men kidnap several X-Men and attempt to steal Cyclops’ eyes, Morrison’s
point has already been made. The supposed “empowerment” of

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regular humans through the absorption of mutant power and culture occurs
through an act of appropriation that is unavoidably violent and deadly to the
mutants form which they steal it. The parallels that can be drawn between the U-
Men and those X-Men readers who would engage figuratively in equally damaging
practices of appropriation are painfully clear.

Fig. 3. Page 14 of New X-Men #114, penciled by Frank Quitely and inked by Tim
Townsend. Note the dark colors and quasi-militaristic design of the Quitely uniforms.

Though Morrison reveals that the X-Men could never be both super
heroes and social activists, the future and direction of the X-Men and their
comic book remain in flux. Though Morrison had Magneto killed, he returned
almost immediately; though his X-Men stopped acting or dressing like their
super peers, the costumes also returned. Current writer Joss Whedon’s
Astonishing X-Men proposes another option, one in which the X-Men wear
brightly colored costumes but play the role of super hero self-reflexively. “We
must give the ordinary humans respect, compliance, and understanding,”
explains the new co-headmaster of Xavier’s school, Emma Frost. “And we must
never mistake that for trust” (2004:10). Under Whedon, Cyclops makes

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battlefield decisions with an eye toward public perception and Wolverine spits the
word “super hero” as if it were pejorative.
In writing of the representational politics of race – and specifically with
regard to the manner in which white Americans represent and perform the other
within their art – E. Patrick Johnson asks, “has not the colonizer become more
humanized by the presence of the colonized? I suggest that some sites of cross-
cultural appropriation provide fertile ground on which to formulate new
epistemologies of self and Other” (2003:6). Indeed, having grown up on the
comics of Chris Claremont and subsequently praising Morrison’s work, it is hard
to imagine Whedon’s X-Men chastising the Morlocks. Instead, Whedon’s team
introduces a new type of mutant hero – these X-Men have returned to super
heroics but with a knowing wink to the reader. The X-Men have become a team
mistrustful of the very genre and politics within which it exists and participates.
While it is impossible to guess where the mutants will go from here, X-Men’s self-
reflexive characters are challenging their readers to become more aware of their
participation and politics. Consciously mediating and complicating their identities
as they refuse their readers a comfortable and merely entertaining experience, X-
Men is finally establishing a mode of anti-oppressive mutant activism.

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Notes:
1
This paper is based on a presentation delivered at the Northeast Popular Culture
Association’s annual conference in 2005, which was held at Sacred Heart
University in Fairfield, CT. The finished paper, more or less as you see it here,
was first published in The International Journal of Comic Art, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall
2006). The IJOCA website is located at http://www.ijoca.com/, though the
electronic version of issue 8.2 is not yet accessible.
2
These comic books include a number of monthly, quarterly, annual, “one-shot”,
and collected publications, the most abundant of which are Uncanny X-Men, X-
Men, X-Treme X-Men, New X-Men and Astonishing X-Men. For the purposes of
reading ease, I will refer to them collectively as X-Men when not speaking of one
or another in particular.
3
Specifically, in Julian Darius’ “X-Men is not an Allegory of Racial Tolerance”
and Lawrence Baron’s “X-Men as J Men”, respectively. See the references for
bibliographical details.
4
Both the characters and fans of X-Men sometimes contend that mutants should
be regarded as an altogether different species from humans, and those who do not

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often refer to mutants as a race of humans. Neither term is wholly applicable.

Though the genetic differences between mutants and humans suggest that the
two are different species, the rules of scientific classification contend that, since
mutants and humans can create fertile offspring, they must also be of the same
species.
5
It must be noted that the interpretation of internet demographics can be
uncharacteristic of offline trends as, for example, Pew Internet and American Life’s
2005 Tracking Survey reports that white Americans are about 20% more likely to
regularly use the internet than black Americans.
6
For a detailed history on the evolution of the retail market for comic books
from newsstands, to supermarkets, to specialty stores, I recommend reading
Robert Beerbohm’s column “Comics Reality”, available online at:
http://members.aol.com/ComicBkNet/reality.htm.
7
Given Wolverine’s prominence in the first three X-Men films – which have
grossed $1 billion in box office receipts internationally – and the star-status that
his character has lent Hugh Jackman, it would be reasonable to suggest that
Wolverine’s mind-share among superheroes is surpassed only by iconic comic
book super heroes such as Spider-man, Batman, and Superman.
8
It seems as appropriate here as elsewhere to be mindful of the important role
that X-Men’s periodical publication plays in maintaining Wolverine’s character and
failing to resolve the problems that mutants face. As a serial with no foreseeable
conclusion, the interest of readers is maintained through a recurring cycle of
threats and near escapes.
9
Recently, Wolverine has regained these memories and is in search of more clues
as to his lost identity in the 2006 mini-series Wolverine: Origins.

Neil Shyminsky is a Ph.D. student in the Social and Political Thought

programme at York University in Toronto, where his research interests are
focused on representations of white masculinity in contemporary North
American popular culture. He has moderated the X-Universe Message Board at
Comicboards.com for nearly a decade and credits the board and its community
for his fascination with comic books and their readers.

IJOCA 8.2, Fall 2006