Despite the promise to back off pushing politics, Marvel can’t help but showcase its disdain for all things conservative. Case-in-point: the new X-Men Gold comic written by Marc Guggenheim, which features the heroes torturing a new villain, a top conservative terrorist.
In the first issue, a new character is introduced — Lydia Nance — in an interview on “The Fact Channel.” Nance is the director of the Heritage Initiative and as comic book artist Matt Battaglia points out in his article at The Federalist, it is “a barely disguised stand-in for the Heritage Foundation,” the conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C.
The writing paints Nance as “pointedly anti-mutant,” Battaglia says, and she is the subject of a conversation between Captain America and now-X-Men leader Kitty Pryde.
“Lydia Nance. She heads the Heritage Initiative. They call themselves a “think tank,” but if you were to ask me…” Cap begins.
“They’re a bunch of anti-mutant racists,” interjects Pryde.
In another scene, some X-Men are watching Nance’s appearance on television as she says, “There are twenty times as many mutants, inhumans, and enhanced individuals in the United States than there are in the rest of the world. That’s a burden our country shouldn’t disproportionately have to bear… Let’s get back to the idea of mutants living with their own kind.”
One mutant asks, “How long, do you think? Until they kick us all out?”
What happens next is best explained by Battaglia:
It’s later revealed that Lydia Nance and the Heritage Initiative planned and funded the terrorist attacks to get the public to hate mutants so they can start deporting them. The X-Men discover her scheme, break into her home, assault her, and vow to bring her to justice. What justice?
Public exposure. Not exposure of specific deeds, but of her lack of virtue. This is key: Kitty doesn’t threaten the “Heritage Initiative” chief with publicly revealing her instigation of kidnapping, terrorism, etc. — she threatens to reveal she’s a bigot! In Guggenheim’s new take on the X-Men, actual criminal acts are less damning than wrongthink.
Compare that to a similar storyline from a 1987 X-Men comic when the heroes set out to torture a murderer, as retold by Battaglia:
Rachel invaded the home of the immortal mutant-vampire Selene, to torture and kill her. If anyone had it coming, it was Selene, who subsisted on the murder of innocents over millennia. Rachel had Selene cornered and was about to murder the villain, when a badly wounded Wolverine showed up to dissuade Rachel from the deed.
Rachel refused to listen — Selene deserved it, she said. Logan responded that this isn’t what heroes are. Then he warned Rachel: he would do whatever it took to stop this murder, even of Selene. Rachel dared him to try. The issue ends with a full panel reading: “SNIKT.” That’s the special-effects sound for Wolverine popping his claws.
Thirty years later, Rachel gets her way. And the X-Men are on board.
But that’s to be expected when the comic series plays loose with identity politics and makes Iron Man a teenage black girl, Miss America a queer Latina, and Ms. Marvel a Muslim. It’s no wonder Marvel comics sales continue to drop. But that’s of no consequence to the powers that be that have promised, “Our new heroes are not going anywhere!”
