Posted : 2014
Author : Mark Allen
Those sticky, icky
moments from characters' pasts that deserve to be buried deep in a forest
somewhere. Most comic book
origin stories are silly beyond belief: an alien sent from a dying world to
another with foster parents that look exactly like him? Toxic waste granting
blindness and super-senses in one go (not to mention turning pet shop escapees
into fearsome martial artists)? And if they’re not terrifically dumb, then
they’re relentlessly bleak: there are more orphans in the DC and Marvel
Universes than in every production of Annie combined.
Silliness and
morbidity are one thing, but it’s the origin stories that make uncomfortable
statements about sex, race and the characters themselves that really take
things to an awkward place. Because many of the most famous characters in
comics history have origins dating back to the mid-20th century, there can be a
lot of wacky and politically dodgy subtexts (and sometimes just straight up
texts) that were born from a less tolerant and more exploitative age.
Another problem
seems to be the consistently inconsistent universes these characters inhabit –
the creators need to keep telling stories about them, but they can only pile so
high before the contradictions start caving in on themselves. They’re easy
fixes for an editor with an eagle eye and a tactful way with words, which is
why it’s so strange that some origins have managed to persist for so long. The following is a
list of 7 characters who have pasts they (and most fans who know about them)
wish could be swept under the rug – or simply just retconned – as soon as
superhumanly possible…
7. Luke Cage
The first black
superhero to get his own major live-action series, Luke Cage will be hitting
Netflix some time in 2015 or 2016, and that’s quite a milestone for Marvel. A
relatively low-profile, street-level character in the Marvel U until recently,
Cage started out running Heroes For Hire with Iron Fist before breaking out on
his own and later fathering a child with Jessica Jones and leading the Avengers
for a spell. Not bad for a guy whose only real power is having unbreakable
skin, right? But how did he get
that skin? By being subjected to prison experiments that were trying to rip off
Captain America’s
super soldier serum, that’s how. Cage was created in 1972, a time when
blaxploitation movies were all the rage and Marvel wanted to jump on the
bandwagon. So they created a black former criminal hero with thick skin and a
streetwise attitude, which is just a little too on the nose. Cage is actually
pretty lucky: he’s an interesting enough character (pragmatic but also heroic,
a family man but also a badass) that his somewhat cynical origin story doesn’t
harm him too much.
6. Iron Fist
When you think of
movie actors who use martial arts, who springs to mind? Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan,
Donnie Yen, Jet Li, all of those guys, right? How about when you think of comic
characters? Shang-Chi aside, it’s pretty slim pickings for Asians in the Marvel
U and you’re left with the likes of Colleen Wing, White Tiger and Danny Rand,
The Immortal Iron Fist. Rand’s acquisition
of the Iron Fist mantle goes a little something like this: his father, Wendell,
discovered the mystical city of K’un
L’un when he was a young man, and took Danny and his
mother with him on an expedition back to the city so he could show them.
Unfortunately both of his parents were killed en route and Danny remained in
the city to study martial arts under the tutelage of Lei Kung. Danny quickly
outshines the rest of the native students and attains the power of the Iron
Fist by defeating the dragon Shou-Lao, shortly thereafter returning to New York City to fight
crime and be a billionaire. It’s not an uncool
story, but it stinks of White Messiah Syndrome, with Rand being able to swiftly
rise above the native inhabitants of K’un L’un in addition to possessing the
wealth and privilege his colour and heritage have afforded him. Many people have
questioned whether Marvel’s Iron Fist Netflix series should star a white,
blond-haired actor as Rand is represented in the comics or make their universe
more diverse by changing Rand to an
Asian-American character. The petition started by 18 Million Rising has had
great support from fans all over.
5. Black Cat
Kevin Smith has a
love/hate relationship with the comics he writes. He loves making them, but the
fans hate reading them. Well, that might be a little bit of an exaggeration
(unless you’re going by the response to The Widening Gyre), but Smith is a
pretty divisive figure in most everything he does, and his take on Spider-Man
and the Black Cat is no different. In her original
origin story, Felicia Hardy is raised by her father who claims to be a
travelling salesman but is actually a jewel thief. He encourages her to follow
her dreams and is a pretty great role model (except the whole cat burglar
thing), but he’s soon locked away for his nighttime activities. So Felicia
decides to follow in his footsteps and aims to break her dad out of prison, but
he dies before she gets a chance. And then she meets Spidey, who up until then
is the only man she trusts (except her recently deceased pa). All that’s fine.
Pretty great, in fact, because Felicia gets to tell her own story and choose
who she wants to be. But in Smith’s retcon of her origin he makes her a victim
of rape at college who doesn’t get to have her revenge on her attacker, stealing
her agency away from her and redirecting her motivations away from her desires.
In the comic Smith tries to assert that she’s taking control of her destiny,
but all he’s done is shackled Felicia to her past in a very, very icky way.
4. Madelyne Pryor
So here’s the
thing: Jean Grey has committed suicide after becoming Dark Phoenix and killing
five billion people and Scott Summers (aka Cyclops) is pretty torn up about it
all. Naturally. Taking a break from superheroics, he visits his grandparents in
Alaska and meets a cargo pilot named Madelyne
Pryor who bears a strange resemblance to Jean and who also survived a plane
crash on the day that the Phoenix
died on the moon. The two start a
romance and are quickly married and pregnant, with Scott eventually leaving the
X-Men to live with her and their son Nathan (aka Cable – more on him later) in Alaska. Unfortunately
for Maddy, Jean Grey is soon resurrected and Scott leaves his wife and infant
son without a word to be reunited with his dead girlfriend. It later turns out
that Madelyne was a clone of Jean created by Mr Sinister so that he could
obtain a child of selective breeding between the Phoenix and Scott. Wow. Madelyne’s
origin is incredibly convoluted and muddles not only her own story but also
Jean’s and Scott’s (he’s really not much of a hero by the point he abandons her
and Nathan) and was the result of an editorial mandate that brought Jean back
to life. Longtime Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont envisioned it all
differently, letting Madelyne be her own person without a secret history that
Scott could have a child and retire from supreheroics with, which sounds far,
far better for a comic as rotational and progressive as X-Men used to be.
3. Cable
Poor Cable. From
his messed-up conception by Scott Summers and the clone of his dead girlfriend
Jean Grey to his time-travelling, alternate-history-brother killing adventures,
Nathan Christopher Charles Summers never had much of a chance, did he? As mentioned in the
last point, Nathan Summers was never meant to be a superhero, but a part of
Scott Summers’ life in retirement. That all changed when Jean Grey came back
into the fold and he and his mother were forced to have crazy storylines in
order justify their existence. As a result, Madelyne became the Goblin Queen
and Nathan fell victim to a virus for which the only cure was being sent to the
future to live with a tribe called the Askani. When Nathan Summers
returned to the present as the telepathic and telekinetic mutant Cable, he was
older than both of his parents and was tasked with halting the rise of
Apocalypse so that the future he came from wouldn’t be quite so bleak. As cool as time
travel is, it seems rather uncomfortable for Cable to be hanging around the
present with his father who’s younger than him and once abandoned he and his
mother. By this point in his life Nathan must have more complexes than a Freud
textbook, so it’s hardly any wonder he likes blowing things up so damn much.
2. Wonder Woman
It’s not like
Princess Diana of Themyscira has a particularly strange origin compared to that
of other superheroes. It’s just that…well, you’ll see. After growing up in a
tribe of women called the Amazons on Paradise
Island, Diana comes
across downed pilot Steve Trevor and fights for the right to take him back to
‘Man’s World’. She is quickly enthralled by the place and wishes to stay in it
to fight crime and be with Steve, who she’s in love with because of course she
is. We’ve all heard
stranger stories than that, and it sounds like it would be fine for a one-off
story in which a woman who’s never met a man falls for the first one she sees
only to find out he’s a cad when she brings him back home in the context of all
the other men in the world, but Trevor never turns out be a bad guy and so
Wonder Woman is perpetually stuck in that pubescent phase of being all doe-eyed
about her first boyfriend. That and the
remoteness of her origin with the Amazons make her a hard character to really
relate to, other than the idea of moving into a big city for the first time.
And the acquisition of her secret identity (she swaps names with a nurse
called Diana Prince who looks exactly like her and wants to move to South America) feels incredibly flimsy, almost like an
afterthought by the writer, William Moulton Marston. He wanted (and was
encouraged by his wife) to create a female superhero who resolves conflicts
“with love”, but that’s not exactly what he ended up with.
1. Professor X
Charles Xavier led
something of an adventurous life before he settled into his wheelchair and role
as the headmaster of his school for gifted youngsters. It was on one of these Indiana Jones-esque
excursions deep within caverns in a foreign country that he encountered the
villain Lucifer, who caused a cave-in that cost Xavier the use of his legs.
That might seem like a less than exciting revelation for a character so key to
the X-Men universe, but the cause of Professor X’s disability being slightly
boring isn’t the weirdest thing in his history. It’s rarely
repeated these days, but early on in the X-Men’s history, Charles Xavier was in
love with the then 15-year old Jean Grey. The latest recruit to his team of
mutant teenagers, Xavier worried about Jean being in danger not just because of
a concern for all youngsters, but because of a very creepy desire to be with
her that was revealed in X-Men #3. Reading this into
the rest of his actions towards Jean and the X-Men is an exercise in weirdness,
so we’d really rather Charles’ self-confession never happened so that the
leader of the X-Men can have always had a platonic relationship with his
students…
~Blog Admin~
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