With the recent release of the “X-Men ’97” trailer, the online discourse on whether the iconic mutant team serves as an allegory for social justice has resurfaced.
The upcoming show, a continuation of the beloved 1990s cartoon “X-Men: The Animated Series,” has sparked both praise and criticism over its expected progressive themes. Controversy arose when an Empire Magazine article revealed that the shape-shifting Morph will now be portrayed as “nonbinary,” despite being a male in the original series and comic book source material.
Taking aim at fans critical of the Disney reboot, the official X-Men Updates account on X claimed the social media uproar over the character’s gender change was due to bigotry and hatred.
“The X-Men have and will always be symbols for inclusion and diversity. If you’re a bigot and have a problem with that, you’re not an X-Men fan and you don’t understand the slightest thing about them,” the post reads.
While we usually don’t comment on people’s opinions, the amount of ignorant bigotry and hate comments that have spewed from Morph being Nonbinary in the series, we will be blocking those that can’t be respectful.
No one is forcing you to follow us or watch the show. 🙂
— X-Men Updates (@XMenUpdate) February 15, 2024
While many have interpreted the X-Men as an allegory for victims of racism over the years, Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee debunked this myth himself.
“I’ve always tried to do our stories so that it didn’t matter if you were of the white race, the black race, the brown race or whatever,” he said in a 2017 documentary. “So social issues, I try to get in the background or underlaying a plot, but never to the point of letting it interfere with the story or hitting the reader over the head.”
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Instead of lecturing his audience, Lee knew he had to create compelling characters that readers could see themselves in, regardless of their skin color or other attributes.
In a 2007 radio interview, Lee said he wasn’t intentionally addressing discrimination in his work.
“Now, take the X-Men. I was just originally trying to get an interesting group of characters with interesting powers, and I thought it would make it twice as interesting if the public really didn’t like them that much and if they had to worry about their reception by the outside world,” he said.
“Little by little I began getting mail saying how great it is that I’m doing these stories about bigotry and the evils of bigotry and so forth and race hatred,” Lee continued. “And I guess I was doing that, but I was doing it subconsciously. That wasn’t the main purpose.”
During the radio program, Lee also addressed the idea that the X-Men have been construed as an allegory for homophobia. When asked whether that comparison was his original intent in creating the X-Men six decades ago, he replied, “No, it was the furthest thing from my mind.”
Both audio clips were shared in a recent video posted by YouTuber and Rippaverse Comics founder Eric July.
A common misconception is that the characters of Professor X and Magneto were based on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively. The mutant rivals, however, were not originally intended to be stand-ins for the two civil rights leaders, as Lee had previously indicated. This was the case, despite the fact that Marvel published “X-Men #1” in September 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement.
Ultimately, recurring themes of oppression did not make their way into X-Men issues until Chris Claremont helmed the series well over a decade later.
But even Claremont, who wrote the definitive X-Men run from 1975 to 1991, said his stories weren’t inspired by or representative of the civil rights movement. Instead, his work was influenced by Jewish figures and antisemitic oppression.
“There’s a lot of talk online now that Magneto stands in for Malcolm X and Xavier stands in for Martin Luther King, which is totally valid but for me, being an immigrant white (Claremont was born in England), to make that analogy felt incredibly presumptuous,” Claremont told Empire in 2016.
“An equivalent analogy could be made to [Israeli prime minister] Menachem Begin as Magneto, evolving through his life from a terrorist in 1947 to a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years later,” he said. “That evolution was something I wanted to apply to the relationship between Xavier and Magneto.”
Thus, Lee and Claremont both shut down the woke left’s claims that the X-Men are direct stand-ins for civil rights, gay rights or social justice more broadly.
The superhero team is rather an allegory for oppression that applies to all people who feel like outsiders in the world, regardless of which social group one belongs to or identifies with.
Left-leaning progressives don’t have a monopoly on the X-Men, as much as they’d like to.
