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Wolverine and X-Force writer Benjamin Percy says the X-Men titles reflect positive cultural shifts in society, and are here to stay.
Recent social movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter have led to positive cultural shifts in society, and a writer of Marvel’s X-Men titles has cited the current X-titles as reflective of these progressive movements.
Wolverine and X-Force writer Benjamin Percy compared the current crop of X-books to those very initiatives. “What you see with [the storylines] Dawn of X and Reign of X is that it’s reflective of larger cultural shifts going on right now,” Percy said at Comic-Con@Home’s virtual Marvel Comics: X-Men panel Friday. “So whether it’s Black Lives Matter or Me Too, a lot of people are standing up and saying, ‘That’s enough.'”
Marvel’s X-Men franchise took a dramatic turn in 2019 when writer Jonathan Hickman took over as the titles’ lead writer. In Hickman’s original Powers of X and House of X mini-series, the living island of Krakoa became a sovereign nation, home to all the world’s mutants. The development allowed mutants to finally have equal status to humans, no longer subject to the bigotry they had faced across the globe. The change in the mutant status quo was arguably the largest and most lasting change in the franchise’s history.
“Some of the best speculative stories are channeling cultural unease,” Percy said. “You can look to [Mary Shelley’s] Frankenstein in the way that it is born out of the industrial revolution, and people playing God. In the same way, it would always be a great time to write X-Men and be a part of the X-Men.”
First created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, The X-Men had long served as an allegory to racism and bigotry against minorities. The peaceful and equality-seeking Professor Charles Xavier had often been compared to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., while his arch-nemesis Magneto, who sought world domination by mutants, was likewise compared to activist Malcolm X. The recent shift in the X-titles aligns with the franchise’s historical parallel with societal and cultural trends regarding tolerance and acceptance.
In another game-changing move, recent developments in the X-Men titles saw Krakoa’s governing body terraform the planet Mars and make it the new home of its relocated sister nation Arakko.
“That kind of paradigm shift which you see reflected in what we’re doing in our various series is something that is here to stay,” Percy concluded.
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