Iceman Gets the Blues in Marjorie Liu’s and Walta’s Astonishing X-Men
Transcript:
Introduction
I got Marvel Unlimited which meant that I had to read ALL THE COMICS. Which I did. And I got to Marjorie Liu’s run on Astonishing X-Men.
At the time, the only thing that got it remarked was the Northstar wedding. Now I find it frustrating that Marvel editorial and marketing managed to make it feel as if they were handling a run-of-the-mill attention grabbing, yet politically safe, story and not actually the real deal.
Because the Northstar issues are really good. They are everything a superhero comic should be. They are action packed and funny, with great art by Perkins. They’re filled with little nuggets of continuity inside-jokes, interesting applications of the superpowers, melodramatic reveals of hitherto unknown siblings and are otherwise filled with big emotions. It’s as if they’re made by consummate professionals, with visions for the characters they write and draw.
At the same time they’re what so few superhero comics actually are.
There’s little that goes to waste. Lines, interactions and reactions get reincorporated later on. We look at the fallout of plots that seemed to have been resolved and done with. This creates a storied world, not just a layered one and leaves off the feeling that those stories don’t stop when the comic is over.
They have really, really smart usages of the comic book medium and its language in ways that don’t really attract attention to themselves.
It feels incredibly timely, even if it was coming out six years ago. For example an external conflict that bookends the series is Jean-Paul’s imminent extradition at the hands of the U.S. authorities, on account of him being a mutant immigrant. With a cameo by full-on lawyer mode Jenn Walters.
Characters act in believable fashions. When Northstar first asks Kyle Jinadu in marriage, Kyle refuses. He recognises that Northstar does it to fill a gap in their relationship, a void created by the laws of the United States and Northstar’s superheroic lifestyle. This doesn’t ruin the relationship, it just complicates it. It makes them need a bit of time out to figure things out. They take it and they end up acting like reasonable adults that are in love. Or as much as people in love can be reasonable.
But I don’t think I would’ve wanted to write about the series were it not the storyline between Astonishing X-Men #52 and #55, focused on Bobby Drake. Also known as Iceman…
How depression usually comes off in comics
For a while there was this genre of webcomics. It was very popular especially on Tumblr. Almost universally they claimed to show what depression was like. Almost universally they represented it as a debilitating affliction, often instantiated as a monstrous shadow grappling onto the main character, preventing her to speak, to share, to enjoy. This anhedonia didn’t result from trauma, from disruptive social conditions, from people in her life mistreating and abusing her. It wasn’t even something internal to the the character, her brain chemistry, her thought patterns, her lifestyle. Rather it came from this demonic force. Outside anyone’s reach, yet holding a life in its grasp.
This is how it can feel. It’s shackling, disempowering and alienating. It’s a good start trying to get empathy for the people suffering in a climate that too often puts all the pressure on the individual to fix themselves. Where people think that just eating right, talking a walk and thinking happy thoughts will make it all go away.
But succumbing fully to the view of depression as a monster or as a literal physical affliction or whatever other metaphor is used, can be enabling for a certain kind of depressed person. Especially, but not exclusively a male person.
This is what Marjorie Liu and Gabriel Hernandez Walta are exploring in those four issues. And they do it in a way I don’t think I’ve seen in another comic, mainstream, underground or alternative.
What makes Astonishing X-Men different
The seeds for the plot are planted since the beginning of the run. Iceman overextends himself, is almost killed by a rampaging colleague, his relationship with Kitty isn’t really the kind that movies are made out of, especially since she always seems to slip away into her love for Colossus, the kind of love Bobby cannot really hope to touch. Oh, and a Beast from an alternate dimension plants a literal Apocalypse Seed into Iceman.
In Claremontian fashion there’s an accumulation of tensions and background details that take their time getting into the foreground. Even the inciting incident is innocuous enough.
During a cold wave, all of Bobby’s former girlfriends apparently get prank-called to meet him in a cafe at the same time. It’s a bit funny, it’s a bit awkward. Thanks to the incident Bobby finds out Opal, one his exes is in town on a books tour. So he tries to reconnect, kinda creepily. But he can’t. He sees her successes as an author, as a mother like attacks on himself. And they can’t remain just friends, even though there’s really nothing else they could be at this point in their lives. It’s not really affection or romance that he want, it’s to feel like a man. To have the women in his life make him feel like a man.
Suddenly Thor announces the Fimbulvetr, the great winter that preludes Ragnarok. The weather is getting worse all over the world. All of Iceman’s former girlfriends disappear in icy circumstances. But it’s not him doing it. Or not quite.
The Apocalypse Seed is taking over the x-man and parts of his psyche inhabiting ice forms are out trying to protect what he loved, from what he’ll become. But they can’t. In a state of depersonalization they’re only able to watch impotent and horrified. Seeing himself from the outside, hurting those he cares for, not caring anymore.
There’s a thrill in not caring. There’s a thrill in turning cruel, in saying things you know are false, things that are wrong, things that are hurtful. Because you’ve had this hurt inside of you for all that time that it’s almost like you are the pain, you are the absence in your chest and you want them to know that there’s something missing, that there’s something they haven’t been giving you. But you can’t. The hurt is you and you can only hurt.
At first you didn’t want to ask for help, you were trying to man up. And some of the people around you were expecting it from you as well. Then the pain started to make you deaf to the cries of others, blind to their wounds, incapable of pointing to your own. To you it seems that they are the ones who don’t want to help. They are the ones who don’t care. This only feeds into itself and at some point the suffering gives in to rage.
So Iceman grows larger and larger and the world grows colder and colder as the catastrophizing male ego erupts and wishes the annihilation of everything. He is power without self-worth. He is every little disappointment and resentment blown up. The frustration over all the absurd, contradictory wishes and drives that he cannot let go of. The self-loathing that must be performed and demonstrated with violence.
After his colleagues intervene, after Thor manages to pull the Apocalypse Seed out of him, it turns out it wasn’t such a big influence. The seed only acted as a catalyst, if that. If it weren’t for it there would’ve been something else. There would’ve been liquor or drugs or video games or obsessive posting on internet boards. Something the unconscious will use to dull the conscious mind for long enough that the apocalyptic conclusions will make sense. Any little bit of pleasure that can be turned into a little bit of poison will have done the job.
And by that point there’s more than enough poison. Poisoned thoughts, poisoned behaviours that gained a life of their own, represented as a monstrous ice form. Iceman is the one that needs to step up to fight the beast that grew from inside him. Just because he cannot do it alone, that doesn’t mean it’s not his responsibility. And just because it’s unjust to ignore the environment and various systems individuals operate in, it doesn’t mean that some individuals don’t have more power to change those systems than others.
Against the giant ice kaiju burying the world under ice, Iceman is the most powerful. Not only in physical terms, but mentally. To fight it is to stop believing all the things that are false, that are wrong, that are hurtful. Shedding the ice that makes him hard and strong. Accepting the vulnerability that comes with being just flesh and bone. Even if that means living as a man, knowing what is like to be a demon.
Slaying the monster doesn’t end it all. Bobby will never be the same. Thank god. The monster didn’t grow out of nowhere. And what he did, cannot be brushed aside. The people he hurt are still wounded. The coldness is just abated, never completely dispelled. The story doesn’t end when comic is over.
Conlusion
I’m amazed at how naturally Marjorie Liu used the X-Men and their mythos as metaphors, at how perfectly she makes their powers, their iconography, their names fit her thematic concerns. If this were an original series, you’d say that even Kitty’s intangibility powers are stretching things a bit and that Iceman and the Apocalypse Seed were too on the nose. Yet she stepped into this decades long cycle of stories and out of a quite silly crossover she elegantly wrote the strongest story in her run. I’m not amazed that Gabriel Hernandez Walta had to draw another series about sad superheroes, this time written by a man, for people to recognise just how tremendously good he’s at that.
The whole run is really good, one of the best modern X-Men series of stories. It’s got big superhero storylines, touching and tragic shorter pieces, fun night-in-the town issues. And it’s always pushing the characters forward, bringing new aspects and layers to them, instead of obsessing over a bygone era. But the Iceman arc is one of the best superhero comics of the past few decades and it could very well stand on its own.
