Marvel is actually doing something really cool at the moment. They seem to be making a concerted effort to reprint Chris Claremont’s celebrated Uncanny X-Men run in oversized hardcover, which is really awesome – Claremont’s run on the title pushed it from the cusp of cancellation to a book published twice monthly, and pretty much set up the template for the franchise’s domination of the nineties comic book market. If you ask a regular person on the street to name something they associate with the X-Men – from Wolverine’s iconic characterisation to those blue and cold uniforms to the Phoenix to the weird aliens to bad futures to the blue-and-gold uniforms – chances are that they came from Claremont.
While the original Uncanny X-Men Omnibus was published way back in 2006, the last year or so has seen the release of a large number of oversized hardcovers, with the promise of more to come. Between both volumes of the Claremont/Lee Omnibus editions, Fall of the Mutants, X-Tinction Agenda, The Mutant Massacre, The Asgardian Wars, Inferno and even The Dark Phoenix Saga, that’s a significant portion of Claremont’s impressive seventeen years on the title. Sure, the rest of his run with John Byrne is yet to be collected in the format, along with his work with John Romita Jr., but these hardcovers have allowed me to jump into Claremont’s celebrated run and get a feel for the “definitive” X-Men writer.
And I have to admit to being quite stunned at the sheer volume of weird kinky pseudo-sexual fetishes acting themselves out throughout Claremont’s run, which seems to be something of a secret among comic book fans – you very rarely see it brought up, at least in serious discussions of the writer’s work. I’d heard one or two jokes and obviously the most famous stories of Claremont’s era involve these sorts of elements – he did, after all, create Emma Frost and introduce the Hellfire Club, and The Dark Phoenix Saga was the result of a sustained attempt to “dominate” Jean Grey.
However, nothing prepared me for the sheer weirdness of the antics going on between the pages. Being a Marvel comic book, there was not really any nudity or anything explicit… but there’s some fairly kinky stuff happening. Off the top of my head:
- Magneto’s revenge against the X-Men for being turned into a baby is to trap them in some weird “age play” game with a robotic Nanny
- the sheer volume of characters over the course of the run who seek to “subjugate” Storm, including established characters like Loki and Doctor Doom
- while the Hand’s conditioning of Psylocke owes a lot to Frank Miller’s Daredevil, why was the character’s body altered and her regular attire changed (especially since she dressed relatively conservatively before this)
- the inevitable stripper-iffic “evil” costume change for characters who indulge their darker sides – Jean Grey, Madelyn Pryor, Alex Summers, among others
- the repeated use of what might be termed “mind rape”
- Masque’s ability to remold flesh, explicitly used to objectify Callisto
- a second unrelated “Nanny” who uses “pixie-dust” to coerce the X-Men into playing along with her “age play” fantasies
- Worm’s ability to cover people in a translucent gel and make them do his bidding
- the entire “Siege Perilous” storyline, which sees the X-Men having their memories wiped and then dumping the team around the world; including a brainwashed Alex Summers
- the Shadow King rendering humans as his pet “beasts” and dressing them in what could be generously described as “gimp” attire
- Rahne’s obvious attraction to a wolf-prince of Asgard, while he is in wolf-form
- Pretty Boy’s non-too-subtle insinuations about forcing himself on just about any female
- the “inter-species relationship” between Charles and Liliandra, arguably more explicit than Lois and Clark, if only because she has feathers
Before I continue, I should make two things clear. The first is that I have now issue with S & M. Whatever anybody does in the bedroom is their own business, as long as it’s consensual. There’s a tendency to demonise fetishes that we don’t understand, and I don’t intend to do that – what fascinates people is their own concern. I think that the taboo around these things is part of the reason I’ve never really seen Claremont’s recurring “fetish” imagery discussed – I think that it’s too easy to either dismiss it as a joke, or to ignore it for fear of causing offense. I want to do neither.
The second thing I wish to make clear is that I hugely admire Claremont as a writer. Sure, he has his artistic hiccups, but he’s mostly aware of them – after all, his first cameo has his artist advising him to shut up and run, while Claremont delivers a purple prose monologue. Claremont doesn’t get the credit he deserves, in treating comics as a long-form narrative, seeding and developing threads across a seventeen-year run, and not only finding a way to make the mutants relevant, but never allowing his writing to get too comfortable. Reading his stories all these years later, his writing seems in-tune with modern sensibilities, suggesting things like a biological arms race, years before that would form the backbone of Mark Millar’s Ultimates, and being one of the first writers to pick up on the success of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.
More than that, though, it was Claremont who developed the “mutants-as-persecuted-minority” theme we still see today, and reinvented Magneto as a Mandela analogue. In fact, Claremont was way ahead of his time. I remember reading that he wanted to reveal that Mystique was Nightcrawler’s father. That raises all sorts of transgender rights issues and plot points. After all, if Mystique is able to create sperm, she’s not technically female, and merely chooses to associate herself with that gender idea, rather than being born to it. In an era where we’re still struggling with an individual’s right to assign their own gender, that idea seems way ahead of its time. So, credit where credit is due. Chris Claremont has made an outstanding contribution.
However, it’s hard to turn ten pages in the writer’s work without hitting some sort of strange pseudo-sexual imagery. It’s quite surprisingly potent for a book that was aimed at teenagers (and, arguably, children). I wonder if this sort of kinky content was part of the allure to younger readers, something that made them feel a little “naughty”, and gave the title a significantly sharper edge than, say, Captain America or Spider-Man. I’m not arguing that this content is inherently bad, or anything like that, I’m just remarking that I found the sheer volume of it rather stunning.
You could argue that Claremont was really just continuing to apply the Silver Age trope that were dying out by the time he took the job. After all, he would have grown up with images like Superman transforming into a weird Lion-Man thing, or Jimmy Olsen marrying a Gorilla. That sort of crazy comic book nonsense is pretty much nowhere to be found these days, at least not in doses quite so concentrated. You could make a very credible argument that Claremont was continuing that sort of spirit, but updating it for a new generation. In fact, you could suggest that we’re only reading the “kinky” stuff into it because or culture has grown so jaded and cynical. In fact, you might suggest that Claremont’s writing is a lot more innocent than our filthy minds might make it seem.
I can respect such an argument, but I’m not convinced. After all, there’s no way that any Silver Age villainess could have gotten away with as much leather or as many studs as Selene, or that Emma Frost would have been welcome in Silver Age Superman. While there’s an undeniable sexual and bondage subtext to Marston’s Wonder Woman, an aspect of the character that is more often discussed than anything Claremont did to his X-Men, Wonder Woman might as well have been wearing a loose-fitting tracksuit compared to Psylocke or the Goblin Queen. When the badguys hypnotised Superman, they never dressed him in barely-there leather while part of him enjoyed the subjugation.
It’s equally possible that this is just sexism at play. After all, superhero comics aren’t generally renowned for their feminism undertones. The genre gave us the term “fridging”, after all. There is a lot of disturbing sexism to be found in some later X-Men stories. Look at what happened to Psylocke when Claremont finished his run. It has been argued that Matt Fraction’s The List one-shot was a feminist-nightmare retelling of Don’t Mess With the Zohan. So there is something to said for that argument. Maybe Claremont just put sexy women in corsets and stockings because he liked sexy women in corsets and stockings, objectifying them.
I don’t buy this argument for a moment. It’s worth noting that (a.) a lot of this stuff is gender neutral (eg. Worm and Masque target women and men, with Alex even getting his own special outfit for Inferno) and (b.) all this objectification came from bad guys (ie. Claremont was unequivocable: being turned into a thong-wearing nudity-prone assassin was not a good thing). Claremont populated his writing with strong female characters, and Uncanny X-Men was way ahead of its time in its portrayal of comic book heroines, who existed as real characters rather than set decorations. I refuse to believe that simple sexism was an element for Claremont. I can’t dispute it for some of the artists and writers who might have worked with him or after him, but I don’t think the label could be applied to Claremont himself.
It is worth noting that Claremont’s Hellfire Club does have some historical precedent, particularly in Ireland and Great Britain, where the members got up to all sorts of shenanigans, not necessarily of a puritan nature. As an aside of an aside, it’s interesting to note that the Hellfire Clubs were replaced or succeeded by the Phoenix Club in Oxford. However, Claremont was inspired by another fictional take on the institutions. The British television so The Avengers had an episode (A Touch of Brimstone) centred around a modern incarnation of the club, featuring Emma Peel in a very familiar “Queen of Sin” costume. Given the episode would have aired while Claremont was a teenager, I imagine that made quite the impression. Indeed, Peter Wyngarde would inspire Jason “Mastermind” Wyngarde in Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men.
However, I do think that Claremont’s seemingly endless sexual bondage subtext does fit the story that he’s trying to tell, that it’s an essential ingredient in Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men epic. I think the moment that hammered this home from me came in one of his later issues, just before X-Tinction Agenda, as Nanny holds Storm captive and plans to deage her into a young girl. “I will not be bound!” Storm vows, at one point. “I will not be enslaved!! Whatever the cost — I shall be free!”
Uncanny X-Men is the story of a group of people trying to live a normal life in the face of a society that won’t let them, unable to trust any authority. Claremont’s pseudo-sexual themes all play into those notions of power and trust, with the interactions between the team and their foes often mirroring the relationships between governments and oppressed minority. These interactions – bodyswapping, mind control, deageing – are all power-related fetishes, but Claremont has the domination and submission occur without the requisite consent.
It’s an abuse, rather than the consensual surrending of power between those in dominant and submissive relationships. Indeed, it’s the non-consensual aspect of Claremont’s repeated use of these elements that makes it so unnerving, as villains seek to assert dominion and control over the X-Men, as authoritarian rulers seek to assert control over their disenfranchised minorities. The shackles of slavery become the handcuffs of a non-consensual bondage sequence.
“Bondage”, in its original usage, is defined as “slavery or involuntary servitude; serfdom.” Claremont has simply taken the iconography of a subculture that “reclaimed” the word, and juxtaposed it against the term’s original meaning. The sexual imagery just filters it through a lens of post-sixties sexual liberation. There’s no shame in a kinky sex life, but Claremont’s more disturbing examples are generally perversions. For all the evil attempts to subjugate Storm during those seventeen years, there are also healthy expressions of her assertion of power.
In fact, Storm seems to spend quite a bit of time naked, but Claremont and his artists seldom objectify her or remove her power. Indeed, during the earlier adventures, she’s most likely to be at the peak of her powers when naked (as Professor X meets her in Africa, or as she returns to the mansion to “cut loose”); she’s the very ideal of sexual liberation – naked, but no less powerful for it. Storm’s claustrophobia represents a fear of being boxed in or enclosed, of being powerless or trapped – the same sort of fears that Claremont’s creepy imagery ties into.
Of course, sometimes a corset is just a corset. It’s possible that I am reading far too much into this, and Claremont’s kinky elements are just Claremont’s kinky elements. Still, I like to think that they aren’t quite as surreal and gratuitous as they seem, and that they play into the larger ideas that Claremont tapped during his iconic tenure on Marvel’s merry mutants.
