X-Men: Making comics relatable through politics

The argument

The claim here is that politics belong in comic books because politics are what make them relatable — and that this does not require politics to be referenced directly. There are artistic ways for politics to enter a story, through the situations characters find themselves in and the choices those situations force, and comics that use them are not weakened by the association but strengthened by it. The X-Men series is offered as the demonstration. In that series, character motivations, relationships, values and beliefs were all influenced by real political figures. The result was not a set of lectures but a cast of people whose predicaments readers recognised. Prejudice and discrimination are innately human phenomena, shared by countless persecuted groups throughout history, and a story built on those experiences gives them a form readers can enter without needing to share any particular political allegiance. A reader who has been treated as suspect, or excluded, or asked to hide something about themselves in order to be accepted, has a point of contact with the story whatever their politics. The commercial record is then used to close the argument. The X-Men title has been immensely popular not in spite of its relationship to politics but because of it. If political content were a liability, a title this closely bound up with politics would not have become one of the most popular. The most successful art tends to be the most relatable, and relatability is what the politics in the X-Men supplied: the series took the universal experience of being hated for what one is and gave it a setting, a history and a cast. On this view, politics in comic books are not an intrusion into the form but one of the things the form does best, and comics should be political.

Context

The X-Men comics are an allegory for the civil rights movement, with Professor Xavier and Magneto being the fictional equivalents of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While prejudice and discrimination were heavily tied to the civil rights movement, they are not innately political ideas. Rather, they are easily politicized ideas. It is relatively simple to have a comic book series explore similar themes of prejudice and discrimination without introducing the politics of the real world. Removing the politics would simply require an introduction of new and different ideas, characters, and groups that were not a part of the civil rights movement.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Removing politics from X-Men does not necessarily mean removing prejudice and discrimination.