My Introduction to Louis L'Amour

“What neither [my father] nor my mother had the least taste for was that kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment I could choose books for myself.  Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland.”

~CS Lewis, Surprised By Joy

I recently joined a Book Club for Men very self-consciously inspired by the Oxford Inklings and the vibe follows the advertisement: we drink scotch and smoke cigars and discuss literature.  My arrival coincided with their review of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, followed by The Revenant.  They had already finished Shackleton’s South: The Endurance Expedition; we will shortly begin Paradise Lost.  If that all sounds unbearably pretentious—actually, hang pretension, and in God’s name let there be an Inklings club in every town and parish!

While discussing The Revenant during our last meeting, the remark was made that men used to read Western authors like Louis L’Amour, but since the 70s or 80s had left off for different genres and settings.  As everyone nodded along and drew breath for a protracted exploration of the zeitgeist, I quickly inserted myself to ask: who was this L’Amour?  Based on the reaction, apparently everyone has heard about or read him (to include my dad and my barber, whom I later asked by way of informal survey).  However, when one of the men seated nearby (he who was most astonished at my uncultured ignorance) handed me a copy of The Rider of the Ruby Hills, the answer to my folly struck me at once: if it wears a cowboy hat, then I have not read it!

A couple weeks having passed and my now having finished the first novella (Ruby Hills being the first of three collected in the book), I am having trouble telling what it is that I like about the story or or don’t.  Its appeal (as teased out during the ensuing zeitgeist discussion above) is clear enough: the tale of a self-assured and honorable man doing hard things while living a hard life; yet it strikes me that this has already been done elsewhere and better.  Not that L’Amour is incapable as an author—his prose is engaging and his characters colorful and fun—but something of the style or perhaps the setting just did not strike the cord for which I had hoped, the persistent idea fussing about my mind, that the Ruby Hills would be more interesting a thousand years ago in England.

It was a moment of existential horror that found me suffering the insufferable notion espoused by Millennial and Generation Z proponents of intersectionality, that if I cannot relate to the subject, then I cannot appreciate it.  But it is true: for all that Ruby Hills is engaging and dramatic, I cannot really relate to the theme.  The self-sufficiency and bravery of its protagonist I cheered, but the subject is acquisition of land and establishment of a ranch, something that I have never been inclined to do, born academic that I am.  Yet again, there is nothing wrong with a story about men on horses doing hard things.  So why is it that I’d be instantly engaged with an Arthurian romance versus a Western drama?  

As a rule I have never really been drawn to Westerns, though I certainly love the drama in Westerns.  In this regard the Western is in an entertainment category alongside sports movies, dog stories, 1980s “kids on bikes” mysteries, and zombie apocalypses; all of them very engaging if done properly, and enjoyable in the moment, but seldom if ever sought out independently.  Put simply, to me the Wild West is bland, while the Ancient Past is not.

I accord well with Lewis’s statement that he had early and unabashedly pledged his loyalty to fairytales.  In an honest parallel with my idol, I cannot get enough of a good fantasy (Narnia or Hyperboria or select corners of Westeros) or science-fantasy (Star Wars or Paralandra or John Carter’s Mars), to say nothing of sword and sandal or sword and board historical fiction (Suttcliff’s Britain or Cornwall’s England).  To these not a single Western can hold a candle.  As to why, the most obvious difference between stories about cowboys and Indians and rival stories about knights and barbarians is one of setting and dress and bearing.  There’s just something cool about swords and togas and dragons; and yet there is just as much excitement in revolvers and ten gallon hats and mountain lions.  In both settings there are horses and savage opponents, whether strange natives or desperate men.  Both settings have damsels to save, either in a tower or alone on a ranch.  And it is the image of that tower that illustrates the greatest thematic difference between Arthurian romance and the Wild West: one is ancient and storied; the other is new.

In Westerns, the protagonist must war against nature and the locals in order to establish his claim and he challenges the untamed wilderness in order to tame it and settle it and establish a name for himself, to say, “I did this, I made something from nothing.”  By contrast, romances exist in worlds ancient and full of ruins and temples and histories, with ten times the material culture and ten thousand times the people.  There the hero moves within the context of the past, either to preserve its heritage or tear down its sins or rebuild its past glories.  Even the wild places and the wild animals have a history: a mountain lion may have been a kit yesterday, but the ancient dragon is a Thing from beyond time and space.  

Certainly not everyone views antiquity as good.  In The Shadow Kingdom, Robert E. Howard bemoans the passing of aeons, his King Kull gazing up at crumbling ruins in his own capital city and pondering the slow passing of time that renders all greatness nothing and reduces all monuments to dust, extinguishing all heroes not through fire but decay and loss of memory: 

The age of the city, its incredible antiquity, was almost oppressive to the king; it was as if the great silent buildings laughed at him, noiselessly, with unguessable mockery… ‘You are young,’ said the palaces and the temples and the shrines, ‘but we are old.  The world was wild with youth when we were reared.  You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible.  We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and Lemuria rose from the sea; we still shall reign when the green waters sigh for many a restless fathom above the spires of Lemuria and the hills of Atlantis and when the isles of the Western Men are the mountains of a strange land.  How many kings have we watched ride down these streets before Kull of Atlantis was even a dream in the mind of Ka, bird of Creation?  Ride on, Kull of Atlantis; greater shall follow you; greater came before you.  They are dust; they are forgotten; we stand; we know; we are.  Ride, ride on, Kull of Atlantis, Kull the king, Kull the fool!’



Howard was a cynic and thus his words are at once tragically romantic and wholly wrong: far from fools, the storied past makes heroes of us all; we work within our cultures and heritage and though Western cowboys may strike out for parts unknown to create something new, we left behind in the cities and settled lands strive to preserve that which is old and worth remembering.  Cynics bemoan the persistence of Scripture and insist that this is the year we forget the tired old tomes that have been long outgrown! and yet age renders those works not irrelevant, but holy.  They are valuable all the more for their ancient pedigree and sheer obstinate perseverance; the gods of the copybook headings will always return.  

Thus I anticipate Paradise Lost to beat The Rider of the Ruby Hills—not least for its sheer excellence but also for its theme; like the Ruby Hills, it is an untamed wilderness into which Adam and Eve are born, but it is an ancient one and the story is the very first since creation itself; despite their old-fashioned setting, the Ruby Hills exist in the “present”; Paradise is the very most ancient past.

"Hard Feelings, Indeed: A Short Review of TITANS Vol3."

The sole strength of TITANS: HARD FEELINGS is its art by Pete Woods and Serge Acuña.  Acuña takes a classically strong approach that places him in company with industry heavyweights like Dan Mora, but Woods offers a dynamism that almost looks digitally rendered, maybe in part thanks to the vibrant inks and colors.  Facial expressions are a particular strong point, and one suspects that (like most comics) the work as a whole would have benefitted from the author trusting his artist to visually narrate inner monologues rather than write them.

Which brings me to author John Lyman.  There is nothing good to say here; "Hard Feelings" points to the narrative theme, and the writing immediately goes downhill to face plant in Act 1 and drag along through the end of Act 2.  The Titans quarrel, then face off against a mind-bending B-villain who explains his dastardly plan but is out-chess'd by a strong-willed female (Donna Troy, aka "discount Wonder Woman") who refuses to let fear rule her and instead faces her traumas in order to blindside the foe.  Then the Titans share a couple more quarrels as the tension builds before facing another B-villain who explains his dastardly plan but is also out-chess'd by another strong-willed female (Raven) who refuses to let fear rule her and instead faces her traumas in order to blindside the foe.  

Dialogue and consistency is lowest-tier.  During the first stand-off, the heroes all make almost comically poor exclamations ("You'll never get away with this!"), or reference events "way back" last issue.  Character behavior is occasionally inconsistent, which seems to be Lyman losing the details as he fixates on the issue's point-of-view protagonist; when Donna Troy is the lead (meaning readers get to experience the inner monologue of her secret fears and anxieties that she self-wills into submission by the arc conclusion), she encourages the captured Titans with, "Don't listen to him, Titans! We can fight this!" (pure Shakespeare, that...), but when Raven is the lead (meaning readers are subjected once more to inner monologues about her secret fears and anxieties that she self-wills into submission by the arc conclusion), a mentally-influenced Donna instead echoes the mentally-influenced Nightwing's pained "Arsenal, you can't fight this!" with "Get out of here...get help..."  This is the same woman who only an issue or two before monologues, "The Justice League still thinks we're the kids, the sidekicks, in constant need of help.  We have to show them otherwise!"

That said, it is also impossible to take any of the alleged adults in this work seriously (quite apart from their incessant puerile bickering), since they all suffer from narrative-induced ADHD.  Twice in as many chapters they 180 away from the matter at hand to engage in "character development"; Arsenal is knocked unconscious and his place taken by an imposter, but when he finally stumbles back to base to warn the others, he immediately engages in a protracted discussion about past adventures and personally hang-ups, finally blurting out, "so yeah, that's when I got knocked over the head!"  A few scenes later, once Raven has self-willed herself to victory, the heroes immediately ignore the villain lying prone at their feet to instead focus on a medical brain scan to ensure that Raven's self-will is really a sign of self-healing (which it is).  Sure, suspension of belief may imply that they'd properly disposed of the bad guy, but I somehow doubt that Lyman thought about that.

Art's a solid 10, writing is sub-zero; I figure 5/10 for the work overall is generous.

The Mutants: Act One, the American Experiment (Part 2)

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!”

~William Shakespeare, Henry V

I do not recall my initial encounter with the X-Men, though I remember the comics readily enough.  I had an edition of the first dozen or so issues, in black and white, over which I spent hours poring as a child.  This was the era of my life when the act of reading was a newness to me, though I hasten to note that this was not so with literature; Mom had been reading to me since infancy, and I like to think that I had a somewhat sophisticated literary appreciation by the age of ten.  But reading to myself?  Now there’s a different story.  Without deviating overmuch into self-indulgent autobiography, I was not a reader until this late stage.  There was never a professional diagnosis, nor is there any real consensus between my parents as to my deficiency, apart from “I wasn’t ready.”  The story of how I did finally arrive at reading letters myself is for another time; let it here suffice to justify my early and dear love for comic books; that is, for pictorial narrative.  

My earliest comics (if you’ll forgive the appearance of pretension) were Franco-Belgian: Yakari and the White Buffalo was a gift from my paternal grandmother, and the peerless Adventures of Tintin were discovered in waste bins at my Dad’s used-book warehouse.  Of Asterix the Gaul I’ve no original memory except for a life-size cutout or mural at a mini-golf circuit someplace in Europe when I was four or five; apart from that non-sequitur observation, the little gallic warrior has always been around someplace.  Add to this lineup editions of Calvin and Hobbes, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four, and you have what a selective memory places as the foundation for my (graphic-novel) literary frame of reference.

Comic books were a sort of freedom to me.  While it was agony to puzzle over why any sensible person would like to see Spot run or care to know what Jane thought about it, comics were there for the interpreting; one could very easily follow Spot’s progress, though what he and Jane were up to was anyone’s guess.  Perhaps that was part of the fun.  One needn’t know why Asterix needed to rescue Getafix before the centurion Crismus Bonus wrung from him the secret to the magic potion; one had only to look at a series of pictures depicting a venerable druid spooning out samples from a cauldron, the super-enhanced Gauls beating the Romans senseless, the ruffled Roman leadership with their heads together and conniving expressions upon their faces, a plot hatched to capture the druid (who expressed his displeasure through what we would today label “rage emojis”), and the distressed Gauls agonizing over a nearly empty cauldron.  The rest of the comic dealt with Asterix enacting his brilliant rescue plan.  In short, the story told itself, the word bubbles just noises that made clear what the images first heavily implied.

This was all predicated, of course, upon attention to detail, flow, and (above all) patience on the part of authors and illustrators, the sort of care taken by Japanese manga-ka today—in my experience best exemplified by the gifted Tite Kubo.  (As an aside, I first “read” Kubo’s internationally famous Bleach in the original Japanese, which is to say, I reverted to my pre-literate days and interpreted the whole story thanks to his outstanding use of the visual medium; imagine then my horror upon flipping through an English edition years later to discover that, at least in translation, Kubo comes across as perhaps one of the worst prose authors I’ve ever encountered).  American comics, at least in the tradition of MARVEL's numerous titles, came from a different stock entirely, stemming maybe from the unusual method employed by the first creatives.  

Years having passed and my original collection nowhere to be found, I turned to the Penguin Classics X-Men (for such a thing happily exists, with forwards and series introductions and chapters chockablock full of literary analysis) and threw myself into the first issue: September, 1963.  The summer of ’63 concluded with the tenth anniversary of the Korean War armistice; troops had been in Vietnam for almost eight years; the Cuban Missile Crisis was not yet eleven months past.  “Surfin’ USA” (The Beach Boys) was competing with “Twist and Shout” (the Beatles); man would not set foot on the moon for another six years.  And in New York, Stan Lee had a dilemma.  His publisher cousin-in-law, Martin Goodman, wanted a new superhero team, and he wanted them fast.  Fast was something that Lee (his nom de plume, the real man being Stanley Lieber) certainly understood and had mastered in his two decades at the company (not yet branded MARVEL).  In the three years since the launch of The Fantastic Four, Lee and artist Jack Kirby (with the assistance of Lee’s brother Larry and artist Don Heck) had developed five different comic book heroes for their new universe, each with his own title, culminating in The Avengers in July of ’63.  

In a stroke of creative genius (it bears the sort of simplicity that one recognizes only in hindsight) Lee and Kirby made two key contributions to the superhero genre that differed from their rivals at DETECTIVE COMICS (DC).  The first was to conceive of their characters as flawed, mortal, subject to suspicion by those that they had sworn to protect, or even genuinely tempted to do evil; the second innovation was the shared universe.  To claim this as totally original would be to mislead: DC had already pioneered a composite world for their heroes with The Justice League, yet it must be stressed that they still adhered to the stand-alone episode—one needn’t bother which comic one read in a year, as each Superman or Batman issue was self-contained.  What Lee and Kirby developed was a new method for integrated storytelling: a self-contained episode that fed a longer story (linear) while also referencing and drawing upon material from adjacent titles (lateral).  This was innovation that drew a crowd, and crowds were another thing that Lee came to understand (to the sad detriment of several of his working relationships, it must be added).  Yet innovation may be accidental genius as often as is intent; Lee’s next creation would certainly be such.

After all, “Fantastic Four," “Iron Man,” or even “Thor” are self-explanatory; but what exactly (or even why) is an “exman”?

Juxtaposition Observed: Comparing Orthodoxy and Extreme Ownership

“This, then, is a king's materials and his tools to reign with: that he have his land well peopled; he must have prayer-men, and soldiers, and workmen.”

~Alfred the Great, Anglo-Saxon Boethius

There are times when I suspect myself to be a cynical, bitter elitist.  Such has been the feeling while toiling through Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALS Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.  Had I to sum up the book in a sentence: “This could have been an email.”  The fault is likely my own, considering that I have only ever cracked the cover on three leadership books (the other two were Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last and Jim Mattis’s Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead) and in no case have I progressed beyond the first couple of chapters.  In some the narrative is plodding or the diction is amateur; in no case does the subject matter inspire interest.  But this time is the first that I can admit to having experienced an epiphany—though this happy circumstance has less to do Mr. Willink or Mr. Babin and everything to do with GK Chesterton.

For all that I have seen the light while reading Extreme Ownership (here my protestation shall be that I am reading it at the boss’s behest), it is safe to say that it is by far the least admirable of my trifold leadership library.  Where Sinek was uninspiring and Mattis condescending, Willink and Babin are so much fluff— excellent leadership principles bookended by protracted and redundant adventure stories alongside corporate-American business vignettes that showcase the authors executing verbal ju-jitsu on incompetent and immature vice presidents and CEOs, in prose that vacillates between inoffensively correct and inexplicably horrendous.  According to one of the effusive reviews quoted on the back cover, its author is “Rereading again, and this time I’m taking notes.”  My own marginal notes are in the vein of “Non sequitur,” “Useful observation but does not advance the theme,” and “Why is this paragraph here?  Either move to the top of the page or cut.”  At least Willink’s chapters offer some mild entertainment; one wishes that the editors had possessed courage enough to edit Babin’s contributions:

“Now, the two of us—the EOD operator and I—were in a hell of a tight spot.  The subdued Iraqi man and possible terrorist we were holding had not yet been searched, a situation that carried huge risks.  We needed to fall back and link up with the rest of our force.  Now, with a larger enemy force maneuvering on us with heavier firepower, the two of us were outnumbered and outgunned.  Finally, I desperately needed to resume my role as ground force commander, dispense with handling prisoners, and get back to my job of command and control for the assault force, our vehicles, and coordination with our distant supporting assets.  All this had to be accomplished immediately.”

As the kids used to say, I can’t even.

My friends and coworkers, being more generous readers than I, have lauded the work to me as tremendously useful while acknowledging its shortcomings; a assessment of “necessary evil” that accords with the more discerning reviews online that praise the intent without endorsing the faults.  In search of something positive to say, I am reminded of the maxim that common sense is not common; some people really do need to be taught what others have come to learn though effective mentorship and demanding fields of work.

But I was also struck by a realization: what some people prize as useful literature are predominantly works of leadership and mindset—the one to earn success and to make it out in one piece, the latter to survive the mental game—with some Sun Tzu and Thucydides thrown in for esoterica.  Yet as Willink and Babin themselves point out, we need first to believe in what we are about in order to justify the rest.  A marine officer told me once that the Corps is a religious organization: they have their saints and their holy days, their founding myths and sacred traditions and incantations.  The common parlance of their having “drunk the Cool-Aid” is to say that they truly believe.  

Which is where I believe that GK Chesterton has more to say about the matter than either Willink or Babin.

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is something of a spiritual autobiography that bears resemblance to CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity in that these two set out a series of arguments for Christian faith from intellect and pagan tradition.  Where Lewis grounds his structure in humanity’s universal appeal to standards, Chesterton argues that fairytales teach children about reality.

Consider what Chesterton calls the Doctrine of Conditional Joy: “according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an ‘if.’ The note of the fairy utterance always is, ‘You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word “cow”’; or ‘You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show her an onion.’ The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden … the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.”

He continues, “Fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as other godmothers. Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a command that she should be back by twelve. Also, she had a glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat … Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is that to me this did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to the fairy, ‘Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace,’ the other might fairly reply, ‘Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace.’ If Cinderella says, ‘How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?’ her godmother might answer, ‘How is it that you are going there till twelve?’ … it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.”

These words sent me back to Lewis’s other work, The Abolition of Man, which begins with the assertion that a child’s earliest reading will lay the groundwork for the rest of his life, that the truths—whether actually truthful, or damnable lies from the pit of Hell—will become the foundation for the whole of his worldview.  

Then, from Lewis’s and Chesterton’s wholesome arguments I returned to the utilitarianism—wearisome Spartans!—of Sinek and Mattis, and Willink and Babin.  For shame that I should so bemoan their earnest contributions (or in the cases of Willink and Babin, at least their strident self-promotion) to the self-improvement of warriors, laborers, and teams struggling in the everyday labors of life.  And yet to what end, I wondered, do their readers labor?  For what titanic and awesome outcome do we each strive so, while employing principles that promise sunny successes?  Do we not have an equal or greater need of stories about the real world, more so than narratives on mindset and leadership?  While the one helps to keep a healthy head and the other shepherds the team to victory, it is stories that teach us why we should be doing any of that, and they teach us to love and to reverence that which we work towards or defend against.  I suppose that’s why Mattis, Willink, and Babin ground their principles in nests of contextually convenient war stories; yet it is somewhat difficult for me to relate to tales of SEAL teams in the distant Battle of Ramadi, much easier to learn from the selfless heroism of Sir Gawain, or even the simple devotion of Carrot Ironfoundersson.

As Chesterton mystically observes, “I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.”

The Mutants: The X-Men and the Twilight of the Gods (Part 1)

“And what’s he, then, that says I play the villain?” 

~William Shakespeare, Othello

“What have they done?  She was a hero, she was purity and courage and flame and she’s been undone.  I must know more!”

Such was my reaction to the rewriting of Dr. Moira MacTaggart.  A long-time X-Men supporting actor, she suddenly reappeared after a hiatus to dominate the House of X run, first as a manipulative key-player in the machiavellian superstructure of the series’ character-hierarchy, more antihero than paragon of virtue, then suddenly transmogrifying into a terrifying arch-villainess with murder in her heart.  What had they done?

Literary interests come and go, and I have lately been reading a lot of X-Men.  The itch has always lingered in the back of my mind and from time to time I’ve picked up a comic or two—or a multi-volume series, at one point collecting the entire Age of Apocalypse run, only to shelve it perpetually for one unfortunate reason: I am a completionist.  To miss out on a story or series is deep irritation to me, and I cannot name the number of perfectly good titles—comics, novels, movies—that I’ve put off for the sake of not having access to the earlier material.  Compound this with the tens of thousands of issues of X-Men comics extant and one is faced with a herculean task equal parts horrific and tantalizing.  It is a dilemma reminiscent of Bilbo’s on his doorstep; less “Then again why not?  Why shouldn’t I keep it?” and instead, “Why shouldn’t I just read them all!”

And so the task remained unfinished—nay! unaddressed—for many years, whole catalogues of comics on my shelf awaiting the simplest of reading pleasures, yet put off for the imaginary-yet-real agony of lost context.  Two events stirred me from this nonsensical stupor; the first was the culmination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s run with Endgame, the second was the rediscovery of Dr. Moira MacTaggart.  

Of Endgame there’s little enough to say: the theatrical release of Infinity Wars left me in a daze of astonished euphoria (“The mad bastards actually did it!”), which led to viewing the sequel with total relish.  (To say that the MCU’s stupefying decline in later years was bewildering after the unbelievable success of its first run would be a tragic understatement; insofar as I am concerned, what began with Ironman ended with Spiderman: No Way Home; the rest is so much bedazzled window dressing).  Fresh from Endgame, I immediately acquired a copy of the trade paperback of Infinity Gauntlet (1991) that inspired it all.  From there I made the leap to other major Marvel Comics events like Secret Wars (2015) and its namesake primogenitor, also titled Secret Wars (1984).  Of the X-Men, there was little sign, but the point here is that I was spurred to action at long last with the realization that having greatly enjoyed the movies, my appreciation would only deepen by reading the original comics.

What drove me back to the Mutants was the discovery of House of X (2019).  A limited series, it began what appeared to be a fresh narrative arc for Xavier and his acolytes.  There were new costumes, new villains, a whole new nation-state exclusive to mutant-kind, all under the forbidding headline that Charles Xavier’s dream (of human and mutant co-existence) was dead.  But lacking all context, I was as confused as I was intrigued, and the now-habitual turn to Google offered more questions than answers: Why is a genocidal monster like Apocalypse one of the good guys?  Wasn’t Destiny dead—no, she was dead, but now she’s back?    And what’s the deal with Dr. Moira MacTaggart—wait, she was dead too, but also resurrected?  And now she’s evil?

My vague memories of the no-nonsense scotswoman resurfaced in a jumble.  Her brief cameo appearance in X-Men: The Last Stand barely registered, while her role as free-thinking American CIA agent in the X-Men: First Class series did not figure at all.  I remembered that she was a longtime ally and ran an isolated scientific institute complimentary to Professor Xavier’s high school; that both were the faces of secret facilities hosting various mutant superhero teams.  So what was her role in this new milieu, and why was she a villain—and for that matter, a primary threat?  

On I read, and my head spun: here was the wholesome and courageous female scientist, maternal counterpoint to Xavier’s paternal professor, reimagined not merely as some brainwashed toady en route to the Big Bad, but a true believer with real blood on her hands and plans to kill every single mutant on earth—to include her own son and her adopted daughter.   What was going on?

My immediate questions were somewhat answered in finishing the House of X miniseries and dabbling in some of its follow-on comics.  In short, a new cadre of writers were on the scene, eager to make their mark on a franchise fifty-six years old and (so I discovered to mild surprise) recently struggling with multiple cancellations and false-starts.  It seemed to me that poor Moira was one of the sacrificial lambs to their ambitions, her recasting a sort of shock to the system to galvanize eager readers (like myself, I may shamelessly admit) into purchasing new comics.  Nor was she alone in catching my eye.  As stated above, new villains, old villains as new allies, and other character redrafts held my attention, especially the nigh-damnable line put in the mouth of Magneto toward the end of the earliest chapters: In a meeting with international delegates to their fledgling mutant nation, Magneto—first and greatest villain-turned-antihero—outlines a plan for mutant-international relations that concludes with the ominous ultimatum:

As a Christian, I was offended.  As a reader, fascinated.  

Magneto’s defining trait has always been hubris, one that I had thought mollified in recent storylines.  Here, evidently, the new writers sought to return to him his first impulses, restoring in their hero his most villainous characteristic.  Would they erroneously intend to validate Magneto’s blasphemy in the ensuing series, to see it accepted and lauded by fans of the “Mutant Metaphor” (that of the mutants as mouthpiece for intersectional oppression, so pervasive in recent years), or was Magneto’s pronouncement the foreshadowing to a Greek tragedy in the making?

And there it was for me: echoes of Oedipus, of Achilles, of Xerxes upon his throne; of the queen-mother become the mother-of-monsters, threatening to eat her own young.  I had to know more.  

I had to go back to the beginning.

Remember that Roman Empire trend?  While guys were/are thinking about the Roman Empire, I’m pretty sure the ladies are pondering Regency England.

Looking Back At Neanderthal Ancestry

"What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor."

~Psalm 8:4-5

It may have been while I was in college that the news dropped that Europeans, Asians, and American natives are descended in part from neanderthals. At least, that's when I first heard of it, and the people talking it over seemed to think it was somehow earth shattering. I thought, "huh, I guess that would make sense."

I'm not caught up on my Ancient Ancestors lore, so I can't speak with any authority on what has or has not been determined based on the genomes and other scientific studies. But the news that select humans had "bred" with their genetic cousins appears to elicit different reactions depending on the audience - not all of them nice. A quick google offers suggested-searches of "does White come from Neanderthals?" and "what percent of Neanderthal does each race have?" Even the idea that "all peoples outside Africa have got a little in 'em," though maybe grounded in the data, lends itself easily to narrative spin. The official word appears to be, "Humans moved out of Africa and got it on with the neanderthals," yet based on the suggested searches above, there's a predisposition to lean into the "all races except the Africans."

One assumes (but look where assumptions get us!) that maybe there's a desire for non-Africans to have a little of the degenerate "race" in our genes. And from what I know of popular culture at least, there's the idea that the neanderthals were all killed off in an ancient genocide by their more intelligent human neighbors. One hopes that I am wrong is supposing this, but I suppose that such thought would lend itself to teleological lines of reasoning that elevate certain "races" over others.

Yet I also suppose (unsophisticated luddite that I am) that an alternate view is permissible: that we're all one race, and that our neanderthal cousins were simply another branch in the genetic tree that came out of Eden. We weren't breeding with the most genetically compatible ape-men; our forefathers (of the non-neanderthal sort) gave their daughters in marriage and took to themselves wives from other human neighbors, whom modern science has unkindly labeled "neanderthal." They worshipped God, or didn't, raised children, waged war, and mourned their dead. I should like to have met one, just to see what sort of Man he was and to hear his thoughts about the state of things. One imagines he could educate me a great deal in the ways of the hunt. Probably in architecture, too, and maybe introduce me to a surprising depth of philosophy. 

As GK Chesterton wrote about the primitive cave painters: all we can really say about them as people, is that they were artists.