New X-Men: Imperial brings to my mind a certain kind of superhero story that uses a narrative structure of utter simplicity:
- Bad thing X is represented by an evil monster.
- The heroes fight the evil monster and defeat it.
- The theme of the narrative is, “X is bad.” You can add nuances to the theme depending on which heroes are in the story. For Captain America, “X is bad, but we can defeat it with patriotism.” For a team book, “X is bad, but we can defeat it by working together.”
You see it a lot in PSA comics. Daredevil fights Vapora the Gas Leak Metaphor, stuff like that. X-Men of course provides a famous example: Sentinels a metaphor of institutionalized bigotry, ooh.
Now, in Imperial, Cassandra Nova, the mummudrai, is Charles Xavier’s dark half. It tries to destroy Charles’s dream, tries to kill him and his X-Men, forces mutant-human relations into a crisis state by destroying Genosha and putting the X-Men’s school into the public eye (hoping, I suppose, to start a war between mutants and humans). Charles and Cassandra are psychically linked—does Cassandra’s forcing Charles to out himself suggest a hypocrisy Charles sees in his own method, his refusal to publicly acknowledge and take responsibility for his mutant status? Cassandra punishing Charles for his cowardice? The mummudrai metaphor even incorporates the classic Sentinel metaphor, first as Cassandra sends her army on its genocidal mission in Genosha and then as it infects the X-Men with nano-sentinel germs.
The mummudrai’s stategy is to point out all the failings and stupities and pathetic flaws of her opponents, demolish their self-esteem until they’re too weak to fight back. With Charles, she actually embodies and seeks to bring about his failures. So the mummudrai is Charles’s dark half—not so much his “evil” or “immoral” half as his failed half, the self-destructive part of him that would give in to his self-perceived flaws and accept (welcome) defeat. And that’s bad. But we can defeat it by working together.
OK, remember my previous writing about political metaphors in New X-Men and about narrationy themes in New X-Men:
New X-Men is about characters attempting to create themselves by creating narratives, and it’s about characters losing control of those narratives.
I think my reading of Imperial fits that, don’t you? But then Imperial is this crazy superhero story with an absurd and simplistic metaphor, which is not necessarily at the level of sophisticated writing one would expect from Grant Morrison (it’s certainly not the level of sophistication I was expecting after reading all the praise people heap on the book). Why did Morrison write this? Rose suggested one answer:
…so is it showing that meaning and metaphor can still arise from something so broken and ugly?
I don’t think I’d use the phrase “broken and ugly.” Maybe I’d say, “It’s showing that meaning and metaphor can still arise from those silly little awkward stories about Superman fighting Smoko the Cigarette Monster or whatever, stories that are often dismissed as irredeemable crap written by hacks who didn’t care. Maybe not especially entertaining (in all senses of the word!) meaning, but meaning nontheless.” In fact, I will say just that! Right now:
It’s showing that meaning and metaphor can still arise from those silly little awkward stories about Superman fighting Smoko the Cigarette Monster or whatever, stories that are often dismissed as irredeemable crap written by hacks who didn’t care. Maybe not especially entertaining (in all senses of the word!) meaning, but meaning nontheless.
