Why I'm Not Reading Generation Hope

[rallamajoop]

Stating up front this is going to be much less a review than a whole lot of frustrated venting coming out at the end of what is now a whole year of build up. I'm not in any way going to discourage dissent in the comments – in fact if anyone who is actually reading Generation Hope and/or enjoying her as a character, I would be very interested to hear why, as I'm actually much happier to hear 'the industry is producing works tailored to tastes which differ from yours, in ways you have perhaps not considered' than to be left with 'the industry just doesn't know what the fuck it's doing anymore', which is about where the whole matter is sitting in my head right now.

So, I'm not reading Generation Hope. This isn't much of an announcement; if the sales figures are to be believed, hardly anyone else is either. The only thing that makes my disinterest notable is that a year ago, back when I was writing my glowing and rather stunned review of Second Coming event, Generation Hope was one of the titles I was most looking forward to. See, what sold me on Second Coming was the fantastic sense of scale to the story. Tasked with the unenviable job of giving us a climax to two inimitable years of waiting for Cable to make it back from the future with a young mutant who we were assured had to be important because, if not, why would so many evil people want her dead? - it delivered one of the most cleverly thought out, edge-of-your-seat reads I've seen from Mavel in recent memory. It never got as far as answering the big questions about exactly what Hope represents, but it did finish with a tantalising hint in the form of five new 'lights' revealed on Cerebro's mutant GPS – the first to appear since M-Day, and certainly not coincidentally related to Hope's return. It was an inspired teaser for the next step for the X-Men line.

But in practice, Marvel had put me off the concept so fast and so thoroughly in the months following Second Coming that I never even got as far as reading issue one. That's a dizzying turnover rate for the enthusiasm.

If I had to explain what it was that put me off in one sentence, it would be this: they think Generation: Hope is a story about a bunch of mutant kids. That may be true in the loosest sense, but approaching the story from that angle carries the dangerous temptation to take the next step and treat them as ordinary mutant kids, in the same way that the New Mutants were ordinary mutant kids, or Gen X were, or the New New Mutants, or any mutant generation since the original X-Men back in the 60s, and the simple truth is that they're anything but. Generation Hope represent the first new children born to a a dying race that has known since M-Day that they were only killing time before extinction, and the way that should be shaping their experience since the moment of their awakening – the shear weight of what their very existence means for every single surviving mutant left on the planet – that just isn't coming through in their story at all.

For fuck's sake, it's not like that kind of impact is a difficult narrative detail to communicate. Where are the scenes of ordinary mutants sharing rumours about these so-called Five Lights? Why isn't anyone showing an interest in teasing out the explanation for how and why now and why them and most of all what has this got to do with Hope? Why on earth would leave Professor McCoy so disillusioned with Utopia that and all it represents that he's happy to disregard these five new mutants as 'not nearly enough to sustain a species' and bugger off without so much as stopping to take a blood sample? Why haven't we seen any of the X-Men's other scientists pouring through their family history and medical records to find out whether those mutant genes have spontaneously appeared or whether they were lurking in their bloodstreams all along? Where are the scenes of the Lights or their families saying but I can't be a mutant, everyone knows there aren't any more mutants! And above all, why on earth has this whole plotline been exiled away to a kids' team book, rather than taking place in the pages of one of the core X-Men books where it so clearly belongs?

Instead of tackling any of those important questions, the defining attribute of these new mutants that the writers emphasise is that their powers go haywire until the magical sparkly touch of Hope's hand instantly fixes them and makes them all BFF's for life. This whole concept is such a spectacularly bad idea I hardly know where to start. For a start, it smacks of an incredibly contrived excuse to keep Hope front and centre in the story even after early indications seemed to be that merely existing somewhere on the same time frame was all she had to do to start the Lights showing up. That lands us with a story where the same brand new character is both the source and the solution to the same problem, generally after a grand total of maybe five or six comic pages and hardly a word of exposition per Light, and when people were already calling her a Mary Sue long before this development, that should have been the last thing any competent writer would have saddled her with. Had there been unstable mutants showing up long before her return, for example, that would be a story, but for some reason we got this instead.

Finally, that instant-magical-BFF element provided them with a neat way of side-stepping any requirement for these new characters to actually meet, interact and make friends as characters. It's the platonic equivalent of having the hero save the heroine's life in their first scene together – with one, sparkly magical touch, any need to develop explain the mystery, introduce character or develop their relationships has been neatly shoved to the side.

Now, at this point, I know someone out there is already chomping at the bit to tell me that the instant-BFF factor is far more nuanced than I've made it out to be, since it's an ongoing plot point in Generation Hope that Hope is subconsiously psychically influencing people around her to like her, and that's starting to cause friction and people figure this out. Frankly, I am at a loss to explain how any part of that is a good idea to paste on to a relatively undeveloped character who's supposed to be sympathetic.

Let's take a minute to put this in context with a quick tally of Hope's powers and abilities established to date: she's the first mutant born since M-Day, and her birth created psychic feedback so massive it blew up Cerebro. The touch of her hand pulled Rogue out of a coma and exised the absorbed minds of an intergalactic alien death monster. She's trained with Cable until she's tough and skilled with weaponry. She has the power to both copy and instinctively control the abilities of any and all mutants standing close to her. She's connected to the Phoenix Force, if not the reincarnation of Jean Grey herself. Her mere existence has started new mutants appearing for the first time since M-Day, but those mutants are helpless to control their powers until they make contact with her in person. On top of all that, they thought it would be a good idea to give her the power to make everyone love her from the moment they meet? Oh, and also, she has an angsty past. (Obviously that last one is not a power, but when added to the fact the comic has yet to provide rhyme or reason explaining one of these miraculous abilities, even the most determined of us would be hard put to deny the Mary Sue title is starting to feel pretty well deserved.)

But getting back to the point, the real problem with the “Hope just has some instinctive power that makes people trust her, we'll get to the consequences later” explanation is that, yet again, it's being used as an excuse to side-step those points where someone should be asking the obvious questions, and that's even without getting into the severely ugly possibility that even Cable's faith in her was no more than the result of psychic manipulation all along.

There's one more possible justification I've seen thrown around a bit in defence of the approach Marvel is taking to this story, and that's that by downplaying the world-changing implications of the arc, they get to give their cast a bit of emotional downtime in the wake of Second Coming and avoid the risk that the big picture stuff will overshadow these new characters as characters in their own right. Taken at face value that sounds reasonable, but I'd still argue it's misguided. It's a poor writer who feels that the opportunity for character development is going to be actively stunted by the plot that's happening around it – about the only way an approach this simplistic makes any sense is if it's being spun off into a title for a younger audience (as Sarah Jane Adventures was from Doctor Who, for example), and the odds that Marvel would attract new readers by that method in this landscape would be dim at best. More to the point, I don't feel they have done a very good job of introducing these characters, or even that they've come up with any very compelling characters in the first place.

Here we come to my other major complaint about Generation Hope – they're all just a bit dull, aren't they?

I'm going to talk for a bit about Uncanny X-Men #526 and #527 for a bit, being two of the four issues that linked Second Coming to the first issue of Generation Hope, because these issues stand out as being the exact moment all that enthusiasm for the concept evaporated (and frankly, I only picked up #527 at all in the vague attempt to not be one of those people who critiques what she hasn't read). These are the issues introduce the first two of the Five Lights.

Although Cyclops does take the time to assure us just that “these new lights are everything”, the story doesn't do much support this. Excluding the cover, recap page, and a backup story linked to Children's Crusade (and Jesus Christ, if ever I wanted a good counter example of how to tackle serious, world-changing subject matter with a teenaged superteam while still keeping a sense of fun about the story, I could not have asked better, but I digress) there are 22 pages of story in this issue, but once you've subtracted out those reserved for us to spend some time watching Hope travel to Canada to find out who her birth mother was (which, in their defence, was a sequence I enjoyed), for Emma to have dinner with Tony Stark for some reason, and for two unrelated pages about Piotr and Kitty, Laurie, the new mutant, appears on only nine. Her entire role can be summarised as follows: her powers begin awaken in painful and distressing fashion, she freaks out and tries to throw herself off a roof while babbling about how she doesn't have time to be sick when she's a high achiever with exams coming up, but not before the X-Men arrive to send Hope jumping off after her, at which point Laurie turns blue, realises she can fly, and instantly realises that being a mutant is the best thing ever and Hope is her new best friend.

Through all this the X-Men remain disappointingly blasé. Angel and Iceman have nothing but snide remarks for a teenage girl facing a nervous breakdown right up to the moment when she is actively ready to throw herself off the roof, and no-one seems to think twice about the wisdom of letting a another mutant teenager – one with no experience in their century and all the interpersonal skills one develops growing up with an emotionally stunted foster father in a wasteland to her name – be the one to approach the new mutant. Hope herself demonstrates her fine grasp the gravity of all Laurie has just been through by saying, “Who's next?” End issue.

#527 follows much the same trend. Laurie gets just enough screentime to wax poetic about how she trusts Hope to fix everything, and the X-Men continue to demonstrate their complete and utter disinterest in how the fuck any of this works. The argument that, as X-Men, they go through shit this weird twice a week holds little water here. M-Day was quite literally like nothing they'd ever faced before, and to see them shrugging off the sight of their mutant messiah jumping off a roof right in front of them makes a mockery of their attitudes a mere issue earlier.

But even here – with the mood in pieces, the stakes in question and the new character introductions given all the weight of a paper clip, there might still have been hope (haha) for the new team if they'd been created as compelling characters. And this, my dear readers, is where Generation Hope lost me for good.

We'll start with Laurie. Her powers are flying, and being blue, which allows the artists an excuse to draw a teenage girl naked without breaking any rules hurhurhur her to shapeshift in ways that help her fly better, such as 'sprouting wings at high altitudes', where the air is too thin for wings to do anyone much good. To listen to the writer, creating a mutant who's only power is to fly – but to fly really fast and really well! – is a creative new take on the powers of one of the original X-Men, Angel, which presumably someone thought was a convincing way to spin the fact that flying is the power everyone else on the X-Men got as a side dish to something useful, like telekinesis, or power over magnetism or the weather, or to turn their entire body in to particles of dust, and so on. Even Angel himself has been variously granted healing blood or the ability to shoot razor darts out of his wings over the years in assorted attempts to make him slightly less rubbish. Flying is a great power, but on it's own it's not much of a fast track to superheroism.


There's really nothing that emphasises the mood of a serious scene like this
like a naked blue arse front and centre of the panel.

And if 'but she can fly really fast! ' wasn't sounding lame enough in it's own terms, it gets worse when you add the fact that the second member of the Five Lights we meet is a speedster. This isn't a terrible power for a superhero – DC's entire Flash family depends on it – but by the same logic it's very much been done by this point, and so many other characters get it as an add-on to a more badass power that on it's own it too looks more than a little lame. Speed of the Young Avengers, for example, is a mutant who has superspeed and the power to accelerate molecules in ways that allow him to move through solid matter or make things explode, and Surge of the New X-Men had superspeed as a bonus consequence whenever she built up large charges using her electricity powers – and that's without even looking further afield than members of other young superteams published by the same company within the last few years. Again, the writers try to spin this as creative by saying that really what he has isn't superspeed at all but time manipulation powers, but using time manipulation powers to simulate superspeed is so blatantly obvious that one gets no creativity points for making the connection. Tempo of the Mutant Liberation Front was using her time powers to speed up her team in the pages of X-Force back as early as the early nineties, and again in a recent AU sidestory just this year. (Also, she could fly. Seeing a pattern yet?) Meanwhile, across the pond at DC, the Flash has been able to use his superspeed to travel in time since the Silver Age.

The problem only gets worse when you hit the third member of the Five Lights, who's power is that he thinks he's a dog.



Oh alright, he 'understands the world through instinct', which apparently means he has roughly the vocabulary and charisma of Tarzan. Much time is spent assuring us that he's not stupid or animalistic, oh no, he's just largely uninterested in tackling complex concepts since his mutant powers awakened, once again side-stepping the real issue of how anyone writing for this dud is supposed to come up with ways to make this power useful without resorting to handwavey pseudo-science. Meanwhile, the 'real' powers he gets to supplement his learning disorder are all the usual vaguely defined animalistic ones: vaguely enhanced senses, speed, strength and healing, making him roughly the equivalent of Wolverine minus the rabid healing factor, adamantium claws and intellectual ability, or Beast minus the sixteen university degrees and (as he would put it) the ravishing good looks. It's hard to believe the writers have even tried to spin this as an inventive new spin on Doctor McCoy himself, since from anyone's perspective it ought to be patently obvious that to give a character with animalistic powers a largely animalistic personality is a big step back from the concept of Beast, which pairs the same with the brain of a genius. I'd also point out that in depriving their Beast-a-like of his brain and fur, they've robbed him of the feature that makes him recognisable and useful.

The fourth member, Idie, wins the prize for being the one character in Generation Hope who drew a power that sounds genuinely interesting and practical. She has heat and cold powers, which is actually halfway inspired, both because most superheros only get one or the other, and because she actually has to use both simultaneously. It seems her real ability isn't to generate or remove heat, it's to isolate and move it around with explosive results. This all becomes doubly ironic when you realise the only character who ever made me want to pick up the book is the first who's set to leave the team.

Meanwhile, our fifth and final Light is an Akira rip-off.


When I sent this panel to a friend to demonstrate how blatant the rip-off was, she thought
I was sending her a picture that was from Akira for comparison. True story.

Look, all I'm saying is, when the idea of an American remake of Akira is already drawing massive controversy – and when your heroine is already drawing accusations of Mary Sue-ism – opening her series with a trip to Japan where she heals Tetsuo of his destructive powers and brings him home to America to learn how to use his disturbing flesh-warping powers for good – that might not be the best way to generate positive fan reaction. That might not be the kind of thing you can safely pass off as 'a homage'. Just sayin'.

But none of that really holds a candle to the biggest problem with the characterisation in Generation Hope, which is with Hope herself, and I'm saying this as that same someone who really, desperately wanted to like her after Second Coming blew me away.

The problem as I see it is thus: throughout Hopes childhood, the writers took it on themselves to pile almost every imaginable kind of trauma on that girl, and now they don't want to deal with the consequences of the fact she should, by all logic, be a paranoid introvert with negligible social skills, minimal general knowledge that doesn't relate directly to survival, and umpteen varieties of PTSD.

Let's do another quick Hope tally, this time her life experiences. We can probably discount the violent death of her mother and the umpteen Marvel villains who tried to kill her at birth, as she was far too young to remember any of that . Hope's earliest memories are probably of the small, rural settlement somewhere in the distant future where she was raised by her adoptive mother Hope, and her adoptive father Cable, who was so insistent that he wasn't and never would be her real father that he refused to so much as give her a name until the day she witnessed the violent murder of her second mother right in front of her eyes, conveniently freeing up a name for reuse. (If you think you're detecting some slight bitterness over the handling of that sequence, you're probably right.) After the destruction of her home for the second time, Hope and Cable were cast out into the wasteland that was all that was left of the USA after Bishop, labouring under the belief that Hope was going to doom all mutants and anything that happened in an alternate future didn't count, took it upon himself to exterminate the human race on every other continent using a variety of stolen doomsday devices. Highlights of Hope's childhood would include meeting X-Force, the X-team with the highest violent kill-tally in history, and making friends with a boy called Emil, who would sacrifice himself in order to save her from the alien attack that had already killed everyone else aboard his spacecraft and quite probably a significant chunk of the entire surviving human race by that point. Hope would wake up from a stint in suspended animation two years later to discover her body had gone on aging without her input (impressively growing all the way from 11 to mid-late-teens in a mere two years), and finally spent an unspecified period with no company but Cable before telling him she was ready to go back. Later, in the pages of Second Coming, she would surprise him by admitting that in actually she wasn't nearly ready for the responsibility of being the Mutant Messiah, and had only told said otherwise because she was fed up living in a wasteland eating rat-on-a-stick for every meal.



Hope Summers, this is your life.

Now, it's fair to say that comic writers do love to pile on the angst, and there have certainly been times when granting a new creative team the license to handwave away the consequences a particularly gloomy period in some character's recent history was more or less essential to making that comic ever be fun again – such is the nature of the medium. Let's get one thing clear, I hated, loathed and despised those Cable issues I'm referencing. Most of them I only read out of what started as a hunt for material to parody and evolved into trainwreck syndrome, and the faster they can be forgotten, the better. However, in Hope's case, once you subtract out her gloomy childhood, you don't really have any defining character history left. Even if for convenience's sake you could justify glossing over the worst of the last twelve-odd years of relentless trauma that is Hope's history, you've still got the fact that her only experience with civilisation was a couple of years in one of those sparsely populating post-apocalyptic dystopias where the technology is a mix of uber-advanced and stone age and every authority figure is working for the big bad, that she hasn't interacted with a single human being besides Cable since the age of 11, and that she's been raised under a steady diet of justifiable paranoia. That shit leaves is going to leave its mark on how you deal with the world.

Despite all this, the worst culture shock I've seen her experience on is a brief spell of excitement over meeting her first bouncy bed, a little predictable discomfort about the whole Messiah thing, and perhaps a side-mention that she's not much interested in modern fashion. The writers otherwise seem determined to pass her off as a perfectly well balanced, emotionally stable teenaged girl.

So please understand where I'm coming from when I say fuck. That. Shit.

There is no way this girl would have the first idea what to say to a mutant teenager from the 21th Century babbling about SAT scores while trying to throw herself off a roof, and yet that's exactly what she does in Uncanny X-Men #526. There's no way in hell she'd have the socio-political background to lecture Professor X on how he apparently single-handedly screwed up mutant relations by using a weighted term like 'gifted' to describe a minority who'd been born different, and yet they've had her do that too. It's blatantly obvious that she's not even being treated as a character nearly so much as a blank slate for whatever soapboxing the writer might feel like projecting today. It's not for nothing that I'm personally suffering from this problem where a single comment from some random fan who's found some aspect of her current characterisation to enjoy is enough to set my teeth on edge.

I really, really wanted to give her the chance to develop into someone interesting.

No such luck. Marvel's determination to turn Generation Hope into yet another tale of a few ordinary mutant kids is far too strong.

Comments

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

It's nice to see how far the industry has come in terms of producing original, nuanced portrayals of characters from countries like Japan, rather than just grabbing a couple of anime references and an Engrish joke or two and taking the rest of the day off, isn't it? *sigh*