"Zeeshan":- Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie’s Generation Hope # 9; On Making The Superhero Protest Story Work (Part 1 of 2)

Please be warned; spoilers! Really substantial, I'm-not-exaggerating, spoilers!

1. Tell A Story, Avoid A Lecture

There’s a continent or twelve’s worth of difference between text and sub-text, but you’d not know that where most superhero protest stories are concerned. Most writers called to this beguilingly worthy cause or that compellingly urgent one seem to have mistaken their obligation to entertain for a license to lecture. In their excess of ethicalness, they forget their responsibility to tell an absolutely engrossing story about the folks in the silly costumes who fly through the sky and punch through brick walls. They inform, but they don’t inspire, they preach, but they don’t persuade, and they puff and puff and puff without making the business of blowing down whatever particular house it is they're discussing any more of a compelling prospect. After all, if folks were moved by facts and feelings and sincere exhortations, what would be the need for a protest story in the first place? In that one key sense, good intentions are not unlike a host of other politically vital resources from food aid to weapons of mass destruction. Without a viable delivery mechanism, all of them are fundamentally useless, if not worse.

          

"Better" is, in Kieron Gillen’s words. “the one where we’re using the X-Metaphor to talk about teenage gay suicide”, but that context could’ve been stripped from the story and there’d still have been a moving and involving tale left on the page concerning the limitations of good intentions and the cruelty of fate. No, a Generation Hope # 9 which had had that specific use of the 'X-Metaphor’ removed wouldn’t have jabbed at the limbic system and provoked such anger, and it wouldn’t have messed with the empathy circuits and inspired such regret, but it would’ve still been exciting and it would’ve still inspired sadness and reflection. It would’ve featured the likes of the pulse-raising scene of Transonic's race against fate as she powered her way across the Atlantic is a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to save Zee’s life, even if the cause of his distress in a less-specific narrative would've perhaps been nothing more contentious than the complications of his emerging mutation. It could’ve presented Hope’s realisation that her mission will inevitably involve failure and a constant re-evaluation of her principles and purpose. It would have been a story that was composed of action and emotion and in its own terms, quite separate from Mr Gillen's more deliberate moral purpose, it would've worked.

         

But it wouldn’t have been nearly as good a comic book. Because in Better, the social protest doesn't eclipse the story, but powers it. And without that focus on a loathing of homophobia, without the rage and the purpose to which it's been put, the remaining tale of superheroes too late to save a potential comrade from the consequences of his mutation would've been far, far weaker, far more run of the mill. Certainly the absolutely vital closing debate concerning the virtues of revenge and restraint would’ve been almost impossible to shoehorn so movingly into the tale, leaving just another story of super-powers and super-conflict. More important yet, of course, Generation Hope # 9 wouldn’t have stood as an unpretentiously heartfelt mark of sympathy and solidarity with those young and entirely blameless folks persecuted to their deaths simply because of their sexuality and the bigotry of their peers.

But then, why would any such censored narrative ever need appear? Why would anyone want the superhero comic gutted of social and political content, when the very presence of such can make it all the more powerful and moving? For it's a myth that politics and the superhero book somehow work to each other's disadvantage, and Better very much proves that. What’s that ‘X-Metaphor’ for anyway?

             

2. The Problem Raised Must Never Be Solved

There’s always the worry that the raised spirits and sense of community inspired by singing of the likes of “Feed The World” will leave the singers feeling that the world has somehow actually been fed. So it is with the superhero protest book. A comic which closes with the reader feeling that even the tiniest amount of a social problem has been dealt with is one which runs the risk of transmitting a sense that things aren’t actually that bad after all. And so the script and art of Better work hard to ensure that the raw frustration and fury inspired by Zee’s impossibly lonely end remains undiminished at the story's close. In places, doing so proves a technically demanding business, and it at times involves the hiding of some dubious but necessary plot-holes in plain sight in order to emphasise how very common homophobia is and how little punished are its practitioners. For example, so understandably keen is Mr Gillen not to give the impression that the loathsome Luke has been suffering for his bigotry that he shows him still living in University accommodation “four weeks”

          
after Zee’s death. Of course, it’s important that there’s no sense in the narrative that Luke has been brought to book, because that would undercut the fact that our real-world societies really aren’t making the appropriate efforts to engage with this issue. It's easy to carelessly suggest on an emotional level in a comicbook that the causes of a social problem are easy to identify and deal with. Consequently, Luke needs to be shown living the life that he had before he drove Zee to suicide, to accentuate the point that terrible things occur and yet all those Lukes are still out there living as if they were decent and typical folks, as if they'd never done such unforgivable things to the folks they've persecuted. But there’s few if any Universities in Britain which wouldn’t have had Luke at the very least suspended and awaiting a hearing as a result of the facts of Zee's suicide. Put simply, it's impossible to believe that Luke hasn't been turfed out long before four weeks have passed. (It's hard not to imagine civil rights groups not making his life in halls a living hell too.) Yet Better cleverly misdirects the reader with the pace of its telling and the content of its narrative, so that the quandary of Luke’s inexplicable presence in the University of Sheffield's halls stays in the background, where it of course belongs. For this is a story designed to make us long for resolution while ensuring that we never receive it. In places, therefore, there's a clear conflict between what most likely would happen and what it's necessary to show, and the latter always cleverly and surreptitiously wins out.

            

Similarly, it doesn't make a great deal of sense that Luke, and perhaps one or two of his fellow persecutors, are standing together in the open when Hope and her fellow mutants arrive at the scene of Zee's death. Unless he's been corralled there by Transonic, which the text gives no indication of, or unless he's waiting there for the police and/or the University authorities, which is never suggested, logic tells us that Luke should be anywhere but. (Laurie, for example, has already witnessed his complicity, and probably that of a good few others, in Zee's death.). Yet the narrative needs them all there, to allow their numbers and their freedom and Luke's presence among them to counterpoint Zee's lonesome and anonymous corpse, and to inspire the reader to identify the problem of homophobia as being of a far broader nature than that of a few bad eggs stinking up a kindly, liberal world.  And such is the contempt and loathing of Luke and his fellow mutantphobic rubber-neckers that Mr Gillen quite rightly inspires, that it's hard to notice that perhaps it makes no sense for all of those characters to be on stage there at all. Their presence is needed to place Luke's barbarity once more into its wider context, and so the narrative is designed to carry us past any such quibbles of logic with the force of the emotions inspired and the implications generated.

       

To that end, we're never ever allowed to focus to any great degree on Luke and his personal motivations separate from the bigotry and ignorance of the wider culture after Zee's mutation begins. At that point, Mr Gillen's script starts to concentrate far more on the blogosphere's encouragement of Luke's prejudice, of his mutantphobia, and upon the lack of will there is even on the part of Zee's friends to challenge what's being done to him. And so Luke's behaviour is reinforced by the 'number of hits' his photos of Zee's distressful state generates, and we're shown the cowardice and therefore complicity of those who witness the plight of Zee but don't immediately intervene, and the point is so emphasised that this is not an individual problem, even as a great many individuals are helping to create it. It's simply not an issue that can be explained with reference to just Luke, a few friends of his friends, and the dead-heartened, cruel and cowardly. bigots that they are. It's a truth that emphasised by how Mr McKelvie's art scrupulously avoids presenting those who're actively bullying or passively failing to help Zee as stereotypically 'evil'. Indeed, they're often far more conventionally attractive than many of the X-Men themselves.

       

And so, though we can recognise some of the folks who're on the right side of Better by the costumes that they;re wearing, it's considerably more difficult to spot the folks that they're meant to be opposing, which in that sense at least makes Marvel's Earth no different to ours. At every stage of Generation Hope # 9, the implication is that the beating up of two or three despicably callous students by the X-Men, or the destruction by a phasing Kitty Pryde of a hundred or so I-Phones and computer screens, simply won't affect the fundamentals of the problem at all. A few costumes knocking around a few students simply won't change anything, and yet that's what superheroes do; they hit things and they make them alright. Cleverly, Mr Gillen turns this impotence on the part of Hope and her fellow mutants to his purpose. He doesn't leave his superheroes on the periphery of his polemic so much as he puts them to use within it as a symbol of the limitations of punitive power in the face of widespread prejudice and apathy. The solution to the appalling problem, he suggests, is not a few show-trials, the odd significant punishment and a pretense that everything's alright now.  Instead, Zee is dead, and there's no meaningful revenge or salvation or closure to be found, which is why the story succeeds in agitating rather than pacifying, and why it inspires a genuine sympathy rather than a well-meaning but patronizing pity. Zee didn't die because he wasn't quite brave enough or bright enough or strong enough; his suffering, quite contrary to logic of the superhero narrative, was entirely beyond his own control. It not only didn't reflect his own fine qualities, but it occurred despite them. Similarly, his suicide wasn't the consequence of the mutants being late or because some super-villainous hidden hand manipulated events. He's not an excuse for the X-Men to feel even more sorry for themselves, or a way of stirring up a soap-operatic angst to add some tearful grit to their story, or even a victim to trigger a good old fashioned conflict with a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or whomever. No, it was the banality of evil that did for him, which throws the question of responsibility back upon the reader.

Or, as Hope says at the end of her time in the story; "We have to be better." Not 'they', or 'he', or 'she', but we.

               

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to be concluded;

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