Recently out is the comic industry’s most recent all female team’s second issue! Very shockingly just titled as X-Men.
SPOILER WARNING!
First off, since here at read/RANT the first issue was skipped in being reviewed, I’ll link over to this nice and short Comical Musing article on X-Men #1. They point out the rather short list of female comic teams and how this is another good stride. Tim, who wrote that piece at CM, also points out the odd choice of an all female team being ran by an all male crew? Seems a bit odd, but then maybe that is why the starting issue centers around a damn baby. Seriously, Jubilee totes around a baby, the other female X-Men coo over the baby. While some of this is progressive and kudos should be sent to Marvel, its a bad starting point to have things center around a baby like this. Trying to be less sexist by being sexist with an all male creative team and a plot centering around women looking over a baby? Yep, props to you Marvel! Enough ranting though for, despite the odd choices, issue one wasn’t bad so lets see how issue 2 comes out.
So twist of fate to the usual damsel in distress story we get Beast in distress and Rogue saving her. Of course to help bring things back to sexism we get the antagonist pointing out that Rogue should be inferior for being a woman seconds later. And this is a female antagonist too! Ugh… Anywho, some action ensues and then we get Jubilee bringing the baby on a search-and-destroy (or imprison) mission that will surely include fighting. And Storm and the others are perfectly fine with this. Why? Well because apparently its the smart thing to do! Or for there wasn’t enough babies around our all-female cast. Lets not forget that shortly in the flight she’s given the ‘you are a mommy now, be caring and loving blah blah’ speech (oddly by the one male in the story, not including Beast’s cameo). Yep, that’s how babies run with a heroine. She coddles and plays with it until other heroines can coo over it, then she brings it towards a most likely giant fight and is told to be a loving and caring mother. When Captain America recently got a baby he fought his way out through an entire city out to get him and then they fast forwarded quite a few years to show Steve teaching the kid manly things like how to hunt and fight.
Yeah yeah, I am a guy shouting over sexism here on woman behalf. But we don’t have a female blogger here currently, and my human relations professor last year was amazing on the subject so I’m voicing up how I can. Bottom lines here is that the story is decent and Marvel should really be given props for trying. But this trying is rather horrendous. Wood and his crew need to change direction and end this baby-bit soon. Or Marvel should work on bringing in a female writer into this mix. Really, why do a comic centered around women and not have a woman in the creative team for it? Sneak Simone from DC? Call in Immonen?
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