Marvel Comics Exec Tom Brevoort Doubles Down On Belief That “For The X-Men, The Message Is The Concept”, Writes Off Those Who Disagree And Use The Term “Woke” In Their Criticisms As “Cretins”
In adding an insulting edge to his previous attempt to rewrite history through a modern lens, Marvel Comics exec Tom Brevoort has dismissed those who dissent to his belief that progressive social messaging is an inherent part of the X-Men’s identity and specifically use the term “woke” in their criticisms as nothing more than “cretins” acting in bad-faith.
As previously reported, Brevoort first shared his read of the team’s origins in December 2023 when, in response to fans hopes that the upcoming X-Men event From the Ashes would curve Marvel’s Merry Band of Mutants line away from focusing on overtly progressive grand-standing (look no further than the decision to put Wolverine, of all people, in a thrupple with Jean Grey and Cyclops) and take it back to its more adventurous roots, he declared via his personal Twitter account, “It’s X-Men. The message is the premise.”
And though he initially allowed his brief tweet to stand as his one-and-only statement on the matter, the Marvel Comics senior VP and executive editor would eventually return to the topic on March 3rd, courtesy of a reader question submitted to his personal Substack newsletter, Man With A Hat.
“With the new X-Men ’97 show coming out, a lot of mainstream attention has been put on the x-men, and all the usual suspects are making their rounds, accusing it of being wOkE garbage before it’s even released, and it’s prompted a lot of conversation about the role that progressivism and so called ‘wOkEnEsS’ does and should play in the X-Men,” wrote a reader who simply referred to herself as Callie. “Do you believe that the X-Men and their comics should be taking a stand and making a statement on current issues minorities face, in spirit with their history and origins? I personally feel like that’s a very important thing to keep, as nearly all of the X-Men’s best stories were made through that lens, such as God Loves, Man Kills, Days of Future Past, the original Sentinel sagas, and even a lot of the stuff in the Krakoan era.”
Brevoort began his response, “First off, I think the ill-defined accusation of being ‘woke’ is nonsense, and I tend to turn off and tune out whenever it comes up in almost any context.”
“The people who are using it, and who brandish it like a sword to attack whatever they don’t like, tend to be mostly, well, cretins,” he then declared. “They aren’t making a good faith argument, they’ve just come up with an all-purpose term, an infinitely adaptable scarlet letter that they can hang on anything they don’t like for any reason.”
From there turning his attentions from said critics’ terminology to their actual arguments, Brevoort next told Callie, “That all laid out, I’ll tell you what I said previously on social media when a version of this question came up: for X-Men, the message is the concept. This is a book about oppressed outsiders, each a minority of one for all that they share the X-gene and a commonality of purpose, who are hated and feared because they are different and who have to constantly struggle to find acceptance within a society that does not understand them and wishes that they would just go away.”
“Every X-Men comic book published since 1963 would is about these themes to one degree or another,” he concluded. “Without them, it wouldn’t be X-Men. So while our primary objective is always going to be to entertain and to thrill, this is always going to be a prevalent stratum in every X-Men story.”
Notably, despite this read of the X-Men having become a recent element of the team’s pop culture identity, it was not part of their original concept.
As explained by the team’s co-creator Stan Lee during a 2004 interview given to the Archive of American Television’s Lisa Terrada for the group’s Living Television Collection, “Well, there’s a funny a story. Everything’s a funny story.”
“After I had done the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man, I think the X-Men came next,” said the industry icon. “The X-Men and one other. I think Daredevil. They’re about the same time.”
“Anyway I wanted to do another group, another group of superheroes, but I was getting tired now of figuring out how they get their superpowers,” he explained. “I couldn’t have everybody bitten by a radioactive spider or exposed to a gamma ray explosion.
“And I took the cowardly way out,” he continued. “I said to myself, ‘Why don’t I just say they’re mutants. They were born that way.’ We all know there are mutants in real life. There’s a frog with five legs, things like that. So I won’t have to think of new excuses. I’ll get as many as I want and yeah, he’s a mutant, that’s all.”
NEXT: ‘X-Men ’97’ Showrunner Confirms Disney Plus Series Will Portray Morph As “Nonbinary”
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