That postmodern should be a hotch potch word is inevitable. Americans in particular use it very freely; there are even pop television shows which call themselves postmodern, thus fueling those who see in postmodern practices nothing but a pompous euphemism for cultural zapping.
Who has not elaborated today her/his own understanding of the phrase postmodern? There are American acceptations, Italian, Spanish or British nuances, and French or German definitions. There is the postmodern of structuralists, that of post-structuralists, of deconstructionists, the postmodern of creators and that of theorists, that of Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, of Jürgen Habermas, Ihab Hassan, and others. There is a postmodern for every form of art, and that of the architects may appear to bear little resemblance to that of the literary critics. As I mean to discuss the X-Men here, and not critical theory, and as this is not the place to moot the debate of the IST/ISM endings or the hyphen, however thrilling, I will merely state in passing that I do not hesitate to use both modern and postmodern as nouns, and that I do not hyphenate postmodern.
Faced with the general confusion and unwilling to obey the dictates of this or that school of thought, I propose here a millionth definition, that is strictly my own, so as not to call the X-Men postmodern without stating what ingredients I detect in the postmodern pot, something that does not seem to deter the majority of cultural critics. I must make clear at this stage that I am mostly concerned, however facile this may seem, with the term as it applies to artistic endeavors, leaving the more strictly philosophical, sociological, historical and political domains to more specialized researchers.
To begin with, I see in "postmodern" no inherent association with "anti-modern". Postmodern artists simply come after modern artists, which does not imply, as some might think, that the modern should be irredeemably proscribed. The prefix post frequently entails in such a context that the one that comes after innovates more than its predecessor. Would that then make the postmodern more modern than the modern, newer than new? Not necessarily, as it is likely that the modern innovated practically to the very limits of innovation, leaving their successors little more than this observation and what logically stems from it. John Barth has developed this[1]. It is relatively easy in the literary field for example to point to, say, Virginia Woolf or Franz Kafka as modern writers and to Javier Tomeo or William Gaddis as postmodern writers, and to find in their writings confirmation of the afore-mentioned proposition. Besides, one should not equate this concept with the ancient notion of avant-garde, nor describe it as a reaction against the proliferation of culturally totalitarian avant-gardes that some say generated it. Moreover, I am sorry to see that certain deconstructionist theories have been assimilated to postmodern usages and vice versa. One reads that this or that artist, because s/he is postmodern, has by definition forgotten the concept of authorship altogether, one is told that in postmodern creation there is no such thing as an author, and so forth. One frequently stumbles upon proclamations of the "death of the author", but Maurice Couturier recalls how ten years after Barthes had announced it it was used as the basis of deconstructionist theory, whereas Barthes had given up the idea[2]. In any event, the arguments of those who generalize this concept to all artistic creation since this or that period, may easily be used to demonstrate that even Cervantes did nothing but amuse himself with other people's signifiers and signifieds. All this is somewhat simplistic; I do not deny the tendency, but Carlos Fuentes, to name but one, seems to me, however passé this may be judged, a magnificently present author. One keeps reading about floating signifiers, and indeed the concept is attractive, but couldn't the talent of the postmodern artist precisely consist at times in making his signifiers float in some particular way (as oxymoronic as this may sound), possibly conveying a feeling of anarchy? The notion of appropriation, so indissociable from postmodern practices, should not entail that of a sum of cultural appropriations piled up randomly as an aim in itself, however often one might encounter the phenomenon. Those problems of analysis are undoubtedly linked to the fact that the postmodern of those who theorize about our society is not the same as that of some of the creators I am using as references here.
It might seem more difficult to determine who in pop music, cinema, comics, and more generally popular culture is postmodern, although bands such as the B52s, or movie directors such as Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch spring rather spontaneously to mind. Roy Shuker writes:
Finally, the impact of postmodernism needs to be acknowledged, with its challenge to the established notions of representation in the verbal and the visual spheres. Postmodernism seeks to blur, if not totally dissolve the traditional oppositions and boundaries between the aesthetic and the commercial, between art and the market, and between high and low culture. The precise nature of postmodernism, however, proves hard to pin down, and there is a marked lack of clarity and consistency in all the varying usages of the term[3].
I am therefore aware of the fact that the word postmodern is indiscriminately applied to all sorts of products; I know some systematically see a derogatory connotation in it[4], whereas I freely confess to the contrary. To simplify my task without yielding to the temptation of loose taxonomy, I shall say that I call postmodern the artist who is acutely aware of everything that has been produced before her/him, at least in her/his field. This may seem paradoxical, seeing that numerous cultural commentators call postmodern any creator who ransacks the past indiscriminately; but I believe one should examine beforehand how this awareness of the past is used. The postmodern artist has, it is true, rejected, to begin with, obsolete distinctions between high and low culture, s/he is not worried in the slightest by oppositions between commercial production and "authentic" art[5], but most of all s/he seems to come to terms, in a more or less intellectualized fashion, with the following idea: everything has been said before, there is no point at all for me to create if my work consists of nothing but yet another example (boring by definition) of such and such categorized type of artistic creation, obeying without distance a set of conventions. Consequently s/he creates in such a way as to master the frequently playful palimpsestuous work (as Gérard Genette would say[6]) that s/he necessarily accomplishes. The postmodern artist knows s/he is sailing on an ocean of intertextuality[7], s/he handles quotations adroitly, as well as allusions, references, tributes, mises en abîme, pastiches, parodies, etc.; s/he shows distance at all times, and irony and derision, frequently s/he manages to free herself/himself from cultural ethnocentrism, s/he plays possibly, especially in popular culture, with Camp. In that respect I might volunteer that the postmodern novelist inevitably writes metafiction, the postmodern painter paints metapainting, the movie director films metacinema, the postmodern pop singer sings metapop and the postmodern comic book artist creates metacomics, each and everyone of them to various degrees, questioning at the time of creation and inside their creation its mechanisms, and the way in which it unfolds, notably in comparison to their "elders". The methodless artist who merely throws borrowed signifiers into a pot and stirs is not postmodern, s/he is simply appalling. I use the prefix meta here as it is now generally understood in the word metafiction (as defined by the postmodern writer William H. Gass or the critic Patricia Waugh[8]).
In order to broaden this definition one might even go as far as to say that postmodern art is necessarily metalanguage, or indeed metatext, should it be permissible to thus associate (in a postmodern way?) post-structuralist, Lacanian, Derridean, etc., concepts, except that some see in metalanguages something necessarily formal, explicit, hence restraining to the artist, which postmodern art certainly is not.
So postmodern practices, in their very essence self-conscious, and hypertextual, are organized along two axes; there is on one side "highbrow" artists such as Thomas Pynchon, who might easily be accused of writing to be taught (as opposed to read), and on the other side, people like Andy Warhol, Madonna[9], Robert Rodriguez, or Thierry Mugler, who can inspire highly intellectual exegeses just as they can entertain the general public (who will enjoy their art without dwelling on considerations such as those that precede). The creators of the X-Men belong to the second category, needless to say.
The adventures of the X-Men are published by Marvel Comics, which are number one on the American market. Marvel Comics publish great numbers of superhero magazines, including the very famous Spider Man[10]. When they first appeared in the 60s, the X-Men were but six: all white, there was Professor Xavier (the leader), The Beast, Iceman, Angel, Cyclops, and a single female, Marvel Girl. What distinguished them from other superheroes whose powers derived from magic or supercostumes was that they were mutants. In those days, the scenarios were still supervised by Stan Lee, the father of Marvel Comics. They were as naive as the artwork was simple, and conveyed a rather paltry ideology: there were bad guys and good guys, the good guys defended America and good old family values. Naturally, the X-Men had no sex life whatsoever. The Cold War was thriving and American imperialism was rampant. This was not so long after the first wars of Flash Gordon, one of their illustrious predecessors, against slanted-eyed extra-terrestrials. However, a new notion made a timid break: the reader was encouraged, back then already, to consider that in spite of their structural differences (mutant genes), the X-Men were human too, after a fashion, and not to be rejected.
Three decades later, they are barely recognizable. Angel for instance has lost his cherub looks, he is now blue and called Archangel. His white feathers have given way to metal blades. Between the storylines of the heroic beginnings and the postmodern nineties, the US went through Vietnam, hippies, feminists, the Black Panthers, a few assassinations, Watergate, Ronald Reagan, etc. A profusion of new mutants has been added to the six original characters, with impressive superpowers that sometimes surpass those of their elders. Three new generations of X-Men can be distinguished, they include African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and a great many women.[11]
Now the writers and pencilers (to use comic book jargon) change regularly, they are helped by lettering specialists, inkers, colorists, huge data banks and editors, as it is impossible for them to remember all the avatars and heavy pasts of their superheroes; today's X-Men adventures are the product of team work, and they are spread over nine monthly titles: The Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Man, X-Force, X-Factor, Generation X, Excalibur, Wolverine, and Cable. The original title, The Uncanny X-Men, has reached in March 1997 issue 342!
Obviously, the details I have just offered may at first glance seem to jar with my somewhat restricted definition of the postmodern: when dealing with the X-Men it is indeed utterly impossible now to think in terms of single authorship, but not in terms of collective authorship. Could we not see the company, Marvel Comics (a million dollar making corporation!), as a multi-headed author, surely a very postmodern concept, somehow?
The modern X-Men wore a uniform; one could discern imposing muscles underneath, but they exuded little sensuality; the postmodern X-Men have encountered desire, indeed they are sex bombs, their costumes share nothing but an X sewn on an impressive shoulder[12] (strangely reminiscent of Hester Prynne's A) and either show off large quantities of smooth skin and hypertrophied muscles (women and men alike) or are so tight that the effect is similar. The pencilers take great care not to neglect this essential aspect. The writers will sometimes still refer to uniforms, but the term is increasingly inadequate, at a time when superheroes look more like fashion victims than soldiers. In fact, their costume changes evoke 40s Hollywood glamour, when actors were always impeccable no matter what horrors they went through. The second generation X-Man Storm demonstrates it in an unbelievably camp piece:
If it is Storm you wish to face, I will use the lightning to transform the unstable molecules of my garments into a fac-simile of my costume![13]
How wonderfully convenient!
The postmodern X-Men have discovered relativity[14], they now know that any given ideology, be it dominant or not, must be examined with circumspection. They are preoccupied (but not too "intensely") by notions that frequently touch upon the most extreme attitudes of the Politically Correct, and at times give the impression that they have read Freud, Jung, and Lacan; they worry about AIDS[15], they more or less militate against racism and in favor of (moderate) feminism, social measures, etc. But they more and more frequently question their own political options, the very basis of the old episodes, as Iceman who thinks in 1997:
I'm an X-Man. That means I've made it a life choice to use my mutant abilities to help a world that would much rather see me dead. Why do I do it? To be honest, right here, right now, I have absolutely no idea.[16]
This would not quite make the X-Men postmodern if anything were still said or done completely at face-value in their adventures; but in fact, it has become impossible to read them (except possibly for teenagers, but even then...) without being aware of the constant ironic stance that pervades them. The X-Men have grown up and grown older (if not quite so fast) with their readers, their authors know that numerous fans who discovered them in the 60s continue buying Marvel Comics in their advanced age. The X-Men are now systematically depicted tongue-in-cheek, they are occasionally so camp that one might almost be tempted to worry about the effect they could have on unprepared children, their hairstyles notably have reached extraordinary levels of disregard for verisimilitude: long green quiffs that reach down to their ankles and never become ruffled even at the highest peaks of battles.
By definition, the language of comic books is dual, as much is said through the pictures as through the words printed in the balloons. Naturally, as a postmodern critic I see the whole of the X-Men adventures as a text that I read, a sum of signs that lend themselves to analysis. The first element that strikes me as particularly noteworthy is that the staff at Marvel Comics seems to have read everything ever published by Science Fiction novelists; more or less acknowledged tributes abound, principally to Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, Philip José Farmer, H.G. Wells, and a few others, but mainly to Philip K. Dick. Indeed Philip K. Dick is becoming everyone's master, as might have been expected. His books in the 50s, 60s, and 70s were too much ahead of their time and mostly delighted aficionados[17], now Hollywood is plundering his work[18] and everyone reads him. The X-Men's universe increasingly resembles Dickian universes, utterly paranoid and looking like drug-induced hallucinations[19].
So the X-Men have appropriated countless novels, but they have also been tremendously inspired by cinema, the most notable example being their celebrated Brood episodes in the 80s, that featured creatures which looked and behaved remarkably like Sigourney Weaver's arch-enemy the Alien, itself a graphic creation of the very Gothic H.G. Giger, an occasional comic book artist. We are not dealing with plagiarism here, obviously, but with postmodern appropriation, with homage. Like the movie director Tim Burton, the X-Men have frequently gone Gothic, not in the Carson McCullers modern manner, but rather along the same lines as Post Punk Rock performers.
The movie director John Carpenter in his recent totally postmodern Los Angeles 2019 rewrote his own classic New York 1999 in a way that is extremely similar to the X-Men's often reliving their own past adventures. In both cases the language at work is almost exclusively composed of references that the fans will immediately identify, never mind about the newcomers, they can still enjoy the product, with a fresh ear, as it were. One may also establish comparisons with the television series The X-Files, just as indisputably postmodern, which can be much more enjoyable if one has read everything about the various conspiracy theories that have circulated in the US since the 50s (shades of Philip K. Dick again, very present indeed in The X-Files), seen most American Science Fiction movies produced since the 50s, and taken an interest in the various excesses of New Age promoters.
In the X-Men monthlies, the visual rhetoric is less and less concerned with realism, increasingly stylized and unhindered by old constraints of strip size and shape, thus allowing the superheroes to fully express themselves. As for the dialogue, it is very little censored these days, as long as no vulgar four letter words are used, anything goes. "Yeah, I could take their minds and place them into rats and we would use their comatose bodies as pin cushions or...", says for example the supervillain called Mindmeld in X-Force[20] (haven't we come a long way?). But even the use of the word supervillain may be problematic these days, as in the postmodern X-Men adventures, old foes becomes allies, superheroes turn evil, and it has become quite impossible to rely on comfortable archetypes as one did in the past. Even Magneto, the X-Men's arch-enemy in the 60s, has now joined the ranks of the "good mutants", to the great irritation of die-hard nostalgic fans. What is the world coming to, if it has become difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys?
The creators of the X-Men do not strive to be avant-garde in any way, but they have read the ground-breaking French avant-garde comics of the 70s, such as the works of Moebius, whose influence is quite visible[21]. They frequently play with signifiers (huge phallic guns that defy the most elementary laws of gravity[22], birth marks and tattoos that look like drag queen make up, punk props, etc.), but never set them afloat utterly gratuitously, as video directors do in most rock videos, giving a bad name to the postmodern. Finally they do question the very art of comic books throughout their pages, as is most notable whenever they address the concept of Time. They have clearly understood that Time in X-Men adventures cannot be the same as Time in the "real world", and yet these adventures are supposed to take place "today". Indeed this premise has always been one of the strong selling points of Marvel Comics, even if from many viewpoints they qualify as Science Fiction (advanced technology, unceasing close encounters of the third kind, space travel, etc.), they have always made sure that the reader could easily identify with the superheroes, who live apparently in the same world, at the same epoch; they go to see the same movies, for instance.
So the authors distort Time in a rather clever way, definitely postmodern (the language of the postmodern knows no barrier of era, as has often been observed), allowing the superheroes to remain relatively young while fighting their way through decade after decade. But there is more: now that Marvel superheroes have sex, they are also capable of reproducing. However, it would not do to have their children aging around them when they themselves at the most change hairstyles to suggest the passing of years. So the writers have come up with a tremendous solution: they send the said children to the future or to the past, and occasionally organize their return as fully grown adults. Thus the latter can take an active part in the action. What is fascinating at this stage is the amount of extremely peculiar situations this entails. Cyclops, for instance, aka Scott Summers, was in love with Marvel Girl, aka Jean Grey. She was believed dead, and after a reasonable period of mourning, he fell for her dead ringer, Madelyne Pryor, a witch. They had a mutant child, Nathan Christopher, aka Cable. But Madelyne turned out to be Jean's more or less evil clone and soon left (but not forever, of course). So when Jean came back from the dead, she was as much Nathan's aunt (considering that a clone is the twin of the original) as his grandmother (considering a clone is the child of the original). She and Cyclops sent him to the future to save him from some danger, and when he came back some time later, he was twenty years older than them! But let us not forget that at some stage Scott and Jean left the present to be reincarnated in the future where they were able to actually raise Nathan using pseudonyms. Their stay in the future lasted many years, but conveniently enough, only a few minutes had passed when they came back to their bodies in the present.
Besides, another mutant girl, Rachel, once stumbled upon Scott and Jean, hailing from an "alternative" future (different timeline), and in that future, Scott and Jean had fostered her. Does this make her Cable's sister? Genetically speaking, yes. But also his aunt, and his cousin. Need I say more?
Obviously the whole point I am trying to make is that this postmodern "confusion" allows the writers to hint at marvelously perverted desires, to pun away furiously, and generally enjoy themselves, playing with the dialogue, questioning the very bases of the languages they use. What do you say to your son who is old enough to be your father when you invite him to your wedding to a woman who is technically his grandmother? And how do you greet the daughter that you will never have with the woman you"re marrying? Such setups defy psychoanalysis on a grand scale, and the writers are perfectly aware of this. They certainly cannot be accused of blindly using the conventions of the genre, but though they might seem to innovate spectacularly, can we not detect, mutatis mutandis, traces of eighteenth century or Victorian novels, in the treatment of coincidence and unexpected kinship, as parodied by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest?
In the same line of thought, Professor Xavier's son, a dangerous mutant, recently traveled to the past (more than forty years ago to you and me, twenty years ago to them, regardless of the dates of the first X-publications) to kill his father before he founded the X-Men, thus allowing Marvel Comics to drastically alter the nine X-titles (even their names changed), for a few months[23], before coming back to "normal" through another twist in the fiction. As for Reed and Jane Richards of The Fantastic Four, another well-known Marvel Comics team, they also lost their son Franklin to a different timeline, only to see him come back as an adult after a few weeks. In a postmodern universe, anything is possible.
To further confirm their postmodern status, the X-Men are more and more frequently drawn by artists who find their inspiration in Japanese Mangas (very large eyes, for example). This allows Marvel Comics to grab chunks of the Nippon market, and appeal to very young Americans, who feed on Japanese TV cartoons. Indeed the X-Men Adventures TV cartoons mean to compete with purely Japanese products; they are simplistic and aimed at a much younger audience than that of the comics. But even they may constitute yet another postmodern game, as many viewers delight in comparing the (much more basic) dialogue with that of the monthlies, as well as contrasting the graphic languages at work -- or is it at play?
[1] Barth, 1984.N
[2] Couturier, 1995.
[3] Roy Shuker, 1994, p. 28.
[4] Many creators reject the label when all the critics attribute it to them. John Barth for example is an exception.
[5] This distinction is still very potent in France, I regret to write.
[6] Genette, 1982.
[7] Genette, 1982.
[8] Waugh, 1984.
[9] I am currently engaged in a work of research entitled Madonna as Postmodern Myth (book out: http://www.georgesclaudeguilbert.com/en/page04.html#ma)
[10] Guilbert, 1983.
[11] These days they even feature Australian Aborigines, French-Algerians, and a hologram with a mind of her own. In the adventures of the Alpha Flight team, the X-Men's Canadian counterparts, there is even a gay superhero who recently came out of the closet!
[12] Sometimes the X is sewn elsewhere, when the superhero insists on baring her/his shoulders.
[13] X-Men # 60, January 1997.
[14] Cf. issue # 340 of The Uncanny X-Men, entitled Relativity.
[15] When they don't mention AIDS as such, they develop the idea of the Techno-Virus, which is not a disease that dance floor addicts catch, but a special virus that especially affects mutants...
[16] X-Men # 340, January 1997.
[17] Guilbert, 1981.
[18] Cf. for instance Blade Runner or Total Recall.
[19] Cf. especially the Age of Apocalypse period, 1995.
[20] X-Force # 62, January 1997.
[21] One knew something was happening at Marvel Comics when they gave Moebius a commission for two episodes of The Silver Surfer in the early 90s...
[22] Particularly in the recent issues of Cable. I mean that they are bigger and obviously heavier than the superheroes who carry them, and yet handled as if they were feather light. Incidentally Marvel Comics modern superheroes never carried guns.
[23] The Age of Apocalypse series, 1995.
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