Throwback Thursdays: 80s Storm

via Marvel

For reasons that should be obvious, Storm is one of my favorite X-Men and favorite Marvel characters besides. However, there is one reason that stands out above all the others: she is unapologetic. Going through Ororo Munroe’s publication history, all the way back to her 1973 origin story, one finds few examples where Storm caves to feeling sorry for any part of her identity. Storm is unapologetically Black, unapologetically African, unapologetically a woman and a leader, and unapologetically powerful.

While she lacks a well-developed rogues’ gallery as an individual, she stands out among the female X-Men as largely not having been portrayed as some kind of embarrassing stereotype. She is not Jean Grey, constantly out of control, shuttled back and forth between men who have no idea how to treat women, and dying every other week. She is not Psylocke, characterized by her crippling identity issues. Beyond other comparisons, she never guilts herself for her childhood trauma, which includes a near-rape and a jet plane crashing into her home and happening to orphan her, by the by, or the pursuant claustrophobia she was left with.

Storm’s entire persona is very Riot Grrrl. She’s here, the elements marshal their infinite might at her command, get used to it. As with the Riot Grrrl movement of the 90s and the female punk and post-punk musicians of the 70s and 80s that preceded it, Storm comes and an ethos of Black female power and expression follow in her wake. What better personification of this than 80s Storm?

Five Characters that Lady Geek Girl Wishes Were Pansexual

December 8^th was Pansexual Pride Day and as a proud pansexual myself, I wanted to mark the occasion by talking about pansexuality in geekdom. Except… there isn’t much pansexual representation in geekdom, and I’ve already written about the few characters who have been identified as pansexual. Gay and lesbian characters are still barely represented in all of pop culture, and bisexual and transgender characters rarely, if ever, grace our sphere of geekdom. So while it’s not much of a surprise that other lesser known sexualities are not represented, it’s always nice to dream of a day when more queer characters will exist in our media. Today, I decided to pick five characters that I would love to see come out as pansexual. Just to clarify, these are characters I wish would end up being pansexual. This does not mean that I think they necessarily are pansexual or are presented as pansexual.

Without further ado, here, in no particular order, are five characters I wish were pansexual.

Storm Is Blowing Me Away

We’ve said much on the topic of diversity in Marvel’s recent additions to its comics lineup. However, more is always better, so today I’m back to tell you about the new Storm ongoing series that premiered in July. Spoiler alert: I’m loving it so far.

Dangerous Black Superheroes

If you’ve read much of my other work on this website, you’re probably looking at the title and going, “What? But he’s always linking to that piece over at Jezebel about how brown kids deserve more brown superheroes!” Well, two things about that: 1) I’d probably do just as well linking you to “A Superhero That Looks Like My Son” and 2) they absolutely do, but I’m concerned that this mandate might encourage us to settle for just about any Black superhero, when that is simply not enough. We do owe it to children of color, to say nothing of LGBTQ+ youth and others, to represent their diversity in superheroes. But first, let’s deal with why it is that comics and superheroes matter so much.

The easy answer is that superheroes aren’t just fantasies; they’re deities. In our modern context, where our media at least appears to be pluralistic and decentralized, our deities come in all forms, and some of them wear capes. I say that to express that superhero stories are modern mythologies. They’re a method by which we represent the best of our culture to ourselves, and also by which we work out the issues currently facing our society. We’re prone to associate the word “myth” with things that didn’t actually happen—events strictly in the realm of fantasy. But take, for example, the story of Perseus and Medusa. Perseus goes on a hero’s journey, beheads Medusa, rescues Andromeda, etc., etc. Clearly a story. Many of the great mythographers of the 20^th century, however, regard this myth as a representation of an actual event. From the third volume of Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God:

 The legend of Perseus beheading Medusa means, specifically, that “the Hellenes overran the goddess’s chief shrines” and “stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks,”…that is to say, there occurred in the early thirteenth century B.C. an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma, which has been registered in this myth.

Pictured: Culture Hero

All that to say that the myths passed on by a society are not simply the idle results of primitive beliefs or childish minds. Even if they do not encode actual events, they record perspectives, cultural norms and ideals, and desires. Thus, when we write superhero stories, we are telling tales about idealized versions of ourselves. If my little mini-lecture about occidental mythology was not convincing, take Captain America: The Winter Soldier. That film could not more blatantly be about the relationship between freedom and security, the tension between individual liberty/honor, and the modern surveillance state. Plainly, it is a 170 million dollar exploration of one our society’s most pressing issues.

X-Men Vol 4. #1

Because you demanded it! The X-Women finally get their own book, from critically acclaimed superstars Brian Wood  and Olivier Coipel!

Ink: So, maybe you’ve heard. There’s a new X-men comic in town. X-Men #1 (2013) is the first issue of a relaunch which focuses on an all-female team of top-tier X-Men. Marvel’s been teasing a new release since 2012, and since January of this year, it’s been public that it will be an all-female team. Naturally, we over here at LGG were ludicrously excited. The comic has been out for about three weeks now, so we’ve all had time to marinate in it—if you haven’t you can buy it here—and now Lady Saika and I want to share our feels with you.

So You Want To Read Comic Books: Authors and Artists

By this point you have watched the comic book movies and TV shows, looked up characters that interest you, and started reading comic books. But wait, something terrible has happened! Maybe you started reading Runaways, but then the authors and/or artists left and went to a different comic and you just don’t like the  new writers and artists working on the comic. Does this mean that you, all of a sudden, find Superman’s character boring? Or, do you find yourself feeling uncomfortable because of Harley Quinn’s new outfit?

This does not mean that you suddenly don’t like comics, Harley Quinn, or Wolverine, or whatever you are currently reading; it means you don’t like the author/artist.