I Am Hopeful After X-Men Fandom Turned Inclusive

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There’s something about our ongoing national nightmare that has me fixated on the X-Men—and no, not just because they literally fight a giant blue dude named Apocalypse. I’ve long been a devoted comics fan, and Marvel’s mutant superheroes have always been my favorite team. But the books’ central political metaphor—a ’60s era morality play that casts the X-Men as the rebel avatars of mutantkind, a marginalized offshoot of humanity—had grown stale. Where once there had been millions of mutants with their own defined culture and customs, Marvel in the early 2000s trimmed their number down to fewer than 200. As one X-Men podcaster joked, “That’s a lecture hall. That’s not a subculture.” Sales were falling and the books’ longtime fans had mostly moved on. Then, last year, Marvel changed everything. Under a new branding initiative called Dawn of X, mutants shunted off to an island in the Pacific, formed their own country, and were left to grapple with the mechanics of nation building.

The stories were enthralling. Comics reviewers and online fandom, responding to the hype of a new era, began to build a critical community that mirrored the chosen family seen on the page. A new wave of writers has convincingly made the case for a modern “mutant metaphor” that encompasses disability activism, queer subcultures, and, yes, resistance to the Trump administration. Given that a major X-Men villain is a deranged narcissist who’s obsessed with cable TV, it’s not actually much of a stretch!

Sites like Xavier Files and Women Write About Comics treat the comics with near-scholarly precision, searching for allusions to history, politics, and religion. It’s a kind of fandom that has become more prevalent online, but can often be drowned out by a few hateful bigots. No community is perfect, but what gives me hope about this one is its capacity for decency. Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men, a wildly popular podcast among diehards, has set the standard for this kind of responsible fandom, where our fictional obsessions are never made to be more important than real-world injustice. Co-host Jay Edidin told the Daily Beast last year that he’s only had to delete “under 20 comments in four years.” If superhero fans can be made to behave, maybe there is hope for the rest of us after all. —Dan Spinelli

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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