Bethany W. Pope, Comic Watch; It’s About Ethics in Comic Book Journalism: The Politics of X-Men: Red
"The central thesis of these eleven
issues is that the act of compassion is a more powerful tool than the
most brutally cinematic superpower. Empathy is the thing which
slaughters fear. Looking at your enemy and seeing a person, woven
through with hopes and loves, fears, the usual mixture of frailties,
transforms disparate (possibly violent) mobs into a functional community
by revealing that there is no ‘us versus them’. There’s only ‘us’. The
X-Men are the perfect superhero group to make this point, because their
entire existence is predicated on the phrase ‘protecting a world which
fears and hates them’. The X-Men have always represented the struggle
that othered groups (racial minorities, religious minorities, women,
members of the LGBTQIA community) have faced when trying to live in
function in a world that is slanted, dramatically, in favor of straight,
white (American) men. Such a group is a necessary force in the current,
fractured, geo-political climate.
The
world needs a message of hope and unity in a time when real children
(mostly brown) are being locked in cages at the border of America. And
Western audiences, who are either complacent in their ignorance or else
furious at their own seeming impotence, need to understand the ways in
which their outlook, their opinions are being manipulated so that their
complacency is undisturbed and their hatreds are intentionally focused
against highly specified targets. Allegory has always been a gentle way
to deliver a clear shot of truth, and the technique has functioned
perfectly in this series...
In this run, Taylor assembled a team
which was primarily composed of characters who are valued for their
empathy and capacity for forgiveness."
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