When comics fans now think about Marjorie Liu, we may think about her creator-owned book Monstress. When we think about who made the X-Men the X-Men, we may think first of Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson and collaborators in the 1970s and 1980s. And if we think of Liu’s work for Marvel, we might think of her Laura Kinney in X-23 (2010-12).
That’s not wrong. But we should think again. Liu’s run on Astonishing X-Men (2012-13) gets remembered for mainstream comics’ first same-sex wedding, but Northstar’s marriage is only the start. Liu spotlights characters Claremont rarely developed: Northstar, Gambit, Xi’an Coy Manh, and Iceman, along with the Shi’ar bodyguard Warbird, introduced in 2011. Liu’s X-Men are mutants and queer, mutants and Asian American, mutants and immigrants, mutants and frontline care-workers, mutants and mentally ill. They make, and regret, and revise, choices about who to trust, who they can love, and whether to live the costumed-hero life. And they do so with the dynamic variety that a visual medium demands, first under the pencils of Mike Perkins and then, spectacularly, with Gabriel Hernandez Walta. Liu’s Astonishing holds not just some of the best character work in post-Claremont mutant comics, but some of the queerest, most intersectional, and most historically aware.
As the run opens Kyle—Northstar’s boyfriend and manager—is moving in with him in New York City (he uses super-speed to unpack). Force-field projector and M.D. Cecilia Reyes, who has quit the X-Men, needs a place to stay in Manhattan. Gambit offers to share his apartment; they flirt, and she puts her feet in his lap. Then Logan arrives to ask for Gambit’s help. The comic’s almost over before any shots are fired or punches thrown. But the shooters and punchers are badass: they’re the Marauders, of Mutant Massacre fame. After they fight, Kyle and Northstar talk about how Northstar divides his time, and Cecilia says why she divides hers: “My friends are here” (with the X-Men) “but I make a difference there,” in the ER.
Everyone in this comic—even the villain Chimera, who’s “actually trying to have a life”—seems to be trying to figure out whether to stick with what they’re given (superheroing, for Cecilia; bachelor angst, for Northstar; ambushes and heists, for Chimera), or whether they can grow and change. Threatened by the Marauders, trying and failing to help fight them, Kyle almost breaks up with Jean-Paul. “You should find yourself some guy who can read your thoughts,” Kyle complains, “or… or… someone who can fly so they don’t have to be carried around like some weakling.” But Jean-Paul tells Kyle otherwise, in midair: “You make me feel like there’s nothing wrong with me.” In the B-plot Logan and Warbird perform unlikely detective work on the Hatchi company. “No one can fight all the time,” Logan (of all people) admonishes her (the advice will resonate later).
The wedding, in glitzy Bryant Park, features “every white rose in New York City,” Beast as officiant (perhaps ordained via Internet), an affectionately nervous cameo by Northstar’s sister Aurora, and a dissonant note from Warbird, whose Shi’ar culture rejects same-sex unions. She’s almost certainly struggling with same-sex attraction of her own, but we won’t learn as much till the close of the run. Instead, we get Rogue wondering whether Destiny and Mystique “ever thought about getting married”; Jubilee and Laura Kinney dancing close; and a joke about Marvel’s moneymaking event. “Our wedding is going to generate about three million dollars,” Kyle later quips. Liu’s Northstar stories become stories about chosen family, as well as about whether (as Gambit puts) “the X-Men is something a marriage can survive,” whether Jean-Paul Beaubier can be hero and husband, more than one thing at once.
Stories about Karma, on the other hand, are stories about blood family: identities you get when you’re born. Her mysterious telepathic antagonist (“I don’t know what’s real and what’s in my head”) echoes the Dark Phoenix saga. Rather than corrupt her sexuality, this possessor threatens Leong and Nga, the niblings Karma is raising; “I wish I could start over,” Karma tells Kitty, who has had her own doubts about superheroing. But Kitty felt it was her decision: Karma’s “whole life has been a series of people making choices for me,” a bleak parody of the family loyalty that comes with stereotypes about Asian Americans.
Can Xi’an be a superhero and be herself? Can she be visibly Asian too? Her name and history still raise objections— “Xi’an” is not a Vietnamese given name, and “Karma” makes no sense for a Vietnamese, non-Buddhist, non-Hindu hero. But writers in company-owned IP use what they’re given. The Xi’an of Astonishing may be the first Asian American superhero written by an Asian American woman; she’s paired with Warbird, whose unidiomatic speech, elaborate dress, devotion to martial arts, and wish to eat cats and dogs (which she catches herself) invokes offensive clichés about Asian immigrants. Warbird is fresh off the spaceship, and cannot go back home; by contrast, Xi’an, who came here as a teen, wants to protect her adopted kids and become her semi-autonomous self, except that her birth family will not let her.
In fact, they’re the ones behind the mind control. “The woman with her finger on your soul” is Susan Hatchi, Xi’an’s half-sister, whose corporate-sponsored nanotech infected the Marauders and now infects X-Men. If Warbird incarnates one negative stereotype, Susan—also visibly Asian—incarnates another, the immigrant capitalist whose drive to succeed creates a sociopath. “It’s so difficult being the ‘good minority,’ isn’t it?” she tells Northstar. “So much pressure. So little room for mistakes.”
Am I trapped in one identity? Can I escape? The plot winds through a Russian warehouse that’s become a prison for Hatchi’s test subjects, who can’t flee without exploding; their status makes those questions gorily literal. This plot also lets Mike Perkins do what he does best—fight scenes, dilapidated townscapes, vulnerable, fleshy bodies. The X-Men escape to find Susan threatening Leong and Nga and Kyle: “I own your bodies. I might as well own your souls.” She directs them to conquer the island of Madripoor for her. Feints and fights ensue: Xi’an’s father comes out of hiding and kills Susan, Iceman’s powers neutralize Susan’s nanotech, and at last Xi’an narrates her own climb out of rubble and obligation: “we swallow the pain. We silence our voices.” No more.
Liu’s next arc has Warbird practically moving in with Xi’an, becoming an auntie for Leong and Nga (much as Kitty had in Mekanix). Their intimacy could– should– have become romance, given time and permission (Liu seems to have deleted a tweet of her own that suggested as much). Warbird also wanders Manhattan, watching the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center (a callback to Uncanny X-Men #98!) and wanly visiting galleries. She then flies to Egypt to investigate a mysterious artifact tied to the Fianden, a civilization the Shi’ar wiped out.
The artifact is a weapon: triggered, it incapacitates Shi’ar by liberating the imagination their warrior culture prohibits. In particular, it liberates Warbird’s talents for making visual art. Hernandez Walta’s abstract patterns, textures and ways to show art within art—Warbird’s sketch pads, the Fianden object’s designs—fit this story perfectly. Her facial tattoos, parallel under-eye black lines, fit the story too: once emblems of ardor, they now look like proto-tears. “Infected with dreams,” “born with the ability to create,” Warbird learns that she can remain Shi’ar and strong, and still be an artist. A Fianden “bomb,” when it goes off, becomes a historical art museum of Fianden creations, and Warbird can finally cry.
Can X-Men be good husbands too? Can warriors also be artists? The question Liu’s characters ask about themselves lead into questions about a genre: do superhero comics have to be always and only allegorical punch-ups between good and bad guys? Or can they succeed in other genres too—romance, immigrant narrative, kunstlerroman? During the Claremont run, and again with Liu, Perkins and Walta, they could.
First, however, someone has to save the comics from faraway companies (like Hatchi) as well as from stereotypes like those Warbird outgrows. The comics might also need saving from crossover events, like X-Termination, which interrupts Liu’s run with three issues’ worth of interdimensional shenanigans involving refugees from the Age of Apocalypse. When the dust clears, Dark Beast is stuck on Earth-616, there to remain till Illyana Rasputin dismembers him; Northstar faces the threat of deportation, since ICE won’t recognize same-sex marriage; and Iceman harbors Apocalypse’s Death Seed, a kind of anti-Phoenix Force that empowers its holders but turns them against all life.
The Death Seed in Bobby is also a seed of self-hate, amplifying Bobby Drake’s resistance to growth and change, and—as if Liu knew, though he wasn’t canonically gay yet—to coming out. “Intimacy requires vulnerability,” Bobby’s therapist tells him (the therapy scenes are also callbacks to Mekanix). Iceman’s habitual wish to freeze out other people (with wisecracks, with emotional distance) blooms into a literal attempt to freeze the whole world Walta’s scratchy, expressive art fits the story, and makes a procession of people drinking coffee together interesting. Some of those people are Kitty—Bobby’s current girlfriend—and his ex-girlfriends (Polaris, Opal Tanaka, Annie Ghazikanian): one part of Bobby’s splintered personality has called them together to punish them for going on with their lives. A hurt, confused Kitty talks relationships with Logan, and the two share a non-romantic hug, while Bobby looks on: “Sometimes I think I’d like to lose myself,” he muses. “It would be easier to disappear.” The out gay Bobby in Iceman (2019) says similar things: Liu was there first.
So was the canonically queer Mystique, another ex-partner of Bobby’s, who’s been trying to sound the alarm about the Death Seed. No one trusts her, but Kitty and others believe her (“I hate it when women get together,” Kitty tells Opal, “only to talk about a man”). Now we can read his arc as like Northstar’s, trying to figure out if he can accept same-sex love. When the comics came out, he might have looked instead like a future incel: “I’m tired of being just a friend. I’m done being the good man, the nice man.”
Either way, Bobby’s story challenges Walta to mix his expressive, soap-opera-ready people with increasingly cosmic landscapes, as ice clones and world-ending Fimbulwinter (a callback to Walt Simonson’s Casket of Ancient Winters) move in. “Pretty soon he’ll be dead inside. When this happens the whole world will die with him. Ice, forever.” He fights Thor to a draw, but Mystique extracts the seed from him, and Kitty grabs it from inside Mystique, placing it “where no one will ever find it” (a plot thread no one has yet pulled). But even an Apocalypse-free Bobby can’t stop trying to freeze the Earth: rather than talking to himself, or to the ice clone who has been his “therapist,” he needs to hear from Opal: “You hid from yourself all these years,” she tells him, “because you thought it might offend the spirit” of Bobby’s authoritarian father.
Like Karma, he needs to get away from his father. Like Warbird, he needs to evade his restrictive upbringing. And like Jean-Paul, he needs to accept chosen family. Kitty even tells him almost exactly what Xi’an had to hear: “You were never alone.” (Another critic has examined the arc as a picture of depression. Back from the brink, Bobby remembers how much he liked feeling “free,” murderous and remorseless: then, like Warbird, he cries.
In Liu’s last real plotline, Jubilee arrives in New York for karakoke, and Cecilia and Karma discover a young space alien that’s been, without malice, and like Xi’an, possessing people: “It just wanted some connection. A friend.” The alien flees to Indiana and finds a painfully obvious reader-surrogate, a high school senior named Wendy with pink glasses and kinky hair who’s “never even had a boyfriend” and writes fanfiction about Wolverine. Of course, she’s able to speak to the alien’s parent, who explains (in phonetic “alien” accents I won’t repeat here) that for her species it “takes adults to trigger growth, so this one ran away” rather than “become something new.” Then the parent repeats Liu’s slogan: “Not alone.”
In the lovely conclusion, Xi’an takes sword-fighting—or sword-dancing, or flirting—lessons from Warbird, and gives her advice: “You don’t have to give up who you are to become something more.” They look about two paces away from watching Xena and holding hands. Then Northstar—Northstar!—gives Bobby Drake similar advice: “You can’t hide yourself again, Bobby. Embrace who you are… Be my friend.” Since Obergefell v. Hodges (2013) applies in the United States of Earth-616, Jean-Paul’s immigration hearing has become a formality: Bobby heads there, and Warbird heads out for wine, beer and sandwiches with the other X-Men. “I will not hide from what I have become… or will become,” she tells herself. “I have a home. I have a family.” Curtain.
Liu seems unlikely to write X-Men again: she told an interviewer in 2016 that leaving Marvel was like “trying to break up with a really hot, billionaire boyfriend who also happens to be a smothering control freak…I know I should walk away—and hell, I have walked away—but it’s hard to stay away.” She may not go back to her mutants, but no one can take them away. Her run leans as hard as any since the 1980s on the mutant metaphor, where X-powers suggest (but aren’t the same as) other kinds of minority identity: queerness, depression and mental health conditions, immigrant status.
And her run is, perhaps more than any other X-writer’s, intersectional: Karma’s mutant powers do not stand for her Vietnamese American identity but drive how she can use it. Jean-Paul’s mutant powers don’t substitute for his status as a gay, and undocumented (and white, and rich) New York resident; nor do they compensate for it. The art, especially under Walta, feels intersectional too: never photorealist, it’s slice-of-life when it should be, and vast, exciting, expansive, when needed. It moves fast—like Northstar—between its kinds of stories, starring a new character each time. But each character—and each reader—gets a similar lesson: no one has to be one thing, and no one has to be alone. You can be a doctor, a husband, an artist, an aunt, or almost all of the above, as long as you ask your friends for help. You can write fan fiction and apply to college and calm an angry alien. You can be a New Yorker and a Canadian hero, You might even—if you want it—catch the bouquet.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
