sorry for the essay, but: you know as a kid I really liked Marvel comics because they seemed counter-cultural. I grew up in a small hick town in the south where people believed Pokemon were Satanic and any music outside of bland white stadium country was trash. So I was into X-men, punk music, and Magic: The Gathering because I thought they were enough of a spiritual raft to get myself through living there. I didn’t have enough words to even describe why I felt so wrong there, but I knew these Marvel characters fought against injustice and the X-men faced persecution and at least to my 9 year old brain, it felt dangerous reading that stuff. Like I was learning power dynamics and how to open my head to different concepts.

X-men would even gracefully humanize the villains like Magneto (this was when Grant Morrison was head writer) as victims of stubborn pigheaded racism by directly showing him as a holocaust survivor. I know how silly it sounds, but that did resonate with me as a kid. My grandmother would tell me stories about when there were “colored” bathrooms at the local diner, and reading about Magneto was the first time I connected the racist bullshit of my hometown with the extent of how much damage that racism can cause. I’m a privileged first-world moron but I at least tried as a kid, and X-men was the tool available to me. I got mocked at school for reading comics. There was an incident where several bullies ripped an issue of Transmetropolitan out of my hands in middle school and then set it on fire. I got sent to the office and directly accused of Satanism and witchcraft by the vice-principal. Shit was bad, but it at least hardened me to just how poisoned these southern reactionaries are and how deeply disturbing their ideology is.

And now as an adult Marvel movies are everywhere and have gained acceptance as cultural icons. Everyone knows the characters I loved as a kid and I doubt any child now gets bullied for knowing who Dr. Strange is. And yet now Marvel is an aspect of that very same machine that generated the white southern reactionaries of my hometown. They’re an integrated cultural and economic force. The most horrifying part for me is learning that Marvel always was part of that same machine and its current acceptance as a cultural force onto itself is simply the mask slipping off and the evil grin revealing itself.