We Call the Ship Blobsy
“The Butterfly Effect Begins” / “We Call the Ship Blobsy”
X-Tremists #2-3 (2019)
Written by Leah Williams
Pencils by Georges Jeanty
Inks by Roberto Poggi
X-Tremists is a mini-series that is part of a larger story called “Age of X-Man” which was devised as an event to be published in the interim period before Jonathan Hickman’s arrival as the new principle writer of X-Men comics this July. It is a sideways version of “Age of Apocalypse” in which X-Man – an immensely powerful clone created by the “Age of Apocalypse” version of Mister Sinister from Cyclops and Jean Grey’s genetic material and who is essentially that dystopia’s equivalent to Cable – forces the majority of notable X-Men characters to be shunted into his bizarre version of a utopia. X-Man’s world is peaceful, and a place where only mutants exist. But because X-Man is so essentially warped by his origin as a clone, he’s decided that all physical, romantic, and familial relationships are inherently bad and obsolete in a world where all new children are created in labs.
As with “Age of Apocalypse,” the story plays out in a set of mini-series that explore different facets of this new alternate reality. The tension in each series mainly comes down to characters slowly realizing something about their existence is off, and experiencing flashes of their true lives. Most of the series involved are pleasantly mediocre and mostly suffer because their premise is overextended in five issues and the art is drab and uninspired. The best of the series by quite some distance is X-Tremists, which is written by newcomer Leah Williams and illustrated by Georges Jeanty, who previously collaborated with Joss Whedon on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book.
The title is very misleading in that there is no group of characters called X-Tremists, and the series is actually about the agents of Department X, who are tasked with enforcing X-Man’s draconian laws forbidding any sort of sex and romance. Unlike a lot of contemporary X-Men titles, in which the selection of cast members seems somewhat arbitrary, Williams was very deliberate about the characters selected for her story. Three of the main characters – Iceman, Northstar, and Psylocke – are canonically queer, and have been essentially forced back into the closet by X-Man. Jubilee is a young mother, and has had all her memories of her son erased from her mind.
And then there’s Blob. Blob has been written as a villain all through his publishing history, and has always been presented as a vile, pathetic fat man who only ever works as a henchman for either Magneto or Mystique. Unlike the other characters, who have had something important about themselves taken away by X-Man, the Blob of this world has been given a much better life in which he can actually be his true self. In a world where being unique is celebrated and all sorts of body types are acceptable, he’s no longer forced into villainy by society’s disgust for his obese form. He’s allowed to be a proud and upstanding citizen. In this context, he’s widely respected as a hero and a leader. He’s well-read and thoughtful. Despite the creepiness of Department X’s mission, he’s a gentle and forgiving pacifist.
And he’s in love with Psylocke. But unlike in the real world, where his self-hatred and a justified assumption that everyone finds him repulsive would lead him to repress a crush like this, he’s kept this to himself here because of the laws he’s expected to enforce. Blob is pushed to reveal this to Psylocke in the second issue in a tearful and often poetic monologue. Blob’s confession is very considerate in a self-loathing sort of way – he makes a point up front about how he never intended to “impose” his feelings on her and was content to keep it to himself – but he refuses to apologize for having those feelings in the first place because allowing himself to love her was something that made him feel alive.
The big surprise for Blob, and for the reader as well, is that Psylocke is not repulsed by him. In the third issue she returns to his home to have tea and borrow some of his favorite books, and she ends up having her own soliloquy about her complicated and painful relationship with her body. The version of Psylocke in this story is the current iteration, who just recently was returned to her original form as a posh British woman after having inhabited the form of an Asian ninja for nearly three decades of publishing. Williams’ Psylocke has been dealing with dysmorphia and an eating disorder since she was a teenager, and being trapped in another woman’s body was a respite from all this. “I never felt that way toward Kwannon’s body, only mine,” she tells Blob. “It was so much easier to be kinder to myself through her body. I did not struggle with my eating disorder when I looked like her. Because she is not me, and she IS beautiful.”
Blob and Psylocke don’t consummate their feelings, and continue to follow the laws they enforce. But the intimacy they’ve developed is profound for both, and carries into how they interact in the remainder of the story. It’s sad in the sense that poor Blob’s deep love is unrequited, but quite beautiful in how they open up to one another. It would be awful if future writers don’t run with what Williams establishes about Blob’s true nature, or how she articulates Psylocke’s fraught relationship with her original body. It certainly makes the most of the editorial decision to revert Psylocke from her far more iconic (though racially problematic) form.
Williams is young and relatively new to writing comics, and comes to the industry after some success as a YA novelist. Her perspective is fresh and her fandom for the X-Men in particular is quite intense. The difference between her approach to this series – as well as recent one-shots she wrote focused on Emma Frost and Magik – and that of most anyone else who has written X-Men comics in the past few years is quite stark. For one, the tight focus on a set of five carefully selected core characters and diving deep into their major themes and inner lives is the opposite of some of the other “Age of X-Man” series or, say, how Matthew Rosenberg has been writing the concurrently published Uncanny X-Men series, which follows the characters who were not zapped into X-Man’s alternate world.
Rosenberg’s Uncanny is a fascinating mess that began with great promise as he focused on the return of Cyclops and Wolverine but quickly devolved into a narrative trainwreck as his core cast bloated to over a dozen members, and each successive issue was packed with yet more characters popping in from out of nowhere in glorified cameos. Rosenberg is hardly alone in the “all-you-can-eat-buffet” approach to casting X-Men comics, but his recent work is the most egregious example yet. It is all too transparent that when given the opportunity to write a 12-issue X-Men run, he decided to prioritize packing in as many characters he liked as possible without, you know, actually giving those characters any meaningful story beats. The plot is rushed and often nearly incoherent, and moments that ought to have landed as emotional and tragic, such as the pointless killing of Wolfsbane, don’t connect at all. (The latter in large part due to the slapdash art of a rando fill-in penciler.)
It isn’t just that Williams is sensible in her narrative choices, but that unlike the majority of people writing these things these days she actually has something to say. She’s working through her own lived-in experiences with body issues and queer identity, and pushing themes that have been in the subtext of X-Men comics for decades to the surface. She writes her characters as people, not just IP to trot out joylessly, or a box of action figures to haphazardly spill out on to the living room floor. She loves the characters she writes, and badly wants you to empathize with them and connect like she has. The bar in comics is very low now, and writers really can just nod in the direction of woke ideas and expect rapturous applause from small pockets of fans on social media. But Williams goes deeper, and there’s a heart and generosity to her writing that was crucial to Chris Claremont and Scott Lobdell’s work on the franchise at its commercial peak in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A lot of writers have certainly attempted to bring that back, but Williams does it effortlessly because this is clearly just the sort of person she is.