Bendis makes Teen-Iceman gay in All-New X-Men

The whole thing is such crap. Alonzo's argument for doing this was that people would say this was a (cheap)stunt but that it was actually a good story. Well, where the hell was it. A handful of pages spread across two issues that wouldn't make a whole comic. A scene in All-New that reads like Jeen waves a magic wand and *boom*. Then:
Bobby, you're gay!
I am? I am!
Let's go confront your older self.
Adult bobby, you're gay!
I...am(you got me!)

And what, countless telepaths in and out of Iceman's mind including older Jean, Xavier, Emma, being absorbed by Rogue, countless other things spread across over a half-century of stories and no one else could tell except teen Jeen?

Or else they all knew and ALL kept silent? Preposterous. Does anyone think Emma, after sharing Iceman's mind, would have spent her time berating him on not pushing himself hard enough with his powers rather than helping him come to terms with being secretly gay if he actually was? Or continued flirting with and even going on a date with him?

That's the difference between good writing and bad fanfic. Fanfic can be total fantasy and not have to make any kind of sense, good writing should.

All-New read like a bad joke and Iceman trolling, mixed with actual, anti-iceman trolling from the internet added to the comments because...Bendis. 600 was like a bad fanfic mixed with a dream sequence. Even the people struggling to defend it aren't labeling this anywhere on the same planet as good.

And just like that, over a half-century of relationships, loves and attractions gets rewritten into a lie. A character everyone knew gets rewritten into a stranger. There's no way in hell Bobby just immediately accepts all that unless he knew he was gay and was actively lying to everyone in his life his whole life.

And what are fans supposed to do, for fans who chose to accept this, when they go back and read older issues and trades and see Bobby in his relationships with women, some of which various fans shipped and loved. How can we enjoy them as we once did now knowing Bobby is now supposed to be faking love and attraction to those women("why do you say hot when you are thinking not?", while suffering in shame and denial?) How the hell are we supposed to accept this and still enjoy those stories the way we once did and read them remotely the same way? You can't. This rewrites and changes so many things.

Even the gay jokes made at Iceman's expense over the years in the comics, now supposedly directed at an actually gay, closeted, living in denial man reads as far more offensive than anything those writers ever intended.

And what are fans supposed to do who KNOW Iceman isn't gay? I mean KNOW it the same way we know Scott isn't and Jean isn't. Are we just now expected to get a lobotomy and keep on reading?

I'd rather stop reading Marvel comics and keep those decades of stories and my enjoyment of them intact as they are, and I am hardly the only fan making that choice. Some made that choice months ago, others like me held out hope that 600 would reveal teen Iceman to be from an alternate reality and leave the adult character as we have known and enjoyed him for decades. If the 05 are not from a parallel reality, why are they even allowed to still be in the present?

Uggh.

People were posting on BC the other day, trying to list the writers who have written Bobby who thought he was gay. The usual inaccuracies were listed(it's just Bendis) including Mike Carey.

What Mike actually said(not an exact quote but I''ll be close):

"Outing the character is counter to my plans for the character. I don't see him as gay and closeted. The thing about Iceman is he is totally clear, completely transparent as a character, which is his appeal. I wouldn't rule out him being possibly bisexual, though, as I think everyone is somewhat bisexual."

Through the magic of the internet that has been translated uncounted times into Mike saying he was gay.

The thing is, he's not that character anymore.

The clear, transparent part is gone, and instead you have someone who has been lying to everyone in his life, trying to lie to himself, and the countless women he has had relationships with.

And he's STILL not out to anyone but Jeen and young Bobby. 600 was told out of order, the 'outing' was a flashback that happened a half-hour before the 'trial', yet he was still giving Kitty shit for the breakup when he just came out as gay and faking attraction to women less than a half-hour earlier? That makes no sense! Like that whole coming out scene never even happened?

Basically, Bendis just shit the bed; Marvel let him, and now Iceman fans are stuck dealing with it.

We were loving Aaron's Bobby/Kitty, Bendis forced their breakup on Aaron, actually rewrote the last page of Aaron's comic. Leaves Peter Milligan stuck trying to explain the breakup in his DOOP mini-series of all places(I still feel sorry for Peter for that). Aaron rolls with it and brings in Firestar, and starts to tease a relationship fans have been wanting for decades. Suddenly Aaron unexpectedly leaves the book he just launched, and Iceman/Firestar goes nowhere. Editor Mike Marts(huge admitted Iceman fan, pimped Iceman hard on social media) and Rick Remender(who came to Marvel with a file of ideas and plans for Iceman and had waited years to get to write the 616 version after killing it with his AoA counterpart) are crafting the next big X-Men arc, with Remender set to write the flagship title Extraordinary X-Men with 616 Iceman for the first time. Suddenly, Marts leaves Marvel so abruptly they are left scrambling for a replacement. Remender not only passes on writing Extraordinary, he completely leaves Marvel and resolves to stick solely to creator owned projects for the foreseeable future.

Bendis basically pushed aside and derailed other writers plans for Iceman that Iceman fans wanted and were enjoying to shove this through, for a cheep stunt that does nothing but fuck up the character and his history, and to give Marvel a claim at having a very prominent LGBTQ character as part of their diversity now! initiative. The sad thing is Marvel doesn't really even give a shit about diversity anymore than a pandering politician. If they did, Northstar and Karma wouldn't be in limbo, Northstar's husband Kyle wouldn't have made only one appearance since Astonishing(at Deadpool's wedding which had damn near everybody), and they would have actually insisted on doing Iceman's outing as a good story instead of letting Bendis just hack it out.

And the people pushing sooo hard for this? Most have predictably already lost interest. All that interest was not in the character; gay, straight or otherwise; it was in getting the fulfillment of their fantasies and that was done when the previously straight character was outed as gay. Mission accomplished.

Outing a character should feel like someone who was already gay has just had that revealed, not that a straight character has just been wrapped in a lie to fit a fringe theory/fantasy of a small segment of fans, rammed through by one writer and a willing editor, and forced down the throat of general fandom while changing years of stories.

It's the kind of thing other writers would normally be looking to correct, but with how big this story got, the current political climate, and the fact Marvel/Bendis all but wrapped Iceman up, put a ribbon on him and handed him to the gay community as a character to relate to and identify with, I'm guessing this mess is set in stone.

True, if they write it that way, which considering how badly this has been handled so far, I sadly doubt.

Since completely retconning this is unlikely, I'd rather a future writer simply made him bi. That would leave all his previous relationships intact as they were. It's a much easier sell to most fans than this, and far more believable.

Instead of living in complete denial of who he is through decades of stories, having an attraction to men make him fear he was gay and thought his feelings for girls was false. I imagine a lot of bisexuals would struggle with fearing having a same-sex attraction meant they were gay. Until very recently, bisexual men were basically considered gay and in denial or unwilling to commit by most people and many still feel that way. Many bisexuals live as straight or gay for most or even all of their whole lives and never even risk exploring that part of their sexuality.

It would also explain why other telepaths have never done what Jeen did. Simply not exploring his full sexuality wouldn't be cause for intervening in his life like that, and having some doubts and concerns over his sexuality wouldn't be the same as being closeted and in total denial his whole, to-this-point, fictional life.

It would still have the character be LGBTQ for Marvel's new diversity quota, but much more in keeping with the person we have always known. Let Bobby define his OWN sexuality, not Bendis/Alonzo and their agenda or a teenage girl most likely still a virgin.

Of course, there's no chance of any of that happening without some regime change at Marvel. Alonzo is praising Bendis for his handling of the story as, and I shit you not, "ELEGANT"

www.comicbookresources.com/article/axel-in-charge-uncanny-x-men-600s-iceman-revelations-getting-weird-with-vision?utm_campaign=axel-in-charge-uncanny-x-men-600s-iceman-revelations-getting-wei&utm_medium=internal_links&utm_source=breaking_banner



While most people, even some of the people who would be fine with the change in orientation, instead of calling it "elegant" are calling it "crap", "bungeled", "preposterous"  "like being beat with a hammer", "hamfisted", "awful", "Godawful", "so bad" and "like a trainwreck I couldn't look away from".

I haven't heard spin like that from Marvel since Chuck Austin was writing for them.

First, you could out ANY of the X-Men and get almost nothing but lots of positive mainstream press. All they are going to say is how "important" that this or that character has come out and what it all means social-politically. Wolverine could come out and mainstream press would have nothing but positives to say about it.

Comic industry coverage, where people actually know and care about these characters, and who they are, and have for decades, are eviscerating Bendis.

Second: They are getting praise from the Advocate, which they gave exclusive previews to, but have gotten negative reactions from the start of this from other LGBTQ press and prominent blogs.

Third: "Yesterday, I was talking with a reporter from The New York Times that asked me if I could think of a more high-profile gay superhero. I couldn't. Bobby goes back to the Silver Age of comics. He is a perennial character. He is an original X-Man."

Which is why they did it. To get press and status from the change and having THE most high-profile gay superhero, not because they in ANY way care about the character, and that lack of caring shows.

And Iceman replaces Northstar as Marvel's premier flagship "full-gay" superhero. Which sucks for Northstar as he was actually created as gay...

If it wasn't for the Iceman story almost no one would have given two shits about Uncanny #600. I hadn't even planned to buy it, and I know a lot of fans hadn't either. Some still didn't, since the story had been essentially spoiled before hand. But because of the real-world implications, just like Marvel did with Northstar's wedding to cash in on the real-world gay-wedding hoopla going on then, there would be plenty of people, some who normally don't even buy comics, getting it out of curiosity or to be part of something historical.

It didn't stop Astonishing from being in cancellation territory a short time later, Northstar almost going into limbo until fans threw a fit and his husband Kyle barely being seen again since.

From one of the many interviews Alonzo has given:



Okay, good story or not, it's the type of thing that would normally go into an elseworlds type of story because it completely defines and redefines the character all the way back to their first appearance. It breaks the character for many of his previous uses including romantic pairing many fans loved and wanted to someday see revisited or even retold in other media.

And that is not a layer. It rewrites many things to mean things they never did, essentially negates relationships some fans loved and COMPLETELY overshadows everything else. For a LONG time to come, Iceman is going to be the elephant in the room in every scene he is in, whether that gets acknowledged in the comic or not.

Caitlyn Jenner, Bill Cosby, Jared Foggle, O. J. Simpson. Olympic athlete, comedian, inspirational pitchman, football star. Does ANYBODY care who they were before who they are NOW. (To be clear, I am not equating being LGBTQ to being a rapist/pedophile/murder, I'm making a point about how something controversial and scandalous can simply override everything else in the interest and perception of someone. And the way this story broke in the real world and how it has played out for six months and how it continues to play out IS a scandal).

And the idea that Iceman is going to somehow be MORE than his orientation is laughable. The character has constantly struggled to get attention and good character development his whole fictional life, be more than just the joker of the team; generally because Marvel didn't care enough about him to do much more, and the way this was handled shows they still don't. And MOST of the people pushing for this have never cared about anything about him other than him being secretly gay unless it somehow played into that perception, to the point they drowned out and made discussion of anything else about the character almost impossible on CBR outside of the appreciation thread for years.

When Marvel starts trotting Iceman out at the pride-parades, fans should show up with huge blow ups of the panels of Deadpool in drag going "I see you back there, Iceman!", or Iceman getting shot in the face with web-fluid and going "I've had dreams...I mean nightmares like this" or a character telling Iceman "If even God couldn't make a real man out of you Drake, how to you expect me to".

Show the way Marvel, and some it's writers, have been treating the character and the 'fan theory' for years; with mockery and ridicule. I wonder if Marvel will start sanitizing some of it's trade reprints? I wouldn't be surprised if they do.

I actually feel sorry for Jeff Lemire having to follow and continue this, whom I like as a writer on other books. He grew up a DC fan, read Teen Titan's instead of X-Men in the '80's, but admits to having an "awareness" of the X-Men(much like I've never read an Archie comic in my life, but I can probably name all the major characters.) If I came onto an Archie book as a writer, and, say Jughead, had just come out, it wouldn't impact me(and there IS a fan theory that Jughead is gay and like with Iceman some Archie fans have been pushing for years to have him outed as gay. It died down some with the creation of Kevin Keller, Archie's first gay character, but it's still there.) but there would be a lot of fans who were pissed and wanting 'their' Jughead back, while others would want to see tons of gay story-lines for the character. It's a tough spot to be in as a writer.

Lemire claims to be a big fan of Bendis's take on the X-Men and the 05 in particular, so I probably wouldn't have cared for his Extraordinary anyway. I wanted a move away from Bendis's characterizations, not a continuation of it.

"Yesterday, I was talking with a reporter from The New York Times that asked me if I could think of a more high-profile gay superhero. I couldn't. Bobby goes back to the Silver Age of comics. He is a perennial character. He is an original X-Man."

You want to lay claim to having the most high-profile gay superhero then do the damn work! Having a character be created as straight, depicted as straight for fifty-plus years of a continuous fictional life, and then after a few panels worth of magical metaphorical hand-waving claim him to mainstream press as a gay superhero(hell, retroactively maybe the FIRST gay superhero from a major publisher) is crap. It's like letting your neighbor raise your kid, and when he is an adult, step in, claim him, and take credit for how he turned out. If that's all it takes, then DC can just out Superman and everyone else can pack up and go home.

I made the comment a while back, long before the start of all this with Iceman, that the storylines and behavior of characters in a lot of Marvel's comics were reminding me more and more of people on bad reality TV shows, especially the X-Men, who felt like they were increasingly becoming the Real Housewives of Westchester County. That feeling has never been more true.

Marvel wanted a 'Caitlyn Jenner' for the media, and used the 'fan theory' as an excuse to give themselves one.

What I thought was funny about Extraordinary X-Men is the tagline is "Still hated, still feared" but in the very first issue someone says "they're not even afraid of us anymore, they just hate us". I'm paraphrasing because that's definitely not the exact quote.

As for the O5, I have no interest in them being around still, but I do think Hopeless is a really good writer and I really enjoyed his Cable and X-force.