Dear Illyana Rasputina (a.k.a. “Magik”) fandom,

You’ve been really really angry at a bad comic called X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity Comic #4 since its release on Monday, and, with the next issue on the way, I wanted to check in to see if you were all okay. Having been in your position several times during my lifetime of reading comics, I know first-hand how exhilarating and yet deeply corrosive holding such feelings for such a length of time can be, and that’s just from having read The Amazing Spider-Man in the past couple of years. Let me say this first: I know the reasons for that anger are entirely legitimate, not just because of all the things we’re about to discuss, but because, as a matter of principle, comics should be good, and not bad, or even mediocre.

However. In the frenzy of it all, in your harried pursuit of any way to draw something cathartic or enjoyable from the events as they have played out, your words and your actions may have gone so far past your intent that you’ve been seen online wishing for a person’s death, which, I hope you can see upon retrospect makes you look really bad and achieves nothing. This is not healthy, and I think you know that it is hurting you on a human level.

So, I figure it is in everyone’s best interest if we unpack what happened, and make use of that wonderful capacity for understanding that allowed you to notice the problem in the first place. I think that if we take a step back and look at the whole picture, and if we put ourselves in the shoes of the people involved along the way, we can find a productive outcome to all of this.

(I know this sounds patronizing, to be clear, but I figure that some of you are young, and maybe this is the first time you’ve done any of this, and if that’s the case and no one has explained any of this to you yet, I might as well do it as nicely as possible. If it’s not, then I am punishing you on purpose through unnecessary purple prose, so this is still working as intended.)

First, we need to go over what’s in the actual comic. It’s the first part of a two parter, telling the backstory of the Darkchild, as she appears in the post-apocalyptic timeline of Age of Revelation. It borrows concepts and characters that have been part of Magik’s origin story ever since she became a fixture of the X-Men’s grand tapestry, in stories penned by Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson, among others, and it gives them a great big grim twist in order to have them fit with the latest terrible alternate future.

It plays out like this: needing his powers amplified to fulfill his goals of world domination, Revelation sends the X-Men to a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility to free no one’s favorite but it’s on purpose Fabian Cortez. During that raid, Magik takes a bullet to the back courtesy of Nick Fury, and that lands her back in Limbo, except without the cool sword or the cooler powers. The demons of Limbo take advantage, and a few scrolls later, the Darkchild is groveling on her hands and knees to the very demons she had fought and overcome all the way back in 1982, in imagery and language that feels reminiscent of BDSM erotica.

Before we can get into everything else, let’s raise the caveats that intellectual honesty demands to be raised. This is part one of a story whose ending has already been implied in the main series, whichever one that is (I have not been keeping track because these are bad comics and there is just too many of them). Not only is it already known that your girl in red makes it out of this with her own piece of hell right in the middle of the Revelation territories, but the comic alludes to the fact that the defenseless posture is how she gets there; it’s a scheme, she’s playing at being what these demon men want until the next part, when she becomes what they really don’t want. It’s in that final secret grin, and it’s also in the structure of how a story like that works. Then there’s the historical argument: these are sequels to Chris Claremont comics that were obsessed with the ideas of domination and submission; it’s always going to be there, and in fact that’s why they’ve been so successful.

Except of course: this is the story of Illyana, abducted by demons at a young age and groomed for their own dark purposes until she broke free. It is a story which is, on the actual page, very explicitly about child abuse. The words and the actions of S’ym and Belasco, her tormentors, are the words and the actions of abusers. Over the years, as that story was revisited and built upon by fans and creators alike, it also became a story of predation and sexual abuse. And that story, of surviving through traumatic and all too real circumstances, and of reclaiming your own power and finding actualization through love, friendship and understanding on the other side, has meant a lot to a lot of people, including survivors.

That means that the first failure of X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity Comic #4 is one of writing. Playing the situation of a character returning to their childhood abuser and getting tortured back into subservience like it’s just another instance of wacky Silver Age brainwashing of no real depth or consequence feels pretty callous on its own. On top of that, there is the dialogue and the imagery, which, intentionally or not, do end up recalling pornography, in the abstract as well as the oddly specific (Unless you know of any other situation where several humanoid but otherized figures lurk lecherously above a young blond woman sitting in her underwear.) I’m only giving it the benefit of the doubt here because the alternative would be one of the most disgusting things the comics industry has done not just this year, but also in my lifetime.

So, yes, Tim Seeley, who wrote the comic, and Phillip Sevy, who drew it, have a lot to answer for here. Some of it is ignorance, some of it is laziness and incuriosity, and the rest of it is the usual mediocrity. None of it is really new, this isn’t the first case of a comic completely missing the mark when it comes to the depiction of sexual violence against women. But, undeniably, it is made worse by the circumstances. And yet: that doesn’t make it okay to call for his death online, because it’s a shitty thing to do.

This is where I might be teaching some of you about how the comic book industry works: in the best case scenario, writers are trying their best under circumstances they have very little control over. It’s deadlines, and it’s corporate mandates, and it’s lengthy and complicated backstories, and they’re all conspiring to get in the way of getting the job done; the job, by the way, even on comics that you have actually heard of, is not as lucrative as you would think it is, and you’re not making it any easier when you go online and tell someone that they should be dead, y’know?

But you know who’s supposed to make a writer’s job easier? Good editors, with solid institutional knowledge of both the characters and the creators that they work with. It’s an editor’s job to set a team up for success, and that takes us to the second major failure of this comic, which is one of editing. Not to brag or anything, but I’ve done this for so long now that I think I can make an educated guess as to how editor Darren Shan, under the supervision of X-Men Line editor Tom Brevoort, chose to give this particular assignment to Tim Seeley, and I can also make an educated guess as to why this was never going to work as intended. They thought it would work because Tim Seeley is the co-creator of Hack/Slash. It was never going to work because Tim Seeley is the co-creator of Hack/Slash. If you don’t mind, we’re going to take a digression here.

Originally released in 2004, Hack/Slash is a comic about Cassandra Hack, a shy outcast teenager turned loner badass monster slayer in a universe where the plot to Friday the 13th is the law of the land, and Vlad, her best-friend-dash-pet-musclebound-undying-freak. They go around killing “slashers”, which in the parlance of the series are supernatural serial murderers motivated by hypersublimated puritanical impulses. In practice, it’s a horror comedy with the kind of libidinous streak that seeks to make it obvious when a woman is not wearing a bra. Skottie Young makes a cameo in the third issue.

It’s not exactly a bad comic, but it is deeply mediocre, in the way post-Buffy pop feminist media about girls by men is deeply mediocre. It wants to be about the complicated things, like girlhood and liberation under the revival of reactionary evangelism; it wants to speak to a complex truth about its main character, who fears becoming a slasher herself; but, at the same time, it also wants to be a wacky tasteless spectacle, something as playfully sadistic as a Wes Craven film and as gleefully impolite as a Troma release. It doesn’t work. It’s simply too self-indulgent to be able to make any kind of cogent point.

Does it get good past the first three issues? I wouldn’t know, and I’m not all that encouraged to care. My point here is that I don’t think the writer and artist of the Hack/Slash Suicide Girls Annual was ever going to give a story like that of Illyana returning to Limbo the gravitas that it was due, and that everyone involved in the making of this comic should have known better.

Once again, however, this is all made worse by the context: Tom Brevoort has a history of saying things online for attention that are either obviously wrong or plain and simple offensive, and some of these things involve his once-violent distaste for Magik. Which means that all of a sudden, a bit of terrible casting becomes the climax of a decades-long conspiracy to ruin your favorite. To be clear: I don’t think that’s the case here, I think they made their pick because, in addition to his aforementioned work, Tim Seeley is currently working at Marvel on other X-Men comics, including an Age of Revelation tie-in, but even if it had been, I must reiterate that, as upsetting as this has all turned out to be, it is not a valid reason to call for someone’s murder online. It’s not going to solve anything beyond making you angrier that said murder has not happened yet.

And at the risk of repeating myself despite an intense editing process: stewing in your own anger and lashing out like that is worse than unproductive. It’s a third failure, less obvious than the first two because it’s yours. It’s a tacit admission of defeat in a fight that you can actually win. Fandom is, by its very nature, a bargain. Sure, they make the money, but the characters, despite what it says on paper, are never completely theirs. Arguably, that’s what got us here in the first place, the fact that Magik meant enough to enough people that you brought yourself to care, right? You took ownership of that story and made it your own!

It’s a two-way relationship, and to be completely honest: they need you more than you need them. These copyrights would be completely worthless if you stopped showing up. The fastest and easiest way to punish the people responsible for your displeasure is your indifference. Stop reading bad comics, and stop talking about bad comics. Life is too short, and the world too full of beauty, even just within this deeply historically corrupted medium. Start writing entities off.

Be curious. Look for your next favorite character. If you take any piece from advice from this bloated carcass of words, let it be this: you have yet to read your favorite comic of all time. Leave the misery to us critics, who have made the vow to be miserable on your behalf. Seek out something as excellent and as weird as I know you can be.

I don’t know what shape that takes for you. Maybe it’s Anderson, Psi-Division, the legendary Judge Dredd spinoff where the eponymous psychic delves into the spectacular terrors of a future city so satirical it’s dystopian. Maybe it’s the most recent volume of Witchblade, by Marguerite Bennett and Giuseppe Cafaro, which delivers on the brutal horror action while interrogating the premise of the 90s original in essential ways. Heck, DIE, by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, just returned in a new volume called DIE: LOADED, and it is about traumatic action and horror in Hell, of a sort.

Whatever it is you seek, there is no shortage of comics that will make you happy. Staying mad is for suckers, and if you’re reading this, I’ll bet that’s not you.

Never let me see you this way again,

HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS