After yesterday brought with it the first look at X-Men ‘97 in action we also got to learn a bit more about one of its more fascination inclusions on the X-Team: the full-time return to the animated fold for shapeshifting mutant Morph.
He was introduced as a minor character in the comics as Kevin Syndey, aka Changeling—with that codename tweaked to Morph for TV due to an alleged copyright concern with DC Comics, which used the Changeling codename for Teen Titan’s Beast Boy—and was brought into the world of animated X-Men, where he skyrocketed to popularity by, well, immediately dying.
Morph has undergone some pretty radical changes in the decades between The Animated Series and ‘97, adopting the pale, hairless, and blankly-featured visage that the character was given when an alternate version of the character inspired by the cartoon series was integrated into comics continuity with the Age of Apocalypse storyline, and then through another alternate riff in the multiversal teambook Exiles.
The mutant allegory has been a stand-in for a large variety of minority causes since the inception of the X-Men, from political thought, to racial discrimination to, yes, issues of gender identity and queerness.
Some of these allegories work better than others—race has always been a fraught lens for the mutant metaphor in particular, especially as more and more non-white mutants have stepped into the spotlight, perhaps best emphasized in the infamous moment in the 1982 storyline “God Loves, Man Kills,” where Kitty Pryde uses a racial slur to draw equivalence to being called a “mutie.” But the connection between mutantkind and queerness has always been particularly potent, and a topic the franchise has engaged with for generations and generations of storytelling in ways big and small.
Star Wars faced a similar dilemma in introducing the first trans-identifying Jedi in the alien bond-pair Terec and Ceret in its High Republic comics.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
After yesterday brought with it the first look at X-Men ‘97 in action we also got to learn a bit more about one of its more fascination inclusions on the X-Team: the full-time return to the animated fold for shapeshifting mutant Morph.
He was introduced as a minor character in the comics as Kevin Syndey, aka Changeling—with that codename tweaked to Morph for TV due to an alleged copyright concern with DC Comics, which used the Changeling codename for Teen Titan’s Beast Boy—and was brought into the world of animated X-Men, where he skyrocketed to popularity by, well, immediately dying.
Morph has undergone some pretty radical changes in the decades between The Animated Series and ‘97, adopting the pale, hairless, and blankly-featured visage that the character was given when an alternate version of the character inspired by the cartoon series was integrated into comics continuity with the Age of Apocalypse storyline, and then through another alternate riff in the multiversal teambook Exiles.
The mutant allegory has been a stand-in for a large variety of minority causes since the inception of the X-Men, from political thought, to racial discrimination to, yes, issues of gender identity and queerness.
Some of these allegories work better than others—race has always been a fraught lens for the mutant metaphor in particular, especially as more and more non-white mutants have stepped into the spotlight, perhaps best emphasized in the infamous moment in the 1982 storyline “God Loves, Man Kills,” where Kitty Pryde uses a racial slur to draw equivalence to being called a “mutie.” But the connection between mutantkind and queerness has always been particularly potent, and a topic the franchise has engaged with for generations and generations of storytelling in ways big and small.
Star Wars faced a similar dilemma in introducing the first trans-identifying Jedi in the alien bond-pair Terec and Ceret in its High Republic comics.
The original article contains 767 words, the summary contains 312 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!