Fantastic Fangirls: Comics and Culture

Posted by Jennifer

I blame Adam Lambert.

Ok, that’s not entirely fair. The openly gay American Idol runner-up isn’t actually responsible for my current predicament. In fact, he honestly has nothing to do with the subject at hand. But in a strange way, Adam Lambert is responsible for my newfound appreciation for a character I never thought I’d enjoy: Wolverine’s sociopathic son Daken, current member of the Dark Avengers.

When Daken debuted in the pages of Wolverine Origins, my eyes just about rolled out of my head. He was Wolverine, but taller and crazier and actually Japanese! He had a mohawk and tattoos all over his body and black-painted fingernails! He hated his dad! But instead of fronting an emo band, he was starring in a comic book every month and contributing absolutely nothing new or interesting to it. He existed only to give Logan even more unnecessary angst, as he coped with the knowledge that his son, who he’d presumed dead with the death of his pregnant Japanese wife, was alive and had been trained since childhood to be a psychotic amoral killer. He was Damian Wayne and the Ultimate Red Skull rolled into one, and I can’t think of a character type that’s less interesting to me.

Then something happened. Daken, previously confined to Wolverine Origins, was recruited by Norman Osborn to join the Dark Avengers as his mock Wolverine. His induction into that team lead to his debut as the star of the core Wolverine book, now retitled Dark Wolverine. Author Marjorie Liu joined Daken’s creator Daniel Way as the new book’s co-writer. And Daken transformed from a sociopathic brat with claws and daddy issues to a refined Machiavellian schemer who used pheromones to sexually manipulate everyone around him.

Daken had been portrayed as a sexual manipulator once before, in Wolverine Origins #11. There, he manipulated a girl he was dating into catching him flirting with a man in a coffeeshop, a chain of events that allowed him to murder both conquests. But it wasn’t until Dark Wolverine and Liu’s entrance that Daken’s sexual manipulation became his default tactic. Suddenly, he was propositioning men and women both to get secret codes and enter restricted areas, and he was playing his game on his teammates as well, flirting with just about everyone and simultaneously seducing both Karla Sofen (Moonstone/Ms. Marvel) and Bullseye.

On the one hand, this is problematic. The idea of the depraved bisexual is a long-standing trope in fiction that paints actual bisexual people unfairly as selfish, promiscuous manipulators. I would not call Daken a triumph for LGBT representation; if anything, he’s a step backward. His sexuality is practical rather than physical or emotional; he manipulates people of both genders because he can, not because he’s actually attracted to anyone. As a sociopath, he can’t be said to have any real sexuality to speak of.

However, Marvel comics — and X-Men comics in particular — have a long, inglorious history with the depraved bisexual trope. One of the clearest signs that a character has gone evil in an old Claremont X-Men comic is their tendency to wear BDSM costumes and throw innuendo at adversaries of both genders. Mystique is perhaps the queen of this trope, but everyone from Madelyne Pryor to Illyana Rasputin has been affected at some point or another. In fact, Claremont is still writing this story, as demonstrated by Illyana’s recent X-Men Forever appearance as a “Black Magik” version of herself who attempts to seduce and convert Kitty Pryde to her evil cause. But in all of these cases, the character in question is a woman, and her seductions, as portrayed on the page, are intended to titillate the presumably straight male reader.

Daken is not a woman. And Bullseye, the character most frequently threatened with seduction and controlled like a puppet by pheromones throughout Dark Wolverine, is not a woman, either. He is, in fact, a violent sociopath himself, and a very masculine one. I don’t ever condone sexual violence in comics, but I can’t deny that the manipulation of a character like Bullseye is a fascinating and much-needed subversion of the usual trope of female victimization.

All this brings me back to Adam Lambert. At the last American Music Awards, Lambert shocked the audience by performing a risque dance routine to his song “For Your Entertainment,” an explicit celebration of BDSM. During the performance, he led male dancers on leashes, pushed another male dancer’s face to his groin in a simulation of oral sex, and passionately kissed his male keyboardist — all while being groped by other dancers of both genders. A storm of controversy followed, with the conservative media crying out about the inappropriateness of the performance, and when clips were shown, the “objectionable” segments of the dance, including the keyboardist kiss, were blurred out.

Some smartly pointed out that the same-sex awards show kiss between Britney Spears and Madonna of several years ago had been aired on these same networks without blurring, highlighting a double standard in the media reaction. In fact, I’d hazard to say that if Britney Spears had given the exact same performance, the controversy would have been greatly reduced, if not utterly nonexistent — because Britney’s version would have titillated the all-powerful straight male audience. But Adam Lambert made those people uncomfortable. And it’s through this kind of uncomfortable confrontation that progress is made.

My new appreciation for Daken stems directly from my realization that he is the Adam Lambert of comics. Though maybe not always progressive, or always appropriate (or, frankly, always deserving of attention), Daken challenges fans’ expectations and makes them uncomfortable in a good way. In their quest to buy everything X-Men-related, or Dark Reign-related, or Wolverine-related, conservative fanboys have been confronted with a book starring a man who is actively seducing Bullseye, flirting with male H.A.M.M.E.R. employees, and accusing Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm of a gay affair. And this man is the son of Wolverine, Marvel’s very portrait of gruff hyper-masculinity. Daken has gone from cliched to subversive, and I largely credit Marjorie Liu — author of X-Men tie-in novel Dark Mirror, which is subversive itself in its use of a gender-swapping plot device — with the transition.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m excited to see what happens with Daken next.

By Jennifer Smith
E-mail: Jennifer@fantasticfangirls.org
Twitter: throughthebrush