Pah

X

New X-Men #114, the first of writer Grant Morrison’s run, opens with Sentinels on the edge of the Botanical Gardens, the Bridge and Opera House in the background. Sydney, just there, makes a great sci fi setting. This is the superscale image we should’ve seen in the movie.

(Underneath the hand of the sentinel lies a man with three faces, each sharing in his four eyes. This is a long-standing comicbook joke, particularly beloved by 2000AD, from which Grant Morrison and other Brit alumni sprung.)

But listen, this is how his second issue ends:

Extermination Event Underway.

Target Genosha: Population 16,521,063: Falling.

Population 11,001,467

8,290,025
800,000
763 …

I heard someone recently call the X-Men an obvious allegory for racism against blacks in America. I got into the series in the mid-Nineties, when they were drawing heavily on homophobia.

But X-Men has for a long time had bigger fish at its core, taking many elements of the Holocaust, though never allowing itself to be held to talking about just Jews.

X-Men strikes me as a story in shock after the Holocaust. H is also for Human. (Inhuman is a just reaction, like swearing or getting angry.)