Social media is currently alight with fierce discussion and debate surrounding Jon Malin, current artist on Marvel's Cable comic book series, and his questionable tweeting. Too often arguments around creators are frivolous disputes that soon descend into unwarranted abuse. Not so here. When I saw the tweet, I was genuinely shocked. It boggles the mind to think that anyone can rationalise the conclusions he came to, but, on reflection, perhaps I shouldn't have been as surprised as I am. Below is the tweet:
Here Malin makes the comparison between 'Social Justice Warriors', left-wing, progressive activists who are pro-democracy and pro-civil rights, and National Socialists, particularly the Nazis of 1930s Germany. It is a gratuitous comparison, letting him take a stab at the political group he despises, disguised as a legitimate counter-argument to the assertion that the X-Men work as combatants in favour of socially progressive politics (they, irrevocably, do).
This has to be one of the most ridiculous pieces of commentary that I have read on the X-Men. It seems particularly strange that I spend so much of my time academically unpacking the false Malcolm X/MLK comparison, only for some people to assert even more bizarre, and dangerous, comparisons. That the minority metaphor rooted into the X-Men franchise, problematic though it is, can be missed so direly is greatly disappointing. More than that though, it poses the question, what is someone who so fundamentally misunderstands the X-Men doing working on an X-Book? His run on Cable will be over soon regardless of this controversy, but Marvel will need to take decisive action to ensure that someone with such a reprehensible viewpoint never gets the same platform with which to spread their ideology. Anything less than a complete disavowal will be a signal that Marvel is supportive of this kind of comment and I'd like to see some reassurances from current creatives that this is not a viewpoint held by anyone else working on the X-Line.
The key to understanding the motivations of this tweet lie in his turn of phrase, "SJW Hitler". Not only does Malin seem to intentionally misinterpret the X-Men franchise, but he seems determined to misinterpret history and nationalist politic. The 'SJW' in this argument takes the place of the universal evil, detached from their actual philosophy and placed as the enemy, much like what has happened to the Nazis in contemporary Western culture. There is no critical response to progressive politics, merely the feeling that Malin is being attacked by them, nor has there been critical analysis of why we consider the eugenicist, nationalist politics of Hitler so entirely evil. The conflation between 'SJW' and Hitler reeks of previous attempts to besmirch progressive politics in popular culture; it was not long ago that any woman desiring fair treatment in gaming spaces was a "Feminazi".
Strictly speaking, what I just wrote there isn't 100% true. There has been some space where Malin chose to address the politics of Hitler, where he continued to perpetuate the idea that the National Socialist party held the values and beliefs of socialism. The justification for Malin's linking of 'SJW' and 'Nazi' seems to be in his misconception of what socialism is, which I think ties into a wider, more interesting contemporary issue in right-wing discourse. We have, ever since the days of McCarthyism, seen the universal evil of Nazism attributed, not to the Nationalistic politics the ideology professes, but to the socialism which was appropriated. Right-wing discourse will have you see no difference between Nazi Germany and countries such as the USSR on the basis that their flaws were born from socialist ideology. Why then is old and new Right alike so committed to the rehabilitation of nationalism in the face of socialism? I don't think it is too hard to guess.
Malin is clearly a nostalgic elitist terrorised by a victim complex, threatened by an influx of more diverse creators who are vastly more talented than he is. We can see, in this very public meltdown, his desperate clinging to old world, conservative power hierarchies. Even in his art we can see designs and styles that have long since been abandoned by most modern day comic book artists, he was even recently at the head of another controversy regarding his poor portrayal of female character 'Blink' in the Cable series. His rendering wasn't merely controversial because of the unrealistic proportions given to the character, but also because his designs in general look poorly envisioned, half-finished and not the kind of quality people expect from an increasingly expensive medium.
Most reprehensible here though is likely the depoliticisation of Jewishness in the context of the Holocaust. This is the kind of topic that deserves more space to discuss and a better writer than I am. I will merely state how utterly deplorable this is. Intentional or not, Malin is rewriting the history of Jewishness, suggesting that progressive politics had no relevance in the Holocaust and removing progressive politics from Judaism itself. Malin's enemy, social justice, is the same enemy the Nationalists had, not the same enemy that the X-Men have and certainly not the same enemy that Jewish people have.
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