106: X-Men '97

I mentioned last week that I recorded a podcast episode for Think Christian about the new X-Men TV show. The show just wrapped up this week, and it's been an enjoyable watch: colorful and dramatic, with a clear point of view and a grounded understanding of the lore it's building on.

I'm not much of a comics reader (although X-Men '97 might just get me into it), and I didn't grow up on the original cartoon from the '90s; my introduction to the X-Men was the live-action movies from the early aughts, plus reruns of X-Men: Evolution on Disney XD while I was babysitting. The rest of my knowledge about their universe comes from cultural osmosis. X-Men '97 does a really good job of getting newbies like me up to speed on who its characters are and what they care about; I understand the arc of the story without feeling like the additional details for hardcore X-Men fans are a hindrance at all. The show is welcoming, which seems in keeping with its general philosophy.

As I watched the show, I kept being struck by just how plain-spoken it is about its social-justice bent. I wasn't surprised by the show's moral compass, exactly; the X-Men have been stand-ins for marginalized people groups even since their inception, in keeping with Marvel Comics' focus on characters who are flawed and still figuring it all out, but who still try to be good anyway. It's also a show for kids, or for people who grew up with the previous iteration when they were kids; there is a lot of flying around and explosions and characters behaving with heightened emotions. It still manages a level of moral sophistication, balanced between Professor X's belief that people are good, but might need persuasion to act that way, and Magneto's lived experience that prejudice and discrimination need to be shut down forcefully.

What I wrote about:

For this week's issue of Seeing & Believing, I covered Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow. The movie's been haunting me since I first saw it almost two weeks ago; if you're in a city where it's playing, go see it so it can haunt you too.

What I'm watching:

Cicadas surfacing in my garden! Chicago is in the beginning of its 17-year cicada emergence. Our local brood is called Brood XIII, and it's one of the largest cicada broods in existence. (Reportedly it had a premature emergence back in 2020, but I'd memory-holed that event, on account of being afraid to go outside during the early days of the pandemic.) No loud cicada songs yet, but the bugs are very much on their way, and the birds are happy about it; the robin nesting on the back corner of our house keeps flying back and forth between its nest and my raised garden bed with freshly-emerged cicadas.