The Four Color Media Monitor

I'm going to have to seriously disagree with what's written in this Bounding Into Comics post, about 5 minority characters they believe should receive more love from Marvel, but one of them, Dust, was created so offensively, it's hard to think of what they did as "love":

Clad in a niqab, since her debut in 2002 and created by Grant Morrison and Ethan Van Sciver, Sooraya Qadir, codenamed Dust, has rarely been seen without it on. She was born in Afghanistan and rescued by the X-Men before she could be made into a tool, slave, weapon or worse. She joins the X-Men as a student and is ultimately made a member of Emma Frost’s training group, the Hellions. She was one of the few handful of students to retain her powers after M-Day.

Hmm, I wonder why? Political bias, maybe? That aside, if Marvel's still keeping House of M's changes as a status quo, it's very poor of them. IIRC, Dani Moonstar was one of the victims of M-Day, and M-Day basically serves as a bizarre excuse to either kick the best characters to the curb, or to change their powers unorganically to suit their contrived ideas for storytelling.

Marvel gives the credit of the first Muslim superhero to publisher darling, the current Ms. Marvel (she’s the third to hold the name), Kamala Khan. However, Dust predates Kamala by more than ten years. Dust is a Sunni Muslim to be accurate and in her own words doesn’t wear her niqab due to political or social pressures but because of her own faith and the comfort it provides her. It’s a sentiment not shared by her friend and one-time roommate, the electric speedster, Surge who sees it as an obstacle to women’s rights.

In my opinion, Dust is a great example of what Muslim faith is and what it means to those who practice it. While Kamala has been at the center of dozens of promotions and helmed her own book, Dust has barely been seen for years outside of brief cameos and background art appearances.

In what way? Is that implying a view of the Religion of Peace as positive? This is disturbing if the writer of this piece is saying that, recalling I'd once found information years ago that Surge was made to look like the one in the wrong. And the problem with Morrison/Van Sciver's story is how it obscured Islam's role in slavemongering, among other awful elements, and normalized the notion of isolationism and separatism by wearing an outfit that can make one sweat badly in the summertime, and can make it difficult to drive a car. It all obscures the vital question of whether people should be segregating themselves from society in such a bizarre way that even leads to corruption.

They're right in a way though, that Kamala Khan is a "darling" to the publishers based on the political propaganda she was virtually built on. That said, they may be moving away from making such a big deal over the character lately, and DC may be doing the same with Simon Baz, because they may realize the political structuring they're characterized and built upon is hurting them in the long run, having noticed news lately that the Muslim Ms. Marvel book's been slowing in publication and a new trade was put on hold. I could be mistaken though, so we'll see what's to be.

In any event, it's galling in the extreme when you have uninformed people giving a pass to an ideology they evidently know zero about, and actually think foreign cultures should be above criticism.

Since we're still on the same article, just prior to this part, they also bring up Northstar/Jean-Paul Beaubier from Alpha Flight, and note that:

Fast-forward to today, he’s nowhere to be seen, even in the ever-expanding landscape of the X-Men. In 2012 in Astonishing X-Men #51, Northstar was at the center of a highly-publicized storyline in which he married his boyfriend, Kyle Jinadu, a milestone in mainstream comic books. Astonishing X-Men came to an end not long after, and Jean-Paul has gone missing, for the most part. In a world where we are seeking ways to promote inclusion, it’s a wonder as to why Northstar, a character with a long history and developed background has been stuck in limbo for years.

Well that's simple! Because Iceman was forced into the role Northstar once had, character history be damned, and look where it's all led to, as the solo books meant to shove this propaganda pretty much sputtered.

But was Northstar ever well "developed"? Hard to say. Scott Lobdell penned the 1992 Alpha Flight story where Jean-Paul was presented as officially homosexual, and it was not exactly what you could call an artistic success, if all he could be shown doing was beating up on Major Maple Leaf while they argued about this. The series' 1st volume was cancelled less than 2 years later, and Marvel, for a time, may have tried to move away from what was otherwise a botch job, but several years later, prior to Morrison's assuming control of the X-Men, Lobdell wrote one more story where he boomeranged it back, "Eve of Destruction", and it couldn't have been more forced and horrific, right down to the part where Wolverine lunged at Magneto, burying his claws deep. A most embarrassingly bad story that only served to demonstrate what an otherwise bad writer Lobdell is. The gay marriage issue did nothing to help Marvel's image either, as it was just more shoving leftist propaganda on everyone's intellect.

And if this is how Marvel's going to handle their characters, major or minor, how can it be said they ever loved them? It doesn't make sense to me. They certainly shouldn't cement characters with components like these to them eternally, because that scuttles the possibility of being able to make repairs too.

Labels: islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, politics, terrorism, X-Men