It’s November 8th, 2016. My wife and I are at my father-in-law’s house picking up our ten month old son after seeing the film Doctor Strange. The anxiety of the last few weeks is washed away by an enjoyable, but ultimately empty, 115 minutes of popcorn and CGI. I’ve intentionally avoided checking my phone this evening, a rarity for someone as Twitter obsessed as me. What I can’t avoid is the television, trumpeting the news that I had dreaded all day. Donald Trump had won Florida, and soon, would become the 45th President of the United States.
I live deep in Jim Jordan’s congressional district. People around me are just as relieved by the results as I am devastated. I hide my rage and fear when a young woman in my graduate level finance class opens our study session with a “thank God for Trump”. I post an image of safety pins crossed into the shape of an X, an expression of solidarity towards my small, liberal Twitter following. This is the totality of my political activism.
I refrain from politics here but X-Men fans can agree to that no one should feel unsafe for their race, gender, or orientation #safetypin pic.twitter.com/7icLVIG36d
— Xavier Files ? C2E2 (@XavierFiles) November 11, 2016
Comics, like House Of X, by Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, and Marte Gracia stand in opposition to that defeatist mentality. They are about progress, moving past the darkness and changing the world for the better. They aren’t about living to die another day, they are about living to live life to the fullest. It’s a story filled with that weaponized optimism that horrible Hopepunk article was talking about.
Much in the same way, the upcoming No One’s Rose by Zac Thompson, Emily Horn, Alberto Alburquerque, Raúl Angulo, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, takes a futurist perspective, but twists it with a view towards optimism. It pulls threads from other sci-fi tales, but inverts them towards the positive. This is post-apocalypse, but with the underlying belief that rebuilding is attainable. It’s a final fortress city, but built around nature, not technology. It’s a book that doesn’t ask the reader to look at the worst of humanity, but the best. It’s the kind of book we need right now.
I’m at work, it’s a few months later and I’m two years into developing refrigeration systems that are 20% more efficient than current products. They use a gas that cuts their contribution to climate change by more than half. This is all to meet government regulations and to give me a paycheck that puts me in the top half of earners in the United States, but it feels good to be helping in a small way. In the next two years these regulations will either have their penalties removed or be deemed illegal by alleged rapist and current DC Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh. The biggest opportunities of my young career are taken from me by a combination of the Trump administration and a toxic management that will end up pushing me out of the only company I worked at since high school.
In just the first issue, it is clear that No One’s Rose and the current status quo for the X-Men comes from the same perspective. To start, they are both rooted in nature. The opening, and most striking image in House Of X is the massive resurrection tree, the symbol of the mutant race’s control over the domain of death. Similarly, No One’s Rose has “The Green Zone”, a city built around an old growth tree, the last of its’ kind and the iconic image of humanities drive to survive.
Both books also make it clear that the enemy is those who hoard wealth for selfish gain. The denizens of The Green Zone are split into that haves and have-nots by a barrier that separates those who toil at the roots from those who chase their leiser in the foliage. This disparity, combined with the false hope that someone could ever rise above their station, provides the emotional backbone for the series. The leaders of Krakoa, conversely, use their wealth and leverage to level the playing field. They have learned the language of capitalism and use that leverage to poison the wells of all those who would stand against them.They condemn the greedy bastards who put themselves before their fellow man, and in doing so, show the world that there is a people ready to stand.
Amid all the political anxiety and career unease, my escape is comics; Marvel ones mostly. The ones I’ve dedicated a young, but growing, website to covering. The big events currenly running involve my favorite characters being gassed to death, the universe’s symbol of hope becoming a Nazi, and the reminder that the head of the publisher has Thanksgiving dinner with the president. I try to moderate my favorite sub-Reddit about comics, but an upswell of hate filled users and targeted, personal attacks on me and my family suck all the joy out of the hobby.
There’s a lot to be said about hope in the face of tyranny, in the face of a dying planet, in the face of depression. It’s easy, natural even, to slip into cynicism when you are constantly bombarded with apocalyptic news. It’s harder to believe that things won’t be like this forever, that if we try, and we are a little lucky, things can get better. That’s not to say live in ignorance or naivety, but as we are told in Flex Mentallo #4 “Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.”
I’m depressed and constantly anxious. My loving wife pushes me to talk to a doctor before the birth of our second son. A man I’ve known for five minutes prescribes me 10mg of Escitalopram daily. Then 20mg. I’m tired, the pills only amplify that, and I am at the end of my rope.
It’s November, two years since the election and I decide to do something radical. Against all reason, I turn to optimism. I hope, without reason, without cause, without assurance that any of this will actually work. I hope for a better world.
Activism, not actionless hope, gets results in these worlds. Faith without deeds is dead. Xavier motivates a community to take their future into their own hands. Tenn, the protagonist of No One’s Rose, pushes through against the pressure of her peers and brother to try and rise up the ranks and influence the system from within. By the end of the first issue, we learn that this activism extends past Tenn and her work on climate change, but into one group fight for their very souls. Complacency is a silent killer, no matter if it is in the face of a changing climate or the oppression of civil liberties. It’s easy to feel like these problems are too big, that those in power are too strong to overcome, and individually, that’s true. The power comes from a community united and in active opposition to that which is wrong.
Thompson has described No One’s Rose as a “solarpunk” story, an inversion, or reputation of the popular “cyberpunk” genre. It’s not a cynical look at the world that our greed has made, but a speculative and optimistic story about how we can fix the mistakes of our past. In her article about the genre Alyssa Hull wrote “We desperately need narratives that move past apocalypse as an endpoint.” It’s not about an obsession with the end of the world, but how people can work to fix things, even after it’s “too late”. In that way, Tenn’s mission in The Green Zone is the same as the mutants and Krakoa. It doesn’t matter how dire, how much you are told we are past the point of no return, that in the end we lose. What matters is the fight to fix this world, and the hope that we can make it a better one.
It’s nine months later. The last issue of Rosenberg & Larocca’s Uncanny X-Men, a run that nails the feelings of loss, despair, and hopelessness, came out. It’s been a bi-weekly onslaught that’s turned every conversation into a shouting match. On the same day, a preview for House Of X hits my screen. I’ve been excited, but apprehensive about what’s coming next. It’s a scene between two characters I have no real love for, a rarity at my level of obsession, and it’s the words I’ve needed to hear for years.
“It’s time to get with the program, Sage. You need to bury all that cynicism and replace it with good old-fashioned hope. The Professor has changed all the old rules and we’ve entered a whole new world.”
When you break it down, No One’s Rose is a post-apocalyptic tale about one youth in the last city in the world fighting for what she thinks is right. Then again, House Of X was just about another mutant nation. When it was released, however, House Of X was praised as innovative and revolutionary. It found a new way to approach an old story. No One’s Rose is much the same. An old tale made to feel new thanks to smart writing, beautiful art, and an underlying attitude that’s unlike what we have seen in the past.
It’s 2020 now, things still aren’t better. The president was acquitted of crimes that were blatantly committed. The leading economy in the world refuses to do anything about the threat of climate change. A large portion of that nation sees nothing wrong with this. But for some reason, I have more hope. Hope that something, soon, will change. Hope that we can be inspired by these stories and find a way, not necessarily an easy one, but a way to take this world back. We can grow something better.
No One’s Rose #1 comes out on March 25th. Pre-order it today from your local comics shop.
House Of X was like, the biggest thing in comics last year. Find it at your local comic shop too.
Zachary Jenkins runs the Xavier Files Media Empire and is a co-host on the podcast “Battle of the Atom.” Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside of X-Men.
Zachary Jenkins co-hosts the podcast Battle of the Atom and is the former editor-in-chief of ComicsXF. Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside all this.
