Why I will
no longer oppose Gambit of the X-Men
And certainly not with the wrong
approach
November 22, 2007
By Avi Green
Several years ago, I used to dislike Remy LeBeau of the X-Men,
because I found his characterization dreadful.
But the problem with this is that – I was basing my judgement then
on the character, not how
he was written, or how the writer/writers were doing it!
It’s been about three years since DC Comics put out their loathsome
Identity Crisis, which was just the tip of the iceberg in ruining a
considerable amount of their universe by killing off, villifying and
demonizing many good characters, as well as Marvel Comics’ similar
steps since they put out their loathsome House of M, and this has
all gotten me to thinking.
One of the reasons why many books and characters end up being
ruined, from what I can figure, is because we, the audience, seem to
be basing our judgement of a character’s personality and other stuff
like that on the characters themselves, as if they were real people,
without even taking into account that, if there’s something wrong
with their personality, it’s because the writers may have led to
that.
For example, during the late 60s-early 70s, when Roy Thomas was
writing some of the stories for Marvel featuring Rick Jones, he gave
him some rather annoying dialogue. As talented a writer as Thomas
could be, and he’s got a very good amount of writing to his credit
that’s well worth considering, there were still IMO some things he
did that were embarrassingly bad, including a 1988 reworking of a
story that Paul Levitz first did starring the Justice Society of
America in 1977, something I’ll have to elaborate on further
someday, even if it’s on my comics blog where I’ll do it (hey,
that’s where the majority of my work ends up today!). What I will
say for now is that it was in the Secret Origins anthology where
Roy’s big blunder took place. Years later, writers like Peter David
improved considerably upon that characterization of yore, and Rick
once again became a more palatable guy.
Now, with that told, let’s get back to what’ll be the primary
subject of this article for my personal website now: Gambit of the
X-Men.
Remy LeBeau, he who would come to be known
as the “Ragin’ Cajun”, which must have what to do with his
superpower, first appeared in Uncanny
X-Men #266, August 1990, as a young man from New Orleans,
Louisiana who’d been raised as a crook since childhood, and was the
creation of Chris Claremont, who was probably more successful with
the girls he’d introduced than any male character he ever did. Remy
was an orphan per se who’d been abandoned in the care of a hospital
because of his bright red eyes, and was later abducted by members of
a local crime racket called the Thieves Guild, who passed him on to
the care of their leader, the Antiquary, as a tribute. In their
view, they saw him as someone who could someday unite the warring
Thieves and Assassins Guilds in Louisiana. He was later taken under
the wing of a bunch of street thieves, and later, with the skills
they taught him, he tried to pick the pocket of Jean-Luc LeBeau, the
patriarch of the Thieves Guild himself. So flattered was this
high-ranking member of the racket that he took Remy in and
officially adopted him as his son.
But if they thought that he could unite that crime syndicate with
the other one called Assassins, which he tried to do by marrying
Bella Donna Boudreaux, granddaughter of the founding head of
Assassins Guild, they were proven wrong after he’d been challenged
to a duel by her brother after the wedding, in which, even if it was
unintentional, Remy killed the brother, leading to his divorce from
Bella Donna and exile from New Orleans.
His mutant power was to set objects afire with kinetic energy that
could explode if he threw them at other stuff (in early stories, he
may have had a power to influence people to liking him, but it was
ignored by later writers), and he took to making his trademark form
of attack explosive card-tossing. His entry into the X-Men was when
he’d first met an amnesiac Storm, and recuperating, she brought him
to the X-Mansion where he was accepted, at least at first.
Gambit would
go to have a crush on Rogue, though with her uncontrollable power,
she was resistant to take to his charms for fear of injuring him
with them. A couple years after Chris Claremont had left, it was
revealed that the Ragin’ Cajun was indirectly responsible for the
massacre of the Morlocks conducted by the gang of Mister Sinister,
for whom Gambit had once done some errands. However, he had never
meant for the Morlocks to come to any harm, and did try to stop the
onslaught, but for the most part failed, and only managed to rescue
one young child, Sarah, who grew up to become Marrow.
I've done some thinking about it, and done a
little research on it, and I'll have to admit the idea he'd
even unwittingly lead the Morlocks to disaster is an embarrassingly
bad storyline. Even though Remy was presumably written as a crook
with a code of honor, the whole retcon still has the effect of
making him like a really pathetic case. Another problem is that the
way writers continued to depict him even afterwards made it harder
to fully credit even that part: he would be depicted as doubling
back onto his corrupt ways, as seen in X-treme X-Men, and even continuing to be
dishonest with the rest of his fellow X-Men, and that he even later
rejoined with Bella Donna was probably a mistake too. And his
relationship with Rogue did turn depressingly angsty, as they would
agonize over the fact that Rogue’s powers undermined any ability to
have a full-fledged, physical affair together.
(Let me also note that I do have a problem with the gang he was
raised by being called "Fagan's Mob". Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist was a nasty,
stereotypical little screed, and while it's possible to write that
the gang and their leader were probably just influenced out of
insanity to take up the name, it's still very tacky.)
That, I guess, was why Gambit turned out to be so appalling as a
character – because they did not write any solid direction that
would depict him convincingly as a hero, or an anti-hero.
But here’s the really challenging question: is it Gambit’s fault if
he’s a crook who doesn’t prove convincingly that he can reform and
be a more honest crimefighter? The simple answer is – no. Quite the
opposite, it’s the writer’s AND the editor’s fault, for not doing a
good job, and for not maintaining a bit of order around the place,
something that even Chris Claremont has to shoulder some blame for,
sad to say, but then, while I don’t consider him the worst writer
around today, there are reasons why he’s taken flak from some
readers for what he’s done since the turn of the century. Come to
think of it, it's also the writer's fault - but mainly the artist's
- for Gambit's having a goofy costume! For that we can blame Jim
Lee, who began his career at Marvel.
Actually, now that I think of that too, it's not that bad a costume per se. The
only problem is that, when you look upon it as someone familar with
the southern states in America, the big duster coat Gambit wears
does come across as absurd and bizarre. But, looked upon as but a
product of the surrealistic world, it's really not as bad as it
seems, and I can guess where it's inspired from: coats worn by
cowboys in some other parts of the US during the 19th century.
Indeed, now that I think of that too, it does make a fair amount of
sense. As for the "semi-mask" he wears, that's not new to me; it's
been worn even by Jean Grey in years past.
But now, just think: if it hadn’t been for all the bad
characterization that dogged Gambit under the pen of Scott Lobdell,
maybe Gambit would have had a better chance of being appreciated by
those who disapproved. Alas, the X-Men had become a neglected
franchise, all because the editors stopped caring about really good
writing and only cared about moneymaking at the expense of a still
dwindling fanbase.
In any case, there you have a little of why, in all this time, I’ve
decided that, simply put, I do not dislike Gambit for having a
crummy personality. Rather, I dislike that he’s been given a crummy personality by
sloppy writers and editors who never gave a damn about good story
quality and characterization. This is a fictional character we’re
talking about here, after all, and no fictional entity can be
faulted for having such awkward personality traits as Remy LeBeau’s
had in the past 17 years since he was first introduced. Nor can he
be faulted for the story that tied him in with the Morlock Massacre.
That awful tale was the product of terrible writers like Lobdell and
Fabian Nicieza, and it's them we should be disappointed with for
foisting it on the audience.
What led me to this decision, you ask? Well...let’s say that it had
what to do with what certain left-liberals were voicing. Namely,
what a certain comics columnist for the MSM was doing, which was to
write all these arguments on an old website he’d once had, in which
he talked about how he disliked Gambit, but never actually seemed to
criticize the writers for poor characterization, and made it almost
seem as though he considered Gambit a real person. Pretty weird,
huh?
Also, when I read his commentary on Gambit, I got the strange
feeling I got that he was looking for an excuse to dislike some
character, any character, regardless of writing quality for the sake
of it.
That, if you ask me, is not the way to go. I think it’s ridiculous
to criticize comic book characters, or any such fictional beings in
literature, as if they were real life people. And it’s defeatist to
look upon a character as irredeemable simply out of dislike. That’s
what I think led to the disaster of Identity Crisis, Avengers:
Disassembled, Batman: War Games, House of M, Infinite Crisis, 52,
Civil War, World War Hulk, Amazons Attack, Countdown to Final Crisis
and goodness knows what other crossover stories that involve
character assassination, all because the characters involved are
supposedly rock bottom.
It should be noted that quite a few of the characters in the
aforementioned crossovers were beat up on for even less than what
Gambit had about him, and by that I mean characters who weren’t
artistically damaged in any way. But if you ask me, the very
mentality I seek to criticize is still what led to this, even
indirectly: those who complained about characters they didn’t like
instead of how they were written indirectly played into the hands of
an uncaring, contemptuous editorial, which includes such people as
Dan DiDio and Joe Quesada, and gave them the ideas to either put
some characters with potential, in the grave, or, worse yet, to
subject them to fates worse than death.
And that’s something that’s got to change, IMO. Even if we don’t
like the characters, we still have to acknowledge and bear in mind
that they are but products of the imagination, fictional people and
such who are but complete automatons that can only do what the
writers, artists and editors make them do. Thus, it’s not their
fault for anything we deem wrong.
And that’s why I’m not going to oppose the existence of Gambit
anymore. Besides, there are more important things that I have to
worry about now. And I guess what that means is that…it’s time to
move on. Put the characters in limbo, but don't put them in the
graveyard, for heaven's sake.
In fact, over the past few years, I'd also gotten to rethinking my
exact positions on Wolverine, and also Bishop. If there's anything
poor about their characterization, that too is simply the result of
bad writing, pure and simple. And if that's the case, why then,
can't those of us who find it bad just say, "I wish they were better
written than they are." Is it really that hard? Plus, I'll have to
recall that, during the Bronze Age, when Wolvie first appeared, he
did have some good storylines that are well worth trying out.
Meanwhile
As of this writing, I want all those
who aren’t sure to know that yes, I do know that in X-Men #184, Peter Milligan turned
Gambit
into
a
“horseman”
of
Apocalypse, in the storyline titled “Blood of the Apocalypse”.
And that he’s even taken anew since then to working for Mr.
Sinister. And that Remy’s got a new look as the minion called
“Death”. (And lest we forget, that Sunfire is another character to
go over to that side.)
Do I like this development? Not really, as IMO, it is possible to
redeem Gambit through simpler writing steps without having to make
him into a villain, and even if the writers have done this as a step
towards redeeming him, which one could assume was the case, I still
don’t think it was necessary (though if this
news report is any indication, he's back to normal? Let's hope
so). And I might also point out that the upcoming Messiah CompleX
story involves some elements that spin off from the horrible House
of M. If so, is it any wonder that I may feel discouraged from
reading it, knowing that they're still submerging themselves in
ideas that stem from bad crossovers done for the sake of political
correctness?
(But who knows if they really do intend, for now anyway, to ever
redeem Gambit? From what I’ve learned so far, it seems as though
Milligan may have injected some criticism into his plot, by having
Cable later comment on how Gambit’s accent seems forced!)
It’s amazing that this actually happened in the past year, but how
I’m of mixed minds at best about it now. A couple years ago, I
might’ve embraced the idea of turning Gambit into one of
Apocalypse’s minions with pleasure. Now, I kinda wish it hadn’t
happened.
Why? Simple. Because as Mark Gruenwald once said, “Every character is someone’s favorite.
You shouldn't kill them off lightly, or worse yet, ruin their old
appearances in retrospect.” The former fate certainly makes
sense here as much as the latter can, albeit in the form of a fate
worse than death. And I know that there are those out there who
surely don’t approve of this. And today, I understand how they feel.
And that’s why, while I may not praise Gambit, I’m not going to
condemn him as a comic book creation either. Because he’s fictional,
and so, it is not his fault for anything that’s wrong with him. And,
as another writer in the industry may have once said, “there are no
bad characters, only bad writers.” Absolutely correct, and no matter
what you and I may think of Gambit, his dreadful characterization is
simply the result of bad writing, for which any or all of those
who’d taken to writing him may be responsible for, and they’re the
ones who deserve the criticism, not Gambit.
Having thought this over, I took to
editing and reworking just about all negative comments I may have
had about Remy LeBeau on this website, because no longer am I going
to look so foolish as to make it look as though my dislike for a
character is based on they themselves and not what the scriptwriters
did. No way. From now on, I know where to base my arguments, and
it’s not on the characters. Most definitely not alone. Nor do I want
to be overly influenced by the mainstream media anymore, which, I
fear, is also what influenced my opinions on Gambit the wrong way to
begin with.
To any and all who dislike the character: don’t base your judgement
solely upon the character alone, but rather, on the way he’s
written. And don’t turn your dislike into an outright grudge, as
easy as it may seem. Because if you do, it’ll only leak over into
other books and take its toll even on those who weren’t written
badly. And believe me, that’s not what the industry needs, nor the
audience.
Trust me, it’s quite possible to build a criticism that’s based upon
how the scriptwriters – and the editors – handle things, and that
way, if work hard, we can shape things for the better without having
to dislike a character for the sake of it. And then, just like with
Rick Jones, maybe with Gambit too, we can result in obtaining better
characterization.
And I think that picture I put on the side with Rogue and Gambit
locking lips is the perfect way to conclude this discussion!
Copyright 2007 Avi Green. All rights reserved.
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