Hello interweb, Nate here. Alright, so I’m pretty behind on the current X-Men titles (I talk more about that below) but on Facebook I noticed something rather interesting: Iceman’s gay! As you can see from the images below (click to enlarge and zoom), in All-New X-Men #40 Iceman, aka Bobby Drake, comes out of the closet.
All-New X-Men #40 I
All-New X-Men #40 II
All-New X-Men #40 III
All-New X-Men #40 IV
All-New X-Men #40 V
Also, I kinda like this art better than the earlier issues
I’m Behind on the Current X-Men Titles
So while most people saw this and probably thought, “OMG, Bobby’s gay!” I actually saw this and thought, “OMG, their on #40 already?”. I have read Avengers Vs X-Men, the first trade paperback (#1-5) of Marvel Now’s Uncanny X-Men, and the first two trades (#1-10) of All-New X-Men. I’ve also read Spider-man and the X-Men #1-3 but I don’t know how much that title is effecting the overall story. So I want to catch myself up to speed with the X-Men titles but I know that Uncanny X-Men and All-New X-Men seems to be leaning on each other and there’s this storyline that happened called Battle of the Atom and I have no idea where that story falls into the timeline right now. So if someone can help me, please comment below on what titles I should read because I’m kinda lost. Do I need to read both X-Men titles or will the story make sense if I’m only reading All-New X-Men (which is actually the title I’m most interested in), and where does Battle of the Atom takes place so I can read that when I should? Please, someone help me XD .
My Opinions on Gay Iceman
So just to be clear, I’m just going to be talking about my opinion on this within the context of the Marvel Universe and as such I’m not going to publicly give my opinion on LGBT in the real world. Comics are suppose to be fun and I want my blog to remain fun, which means avoiding controversial political stuff going on within our world.
With that said, what is my stance on the resent news? Well, I like that Marvel is at least trying to add more diversity to their world. While many fans (me included) hates when an established character’s race or gender (it’s usually race) is changed purely for the sake of diversity rather than creating new characters, sexuality is different. Unlike race and gender, you can hide your sexuality and as such it’s probably a common thing for LGBT people to hide their sexuality and to come out of the closet later in life. And people like this do exist and as such it would be nice for them to have a superhero that went through their same situation.
However, I don’t know about Iceman, especially with his specific history. I mean over 50-ish years of publication and no telepath was able to detect this until just now? Heck, Emma Frost even took control of his body at one point, how did she miss that? Considering that Bobby’s been around Professor X, Emma Frost, the Steford Cuckoos, and Jean grey you’d think one of them would’ve found it long before this. On top of this, Bobby’s dated a handful of women in the past. Now in one panel (not above) Bobby mentioned that the older him has already dated quite a few woman and Jean Grey replied with “Not well”. So? You can’t be straight and just not be good with women? Again, it’s nice that Marvel is at least trying to add more diversity, but they couldn’t have done this better?
End Poll
Do you like this resent change of events?
Superhero etc. 
Aw man, I just think this is pretty sad. There’s literally no point to this and it’s just going to alienate Iceman fans.
One thing though, I think Jean Grey and Iceman meant that the older Iceman isn’t gay, which is why the younger one was confused. It seems that time travel turned him gay for some reason. Perhaps just being in the modern culture was too much for him and simply turned him gay. Still, these are the kinds of comic twists that simply don’t work and remind me why I still find the old comics to be the best ones.
Yeah, I’m glad that Marvel is at least trying to do the right thing but it comes off as a publicity stunt. Now the same thing happened to Alan Scott in the New 52 and that got some hype because DC just said that “Green Lantern is gay” and as such people who don’t read comics bot upset because that sounds like they said that Batman/Superman/Flash/any-other-DC-A-lister is gay. The thing is, most people don’t even care about Allen Scott (including me) so this kinda died down quickly.
On the whole “old comics are better”thing, yeah I don’t really agree with that. Old comics have a charm to them and I enjoy reading them when I can get my hands on them, but I still feel like new comics are really good to. The New 52 Green Lantern title was awesome (what! A good comment about the New 52?), what I’ve read in those X-Men trades I mentioned earlier is rather intriguing, and I honestly do like modern comic book art rather than older art. I guess it is an opinion, but this is personally mine.
While I think that the scene itself was written poorly and the in-universe situation was so awful, I don’t agree at all that it has no point overall.
This well established character, who has been constantly written as conflicted about something, has come out and can now act as a role model for all of the young people out here struggling with themselves. Anything that can help someone accept themselves for who they are is a good thing in my book.
One of he things I’ve always liked about the X-Men is now they’re constantly persecuted just for being mutants. Back when they where created I think this ment they mostly represented racism but since today racism (for the most part) is no longer a problem they kinda shifted to homosexuality. I especially remember seeing a clip from an X-Men movie where one person asks a mutant something along the lines of “Can’t you just not be a mutant” which is similar to the whple “is being gay a choice” thing. I’m not going WO away whether or not I believe it’s a choice, but those themes do float around the feanchise already so making a character straight up gay isn’t that bad all things concideres.
And Iceman isn’t the only gay X-Men with North star, Anole, and Prodigy being gay or bi. And since Iceman’s mostly been known for being straight him coming out of the closet is probably going to have more of an impact than the three I mentioned.
Yes, but it shouldn’t have come at the expense of a great character. Iceman was one of my favorite Marvel characters back in the day (Before he started looking terrible in the early 2000’s) and they should have just invented another character to make gay. I’m not the kind of guy who will tell someone how to live their life, but i don’t believe that being gay is moral and supporting it just about everywhere is getting to be a bit much. The one thing that I do like is that this version implies that Iceman just decided to be gay and wasn’t born gay as many as trying to speculate. His older self wasn’t as he didn’t get exposed to the modern world and this one did, which seems to be why he was changed.
Regarding your question about All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men, while they do intertwine a lot at the beginning they definitely split into their own separate stories as you go down the line.
So if you’re only interested in All-New X-Men then you’ll definitely understand everything that’s going on. There will definitely be references to everything going on in Uncanny X-Men but you can easily just forget about it and focus on this time-displaced team of X-Men.
Battle of the Atom was a crossover between pretty much all of the X-Men titles that existed at the time. If you’re only reading All-New X-Men then you should read it after issue #15 (so probably after the third trade). I actually really enjoyed the crossover as a hardcore X-Men fan. It was succinctly described by someone as “The perfect X-Men crossover. Loads of mind-boggling time-travel and everyone obsessing over Jean Grey”.
Wow, thanks. I’ll definitely start reading the trades from my library. I own the digital copies of the first two trades so I just need to read the third trade before jumping into Battle of the Atom. I have heard that Battle of the Atom was good but I had limited amount of money at the time so I was reading other things and lost track of the X titles. But thanks for he help, very informative XD