Growth.
That's what's been on my mind the last few weeks, because I'm experiencing all kinds of growth in my life. There's been growth in my awareness, like the discovery that I have the disease diabetes. That wasn't the most welcome discovery - especially since it required a trip to the hospital by ambulance. My blood sugar rate was a staggering figure so high that the machine that tested me didn't have a register to go up to my level.
Fortunately, I've had an EKG and other tests and there was no permanent damage from any of this. But the blood sugar surprised everyone - the machine maxed out at 740, I guess - and I was above that. Even when it comes to diseases, I take it to a higher level.
Of course, there's a lot of stigma about having diabetes, and I had to grow very quickly in terms of educating myself about what the diagnosis really meant for my future life. Since I know you all worry about my welfare, I'll add that my blood sugar is now down to a regular rate of about 89-130 on a daily basis thanks to a daily regimen of a pill called Metformin and a nightly injection of 20 mililiters of insulin.
But I also grew in other ways. I learned that I really can inject myself with a needle - something I would've told you was impossible for me before I learned that I simply had to do it. I learned I can prick my finger and check my own glucose levels - something I had always imagined as an excruciating process that has turned out to be no major chore at all. I learned that I can very easily restrict my diet to a maximum of 90 carbs per meal - and that it hasn't really hurt my enjoyment of food to do so. I learned I can laugh about my situation, like joking with women I know that I'm glad I'm a transwoman since that means I get to have the male allowance of carbohydrates (the aforementioned 90).
And I've discovered many people on my timeline on Twitter have stepped up to support me, giving me advice or suggestions - or just moral support in a time when I've really needed it. These people, like the amazing Hel M, have helped me in so many ways that they may not even realize, and it has helped me feel less isolated in terms of dealing with this change in my situation. Their help has also allowed me to realize I'm not tackling this alone, and that the supposed distance of online "friends" - complete with the suspicious analysis by quotation marks - can prove be friends, too, in that they meet the critical criteria of reaching out to really help during challenging times. Because of them, I feel less alone, and as I cause myself pain every morning to check my glucose levels, I'm thankful again and again that I know them. It makes my new ritual of medically-required self-inflicted "harm" go that much easier.
And it doesn't really hurt THAT much, either; to prick my fingers, to look at the little orb of blood on my fingertip and then watch as it slides into the test strip and a little machine like a tricorder tells me how efficient my body is being - none of it is the end of the world. It's pain, but I recognize that it's pain with a purpose - and that makes all the difference, and it's a difference that's taken me half my life to understand.
But, I get it now.
And that's also gotten me thinking about Marrow.
Now, if any character fits the bill of not being well-known to the general public, it's got to be Marrow. So, as per the usual process, here's a link to the the biography and critical information profile from Wikipedia.
That done, let me next draw attention to the date of Marrow's first appearance.
As you can see from the Wikipedia article, that would be in the year 1994. So - yes - Marrow is a Marvel character from the 1990s. And we all know what that means; she's extreme - mean - tough - indestructible - and kinda like Wolverine. Except even MORE awesome, and even MORE extreme, said Marvel over and over again at the time.
Now, I want it writ large here, even I can't write it any larger because I use the maximum font size for this blogging tool: mainstream comics from the Big Two in the 1990s are probably at the top of my list of Least Favorite Things About Comics of All Time. People who know me - and who also understand comics - tend to also know this about my tastes, as well.
So, I expect that the fact that Marrow happens to be among my favorite Marvel mutants possibly comes as a surprise to them.
No matter - it's true, and she is, for so many reasons ... none of which have to do with her being extreme.
To me, the mainstream superhero comics of the 1990s that gave birth to Marrow represent everything that's wrong with what superhero comics have become - and how they've in many ways stayed since that time.
To me, these comics are all about the frosting.
And no, this isn't just a metaphor I've recently invented due to my diabetic diagnosis. Not everything is about sweets to me.
This is to say that, to me, superhero comic books are in many ways like cupcakes. They're tasty and sweet and give you a sugar rush. Sometimes, a really talented baker can whip up a cupcake that's a little healthier than others, but for the most part they are a decadent dessert item - not a daily nutritional requirement. They're usually full of empty calories, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy them, or that they're totally without benefit or merit.
But they're usually coated in frosting, which is even less an item of food than the contents of the cake, being basically pure sugar. And yeah, sugar is tasty.
But it can't be the entire treat.
To me, the cake of a mainstream comic is essential - and the cake is the truth of telling a story about real human beings through the metaphors and symbols of mainstream superheroes. To me, the cake is the part of the treat that carries the weight of a story - developing the personalities of the characters, reminding us how the story resonates with real life, dealing with real issues through those symbols and metaphors. Everything that warms the tummy is the cake. Everything that makes a reader truly feel something on an emotional level instead of merely a visceral sensation is the cake.
Gail Simone writes this kind of cake, and Neil Gaiman, and those select few who understand what mainstream superheroes can tell us about ourselves and about the world in which we live.
Continuity? Plot? Adamantium? Everything extreme? That's the frosting.
And even without knowing I had diabetes, I didn't want to ingest that much sugar every time I took a trip to my local comic shop.
So I shied away from most of the mainstream comics of the 1990s.
Doing so meant broadening my horizons and discovering the more literate modern classics that came from the period.
.comiccover.jpg)
But there were still characters I loved.
I loved them cake and frosting and all.
I loved them even if they had been modified so much to match their 1990s counterparts that they were changed nearly beyond recognition.
The woman with the claws is Kitty Pryde, by the way. But that's another article.
Not even the glut of frosting in the 1990s could dissuade me from my beloved crimefighters completely, though, so I ate as much frosting as I could stomach - which wasn't much - and endured the excesses in mainstream 1990s superhero comics because I truly love superheroes. And love makes us do crazy things, you know?
And not all superhero comics of the period were terrible, and not all new characters introduced were worthless. Some have grown to become my favorites in the genre.
But my mutants.
My poor, poor mutants.
How they suffered.
But even in the midst of this "creative" desolation, all was not lost.
And that's where Marrow comes into the picture.
Oh, to be sure - Marrow fits the bill of these extreme 1990s characters I've bemoaned in this piece. She was typically full of rage, aggression and malice. She had a healing factor. She had knives and striking weapons growing out of her body. She was a villain who later joined the X-Men and found herself. The tiers of frosting are all there.
And yet - there was something more to her than that, at least to me.
Whether it was by accident or intent, the people who crafted Marrow imbued her with a particular quality that was absent from most of her sisters and brothers of the era. She wasn't unique in terms of raw construction, to be sure, so that wasn't it.
And yet there was more to her than her component parts. And I couldn't figure it out as a reader no matter how much I tried.
I just liked her, even though she was often a mess of contradictory character "development," prone to extreme violence and extreme emotional dissonance and disconnection.
Then again, so were almost all the other characters in superhero comics, even the ones I loved.
And yet, when Storm "killed" Marrow, I was crushed. I hated it, for so many reasons. At first, I thought I simply hated it because Storm had been turned into yet another "killing machine" character like every other mutant.
But I quickly realized there was more to it than that. I missed Marrow. I really missed her.
Of course, 1990s comics being a world where life and death were equally cheap, Marrow didn't stay dead for long.
Disregarding the dialogue - wow! - I was nevertheless thrilled to have Marrow back, and glad that a relationship between Sarah and Ororo was being established.
Suddenly, all the awfulness of their prior history didn't matter - they were friends, and I was simply glad to put the unpleasantness of those awful stories in the past.
This was the here-and-now ... or, at least, it was, then. And no amount of extreme writing could ruin my appreciation of Marrow.
And, yet, I still didn't understand why.
And I didn't figure out why until I was standing in my living room, exhausted from the aforementioned trip to the hospital, diagnosed with diabetes, feeling roughed-up and dirty and overwhelmed, barely able to process information coming in through five battered senses.
I didn't figure it out until I pricked my finger and watched blood well up on my fingertip.
.jpeg)
That's when it came to me, oddly. I'm not making this up. At that moment, my first home use of my OneTouch device, I thought of Marrow as I waited for the meter to come back with a count.
Before that moment, I had been thinking about the necessity of what I was doing. I thought about how it was going to hurt, but how I needed to do it, and that I needed to do it myself. I thought about how nobody else was going to do it for me. Nobody was going to help me inject myself with insulin by poking a needle into my stomach that evening, either. Nobody was going to count all my carbs for me.
I realized that even in a world full of my friends and enemies, the ultimate responsibility to keep myself alive - and to flourish - would have to come through in my own actions. I had to do these things, myself, because there was no other option. I had to stand up for myself and take adult responsibility of my future health - my very being - my survival, really. And even though I wasn't in complete control of what was happening to me, I could either curl up in a ball and suck my thumb ... or take action, take control of doing what I needed to do if I wanted to live.
And that's when it clicked, why I love Marrow. It had been in front of me the entire time, and I feel a little silly for not getting it sooner - for needing a diagnosis of diabetes to do the self-analysis that got me to this point.
It's about my growth.
And what growth can mean, both good and bad, in a person's life - and, in particular, a transwoman's.
There are surface comparisons between myself and Marrow. She's a woman whose body grew strange in adolescence, whose very physical form became unfamiliar and painful. What transwoman who wasn't started on hormone therapy before puberty has been immune to that?
Looking into the mirror and seeing growth that is not what's desired, not what's expected, not what feels natural or wanted - it's almost a rite of passage for transgirls becoming transwomen. It's the act of looking at one's developing body in the shower and feeling anguish because of all the things that are wrong instead of grateful at what's going right.
It's the deep, hurtful agony of being betrayed by a body that's doing all the wrong things, that's forcing you as a person to conform to a reality that is alien and incorrect. It's realizing that the days of putting on your best friend's dress and going into town as her best girl friend are coming to an end. It's the realization that, just as Marrow can't pass for human, a transgirl who's become a transwoman can't so easily fit in to the "normal" world.
These aren't simply cosmetic issues. These are issues that preclude regular interaction without a lot of strength. They require determination, and they require growth. They require the kind of growth that can turn hearts cold, as you learn to stop caring what other people think of you - which can, in turn, make a person eventually numb to the feelings that others take for granted - inclusion, acceptance, love.
I look at Marrow and I see her as beautiful, and I always did, even though I didn't realize why until very recently. But that beauty wasn't simply a reaction to her physical appearance. It was a beauty of harmony - a kinship I felt with her past and present - and hopefully future. It was a kinship that made me see and understand why she felt the need to hide from others, to harden her heart, to live in the metaphorical or actual sewers beneath the bustling city.
That she was a "freak" was secondary; after all, that was sort of the point of the Morlocks.
What resonated with me was the character's ultimate reality in terms of reflecting my own life, in terms of reflecting my own experiences with humanity - just writ large in her superhero story, writ in fantasy.
And the metaphor extends even to her powers and how I've chosne to live my own life. The growths of bone could simply be a curse to Marrow, a painful disease. And I know that there are transwoman who refuse to live their lives and who hide and wrap their arms around their knees and refuse to step out into the world, who live in the darkness of the tunnels they have carved for themselves, never venturing into the world for fear of retribution and hate - for fear of mirrors, for fear of experiencing a higher degree of the brutality of self-loathing; hating oneself, after all, can be more painful than any cruel words from a passerby.
But that's not what Marrow does.
Marrow doesn't hide in the darkness. She uses it as a tool, a weapon. She uses the foreign growths of her body as tools. She uses her hardened heart as a means of survival; after all, even when someone rips out her heart, she survives.
What doesn't kill Marrow doesn't just make her stronger.
It makes her better.
Her body's out-of-control growths could destroy her. But she hasn't let that happen. She's turned herself into a warrior she wouldn't be if she didn't have those growths.
She's the person who she is because of her growths, not just in spite of them.
And, most of all, she accepts these changes and, more often than not, embraces them.
Even more than that, she breaks off pieces of herself and uses them to improve her changes of success. The objects of her suffering are, as I said, the tools of her survival, so this only makes sense. But think about the metaphor.
When I write, it isn't the banal day-to-day experiences that have helped me to grow into the person I am now. It's my memories of the tough times, the difficult challenges that led me to this point in my life. Sure, it led me to diabetes - but it also led me to strength, courage, friendship, intelligence, comprehension of the world around me. My status as a transwoman has caused me pain, just as Marrow's bone growths can cause her pain - but she breaks off those pieces of herself and leaps into the fray.
And I love her for that.
So there's the cake of Marrow's character. She represents, to me, all the women who have ever suffered simply for the nonexistent "crime" of not matching some person or society's preconceived ideas of beauty or normalcy. She represents, to me, the power that we have to take the wounds inflicted upon us and transform them through our minds and bodies into weapons that we can use to survive and to become better, to evolve beyond the petty constraints of those people or those societies.
We're better and stronger because of our wounds, not in spite of them. And we need to realize that the way Marrow does. We're not weak because we're mutations - we're strong for the differences, and we have to celebrate them. We have to celebrate these variances in gender, pigment, sexual orientaton - all the metaphors that rise when one thinks of mutation in comic books as symbolic of minorities of any kind, whichever group you can call your own because of who you are and the kinship with others that can come from what you've endured.
We're all different. We're all unique. But those of us who have experienced the lash of true societal exclusion know that's our strength and our weapon. When society screams at us to get back into the sewers, we know that's where we can turn into the people we're meant to be. We're not damned for that exclusion, because it will be the chrysalis that helps us turn into the warriors of change that we were always meant to be.
And it doesn't matter whether we have a disease like diabetes, or bones growing out of our backs, or one leg, or dark or light skin, or a weird growth that doesn't belong between our legs or any other mutation life throws at us. We can have our metaphorical hearts ripped out and come back because of these mutations.
That realization isn't because of Marrow's status as extreme or because of any 1990s frosting. It's because she resonates with a fundamental reality that outsider readers know, a reality that we've all experienced in their own lives. It's because, deep down, she is a strong character that reflects our realities in so many ways.
Plus, I happen to think that her hair ROCKS.
So there's that, even though some artists give her a look less similar to myself.
It's different when an artist reinterprets an established character into having a new look, but I eventually get used to it.
It's all part of the character's growth.
But I also grew in other ways. I learned that I really can inject myself with a needle - something I would've told you was impossible for me before I learned that I simply had to do it. I learned I can prick my finger and check my own glucose levels - something I had always imagined as an excruciating process that has turned out to be no major chore at all. I learned that I can very easily restrict my diet to a maximum of 90 carbs per meal - and that it hasn't really hurt my enjoyment of food to do so. I learned I can laugh about my situation, like joking with women I know that I'm glad I'm a transwoman since that means I get to have the male allowance of carbohydrates (the aforementioned 90).
And I've discovered many people on my timeline on Twitter have stepped up to support me, giving me advice or suggestions - or just moral support in a time when I've really needed it. These people, like the amazing Hel M, have helped me in so many ways that they may not even realize, and it has helped me feel less isolated in terms of dealing with this change in my situation. Their help has also allowed me to realize I'm not tackling this alone, and that the supposed distance of online "friends" - complete with the suspicious analysis by quotation marks - can prove be friends, too, in that they meet the critical criteria of reaching out to really help during challenging times. Because of them, I feel less alone, and as I cause myself pain every morning to check my glucose levels, I'm thankful again and again that I know them. It makes my new ritual of medically-required self-inflicted "harm" go that much easier.
But, I get it now.
And that's also gotten me thinking about Marrow.
Now, if any character fits the bill of not being well-known to the general public, it's got to be Marrow. So, as per the usual process, here's a link to the the biography and critical information profile from Wikipedia.
That done, let me next draw attention to the date of Marrow's first appearance.
As you can see from the Wikipedia article, that would be in the year 1994. So - yes - Marrow is a Marvel character from the 1990s. And we all know what that means; she's extreme - mean - tough - indestructible - and kinda like Wolverine. Except even MORE awesome, and even MORE extreme, said Marvel over and over again at the time.
Now, I want it writ large here, even I can't write it any larger because I use the maximum font size for this blogging tool: mainstream comics from the Big Two in the 1990s are probably at the top of my list of Least Favorite Things About Comics of All Time. People who know me - and who also understand comics - tend to also know this about my tastes, as well.
So, I expect that the fact that Marrow happens to be among my favorite Marvel mutants possibly comes as a surprise to them.
No matter - it's true, and she is, for so many reasons ... none of which have to do with her being extreme.
To me, the mainstream superhero comics of the 1990s that gave birth to Marrow represent everything that's wrong with what superhero comics have become - and how they've in many ways stayed since that time.
To me, these comics are all about the frosting.
And no, this isn't just a metaphor I've recently invented due to my diabetic diagnosis. Not everything is about sweets to me.
This is to say that, to me, superhero comic books are in many ways like cupcakes. They're tasty and sweet and give you a sugar rush. Sometimes, a really talented baker can whip up a cupcake that's a little healthier than others, but for the most part they are a decadent dessert item - not a daily nutritional requirement. They're usually full of empty calories, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy them, or that they're totally without benefit or merit.
But they're usually coated in frosting, which is even less an item of food than the contents of the cake, being basically pure sugar. And yeah, sugar is tasty.
But it can't be the entire treat.
To me, the cake of a mainstream comic is essential - and the cake is the truth of telling a story about real human beings through the metaphors and symbols of mainstream superheroes. To me, the cake is the part of the treat that carries the weight of a story - developing the personalities of the characters, reminding us how the story resonates with real life, dealing with real issues through those symbols and metaphors. Everything that warms the tummy is the cake. Everything that makes a reader truly feel something on an emotional level instead of merely a visceral sensation is the cake.
Gail Simone writes this kind of cake, and Neil Gaiman, and those select few who understand what mainstream superheroes can tell us about ourselves and about the world in which we live.
Continuity? Plot? Adamantium? Everything extreme? That's the frosting.
And even without knowing I had diabetes, I didn't want to ingest that much sugar every time I took a trip to my local comic shop.
So I shied away from most of the mainstream comics of the 1990s.
Doing so meant broadening my horizons and discovering the more literate modern classics that came from the period.
.comiccover.jpg)
But there were still characters I loved.
I loved them cake and frosting and all.
I loved them even if they had been modified so much to match their 1990s counterparts that they were changed nearly beyond recognition.
The woman with the claws is Kitty Pryde, by the way. But that's another article.
Not even the glut of frosting in the 1990s could dissuade me from my beloved crimefighters completely, though, so I ate as much frosting as I could stomach - which wasn't much - and endured the excesses in mainstream 1990s superhero comics because I truly love superheroes. And love makes us do crazy things, you know?
And not all superhero comics of the period were terrible, and not all new characters introduced were worthless. Some have grown to become my favorites in the genre.
But my mutants.
My poor, poor mutants.
How they suffered.
But even in the midst of this "creative" desolation, all was not lost.
And that's where Marrow comes into the picture.
Oh, to be sure - Marrow fits the bill of these extreme 1990s characters I've bemoaned in this piece. She was typically full of rage, aggression and malice. She had a healing factor. She had knives and striking weapons growing out of her body. She was a villain who later joined the X-Men and found herself. The tiers of frosting are all there.
And yet - there was something more to her than that, at least to me.
Whether it was by accident or intent, the people who crafted Marrow imbued her with a particular quality that was absent from most of her sisters and brothers of the era. She wasn't unique in terms of raw construction, to be sure, so that wasn't it.
And yet there was more to her than her component parts. And I couldn't figure it out as a reader no matter how much I tried.
I just liked her, even though she was often a mess of contradictory character "development," prone to extreme violence and extreme emotional dissonance and disconnection.
Then again, so were almost all the other characters in superhero comics, even the ones I loved.
And yet, when Storm "killed" Marrow, I was crushed. I hated it, for so many reasons. At first, I thought I simply hated it because Storm had been turned into yet another "killing machine" character like every other mutant.
But I quickly realized there was more to it than that. I missed Marrow. I really missed her.
Of course, 1990s comics being a world where life and death were equally cheap, Marrow didn't stay dead for long.
Disregarding the dialogue - wow! - I was nevertheless thrilled to have Marrow back, and glad that a relationship between Sarah and Ororo was being established.
Suddenly, all the awfulness of their prior history didn't matter - they were friends, and I was simply glad to put the unpleasantness of those awful stories in the past.
This was the here-and-now ... or, at least, it was, then. And no amount of extreme writing could ruin my appreciation of Marrow.
And, yet, I still didn't understand why.
And I didn't figure out why until I was standing in my living room, exhausted from the aforementioned trip to the hospital, diagnosed with diabetes, feeling roughed-up and dirty and overwhelmed, barely able to process information coming in through five battered senses.
I didn't figure it out until I pricked my finger and watched blood well up on my fingertip.
.jpeg)
That's when it came to me, oddly. I'm not making this up. At that moment, my first home use of my OneTouch device, I thought of Marrow as I waited for the meter to come back with a count.
Before that moment, I had been thinking about the necessity of what I was doing. I thought about how it was going to hurt, but how I needed to do it, and that I needed to do it myself. I thought about how nobody else was going to do it for me. Nobody was going to help me inject myself with insulin by poking a needle into my stomach that evening, either. Nobody was going to count all my carbs for me.
I realized that even in a world full of my friends and enemies, the ultimate responsibility to keep myself alive - and to flourish - would have to come through in my own actions. I had to do these things, myself, because there was no other option. I had to stand up for myself and take adult responsibility of my future health - my very being - my survival, really. And even though I wasn't in complete control of what was happening to me, I could either curl up in a ball and suck my thumb ... or take action, take control of doing what I needed to do if I wanted to live.
And that's when it clicked, why I love Marrow. It had been in front of me the entire time, and I feel a little silly for not getting it sooner - for needing a diagnosis of diabetes to do the self-analysis that got me to this point.
It's about my growth.
And what growth can mean, both good and bad, in a person's life - and, in particular, a transwoman's.
Looking into the mirror and seeing growth that is not what's desired, not what's expected, not what feels natural or wanted - it's almost a rite of passage for transgirls becoming transwomen. It's the act of looking at one's developing body in the shower and feeling anguish because of all the things that are wrong instead of grateful at what's going right.
It's the deep, hurtful agony of being betrayed by a body that's doing all the wrong things, that's forcing you as a person to conform to a reality that is alien and incorrect. It's realizing that the days of putting on your best friend's dress and going into town as her best girl friend are coming to an end. It's the realization that, just as Marrow can't pass for human, a transgirl who's become a transwoman can't so easily fit in to the "normal" world.
These aren't simply cosmetic issues. These are issues that preclude regular interaction without a lot of strength. They require determination, and they require growth. They require the kind of growth that can turn hearts cold, as you learn to stop caring what other people think of you - which can, in turn, make a person eventually numb to the feelings that others take for granted - inclusion, acceptance, love.
I look at Marrow and I see her as beautiful, and I always did, even though I didn't realize why until very recently. But that beauty wasn't simply a reaction to her physical appearance. It was a beauty of harmony - a kinship I felt with her past and present - and hopefully future. It was a kinship that made me see and understand why she felt the need to hide from others, to harden her heart, to live in the metaphorical or actual sewers beneath the bustling city.
That she was a "freak" was secondary; after all, that was sort of the point of the Morlocks.
What resonated with me was the character's ultimate reality in terms of reflecting my own life, in terms of reflecting my own experiences with humanity - just writ large in her superhero story, writ in fantasy.
And the metaphor extends even to her powers and how I've chosne to live my own life. The growths of bone could simply be a curse to Marrow, a painful disease. And I know that there are transwoman who refuse to live their lives and who hide and wrap their arms around their knees and refuse to step out into the world, who live in the darkness of the tunnels they have carved for themselves, never venturing into the world for fear of retribution and hate - for fear of mirrors, for fear of experiencing a higher degree of the brutality of self-loathing; hating oneself, after all, can be more painful than any cruel words from a passerby.
But that's not what Marrow does.
Marrow doesn't hide in the darkness. She uses it as a tool, a weapon. She uses the foreign growths of her body as tools. She uses her hardened heart as a means of survival; after all, even when someone rips out her heart, she survives.
What doesn't kill Marrow doesn't just make her stronger.
It makes her better.
Her body's out-of-control growths could destroy her. But she hasn't let that happen. She's turned herself into a warrior she wouldn't be if she didn't have those growths.
She's the person who she is because of her growths, not just in spite of them.
And, most of all, she accepts these changes and, more often than not, embraces them.
Even more than that, she breaks off pieces of herself and uses them to improve her changes of success. The objects of her suffering are, as I said, the tools of her survival, so this only makes sense. But think about the metaphor.
When I write, it isn't the banal day-to-day experiences that have helped me to grow into the person I am now. It's my memories of the tough times, the difficult challenges that led me to this point in my life. Sure, it led me to diabetes - but it also led me to strength, courage, friendship, intelligence, comprehension of the world around me. My status as a transwoman has caused me pain, just as Marrow's bone growths can cause her pain - but she breaks off those pieces of herself and leaps into the fray.
And I love her for that.
So there's the cake of Marrow's character. She represents, to me, all the women who have ever suffered simply for the nonexistent "crime" of not matching some person or society's preconceived ideas of beauty or normalcy. She represents, to me, the power that we have to take the wounds inflicted upon us and transform them through our minds and bodies into weapons that we can use to survive and to become better, to evolve beyond the petty constraints of those people or those societies.
We're better and stronger because of our wounds, not in spite of them. And we need to realize that the way Marrow does. We're not weak because we're mutations - we're strong for the differences, and we have to celebrate them. We have to celebrate these variances in gender, pigment, sexual orientaton - all the metaphors that rise when one thinks of mutation in comic books as symbolic of minorities of any kind, whichever group you can call your own because of who you are and the kinship with others that can come from what you've endured.
We're all different. We're all unique. But those of us who have experienced the lash of true societal exclusion know that's our strength and our weapon. When society screams at us to get back into the sewers, we know that's where we can turn into the people we're meant to be. We're not damned for that exclusion, because it will be the chrysalis that helps us turn into the warriors of change that we were always meant to be.
And it doesn't matter whether we have a disease like diabetes, or bones growing out of our backs, or one leg, or dark or light skin, or a weird growth that doesn't belong between our legs or any other mutation life throws at us. We can have our metaphorical hearts ripped out and come back because of these mutations.
That realization isn't because of Marrow's status as extreme or because of any 1990s frosting. It's because she resonates with a fundamental reality that outsider readers know, a reality that we've all experienced in their own lives. It's because, deep down, she is a strong character that reflects our realities in so many ways.
Plus, I happen to think that her hair ROCKS.
It's different when an artist reinterprets an established character into having a new look, but I eventually get used to it.
It's all part of the character's growth.
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