Iceman and Why It’s Important To Stand With Our Fictional Friends

So, this week, someone nerds have known of for a while came out of the closet. Well, really, he was coaxed out of closet by a nosy friend with Hulk-like subtlety, but his audience now knows him as a homosexual. The media let the news fly and so the genie’s out of the bottle. Some people like it and, as these things usually go, many people find it to be a gimmicky affront to nerd culture, part of some prevailing “agenda” to upgrade geekdom into a forum more welcoming to non-binary readers. Oh, and I forgot to mention he’s not a real person. He’s Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, a time-displaced younger version of one of the founding members of the X-Men. Upon hearing the news and reading the publicized issue #40 of All New X-Men, I was sitting with some of my friends who probably own maybe ten comics between them (gifts from me in an attempt to convert them) and, after being informed about the situation, were not nearly as pleased with the situation as I was. In fact, their understanding of the event matched that of a lot of hardcore nerds I’d interacted with in groups and message boards online. “It’s a gimmick to sell books.” “It’s just capitalizing on an agenda.” “It’s lazy writing. Marvel’s out of ideas.” “Why do they have to make Iceman gay? Why not just create new characters and make them gay?”

First of all – and this is really more of a sidenote than anything else – we HAVE to stop using this word “agenda” to describe anything and everything promoting even slightly liberal adva…