While the real world goes to hell, there’s a comfort — a very small, cold comfort — in knowing that democracy is still holding strong somewhere, namely over at Marvel Comics. Well, not really Marvel Comics, just the X-Men… and even then, that’s kind of overselling it. Look, you just get to elect the team’s new incredibly minor mutant again, all right?
Yes, it appears Marvel is going to make last year’s fan election to choose a member of the X-Men an annual event, as the publisher has released a new slew of characters that people can vote to join the mutant big leagues, including Armour, Avalanche, Bling!, Firestar, Gentle, Gorgon, Micromax, Penance, Siryn, and Surge. There are several things to note here, the first being that the selection is perhaps even more obscure, relatively speaking, than last year’s pool of candidates — even if characters like Armour and Penance have gone on to have larger roles on Krakoa in series like New Mutants and the short-lived X-Corp. The only character to have had any kind of pop culture significance outside of the comics this time around is Firestar — who’s defining fact here is that she has yet to claim Krakoan citizenship, which, rude — and that’s only because she was one of the leads of the very early ‘80s cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, alongside fellow mutant Ice-Man.
This is presumably because of last year’s controversy over the election, where many fans thought that Polaris’ votes were boosted by people who weren’t reading the comics, but were fans of the live-action character as seen in the recent TV series The Gifted. It is unlikely any such similar campaign will happen for Firestar, as anyone who has that much nostalgia for a cartoon that literally premiered over 40 years is surely still reading X-Men comics anyway, but you never know.
Finally, it’s also worth mentioning that Armour is the only candidate to have been featured in last year’s election, which implies that Marvel has some idea for something to do with the hero beyond her current role as part of New Mutants, but doesn’t care about it enough to just make her a member of the team, instead of hoping fans will get around to it. I don’t know. It’s just weird: let Hisako step up without fan intervention!
Voting opened early this morning and will remain open until January 13, 2022, at 11:59 pm EST — head here to cast yours.