Marvel Comics have again insulted all comic book fans everywhere by announcing a new superhero team full of politically correct, woke, so-called diverse characters. And yes, all sane individuals have been calling for Marvel to stop gender-flipping, race-flipping, orientation-flipping their characters and create new ones, but now we have all changed our minds and are saying no, not like that. And while the characters are new, they have taken a team name of a much-loved superhero comic, even if no one had been buying it for years. And it's all been arranged by a marketing department at Marvel trying to appeal to a non-existent audience that they will fail to reach.

The comic is, as I am sure you have guessed, is called Giant-Size X-Men #1, written by Len Wein and drawn by Dave Cockrum, two creators who should know better. It has taken a team of all-American heroes, kept one as a token, Cyclops, pushed to the back of the group, and then introduced characters from Japan and Germany – countries that the USA was at war with only thirty years ago, added a Russian, who we are in a Cold War with right now, as well as a Canadian, who we might as well be at war with – and given him universal healthcare powers as well. And then they have taken the powers associated with Norweigan Aryan gods of thunder and given it, in an astounding display of virtual signalling, to a black woman. Oh and just to put the cherry on the top added a Native American, because normal Americans just aren't good enough. At least they kill him off in the first issue.

Anyway, I predict that as a result of this casting, demanded by Marvel's sales department because they wanted to appeal to international audiences, but then used characters from countries that they don't sell their comics to, this ludicrous and transparent attempt at woke comic book storytelling will fail and no one will ever hear the words X-Men again. Get woke, go broke.

Though I hear rumour that a certain Chris Claremont is waiting in the wings to take over the writing, so maybe there's a hope that he, with John Byrne, might stop all this inorganic foisting of black women and other attempts at diversity onto the public, and certainly won't be pushing some message of tolerance, or political messaging that was never intended by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

UPDATE: Apologies, again, I have somehow engaged in a timeslip and thought I was back in the mid-seventies, when I was just trying to write about the new New Warriors. I seem to have a habit of doing things like this now and again, don't I?