Haunted by Mythology

The Omega Gang, from comic book to film

Cinema poster and book cover for critical review

I wrote an obscure article in the 1990s which became an influence on the X-Men. The comic book author Grant Morrison later discussed the topic in his book, Supergods. He said a fictional gang in the X-Men is based on my ideas in the past. Here I’ll look at the gang and follow their evolution to the cinematic series.

The Influence

Back in the late 1990s, I wrote an article for a journal in the UK which applied IDP (Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality) to pop cultural trends.¹ The article took the four main atavistic moods of friendly weakness, hostile weakness, friendly strength and, hostile strength, and corresponded them to atavistic pop trends. Later I replaced the terms of ‘friendly’ and ‘hostile’ with ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’:

Optimistic Weakness
Pessimistic Weakness
Optimistic Strength
Pessimistic Strength

So, to give a couple of examples, we can take rave culture and correlate it to the mood of optimistic strength. Likewise, we can find an easy comparison between gabber culture and pessimistic strength. Elsewhere, genres of music such as hip hop and rap, play out the entire four moods of our atavistic nature.