It’s no coincidence that a character like Mojo should appear in the pages of X-Men comics in the year 1985. The ’80s were a time of media deregulation thanks to the vomitous up-with-money policies of actor turned politician Ronald Reagan. Prior to the 1980s, it was illegal to market directly to children, with many considering that milking children for money was crass. When Reagan took office, those rules were removed or weakened, allowing companies to market as much junk as they wanted directly to kids. This is why kiddie products and toyetic entertainment from that decade boomed the way it did.
There’s an old saying: if you blindly blame Reagan for something bad about society, you’ll be right more often than you’ll be wrong.
Naturally, there was a lot of punk rock pushback to Reagan’s brazen business-forward practices, and characters like Mojo began popping up throughout media. Mojo was the ultimate TV exec, the man more concerned with ratings than human life. He was a monstrous yuppie. Mojo was created by Ann Nocenti and Art Adams. Nocenti admitted that Mojo was inspired by the authors she studied while getting her Master’s at Columbia, particularly Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, and Walter Lippman. If the media is monstrous, then why not give it a face? Mojo was the media monster, feeding off his viewers.
Mojo was literally spineless, having come from a species that couldn’t evolve as quickly as homo sapiens. Another species provided exoskeletons and spidery platforms for Mojo’s species to walk around with. They also demanded slaves do all their labor. The implication is that Mojo, while ambitious, is unbearably lazy. The slaves were genetically engineered to resemble society’s nightmares. It so happens that their nightmares are TV signals from Earth.
Mojo returns to the animated universe of the X-Men, this time with a plan to trap Jubilee and Sunspot in a video game. Let’s dig into his Marvel history. Read More