Look, I may sound like an insane Green Lantern fan, but I’m actually not.
No, I lied, I fucking love Green Lantern. But I do enjoy other comics too.
For instance, X-Men. You’ve heard of them, and probably seen them on your television or movie theatre a couple times. Wolverine. Professor Xavier. Magneto. If you haven’t heard of those three I don’t think you should be reading this post, let alone reading this blog at all. Cause this kind of thing is going to be a common theme for the time being.
So yeah, I’m going to tell you all about the X-Men and how I came to familiarize myself with the mythos of the Mutant Menace and just how awesome they actually are as misunderstood members of the next step in human evolution.
This is a long post. If you don’t give a shit about comic books, stop reading now. Or, you could continue reading. Could learn something. Up to you.
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Basically, think Rodney King or Martin Luther King Jr. Think Klu Klux Klan. Think xenophobia—even more relevant, Islamophobia in relation to contemporary American culture. Think Holocaust and persecution of the Jews in WWII.
And you’ve got the X-Men.
Writing comic books is a flimsy business. And I don’t mean flimsy as in weak or bad, I mean flimsy as in it’s actually not a very solid process. It’s quite fluid in terms of the plot and history behind the characters as a whole. That’s in no small part due to the vast, extensive cultural history that comic books have. All of them. Especially the big guys—Marvel and DC.
In the case of the X-Men, I’m not the top authority to consult on complete historical background of the X-Men comic book runs or their characters. But hey, you’re not looking for a top authority, cause you probably don’t even care at this point.
I’m setting this up, because the X-Men are a cast of characters that, through comic book writers in the old days, Post-WWII towards the seventies, started a pretty different kind of superhero. This was Marvel’s way of saying fuck you to DC and their unstoppable forces, like the Man of Steel and the World’s Greatest Detective.
Not to say they don’t have their weaknesses, troubles, and hamartias, but Marvel’s a street-level company. With street-level heroes and street-level issues. What was the most predominant street-level issue in the old days?
Segregation, racism and discrimination against 'others'—that whole ugly thing. So, what sold in that era (and this is all my logical conclusion by the way, I haven’t researched any of this)? These street-level issues. Marvel wanted representatives in the comic book world to speak to those issues. Get sales by relating to your readers. Make them believe what’s happening in their world can happen to the world of superheroes, and vice versa. Suspension of belief can take you to very, very incredible places.
Are we supposed to fear you and hate you, or not? That one sounds familiar. It’s meant to be. This is the core of the X-Men mythos. They’re the discrimination scapegoats of the Marvel Universe.
- PROTIP: A comic book ‘universe’ is where all of the publisher’s (i.e. Marvel or DC) characters and events reside in—think of it as a parallel to ours, where wondrous things that could never happen here, indeed do over there.
So, people born with a special gene in their DNA, usually in Chromosome 23 or something (I’m not actually sure) are born with amazing abilities that usually manifest when the individual hits puberty. Then, more often than not, all hell breaks loose. You might wake up with big-ass eyes, tentacles for arms, or collapsing into plasma. Or you could just discover you can read minds. Still, it’s genetic roulette. Risky. 
Enter the X-Men. They’re the crusaders for social justice in the matter of Mutant-Human relations. They’re hated, yes, but it’s hard to kill them and get away with it. Their public image is too good. They’ve established themselves as superheroes, and all those mutant-haters can’t really do their task risk-free nowadays. Thank Professor Charles Xavier for that.
And if you’re a mutant, the X-Men will try to find you. Usually before someone else does. Either a lynch mob or Magneto, is what it was down to until recently. Magneto controls magnetism—if you know about science that’s pretty damn powerful (it’s not just flinging pans at your face). He’ll turn you into a bad guy. Nobody wants to be a bad guy. If you do, then I really hope you don’t manifest latent mutant abilities.
When the X-Men get to you, they’ll bring you to a safe haven, free from discrimination and persecution, or civilian justice at the hands of all kinds of bigots and extremists. Recently, it used to be a mansion owned by Xavier turned school for ‘gifted youngsters’. Recent major events have proven location changes are pretty common with this troupe. Here, you’ll get to go to school without judgemental stares or screams of horror, feel welcome, find some friends you can relate too, and also get kick-ass training based on your genetic power-set.
Genetic mutation in the Marvel Universe is what genetic mutation in our universe wants to be: awesome. Your mutations, if they have their downsides, have some pretty stellar upsides too. You can fly? Don’t worry. Xavier’s School has teachers who can fly. They teach you how to fly better. Telekinesis? Well, they’ve got telekinetics to help you telekinect things. Good, right?
Wrong. You see, everything in the Marvel Universe is everything on our universe on steroids—refer to the genetic mutation comment. So bigots are not just bigots, they’re super-bigots. Terrorists are not just terrorists, they’re terrorists with giant mechanical robots and unknown sources of billion-dollar funding. Hate is not just hate, it’s super-hate.
So, you put a bunch of mutants all in one place, and what happens? Bad things happen. Everything that’s happened to mutants in the Marvel Universe, prior to something called ‘M-Day’ which I don't know if you can take me getting further into, has been centered on the X-Men protecting that school from destruction of super-terrorist bigots with guns and a lot of money. And on top of that, a former mutant ally turned mutant extremist hell-bent on the ‘it’s us or them’ mentality (that’s Magneto). And he’s always pissed. If you don’t play on his side, you play on the other one.
Imagine if, in the decades of that turmoil, the hate run rampant, the protests, the media attention, the corruption—there wasn’t a happy ending? What if desegregation never happened? What if the hate grew stronger with each person different from us was born? What would the world look like?
The X-Men are a very good cultural symbol for comparison. This is if those things went wrong. If someone decided that they were a ‘menace to society’ and wanted them away from everyone else. Dead or gone, it didn’t matter. Beside all the other stories with the X-Men, and there’s a shitton, believe me—this is the heart of it all.
What they’ve always fought for is equality, respect, and peace. It’s something they still can’t seem to get. And it’s tragic, and it’s also great how comic book writers, contemporary ones anyways, don’t dare alter that reality with the X-Men, because, like I said, that’s the heart of it all.
There’s writers who come along and introduce HUGE crossover events where the X-Men fight unimaginable foes and universe-changing things happen that resonate not only for the X-Men books, but all across the Marvel Universe. That’s one of the reasons I read comics. Proof that it’s all connected, and that these characters’ actions mean something greater than the page that they’re featured.
But when those writers do those big events, for the sales and the new fans or whatever, they still have to maintain that presence of prejudice and discrimination that the X-Men have to fight with every day, in the face of the millions of lives they usually save with each foe they defeat, they still walk away with their heads hung low and going back into the shadows, because when everyone’s done yelling ‘Hurray!’ it’s back to the stares and the screams and the yells; ‘We don’t want you here!’ ‘Dirty muties!’ ‘Freaks!’
But hey, they don’t care. They save lives and kick ass. They can teleport, read minds, fire concussive blasts from their eyes, heal from wounds in a second, leap from great heights, alter probability, change into elemental forms, use heightened senses, move objects with a thought, absorb all kinds of energy, be indestructible, and fly faster than a speeding bullet even. And they were born with it. And they celebrate their mutations; their ‘powers’. They stick together, and even if they’re not equals to everyone else, they’re equals to each other. They respect each other, they fight bad guys together, and most of all, they stick together.
The X-Men have gone through some tough times. Most of them are gone now. A lucky few came back. Some new ones are just getting to know their power. They’re still here, though. They’re still Marvel’s token discrimination scapegoat.
And if they could talk, they’d say if there’s still one mutant left to bring back home, they wouldn’t have it any other way.
It’s fiction, I know. Suspension of disbelief, remember?
- PROTIP: M-Day was a very large Marvel crossover event (when a story exists in several simultaneous runs of different comic books) that centered around the X-Men. A mutant with the ability to alter probability used her powers to her fullest extent—changing reality as a whole. She said three words. “No more mutants.” On M-Day, the mutant global population went from a 14 million to 198. The writers did it because other writers wrote in too many mutants for the Marvel Universe, and had to get rid of some. That’s comic books, folks.
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Thanks for reading. This isn’t layman’s terms, and definitely can be more condensed and understandable. Two things I’m not really taking into account. Sorry. If you understand the X-Men a bit more now, then congratulations. You may just like comic books. Don’t worry. You won’t be hated like the X-Men, despite popular belief.
Also, new X-Men: The First Class character profile trailers.
Beast, Havok, and Banshee. Save for Beast, most of those X-Men in the movie are not the actual first class of X-Men. If you were wondering, that roster was originally Beast (pre-blue fur), Cyclops, Marvel Girl (Jean Grey), Iceman, and Angel. They were all in the last trilogy of X-Men movies. But movie franchises can take liberties if they want to. It’s still X-Men, and therefore, still awesome.
If you want to know more about some more Marvel, here’s a bit more about a certain Asgardian god-warrior with a really big-ass hammer.
[all of this via io9]
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