A man who's eyes uncontrollably emit ruby beams of pure force. A woman who can control the weather. A teleporting acrobat who looks like the devil but has the faith of a saint. An orphaned teenage mallrat who can shoot fireworks from her fingertips. A telepathic heroine who has resisted a primordial cosmic entity. A survivor of the Holocaust who wishes to bend humanity to his will as easily as he can bend anything of metallic origin. These, and many, many more, are the X-Men, a team of superheroes in the pages of Marvel comics and the geeky media that I have spent by far the most time indulging in.
Comic books were among the first books I ever read. My dad was an avid collector throughout the 1980s, and he continued to be interested in superheroes afterwards. I have vivid memories of going to Another World Comics in Eagle Rock (a neighborhood of LA) when I was young, where my dad would buy my brother and I a couple comics to take home. Any time I see those issues I am immediately taken back to sitting on the floor in our old house, reading and re-reading the issues to find out more about the characters and what fantastic nonsense was happening in the story. It helped that I was a child in the 90s, when Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and many other superheroes had some quality (and some not-so-quality) weekly cartoons, which helped heighten my interest in the heroes.
Though the X-Men were always among my favorites, they didn't really stand out until I started reading my dad's comics collection when I was in high school. He has 16 short boxes, which each hold about 200 comics in them, so there was a lot to go through. I searched around, ultimately reading a lot of Spider-Man, some Avengers, and a few other titles, but I was instantly captivated by the X-Men. I didn't know this at the time, but during the time when my dad was collecting, the X-Men was in a renaissance and growing into the most popular and critically-acclaimed ongoing superhero comic on the shelves, due in large part to a creative team headed by Chris Claremont. All I knew was that the characters and stories were interesting and complex, and I always finished an issue wanting more. It didn't take long to get through the hundreds of X-Men comics my dad had, but I didn't stop there. Using the internet, I was able to get digital copies of even more comics, and over the years I went through the many X-Men series, to the point where I have read almost every single X-Men comic that has been released since they were created in 1963, easily thousands of comics.
The X-Men really hits a sweet spot for me, which is why I really love them. Since I was a kid, I have been attracted to the colorful design, the interesting powers, and the dramatic story lines of the team. As I've grown older though, I've been able to see the depth in storytelling and social commentary that is a major part of the books. The X-Men is almost entirely comprised of mutants, which in the Marvel Universe typically means someone who gains their powers genetically, typically manifesting during puberty (as if that wasn't a hard enough time). With the frightening powers and the framing that mutants are the next step in human evolution, the mutant minority is often hated and feared by the humans who worry they will be replaced. Over the years, the mutant metaphor has been applied to the treatment of various marginalized groups in the real world, with the Civil Rights Movement being the most common analogy for their experiences of oppression. The metaphors don't usually hold up when you factor in the amazing superpowers, but they do provide an interesting framing for a story about a minority group with immense power, but power that is still overshadowed by the interpersonal and systemic discrimination they face. And so ultimately, as I enjoy doing with all fantastic fiction, I find the parallels to real-world issues cathartic and enlightening.
Another reason the X-Men speak to me personally is that the team is classically centered around a school. Understanding that these powers are frightening and sometimes dangerous, and that the human world cannot provide a safe space for young mutants to learn how to use their powers, a rich mutant known as Professor X started a school where they can come to gain support as they learn to control their powers. Like with Harry Potter, I am a sucker for any story that centers education, and some of my favorite X-Men stories are the ones that focus on the diverse student body, and how characters with different backgrounds, beliefs, identities, goals, and experiences interact as they all learn more about their powers and capabilities. The school is not automatically meant to be a recruitment ground for future members of the superhero X-Men team, though most of the highlighted characters tend to join as they grow. However, former students of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters have become CEOs, mental health professionals, dance instructors, humanitarian workers, and homemakers.
The diversity of characters is another thing I love about the X-Men. Though the series started with a cast of six white characters (only one of whom was female), it really kicked off after it was reintroduced with Giant Size X-Men #1 in 1975 with a whole new cast of characters from around the world. This included a super-strong Native American, an African woman named Storm who can control the weather, a Soviet farmer whose skin transforms into steel, a Japanese hero with power over fire, and of course the short, Canadian berserker with metal
claws named Wolverine. Though still fairly white and overwhelmingly male, the new team embraced diversity in ways that had never been seen in mainstream comics up to that point, and Storm became the first woman of color to lead a superhero team, in the #1 series in America no less! The next generation of students, the New Mutants, is even more diverse, with over half the students female and prominently featuring Native American, Vietnamese, and Afro-Brazilian characters.
Now, over the years X-Men comics have absolutely not always done representation correctly. There have been times of tokenization, exotification, and appropriation, and the series continues to be held back by long-running norms in comic books to cater to a white, male audience. However, as a series about a team and a school for an oppressed minority, the X-Men tends to be one of the most representational comic book series out there, and there have been many characters representing different races, nationalities, genders, sexualities, and mental and physical abilities. Some of my favorites include Whiz Kid (a Japanese teenager who can transform his wheelchair or any other mechanical objects with his thoughts), Dust (an Afghan woman who can transform into a sentient cloud of dust), and Cypher (a character who can understand any language and is often interpreted as being on the autism spectrum). As we do on Geek Between the Lines, it is important to celebrate the areas in which representation is done well, while also remaining critical of the times it falls short.
As a long-running serialized narrative, X-Men has seen both the benefits and the problems of the comic book medium. With many new creative teams coming on over the years, its inevitable that some stories just won't be as good as others, and X-Men has had its share of awful stories. Honestly, I personally have trouble getting through the early "Silver Age" comics of the 1960s. Stan Lee is famed for co-creating many of the most famous Marvel characters, including the X-Men, but his writing style is so verbose and cliched that I find it hard to be gripped. The 1990s was also a period of ups-and-downs, with a number of new creative teams taking characters in unfortunate after Claremont's departure.
However, it has also been able to benefit from the length of its run, with wide character arcs, compelling mysteries, and expansive plot lines that can take years to come to fruition. The best example of this is with the character of Magneto. Introduced as the X-Men's premier supervillian in their first issue, for the first 20 years or so Magneto was a fairly bland character who only wished for power and the domination of humans on behalf of mutants. In the early 1980s, however, Claremont began a years-long dive into the backstory and motivations of Magneto, retconning him into a Holocaust survivor as the impetus for his villainous acts. As we learned more about his past, Magneto's violence against mankind changed from that of a brutal would-be dictator to someone who has experienced the horrors of oppression and would use all of his power to protect his community, at any cost. Over the years, Magneto grappled with whether his actions were actually best for mutants, and at times he even joined the X-Men to support their dream of peaceful coexistence with mankind. In the 200th issue of the series, Magneto turned himself in to the World Court to face judgement for his actions against humanity, an important step on his journey of redemption. Of course, new creative teams have different ideas of what they want to write, and so Magneto has gone back and forth from villain to hero, and redemptive journey is never complete. However, as hero or villain, the character remains one of the most complex and compelling in any media, in a way that only a story that has been continuing for over half a decade can provide.
That's the thing about the X-Men - their story can't really come to an end. Like most superheroes, the X-Men are defined by their adversaries. However, unlike Batman or the Avengers, the X-Men's main adversary isn't an actual supervillain. Instead, the thing they fight most is the hatred and fear of those who don't understand, and the persecution that comes from being hated and feared. Thus Magneto isn't only a powerful villain who they must at times deter from violent acts, but he is also a fellow combatant in the fight against their oppression. Their philosophical differences regarding the use of violence to protect their community are often born out through physical fights, because, yeah, its still a comic book. But in those instances it is the hatred that is the existential threat to mutants that is the true adversary, and Magneto is an obstacle in their attempts to address it. But that battle against hatred and oppression can never end. The X-Men will be needed so long as discrimination exists. And in our world, they will be poignant so long as we people hate and fear those they don't know or understand as well.
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