by Thom Yee

X-Men: First Class images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Remember childhood? Baseball? Dinosaurs? Weird Al? Those things you were supposed to like seemingly just because you were a kid, but you really never liked them at all? For me, a comic-book-nerd kid, X-Men was that thing (though I didn’t like those other things either). To me, the appeal of the X-Men never reached beyond the obvious attraction of a bunch of cool-looking characters with different powers. While that was cool, I always liked the Avengers and Justice League-related characters a lot more, and I think that’s down to the fact that I could buy in to the basic idea of standing up for truth and justice more than I could X-Men’s persecutional allegory. I can see it’s there, it’s a conceptual characteristic very obviously worn proudly and prominently by the series, and it’s apparently a big part of why the franchise has reached so many people, but I just never felt it. I just never understood the central conceit that people in the Marvel universe would draw a line between mutants born with powers and people who got them from serums or accidents or suits of armour. They both have powers; they’re both saving lives and fighting bad guys; why would it matter how they got their powers?

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