Generation X-Men

Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel Comics superheroes such as Spider-Man, The Hulk and The Fantastic Four, claims he and artist Jack Kirby wanted the X-Men to be different. He says that the X-Men were intended to be allegorical, a super-heroic symbol for the civil-rights movement in the ’60s. They were mutants, born with genetic abnormalities, powers that set them apart, and yet they tried to prove their worth to a world that hated and feared them.

Well, that’s all well and good to say now, but somehow, it’s doubtful Lee really had such grand designs for his characters. Comic books were hardly so ambitious in those days. Lee knew his audience, and they weren’t politically aware. They were misfits, teenagers, mostly boys, the same crowd who would later glom onto heavy metal or computers or bands like Talking Heads or Weezer. The Uncanny X-Men were written for geeks, and fortunately, the geeks have inherited the earth.

The original team of five teenage mutants was a bit weird. They were led by their bald, wheelchair-bound telepathic mentor professor Charles Xavier; but in the action was Cyclops, the dull, self-conscious guy with the deadly eyebeams; Marvel Girl, telekinetic and telepathic; The Beast, both an academic and a gymnast; Iceman, a walking snowman; and Angel, the winged golden boy. From their launch in 1963, they were hipper and odder than any other superhero team in the Marvel stable. The only other team to compare was The Avengers, and they were all older, and more corporate—some Avengers, like Iron Man and Captain America, had their own individual comic titles. The X-Men were teenagers and appealed to teenagers.

By the mid-’70s, sales had dipped and the team needed an overhaul. Marvel was well established by then, and Lee was no longer writing the X-Book. Enter writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum, who with issue 94 introduced a slightly older bunch of X-Men, while retaining Cyclops, Marvel Girl and Professor Xavier. The more sophisticated and ambitious X-Men legend that we know today, the one that inspired the films, started here.

Though they remained misfits, this was also an international team: Storm, an African woman with the power to control the weather; Nightcrawler, a German, blue-skinned circus performer with a prehensile tail; Thunderbird, the Native American warrior with strength, speed and a bad attitude; Banshee, the Irish screamer; Colossus, a Russian whose skin turns to steel; and finally, the character who would subsequently become the most popular, the Canadian brawler Wolverine.

Wolvie originally appeared as a C-level villain for The Hulk. His mutant powers were his animal senses, combined with metal ìclawsî that retracted through the backs of his hands. Later it was revealed he also had amazing regenerative powers, experience in the Canadian secret service, as well as Japanese samurai connections. That’s both the good and bad thing about serialized stories, especially at Marvel comics: a rotating staff of writers and editors kept changing the story, sometimes with really bad ideas. Now there are almost as many character versions of Wolverine as there are of Batman, including, recently, a bland origin story that takes away much of the mystique around the character.

It wasn’t Wein or Cockrum who made Wolverine a star, though. Rumour has it that Cockrum didn’t like the character. Besides, Wolverine didn’t feature prominently in the book for a while, though almost right away they killed off Thunderbird because his powers were too much like Wolverine’s. It gave the title the air of dramatic self-sacrifice and jeopardy: characters could actually die in X-Men. The next one to go was Marvel Girl, now just Jean Grey (Marvel Girl was so ’60s), who piloted an irradiated space shuttle into Jamaica Bay in New York City in order to save the rest of the X-Men, but was immediately reincarnated as Phoenix, the same character with greater, almost cosmic powers.

Wolverine is the greatest comic character ever written for a marginalized, self-conscious audience. He’s short, but tough. He’s grumpy: He doesn’t take any crap from anyone. His fondness for Jean Grey and his dislike of authority (read: Cyclops) made him the one everyone likes. Much credit must go to John Byrne. Byrne was the artist on the X-Men from issue 108, joining writer Chris Claremont, who would take the X-Men through the ’80s and what is considered the greatest period for the mutant superheroes. Byrne, though British born, is Canadian, and maybe that’s why he liked Wolverine. His art was embraced by the readership, and his clean lines helped define the ìMarvel style.î

Byrne penciled the Claremont-written Dark Phoenix saga, a story that took place over almost a year in 1980. It’s an epic of self-sacrifice that comic book nuts still reference today, the way Star Wars fans talk about the death of Obi Wan Kenobi. Phoenix loses control of her powers, leaving earth as an elemental force. She destroys an alien civilization and returns to earth, though with the help of the X-Men, reverts back to Jean Grey. A cosmic tribunal whisks them all away and judges that Grey must be punished for her crimes against the galaxy. The X-Men battle to save her, but she commits suicide, realizing that she would never be able to control the dark side of the Phoenix. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and all that. It made for great, heartbreaking reading.

Though many comic book movies have been stinkers, the X-Men films have impressed comic fans and done well at the box office. Though certain changes were necessary—black leather instead of spandex, fewer masks—the anxious, earnest quality of the comic prevails, as does the freaky outsider aesthetic. Director Bryan Singer managed to do it twice, in both X-Men (2000) and X2: United (2003). With solid scripts and the Shakespearean heft of Patrick Stewart as Xavier and Ian McKellen as the X-Men’s greatest villain Magneto, Singer elevated the material. The irony is that the allegorical nature of the mutants representing any suppressed group, ethnic or otherwise, is much more feasible on the big screen, where the X-Men are depicted with as much realism as Singer could muster, given the material. The comics certainly have become more sophisticated since the days of Lee and Kirby, but the movies are real achievements in the genre.

Singer, with screenwriter David Hayter, took elements from all across the X-Men continuity for his films. Australian Hugh Jackman is a bit tall as Wolverine, but he is otherwise very much the comic book character lifted off the page. A girl named Rogue also plays a major part in the story, a character who wasn’t introduced until the mid-’80s, also a former villain. In X-Men, the mutants deal with the mutant registration act, a superheroes vs. the government plot development from the 1990s, one that pits Magneto’s by-any-means-necessary combative stance against Xavier’s more integrationist philosophy. The second film brought in more of the junior X-characters, and includes an awkward scene where the young Iceman ìcomes outî to his parents as a mutant. A comic book movie that promotes tolerance as its central theme is something to crow about. By the end of the second film, Jean Grey has sacrificed herself in a northern Albertan lake order to save the X-Men, and a bird of fire is suggested in its placid waves.

This week, Hollywood director Brent Ratner takes over from Singer to give us X-Men: The Last Stand. The plot revolves around the arrival of a so-called cure for mutation, a plot point taken from the past year of one of the now many X-Men titles, Astonishing X-Men, the comic written by Buffy The Vampire Slayer scribe Joss Whedon. The Beast is finally introduced, but in his blue, furry self, a mid-’70s change in the character, as is Kitty Pryde, the Jewish girl who walks through walls, originally introduced by Claremont and Byrne. She has cameos in the first two films, but in the third she is played by Haligonian Ellen Page and she gets lines. It also looks as if Jean Grey will return as Phoenix, and will turn into Dark Phoenix.

Of course, the cosmic elements of the X-Men comics have been dialed down in the films, but the problem seems to be that there is still a great deal of story to be told and only one film to do it in. Also, Ratner, famed for the action-filled Rush Hour movies as well as the barely serviceable Hannibal Lector prequel Red Dragon, hasn’t the taste nor the technique of Bryan Singer. Wags have suggested this will be the final X-Men film, perhaps due to middling buzz and rumours of a Wolverine spin-off.

Whatever happens, even if the third X-Men movie is an artistic and commercial failure, the adaptations to date from comic to screen has been faithful to the spirit of the comics, perhaps even improving upon them and revealing larger social themes that often lay dormant on the page. The X-Men were always Stan Lee’s babies, but it was nurture, not nature, that made them great.

This article appears in May 25-31, 2006.