Welcome to the X Days of X-Men. Over the next few weeks, leading up to the release of “X-Men: Days of Future Past” we’re going to cover some of our favorite X comics, all of the movies, and maybe some cartoons and video games along the way.
But first, why? Why is this team of “mutants” so important to so many people? X-Men is simultaneously a soap opera, a swashbucklling, beat-em-up adventure, sci-fi techno-drama, incisive political commentary, and a comic for anyone who has ever felt different or marginalized.
Back 50 years ago (50 years?!? wha?!?) Stan Lee published the first X-Men comic book about a group of teenagers with super powers studying at Charles Xavier’s school for the gifted in Westchester, New York. While most of the rest of Marvel’s comic universe was taking place in New York City itself, even the setting they chose showed how the X-Men were both set apart but also privileged. Yes, they were displaced, but not all that far. And Westchester, known for its estates and wealthy residents, represented the huge gifts these “homo superior” were born into.
Soon this core team would change. Jean Grey would become The Phoenix, then The Dark Phoenix, then dead, then not dead, then dead again. Cyclops would stay the same dickish team leader, but would go from put-upon teen to mopey young adult to intergalactic savior to the renegade who is also sleeping with one of the team’s former greatest foes. Beast would get furry. Angel would lose his wings, then get shiny metal ones and become one of Apocalypse’s horsemen, then come back and have regular wings again.
New team members would be introduced, including a 1970’s reboot that replaced the all-white, all-American team with an international gang of misfits of all colors and races, even blue demons. In X-Men 100, the old and new team even faced off against one another, (though not really– the old X-Men were actually replaced by robots, which Wolverine figured out when he sliced open “Jean Grey” because he knew she didn’t smell like Jean. . . creepy) and just a few issues later Phoenix would be born.
This new team of X-Men continued to shift and morph, bringing in Cyclops’s brother Havok, a teenager named Kitty who can walk through walls, while the old X-Men went off into their own book “X-Factor.”
But despite lineup changes, the themes of alienation stuck around. Suddenly, we were discussing overt racial prejudice and seeing the civil rights debate taking place in the pages of a comic book. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X had their analogues in Charles Xavier and Magneto, respectively. Could we live in peace through working for acceptance, or did it require being militant and breaking down tools of oppression?
And then, something brilliant happened. Writer Chris Claremont wrote one of the most celebrated storylines in the history of the book: “Days of Future Past.”
A time-travelling Kitty Pryde goes to the future and sees it decimated by sentinels, most of the X-Men dead or in hiding. This alternate future would be the thing the X-Men would continue to fight against and be haunted by for years in the comics.
As a kid, this was always the comic I wanted to own. As the child of divorced parents who decided to live on different coasts of the US, I would hop on a plane with my brother and sister to go visit our mom for a month or two during the summer. And before heading off on this adventure, my mom would always buy me a stash of comic books. X-Men was my favorite, and one of my brother’s too. Usually (since Washington DC to San Diego flights were pretty long) I’d end up with almost the entirety of the previous year’s books to keep me satiated. Every summer for three years straight I’d tell her I wanted this specific back issue comic with these covers:
What. the hell? was happening here?
Before the days of digital comics and trade paperbacks, all I had access to was a grocery store spinner rack and a somewhat-rank-smelling comic shop that wouldn’t part with these comics for cheap– and they certainly weren’t for an 8 year old to read! They must be kept in their mylar bags in mint condition!!!
So “Days of Future Past” always represented a sort of Holy Grail for me while, instead, I slogged through the Mutant Massacre, X-Men vs Avengers and X-Men vs Fantastic Four, Fall of the Mutants, and that time when the X-Men lived in Australia?
Then something else amazing happened. The X-Men doubled down on their social commentary with the stories about The Legacy Virus, a plague which initially only affected mutants and then infected the rest of humanity. (No, nothing at all like AIDS and the gay population) X-Men firmly understood that the next battle for civil rights was not about race, but about sexuality.
As a young teen now living in incredibly cloistered Provo, Utah, I didn’t officially know anyone who was gay (I did, although I didn’t know it at the time). X-Men saved me, providing a strong moral compass that fought back against a lot of homophobia that was endemic from the local, closed-minded culture.
Jesus taught me most of my moral values, but Charles Xavier taught me tolerance, and even more, acceptance.
And then I fell away from comics for a while, as a lot of teenagers do. My local grocery store got rid of their spinner rack and I was largely cut off, but also became a little less interested. I did, however, have the X-Men cartoon on Fox that I could enjoy as it rehashed most of my favorite stories from the comics.
Oh, and there was this, from one of the first episodes:
It’s so lame, it came back around the scale to completely awesome.
And then Bryan Singer made history in 2000. He made a movie based on a comic book that didn’t completely suck and was a big hit at the box office. (Yes, Blade came out earlier, but it wasn’t a big hit, and didn’t really resemble his comic book counterpart anyway) This unleashed the entire cinematic universe that we are blessed with today.
It also means a lot to me personally, as I think I first started really liking my wife when we were just friends/neighbors and I came over one day to find her watching X-Men on VHS. I asked her if she was actually watching X-Men and she replied “Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answer?” doing a hilarious Patrick Stewart impression.
We’ll get into reviewing the actual films soon, but it’s been great to see X-Men break new ground over the last decade.
Years before anyone dreamed that Joss Whedon would make an Avengers movie, he was given the writing duties for Astonishing X-Men, which remains one of my favorite runs on any X-comic ever. Why? Well, he made Kitty Pryde badass. And he brought back Colossus, one of my favorite X-Men ever. And John Cassaday’s art is amazing. And also insane stuff like this:
Tee hee indeed. And then this. . .this is totally bananas:
While probably a bit overhyped, I think the Northstar wedding was a nice statement and help broach an important topic we’re currently debating in America. (Though, to be fair, I think the whole issue of being gay as superheroes has been dealt with better in Young Avengers, but we certainly wouldn’t have that if not for the groundbreaking work of X-Men a decade earlier).
Regardless, X-Men continues to break new ground. They completely re-imagined their world with the House of M storyline. Avengers vs X-Men was one of the better “event” crossover comics in recent memory.
So what does the future hold? We’ll see, but it’s going to be a great ride, especially as audiences get X-posed to Days of Future Past. Keep watching us here at Big Shiny Robot as we bring you regular updates and reviews on various aspects of the X-universe over the next several weeks.