![]() The primary antagonist to this plan was Magneto-an exceptionally powerful master of ill-defined “magnetism”-whose Brotherhood of Evil Mutants proposed a reversal, in which the disempowered use their superpowers to subjugate their oppressors, a bigoted humanity. Their mandate was to fight so-called evil mutants, such as the loutish Blob or the inconsistent Mimic, in order to convince the larger society to accept them. White kids with strained relationships with their parents, the X-Men were prep schoolers who, by virtue of the fact that they were born different (even from each other), shared an alienation from the hostile society into which they were attempting to integrate. Cyclops had to wear a visor or else his eyes would shoot red blasts at whatever he looked at Beast had big feet and hands Iceman could turn into a snowman Marvel Girl could set the table with her mind. Instead of a convoluted mélange of conflicting origin stories, they all shared one: they were mutants, the “next step in human evolution,” born with a mysterious X-gene that manifested outré abilities with uneven use values. The X-Men, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, first appeared in 1963, the students of wheelchair-bound telepath Professor X. If DC Comics’ Justice League provides mythic bodies as surrogates for the nation (in the iconic figures of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, among others), and Marvel Comics’ the Avengers brand bodies with powers siphoned from capitalism (think of Iron Man’s seemingly limitless access to machine technology), then the X-Men can be seen as bare lives whose marked bodies band together to survive the onslaught of those forces. The medium can show us the others to identify with-“us” being the deeply “othered” nerds who read such things. In any case, otherness, it seems, is a subject particularly suited to comics. ![]() Of course, Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, the “special” academy where young mutants are recruited and trained to master their extraordinary powers, could also be seen as a paramilitary revolutionary cell training a generation of child soldiers for a coming race war. Defined by their mantra, “To protect a world that hates and fears them,” the team redefined the superhero comic in the early 1960s, expanding its repertoire of genres, from soap opera to space opera to body horror to speculative fiction, in a diverse pastiche of unstable forms used, in this case, to explore “otherness.” It is fitting that a comic book story that takes prejudice as its subject would find its setting in a school: academia being an agonistic way out of class-, gender-, and race-based discrimination for many “gifted” people. Like the oppressed they represent, the X-Men’s death is foretold.īut like oppression, the X-Men are still with us. Across the years, nearly all of the main characters who have made up the X-Men have been killed at least once. And if we forget the future and look at the ways the X-Men die in the continuous timeline we’ve been following all this time, they have been blown up in a high-rise while the world watches on TV they have been blown up in a school bus they have been crucified on their own front lawn they have succumbed to a virus that only they can catch and they have died of a poison only toxic to them. ![]() The characters are instead warring factions whose power creates a conundrum: what to do with the humans not born superior, like them? The ensuing civil war leaves few mutants, or humans, standing. In another future, the “Age of Apocalypse,” the X-Men simply do not exist. In one future, they are hunted by the federal government, wanted posters pasted on dystopian brick walls, their faces marked “Slain” or “Apprehended.” Those captured are neutralized with power-dampening collars and sent to concentration camps, where they unsuccessfully attempt a rebellion that leads to their destruction by the Sentinels, giant robots with weapons in their palms. How many times have the X-Men died? The outcast team of mutant superheroes, whose stories have been ongoing in Marvel Comics for over fifty-five years, has through time travel created a multiverse of alternate futures in which their deaths are predetermined.
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