Comic books get a lot of people through adolescence, and of course, they're mostly people like me: boys, mostly geeks, weirdos, smart kids -- in a word, mutants. And that's the whole point of the X-Men, that they're mutants, genetically different from those around them. By the time I was 12 or so, I had figured out that reading this stuff wasn't exactly going to teach me how to rule the school; it was a marginal, suspect activity, like Dungeons & Dragons, or arson. And although over the years since then I have been mildly interested as the characters popped up in video games and Saturday morning cartoons, I didn't think about them twice.

But when I heard there was going to be a movie, I suddenly began to feel proprietary, like the guys who claim to have loved R.E.M. back when Michael Stipe still had his day job. The symbols of my junior-high loserdom had gone major label on me, and so as the advertisements and press articles began to make X-Men a household word, I dug out my old, neglected boxes of comics to try to figure out what had made them so important to me in the first place.

Even in the angst-friendly world of the comic book, the X-Men have always stood out. They were invented in the '60s by the legendary Stan Lee, who revolutionized the superhero genre with his creations: Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and more. In a rare break from the Cold War origins Lee tended to give his heroes, the X-Men were not people who had been bombarded by fallout or bitten by a radioactive trout; they were "mutants," people born with psychic talents or the ability to shoot red power beams from their eyes, not Homo sapiens but homo superior.

Embodying the adolescent feelings of difference and alienation, the original X-Men were also all teenagers: "The Strangest Teens of All!" they were billed. They had been taken in by older mutant Charles Xavier, known as Professor X, at the good professor's "school for gifted youngsters," a prep-school-like haven where they could practice their abilities and fight evil. They even had identical school-uniform-style costumes.

In 1975, at a time of languishing comic sales, the original team was kidnapped and replaced by a new group of students at Xavier's academy, a somewhat older and more individualized group, which incorporated some of the original members. It was this team of X-Men who, under the creative guidance of writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne, took the comic book to a new level of sophistication. In its new incarnation, "The X-Men" continued to speak to a teen audience, but its appeal was subtly different; rather than allowing disempowered or alienated kids to identify with superempowered alter egos, the new comic drew attention to the metaphoric possibilities of being a mutant.

Like punk's appropriation of West Indian reggae, the white B-boys with their hip-hop and baggy jeans and the young girls curled up with copies of "The Diary of Anne Frank," the new X-Men made sense of mainstream teen alienation by appropriating the experiences of minority groups coping with much more powerful and genuine forms of discrimination. Whether deliberately or not, the comics created parallels with African-American, Jewish and, most surprisingly, queer culture.

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