The queer world of the X-Men

Wed, 12 Jul 2000 18:17:00 +0000

It was all a big mistake, really. I had a flu sometime in the middle of 1979, and when my mother went to the store for more ginger ale and Jell-O, I asked her to pick up a particular comic book for me. I thought I was fairly specific in my instructions. But mothers, as all adolescent boys know, should not be trusted to make minute distinctions among comic books, and what I ended up with was the current X-Men Giant Size Annual No. 3 ("The Awesome Attack of Arkon"). It got me through another day on the couch, and soon after I bought another X-Men comic (issue No. 128, "The Day Reality Went Wild") out of curiosity. The characters and situations were complicated, the art was crisp -- even the lettering seemed lively and engaging. I didn't miss an issue for the next five years.

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.

Salon.com > Erik Dussere

The queer world of the X-Men