Digital Joe #12

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One of the best (and conversely the worst) things about the internet are message boards. They enable people from across the world to share information on any subject: movies, car repair, sexual advice, cooking. You name it, you can find people talking about it. By some freakish chance, I found a certain message board way back when I was a young pup in college. (Good god, has it really been five years since I graduated?) This board is dedicated to an entertainment franchise; however, there are also forums related to other things.

Recently, in one of those places, a thread popped up about the next comic book movie to hit the theater, "X-3: The Last Stand". Ideas were tossed about regarding the then-rumored running time of just over an hour and a half, the plot, how Brett Ratner would handle the franchise after Bryan Singer left to direct "Superman Returns" and all the other miniscule minutiae that fanboys love to argue about.

I want to be upfront: I´ve never really gotten into comic books. Sure, I had two huge boxes of the things for a long time, but they mostly consisted of various "Star Trek" titles. There were some "Spider-Man," "X-Men," "Star Wars," "G. I. Joe" and "Superman" spread in there too. Outside of the trade paperback of "The Death of Superman," I read each one once-maybe twice-and then put them back in the box. Quite simply, following one group of characters in five or six different books had-and still doesn´t-little interest to me. Why get The Uncanny X-Men and The Ultimate X-Men along with the Wolverine, Magneto, Angel, Ice Man and Cyclops one-shots? (Alright, some smart ass is going to tell me I got something wrong here somewhere. Go ahead, be my guest.) My point: I´m not a fanboy. We´ll get back to that message board thread in a minute, okay?

Anyway, my interest was never really piqued by any of these titles. I knew who the characters were and the general outline of their plots, but I never really cared for the specifics. All that being said, like every other dutiful male in the country, I went to go see "X-Men" in the theater. I absolutely loved it. I was taken with the characters nearly immediately, though I´m not a big a fan of Hugh Jackman/Wolverine as some people I know (I´m more of a James Marsden/Cyclops kinda guy). Besides being a solid action movie, I found something else in "X-Men" I didn´t expect to. I found people who weren´t a whole lot different from me.

For all you smart asses out there who are going to put me in my place for the titles of the various X books…no, I can´t fly and control the weather; no, I don´t have red laser beams coming out of my eyes; no, I don´t have an adimantium skeleton; no, I don´t have power over magnetism. What I mean is that the mutants, whether they be the X-Men, the Brotherhood or mutants who had not come out yet all had something to hide: their powers. Powers they were born with and powers that made them different from the rest of society. As far back as the first scene in the first movie, there are calls by the government to regulate mutants because people are afraid of them.

Does that sound even remotely like anything in current events? Laws are passed to give certain people certain rights-and to keep those same rights from another group. People are singled out, murdered, harassed and made to feel less than what they are because of the way they were born. More than perhaps any other movie characters I´ve ever seen, I felt like a mutant.

Fundamentally, don´t Professor Xavier and Magneto want the same thing? For all mutants to be free of harassment and fear? They both have different ways of achieving that one goal, but, once all the rhetoric is cut through, they share that dream.

In the first film, they are at odds with one another. In the second, they are forced to work on the same side. From what I can glean off the trailers for #3, the mutants will no longer sit idly by and let the rest of society marginalize them. Again, that is an idea I can identify with. I (as did a great many of us) sat idly by as some citizens were given second-class status because of the way they were born. Health care, marriage, adoption, property, spousal consent. The films have the Mutant Registration Act and supposedly a cure in the third film? We had 11 states pass marriage protection laws in 2004 (my own included) and still more on the way.

Remember that message board thread I started off with? Well, here´s where it comes into play. There was a posting over the weekend that "X-Men" was never really about civil rights for mutants. The argument was that Stan Lee never mentioned it in his autobiography and the storyline was something concocted to bring Bryan Singer to the series. Somehow, and I never did follow the logic, that made the civil rights plot for mutants less than canon. It was also argued that there are very few good to great comic book movies because none of them actually adhere closely to the source material.

My retort? Do any of us really want to see Hugh Jackman running around in a yellow spandex suit? That would be a resounding no. Would any of us believe a Superman with the awesome musculature he displayed while battling Doomsday in the streets of Metropolis? Nope. The one comic book movie that had most of the trappings of a comic book is thought of in many circles as a failure (that being "The Hulk").

On the surface, comic books are about the action, the colors, the dastardly villains and the hero performing amazing physical feats. Below that, though, they´re also about the time in which they were created (as any good entertainment is). There is a long history of comic characters taking on real world storylines for the betterment of the readers, mostly young people. If I recall my Wikipedia reading correctly, Green Lantern had a gay bashing storyline (which fans decried, go figure); Spider-Man took on drugs; the Power Pack with child abuse; and dozens of others.

So what if Stan Lee didn´t think of the civil rights storyline when creating the X-Men? Does it really matter? Everything changes with time. "X-Men" has tackled an allegory on AIDS in the 1990s; heck, the Mutant Registration Act, if examined closely enough, can be linked closely with Senator Joseph McCarthy or even Hitler branding the Jews before the Holocaust. Guys, there´s no less than four LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) characters in these X-books. Did Lee think of them back in 1963? Does that make them any less relevant to the history of the franchise?

The evolution of characters and a universe does not invalidate them, no matter how hard some fanboys want it to happen. Just like people-whatever kind of person they are-shouldn´t be invalidated because of who they are.

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