X-Men: First Class and Me
Oh, Marvel Comics.
You were my first true love. Unlike Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I invariably outgrew and let go of, Marvel Comics stuck with me. Ever since I was five, and got my hands on an X-Men annual where Sabretooth went on a murderous rampage and Maverick had to find Wolverine to take him on, talk him down, and bring him out of the cold, I was hooked on The House of Ideas. X-Men, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider Man: these were the stories I was reading, the Saturday morning cartoons I was watching. These were the writers I was learning from, the people I wanted to be like. From 1991 through 2005, comic book store clerks from Texas to Florida knew to sit up when I walked in and point me to the latest Dead Pool, Excalibur, Uncanny X-Men and Generation X. Some of them even knew me by name.
I was less than five-feet-tall, and I was a girl on a mission. No bit of trivia was too esoteric, no character too unknown. I was writing literary critiques of issues to the letters to the editors pages, getting into arguments with fully grown adult nerds about character arcs and story progression. I could even explain the entire Summers family tree to you, alternate timelines and children included. I lived and breathed Marvel Comics.
Then something a little silly happened, and comics, well. Comics went broke. Publishers were bleeding money left and right, printing far more than comics than there were readers. Putting out variant cover after variant cover hoping it would increase sales, and inadvertently flooded the market in the process, making collecting useless. After a while, comics started becoming less about telling amazing stories and more about just trying to break even. But, hey, there were always action figures (which I still have, by the way) then there were movies. Movies that made a lot of money and brought a lot of fans, new and old, the initiated and uninitiated alike, into the fold. And some of them were actually pretty good, and got me interested in comics again.
Then a lot of my favorite titles got cancelled. A lot of my favorite characters were shelved, deemed "unmarketable." The ones that survived were rewritten, reshaped, repackaged, becoming something I didn't recognize or identify with anymore. That, above all else, broke my heart. You can take my titles from me, but you take my characters? What's a girl to do?
So like most things from my childhood, slowly but surely, little by little, I let go of Marvel Comics. I stopped following, stopped reading the news, stopped coming around the comic book stories. Sure, I still saw the movies when they came out. Like a bad boyfriend, I stopped what I was doing every time Marvel Comics came back around, made the papers, got a little attention. I participated in fandom a bit, maybe got a little excited from time to time, but it was never the same. Like all bad boyfriends, before long Marvel was up to the same old crap, and I would get tired and leave again. Sitting in a Marvel Comics writers panel at San Diego Comic Con in 2009, listening to a writer give a snotty response to a fan's question and telling the fan that comic books are about making money and nothing else, kind of clinched it for me. I went back to reading indie comics from small publishers, where writers still seemed to give a damn, and forgot all about Marvel for a while.
Then I heard about X-Men: First Class. After Wolverine: Origins had turned into a such train wreck, I wasn't impressed with the idea behind it. I told myself Don't see it. You'll only be disappointed. You always end up so disappointed. But the cast looked so good I decided to throw caution to the wind and see it anyway, at a Sunday matinee in a half-full theater. (So I think The Fassbender is a treasure. Wanna fight about it?) I expected to hate it. To my surprise, I didn't.
Okay, so, it was nowhere near perfect. Like the previous X-Men films before it, it basically went through the canon I remembered from the late 80s through the 90s with a black marker, replacing names and dates with new material and interpretations. And, yeah, my beloved Moira MacTaggert was replaced with a generic American CIA agent and Mystique was watered down to a doe-eyed puppy and Emma Frost — well, that wasn't Emma Frost, I'll tell you that. I could make a few of arguments about the treatment of PoC and sloppy writing and silly plot devices. But for a story about one of my favorite friendship dynamics throughout the history of Marvel, that of Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier — one of the few things I truly do cherish about the previous film adaptations — well, it was kind of amazing.
Since I was a kid, their relationship has always been something I enjoyed. The deep love and understanding they forged in their youth. The philosophical divide over human-mutant relations. The tragedy of the inevitable chasm that grew between them, as Magneto radicalized mutants and Charles still clung to the idea of peaceful co-existence. And that even for all of these things, these impossible obstacles, stripped of their differences, they remained friends. They would fight to stop each other at any turn, but at the end of the day, they still cared for and respected each other. A lot of things have happened between them in the many decades and incarnations of X-Men canon, but when I was reading them, Charles was still there to catch Erik when he fell. And Erik, for all his flaws and his anger, he still loved Charles for that.
So to see that, the spirit of that relationship I cared so deeply about, so perfectly summed up and wonderfully portrayed on screen (did I mention I love The Fassbender?), well. It kind of resonated with me.
So maybe it wasn't perfect. So maybe it hasn't made up for a losing a lot of what I loved about Marvel Comics. But strip away the silliness and the costumes and the super powers, it was a story about two characters. It was a story about heart, and two men who become friends only to lose one another to the tides of politics and history, and for that, I'm a little less mad at Marvel Comics. For now, at least, they have my attention again.
(But seriously, though. That wasn't Moira MacTaggert. That was a Moira-Bot in the shape of Rose Byrne. You can never convince me of anything else.)
