So I saw the Wolverine movie last night with a great friend of mine. The movie was alright, as far as movies go. Actually the first hour was pretty good. It was the last 45 minutes or so that it lost me. More of that in the next post, but first, a little flash back, comic book style (but with a lot less super powers).
In the early 80s, I entered Junior High School, or Middle School as it was more appropriately called in my case. Middle School meant serious maturity. It was time to put away those childish Elementary School things and grow up. No more Spiderman, Captain Marvel, and Isis. My superheroes (the thought of no superheroes wasn’t even on the radar) had to reflect a newfound maturity. Of course the only place to adequately feed after-school imagination was that hotbed of creativity: the Save-A-Step convenient store on the corner of Moser and Shelbyville Road in Louisville, Kentucky.
As frequently as our meager resources would allow, my friends and I would take a pilgrimage to the ‘Save-A-Step’ (it’s long gone now). I recall the store sign was a huge orange footprint with Save-A-Step written inside. It was your typical convenience store with lots of candy, magazine racks, and the all-important comic book rack. On a fateful day in Fall1985, I picked my first copy of The Uncanny X-Men.
It was a revelation. To my 12-year-old-mind, this was a very intellectual comic book. It almost didn’t deserve to be called a “comic” but unfortunately that was its pedigree. And it would be a few years until the term “graphic novel” was adopted to describe an extra long, extra special comic book (I think it was adopted because adult collectors wanted to be taken seriously - and don't worry guys, we take you seriously. No really). The word “uncanny” wasn’t a usual entry in my personal glossary so I read in my mom’s dictionary: “having or seeming to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis; beyond the ordinary or normal; extraordinary.” After I looked up “supernatural,” and “inexplicable,” I began to read the book itself. That dictionary would be a companion to X-Men until I had caught up to the vocabulary about 10 issues later.
Number 200 was the first issue I bought. It was a double-size special issue, and Magneto (I wasn’t sure who he was, but he seemed like a good guy) was on trial for crimes against humanity (again, I had to catch up to what these were, having not had much exposure to World War II history). Apparently he’d reformed his evil ways, gave up his helmet, and turned himself in to a tribunal. And ironically, he was on trial for the very thing the Nazis that he hated were.
At first, I wasn’t a fan of Wolverine or of any superhero in particular. I was just trying to figure out the storyline. Soon all the characters were increasingly interesting, especially their backgrounds. Also, all of the main characters had totally diverse backgrounds which added immense color to the story lines. Rogue was a southern gal, Wolverine was Canadian with a very hazy past, Colossus was raised on a Soviet farm commune, Storm was Kenyan (I think) and was personally detached, Nightcrawler was German. Each character had their accents written into the text, and frequently reverted to their native languages, and used native terms of endearment for each other. Also, as frequently, stories took place in their homelands, which exposed the reader (however best a comic book could) to these regions of the world.
One character that deserved everyone's admiration was Cyclops/Scott Summers. He was the leader of the X-Men, due to his talent at distilling murky situations down to right and wrong, which allowed the team to act unanimously. He was never an ambiguous moral figure as was Wolverine, but more often than not, his actions led the team to doing the right thing. That is rare in real life.
The comic constantly explored civil rights between mutants and humans. I’ll never forget a short episode where a couple of X-Men saved a man from a brutal beating from two thugs. It turns out the man they saved was spray painting “Mutants Die!” on an alley wall when he got jumped. He was horrified at his rescuers and fled.
Wolverine easily became my favorite, but he certainly wasn’t an object of attraction (as portrayed in the movies). In the comic, he was much shorter than a normal man, and was quite hairy. He had a foul mouth, smoked cigars (since they didn’t affect his health at all), flirted with every female member of the team, and had other unsavory habits. But he was the one with the most personality, not to mention he had claws that came out of his hands. Just think what a 12-year-old could accomplish with those. Although, in the X-Men of the ‘80s, Wolverine rarely used his claws against either mutants or humans. You almost never saw blood, but there were always other uses for them, plus plenty of mechanical bad guys needed slicing and dicing.
By my sophomore year in High School, comic books were deep-sixed, and it was time to concentrate on the next big thing: girls and music. I think there was a distinct down-turn in my grades from that point until my senior year as a result.
While I think my wife is smarter than me in probably every aspect of life, she sometimes asks me where I learned certain vocabulary, or even geography that she missed. I have to laugh, but she missed it because she wasn’t reading X-Men.
In the early 80s, I entered Junior High School, or Middle School as it was more appropriately called in my case. Middle School meant serious maturity. It was time to put away those childish Elementary School things and grow up. No more Spiderman, Captain Marvel, and Isis. My superheroes (the thought of no superheroes wasn’t even on the radar) had to reflect a newfound maturity. Of course the only place to adequately feed after-school imagination was that hotbed of creativity: the Save-A-Step convenient store on the corner of Moser and Shelbyville Road in Louisville, Kentucky.
As frequently as our meager resources would allow, my friends and I would take a pilgrimage to the ‘Save-A-Step’ (it’s long gone now). I recall the store sign was a huge orange footprint with Save-A-Step written inside. It was your typical convenience store with lots of candy, magazine racks, and the all-important comic book rack. On a fateful day in Fall1985, I picked my first copy of The Uncanny X-Men.
It was a revelation. To my 12-year-old-mind, this was a very intellectual comic book. It almost didn’t deserve to be called a “comic” but unfortunately that was its pedigree. And it would be a few years until the term “graphic novel” was adopted to describe an extra long, extra special comic book (I think it was adopted because adult collectors wanted to be taken seriously - and don't worry guys, we take you seriously. No really). The word “uncanny” wasn’t a usual entry in my personal glossary so I read in my mom’s dictionary: “having or seeming to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis; beyond the ordinary or normal; extraordinary.” After I looked up “supernatural,” and “inexplicable,” I began to read the book itself. That dictionary would be a companion to X-Men until I had caught up to the vocabulary about 10 issues later.
Number 200 was the first issue I bought. It was a double-size special issue, and Magneto (I wasn’t sure who he was, but he seemed like a good guy) was on trial for crimes against humanity (again, I had to catch up to what these were, having not had much exposure to World War II history). Apparently he’d reformed his evil ways, gave up his helmet, and turned himself in to a tribunal. And ironically, he was on trial for the very thing the Nazis that he hated were. At first, I wasn’t a fan of Wolverine or of any superhero in particular. I was just trying to figure out the storyline. Soon all the characters were increasingly interesting, especially their backgrounds. Also, all of the main characters had totally diverse backgrounds which added immense color to the story lines. Rogue was a southern gal, Wolverine was Canadian with a very hazy past, Colossus was raised on a Soviet farm commune, Storm was Kenyan (I think) and was personally detached, Nightcrawler was German. Each character had their accents written into the text, and frequently reverted to their native languages, and used native terms of endearment for each other. Also, as frequently, stories took place in their homelands, which exposed the reader (however best a comic book could) to these regions of the world.
One character that deserved everyone's admiration was Cyclops/Scott Summers. He was the leader of the X-Men, due to his talent at distilling murky situations down to right and wrong, which allowed the team to act unanimously. He was never an ambiguous moral figure as was Wolverine, but more often than not, his actions led the team to doing the right thing. That is rare in real life.
The comic constantly explored civil rights between mutants and humans. I’ll never forget a short episode where a couple of X-Men saved a man from a brutal beating from two thugs. It turns out the man they saved was spray painting “Mutants Die!” on an alley wall when he got jumped. He was horrified at his rescuers and fled.
Wolverine easily became my favorite, but he certainly wasn’t an object of attraction (as portrayed in the movies). In the comic, he was much shorter than a normal man, and was quite hairy. He had a foul mouth, smoked cigars (since they didn’t affect his health at all), flirted with every female member of the team, and had other unsavory habits. But he was the one with the most personality, not to mention he had claws that came out of his hands. Just think what a 12-year-old could accomplish with those. Although, in the X-Men of the ‘80s, Wolverine rarely used his claws against either mutants or humans. You almost never saw blood, but there were always other uses for them, plus plenty of mechanical bad guys needed slicing and dicing. By my sophomore year in High School, comic books were deep-sixed, and it was time to concentrate on the next big thing: girls and music. I think there was a distinct down-turn in my grades from that point until my senior year as a result.
While I think my wife is smarter than me in probably every aspect of life, she sometimes asks me where I learned certain vocabulary, or even geography that she missed. I have to laugh, but she missed it because she wasn’t reading X-Men.
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