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BEYOND: Nightcrawler.
"Le Freak, c'est chic." By Andrew Wheeler.

It's not just about supermen and wonder women. Not everyone in comics is built like a perfect Greek statue, and even the ones who are still aren't normal. The playground of comics lies in the strange and the weird. Tales that astonish. Things that don't fit. In comics, the imagination runs wild, and the oddities are free to emerge from the shadows of the subconscious mind. This month in Beyond, we celebrate the odd. The outsider. The monster. The mutant. Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, for the greatest show on Earth: the freak show.

NIGHTCRAWLER - Nightcrawler's first appearance, in GIANT SIZED X-MEN #1, showed him being chased through a town by an angry mob carrying flaming torches and pick-axes. It's a classic set-up for the 'feared-because-he's-different' archetype. Nightcrawler not only has the eyes, teeth, ears, hands, feet and tail of a devil; he is also a dark, shadowy ebon colour, and can disappear and reappear at will, cloaked in the stench of brimstone. Of course people fear him. We would too. As an X-Man, Kurt Wagner faces the same discrimination as all his peers, but of all the X-Men that went before him, even Angel and Beast were never dealt such a poor hand. Not that the fans seem to mind. In spite - or, more likely, because - of his unusual appearance, Nightcrawler has picked up a whole army of loyal female fans. As the old line goes; "is that tail really prehensile, Mr. Nightcrawler, sir?"

THE HEAP - When Baron Eric von Emmelman was shot down in a dogfight over Poland, he crash landed into a swamp, where he became hideously mutated into a greenish-brown walking mound named The Heap. Originally created as a villain in Harry Stein and Mort Leav's 1940's SKY WOLF series, the character started out as a vicious, angry monster, but slowly developed into a poor, misunderstood outcast; a victim of society. The story is an interesting one, because it shows a villainous German air-ace slowly becoming heroic through deformity, rather than treading the well-worn path of deformity leading to evil and insanity.

SWAMP THING - If the Heap sounds familiar, then perhaps Swamp Thing is the reason. Created over 25 years later, Dr Alec Holland was also transformed into a lumbering green monster after a mishap in a swamp. Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's creation also shared with The Heap a sense of tortured humanity, as Dr Holland retained his sentient mind underneath his mask of deformity. First appearing in HOUSE OF SECRETS, the character was deemed eerie and haunting enough to hold his own series, first in the 70's, then again in the 80's. The series became one of the foundations of DC's Vertigo imprint in the 90's, thanks to writer Alan Moore. Though the character represents the phenomenon of freak-as-horror, the real monsters in the series actually came in the form of 'normal' men, like Dr Arcane.

THE THING - Ben Grimm, working-class Yancy Street stiff, agreed to fly that space-rocket as a favour to his old pal Reed. Little did he know it would turn him into the first freak of the Silver Age, and the most famous superhero-monster in comics. Ben has struggled for almost 40 years to come to terms with his monstrous orange brick appearance, and has come closest through the love of a blind sculptress, Alicia Masters. What Alicia convinced him to believe was what Ben's friends and fellow heroes had known for years; that it wasn't the appearance that mattered, but the heart of the man himself; and that Ben has the biggest, most noble heart of them all.

TWO FACE - In pulp fiction it is often the way that villainous characters can be identified by their deformities. In fact, the association of physical deviance with moral deviance is a distinctly medieval way of looking at the world, which has caused many disabilities groups to cry misrepresentation - and not unreasonably. Two Face is a perfect example of the type, as the unscarred half of his face represents his humane and reasoned persona, while the hideously scarred half represents his dangerous, psychotic self. Two Face is a typically politically incorrect pulp monster, but in the Batman rogue gallery, he could easily be overlooked, since all the villains - and most of the heroes - have far more interesting psychoses than his.

DOOM PATROL - A radioactive man, an elastic woman and a steel robot. The Doom Patrol was founded as a very different superteam to their contemporaries, the Justice League. Rita Farr was an actress imbued with shape-shifting powers by exposure to volcanic fumes. Cliff Steele lost his body in a car crash, and his brain was placed in a metal shell. Larry Trainor flew his plane through a radiation belt and gained the ability to project a radio-wave entity from his body. Three people horribly transformed by terrible accidents, they knew they could never be the beautiful people, making the front page of the papers, but they also knew they could still make a difference. The man who brought them together, Niles Calder, was a paraplegic, who boasted; "I, too, have a handicap! But I conquered it with my brain by mastering every field of knowledge! In these rooms I go on my own adventures... adventures with my mind!" The Doom Patrol is there to prove that being an outcast is not the same thing as being worthless.

ELEMENT GIRL - In Neil Gaiman's DREAM COUNTRY, we experience a day in the life of an old 1960s DC superhero named Element Girl. Given the amazing power to turn her body into any chemical substance, Rainie Blackwell spent years working for a secret intelligence agency, and as the sidekick to the hero Metamorpho. However, in spite of leading an amazing life, Element Girl just wants to be normal. In fact, what she really wants is to die, but she can't, because nothing could kill her. 'Facades' is a tremendously moving story about the despair some people feel from knowing they will always be too different, and the resolution, in which Element Girl finally finds beauty, should touch the freak in us all.

TONJA - The dark flaws inherent in the society represented by Marvel's Inhumans had never been adequately explored until the recent series by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee. The first chapter set the tone, as a group of teenagers came of age and were forced to enter the Terrigan Mists, where they would embrace their powers. The central character in the tale was Tonja, desperately afraid of what she would become. She need not have worried, since she emerged from the mists as the first flyer in over a generation. One of her friends, on the other hand, was not so lucky. Wrongly classified as an Alpha Primitive, he was sent to join the slave caste. Being different can enhance your status; or it can destroy it utterly.

ARSEFACE - In PREACHER: THE STORY OF YOU-KNOW-WHO, the tale is told of one typically morose teen who, upon learning of the suicide of his idol, Kurt Cobain, decides to emulate his hero by taking his own life. He fails. Instead of shooting his brains out, he tears his face apart. After an attempt at restoration, he ends up, in the words of one character, with a face like an arse. It's a tragicomic tale, but more than that; Arseface represents triumph over adversity. When he had plenty to live for, he tried to kill himself because he thought he was miserable. Given a real reason to be miserable, Arseface overcame ridicule, hatred, and his own burning urge for vengeance to emerge as arguably PREACHER's least maladjusted character. In PREACHER, everyone is a freak. Apart from the boy with a face like an arse.

THE X-MEN - Nightcrawler's story is just one of many. Marvel has always cornered the market in the most interesting freaks. Not only did they coin the concept of the ordinary man with the life less ordinary, they also gave us mutants, a major constituency in the Marvel Universe, and a potential resource for a thousand original takes on the human condition. A man who would be considered disabled because he has lost the use of his legs, but is also one of the most powerful minds on the planet. A woman whose body refuses to let her ever know intimacy, making her an outcast even in a crowd. A girl raised among sewer-dwelling rejects because the world considers her monstrous, who is made monstrous as a result. The X-Men - the mutants - are comicdom's best known, best loved freaks, and they've been fighting our worst prejudices for decades. Perhaps that makes them the truest superheroes around.

Andrew Wheeler is a staff writer at PopImage.

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