Growing Up, Mutant Style
By Loki Carbis.

When the X-Men were first introduced, way back in 1962, the fact that they were teenagers was at least as important as battling anti-mutant prejudice. They were a bunch of kids, all being trained by Professor X to use their powers carefully and wisely. And unlike most other heroes, their powers made them outcasts.

Among the original X-Men, Cyclops' deadly eye beams were not controllable by him, and posed a huge threat to those around him, while the Angel's wings, although concealable, were always a part of him, unlike most other flying heroes. The two major themes of the title were growing up and battling persecution. Mutations almost always took effect at puberty, and gaining mutant powers was thus explicitly identified with being a teenager. And usually, with having a curse.

All of this contributed to their outcast status, and the feelings of rejection they constantly struggled with - the X-Men felt driven by their senses of duty to fight for a world that feared and hated them. They were like children desperately struggling for adult approval, and even when they did the right thing - and this is a team that managed to save the world on national television, let's not forget (in the "Fall of the Mutants" crossover, back in X-MEN 227) - they were rarely praised for it. The theme of being an outcast from society would never go away - when Nightcrawler was first introduced, in GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 (1974), he was being chased by torch and pitchfork bearing mob worthy of any Frankenstein movie. Later on, the introduction of Kitty Pryde, a young Jewish mutant, and the revelation that their arch-enemy Magneto had spent time in concentration camps as a boy, made the theme of persecution even stronger.

But growing up wasn't nearly as interesting as battling persecution, somehow. Maybe it was just that the persecutors had big scary robots (the Sentinals) and that most of the growing up stuff was more or less internal. In all fairness to Stan Lee, there's a lot less room for that sort of inner drama in a team title. (That Lee could write such material is indisputable - it's never been done better than in the SPIDER-MAN stories he was writing around this time.) Wherever possible, Marvel tried to combine the two - but battling persecution would always take priority over growing up (a point which was underscored by the death of Thunderbird in issue 95, which was the result of a childish rivalry between him and Wolverine). On the other hand, what teenager doesn't feel unjustly persecuted by the adults around them?

The title's key audience has always been adolescents. And the thing that the X-Men family of titles is best known for, other than convoluted continuity, is precisely that sort of internal melodrama that makes adolescent angst such a cliche (in comics, and in real life). During the many years that Chris Claremont wrote the X-Men, the angst level was kept at a fever pitch that only a teenager could really empathise with. Claremont himself believed that this was due to the identification of readers with the characters - "people their own age." But most of this angst was generated in other ways than from the stresses of growing up. In fact, most of it originated from the prejudices of non-powered folks who feared the "mutant menace." (Which was basically a return of McCarthy-style witch-hunting, only this time the "reds under America's beds" were called "muties" and had superpowers that "normal folks" didn't have.)

It's not like there was any lack of juice in the growing up thing - the success of THE TEEN TITANS at DC proved that. (And the concept still has legs, even today - DC's recent SINS OF YOUTH event grew entirely out of it, and GEN 13 remains a popular enough comic. And the appeal of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER across comics as well as other media is also to a large part the result of this theme.) Eventually, Marvel cottoned on to this, and in 1982 THE NEW MUTANTS was created, the first ongoing spin-off of THE X-MEN. Over the following years, it would be joined by nearly a dozen other spin-off titles, most of which would lean more towards the X-Men than the New Mutants as a model. Only X-FORCE (which was only a re-named NEW MUTANTS - the renaming symbolising that these characters had "grown up" now) and the tellingly-named GENERATION X would really feature the growing up theme in any real way.

But it's not often that these alleged teenagers have really acted the part. The original X-Men did engage in a fair amount of hi-jinks, but they were rock solid when the time came. If they were teenagers, than Xavier must have been a much stricter disciplinarian off-panel than he ever was on, because more often than not, they acted like little grown-ups. (Interestingly, Marvel has recently chosen to show that this was indeed the case, in titles like CHILDREN OF THE ATOM and X-MEN: THE HIDDEN YEARS. One of the major focuses of these titles is to show stories of the original X-Men as teenagers.) Wein and Cockrum's New X-Men didn't really act any differently - and some of them were notably more adult. And despite the reputation he later earned, even Claremont didn't start out that way.

It wasn't until fan favourite Kitty Pryde joined the team, in issue 129 that we really saw a teenager. Not a real one. But there Kitty was - more idealistic than sensible (as seen in X-MEN 150); utterly indecisive (it took over 40 issues for her to settle on a codename, and she went through at least a dozen costume changes); capable, but not taken seriously by the adults around her (never seen better than in the memorably-named "Professor Xavier Is A Jerk!" story in X-MEN 168); and so on.

The introduction of the New Mutants continued this theme. Claremont wrote them reasonably sensitively as teenagers, and his replacement, Louise Simonson, wrote them as even younger (aided by the somewhat cartoony art of Bret Blevins). The characters seemed to lose about 5 years of aging as soon as she took over, and suddenly, they had a lot of the stresses more normal teenagers would have - as in the issue in which they attend a mixer at a nearby school, encountering the heretofore uncharted waters of dating - and consequently, were easier to identify with by a teenage audience.

At the same time, the X-Men were getting a little younger too. After Kitty, the next two members to join the team were also teenagers - Rogue and Rachel Summers. As the team matured on the one hand - Cyclops got married and became a father, Storm went through incredible personal changes, including the traumatic loss of her powers - the new members carried on the banner of struggling adolescence.

Marvel had several spin-offs that employed similar themes at the time. The FIRESTAR limited series also focussed on a teenage girl, experiencing first love, leaving home and all that familiar coming-of-age, CATCHER IN THE RYE type stuff. Oh, and she was a mutant too. Cloak and Dagger, after a mini-series and numerous cameos in other titles, wound up as half of the STRANGE TALES series, and were retconned into being considerably younger - and less mature - than they previously had been. Their naively idealistic efforts to end the drug trade once and for all were both amusingly quixotic and movingly tragic. And the FALLEN ANGELS limited series was explicitly based on the idea that being a mutant is a lot like being a teenager, which was something of a return to the roots of the X-Men.

It was just that time, I guess - the Eighties were a weird era to be growing up in, and the mutants of Marvel reflected that weirdness right back. They even added a little of their own. But the whole point of growing up is that it's a process, not a state. In real life - and even in adolescence - nothing's static. How could anyone or anything grow if it were? As the writer of the two main X-titles, Chris Claremont was brilliant in portraying this. The one constant of his run was change. The team's arch-nemesis reformed and joined them as a hero in UNCANNY X-MEN 200. Several of the members were killed or badly injured in the so-called Mutant Massacre (UNCANNY X-MEN 210-213, X-FACTOR 10-12). The characters evolved and grew as they responded to circumstances. Some found peace with themselves, and what they became. Others were broken in two by it all. But however many mistakes they made along the way, they continued to grow, and to grow up.

And eventually, everyone stops being a teenager, even if (as in the case of Dick Grayson) it takes 30 or 40 years. NEW MUTANTS gets renamed X-FORCE (and TEEN TITANS becomes just TITANS). Which leads to an even stranger phenomenon: second generation coming of age titles. TEEN TITANS was replaced by YOUNG JUSTICE at DC, while back at Marvel, the aptly named GENERATION X pretty much picked up where the X-Men and New Mutants had left off. Heck, it even featured as team members Jubilee (resident token teenager in the X-Men at that time) and Paige Guthrie (younger sister of Sam Guthrie, a founding member of the New Mutants). As the title suggests, it tried very hard to keep up with current and popular conceptions of teenagerhood and teenage trends. With the inevitable occasional embarrassing missteps, and the apparently obligatory pop culture references that are out of date by the time the book sees print.

But every popular medium has that problem. There is also the one problem that is unique to the comics medium, and in particular, to that part of it that consists of coming of age stories. The simple fact is that different writers see things very differently. So character ages tend to fluctuate. When Sam Guthrie, after spending more than a hundred issues of the New Mutants and X-Force as team leader, joined the X-Men, he was suddenly a lot less mature, and was portrayed as the rookie on the team, despite the fact that he'd been around a lot longer than say, Gambit or Bishop. And most recently, returning writer Chris Claremont announced that Kitty Pride, who'd grown up quite impressively in the decade or so since Claremont left the title, was still a minor, wreaking havoc with some of the stories told by other writers (and introducing a few questions of morals as well).

I suspect that it's caused, more than anything else, by a certain willingness of writers to see characters as eternal teenagers, because that's what their favourite version of the character is. It happens regularly in comics. A character like Spider-Man has had 30 solid years of adventures. When a new writer comes on board to write Spider-Man, his vision of the character is automatically an idealized one - the bad stories from the past 30 years fade into the background, with prominence given to the stories that the writer loves. The superhero market supports this, because superheroes at their core are meant to feel comfortable, familiar and accessible to their readers. There might have been three Robins over the years - but they all had the same costume (until recently) and the same personality (again, until recently).

That mindset is the main enemy of real character growth and evolution, and it causes friction between fans who want to see their superheroes exactly as they remember them from the previous months and years, and those hoping for the characters to grow and change along with them. Fortunately for those of us who like to read about people growing up, it's not the only thing going on in the market. Fads come and go, but they do provide a rationale for characters to change.

No current series seems more responsive to such stimuli than GENERATION X. GENERATION X's members have recently (with issue ) become agents and activists for their cause: the protection of teenagers (mostly mutant teenagers, but to some extent all teens) from a world that fears and demonises them. Where before they were usually portrayed as being merely students and idealists, they are now acting to right the wrongs they perceive (which are somewhat obscured in the comic, but are quite obviously the response of middle America to the Columbine shootings). The Mutant Menace hysteria card played to death in the X-titles over the years has been reborn as a fear and blaming of teenagers for all our woes, neatly bringing together the two main themes of growing up and persecution into one singular theme, since each is now an integral part of the other. Which would be a happy thing on a creative level, were it not that the real world is tending the same way. Face front, True Believer! Because the X-Men have never been more relevant, and the lessons they teach (however heavy-handedly) never more important.

Loki Carbis is a staff writer at PopImage.

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