Ruining My Childhood

You may not know this, but the Ragin' Man had trouble reading as a child. My little brother, the head Billy Blogger, was apparently reading the New York Times every morning with a cup of coffee and a cigarette while I was busy scrawling rudimentary drawings on the wall that depicted me as a stick man and drooling on myself. "Never fear!" said my kindergarten teacher (all quotes are approximated) "Little Ragin' Man will want to read sometime, and when he does, you need to surround him with whatever he wants to read!"

Well, a few years passed and the Ragin' Family took a long trip to the Ragin' Homeland, also known as our grandparent's farm, for a couple weeks. We got to go to the local drug store and buy it out for this trip so we would have something to occupy ourselves with when the adults did adult things like watch the news and tell us to be quiet. In those days every convenience store had a spinner rack full of comics. I bought a couple, and I loved them.

My mother noticed I liked comics so she got subscriptions to every kind of Archie comics, which are good, but were more her fare as a child than they were mine. When I went to the store I would ask to buy all the Marvel Comics I liked on the spinner rack. My favorite, bar none, were Marvel's mutant titles, specifically Uncanny X-Men. Don't get me wrong, I loved most all the Marvel titles, but a new X-Men issue was like Christmas and Wrestlemania happening for the 15 minutes or so it took me to read through the latest issue.


I loved everything about them. I've heard it said that every prepubescent boy can relate to a group of people who are outcasts just because of their birth. I guess I can identify with that, but I thought the personal struggles of the characters was what I particularly identified with. It seemed like every X-Man was committed to making the world a safer better place in spite of their own proclivities, and sometimes in the face of the powers they were both gifted and cursed with. I guess I identified with that a little more than I did "with great power comes great responsibility." Besides, by the time I was a kid Spidey had already married his super model girlfriend, Mary Jane, had 4 different comic books all about him, and guest starred in all the other books at least once a year. Not much self identifying for me.

Well, needless to say my mom took my teacher's advice and fed me as many comics as I could bring her, and they were always around a dollar an issue, and at most I'd get 5 from the spinner rack. Five bucks to teach your kid to read? Who could argue with that? Plus my mom actually loved me, so she thought she was helping me succeed, when in actuality she was making me a life long comic geek who believes in justice.

Well fast-forward to the year 2000 and I see X-Men is being made into a movie. I was stoked! It wasn't even up for debate with my friends what we were doing Friday night. I was going opening night, and they could come and have fun or spend the night crying in sadness. It was awesome. A good Wolverine based story with a good back up cast that played up the differences in the messages of Magneto and Professor X.

The next film was good, and the third not so much. I really couldn't complain though. Now I know a lot of the fans complain with what will now be known as "the first set" or something like that because things happened like Rogue and Iceman are children compared to the other X-Men. Let's face it, if you want the comics, read the comics. If you want to see a condensed story that hits all the main character points, watch the movie. The characters are all largely portrayed in a way that makes them true to what is interesting about them. If it was a serialized tv show I'd expect a little more adherence to the original comic simply to make it last long enough.

Then came Wolverine: Origins. A horrible movie with some good action. Wolverine and Sabertooth became brothers, Gambit has powers that basically allow him to do anything, and you know Deadpool talked a lot because everyone talked about it. You never got to know any character but Wolverine, who you already knew.

Now there's a new X-Men movie coming out. X-Men: First Class. This movie has a lot of the important X-Men who have not been shown, and those that have risen to prominence in the comics since the first movie was made. The only fanboy gripe I have is that I don't really like the way Havok's power looks and is portrayed in the new trailer. He is probably my favorite X-Man, and I identify with him in numerous ways, most of all because he feels as though he is living in the shadow of his father, Corsair, and his older brother, Cyclops, and Havok compares himself to them in all that he does, and more often all that he feels he failed to do. It makes sense too because his brother is a legend among mutants as the leader of the X-Men, and his father is famous throughout the universe as the leader of the Starjammers. He can't just be a manager at McDonald's after that. A lot of X-Factor plot lines focused on him always second guessing what he did, and wanting to turn down the mantle of leadership because he felt he only got it due to his last name, when it's actually due to his just being an awesome leader. Havok often chose fields of work that had nothing to do with the fight between good and evil. Havok is hard to write, but the X-Factor comics of my youth were fun and not overbearing. Here's hoping they figure out that character and don't ruin him.

No, the character that seems to be ruined is Beast. Check him out in the movie trailer below.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Now this Beast is a little nerd with amazing agility and monkey feet who takes a serum of his own creation that turns him blue and furry. The comics Beast is a hulking brute who is really smart and nerdy that takes a serum of his own creation that turns him blue and furry. That was part of the charm of Beast. He was a football star in high school, but you couldn't just judge him as a beast of burden due to his size, you also had to take into account that he is extremely smart, something that also appealed to a young Ragin' Man. Without his size and speed prior to the transformation he does not celebrate the dichotomy that is found in the best Marvel characters of Stan Lee/Jack Kirby era, and is instead just a walking stereotype who happens to be walking on big ass monkey feet. This is one of those times when I think they failed to look at the spirit of the character, and instead used him for the visual affect/plot devices he will allow in the movie.

I have to say that I am excited to see how they use characters that were previously unused, and almost wish they had just rebooted the series with less emphasis on Wolverine. This remake seems like an attempt to keep in standing with the previous movies while getting the most out of all the characters, especially Emma Frost, the White Queen, as she is a central character in almost every X-Men comic now. I am excited to see Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, the Black King though, and really hope they don't make the mistake of messing up the characters by making them unrecognizable motivationally.

Now I'm off to see Thor in 3-D. Let's see if Marvel can manage to pull this one off as well as they did Iron Man. Here's a cover from my favorite Thor run. It was the early 90's, so they did a new costume, and in this case made it a whole new person imbued with the powers of Thor. As was the case with most comics as well, in the mid 90's they later went through and retconned it, which was an under reported reason everyone stopped buying comics, as they got way too convoluted.

Well, until next time, to all the true believers: Make Mine Marvel! Excelsior!