Evolution In Action: The X-Men

Forget the convoluted side plots, the fan base and the vast amounts of fan fiction surrounding the relationships between various X-Men, both straight fiction and gay fiction.

The basic premise of The X-Men is this.

At some point in the latter half of the last century, possibly due to the open-air atomic testing conducted between 1945 and 1963, evolution suddenly took a great leap. The result was mutants, humans gifted - as only science fiction can gift - with extraordinary abilities. Powers which are, frankly, dangerous to humanity, because humans cannot compete against telepathy, metal or diamond skin, or the ability to freeze every molecule in the human body solid.

The main thread of the story is - Evolution has given mutants an adaptation to the world, but it's not the adaptation alone that is enough. It's what you do with it.

The other thread of the story is about giving in to the dangerous idea that the only way evolution will favour one species over the other is to make sure that the other species does not live. Eliminate the competing species, and you eliminate the competition.

This is the thread which drove many of the earlier stories of the X-Men, as the mutant populations of the world faced persecution from the authorities, bigots, Republicans, corporate types, religious nuts with guns, non-religious nuts with guns and sane people with guns.

The beauty of this series is that it has placed the protagonists in the position where the readers identify, not with the "unmutated" humans, but with the mutants. The series speaks to the alienation of the individual in a society which itself has evolved into a form which they who comprise it themselves do not understand what they are a part of any more.

It puts us into the bodies of the mutants. Because we are all, it says, a little bit mutant.

Though not everyone can carry this look off ...