About Heroes

This review was submitted by Muuurgh:
If anyone remembers my older reviews, I have stated that I grew up reading comics from the 90s, and thus my knowledge of the past is only partially present from indirect sources rather than from reading the stories themselves. Aside from reading the comics I also watched the cartoons that came out in the early to mid nineties, which is basis for my knowledge of the history of the X-Men in particular.

Anyway, I naturally grabbed a bunch of early X-Men comics because they have always been the ones to interest me the most, despite the state of their books for quite some time (with few exceptions, such as Astonishing). There were two things that heavily struck me right off the bat about the book. Just on page two I noticed that Cyclops has been played off as an ass-kisser from the start. The first thing he does is tilt Professor X’s chair back to make him more comfortable. Dick. Angel aids him in his endeavor but seems a little more playful about it, so I’m not going to bash him about it. Even when Cyclops is doing his training for the day he has to impress the Prof. by being a dick to the other X-Men.

Iceman is characterized as I expect him to be, but Beast threw me for a loop. The whole comic I was trying to imagine these characters with the voices that they had from the X-Men cartoon on Fox (this is a normal practice for me for the X-Men and Spider-Man especially… does anyone else do that?), and I just could not get the Beast to sound like I imagine him. In this comic he’s not perceived as a scientist like I know him to be, and figured he always was, but as a Thing-like character, using lots of apostrophes and meshing of words to shorten his speech.

Some interesting things about Prof. X show up, too, particularly with him stating rather randomly that his parents had worked on the A-Bomb, and the fact that the X-Men have to get used to his physic powers. They actually have to master reading the messages he transmit whereas it’s seemed like by the recent era that everyone, even if they’re a little freaked out at first, reads them just fine.

The introduction to Jean Grey is interesting, too. Cyclops, of course, looks like a tool bag, not to mention him being introduced as “Slim”, which I wasn’t expecting (I just thought Wolverine had just had made that up for him). Also, Beast is the first one to really make moves on her, and though I imagine Hank as a sweet talker, I’d expect someone like Iceman to move in first. Jean is shown as quite the feisty new recruit as she has no hesitation to take care of Beast the old fashion way; i.e., spinning him around really fast in the air and throwing him on the sofa.

Magneto looks rather hilarious to me here. His introduction makes him look like some mad scientist looking out the window of a huge tower, like a hermit of a super villain, rather than a sinisterly calm-but-enraged master of evil. He even hides behind a big thing of rocket fuel to avoid being seen by the X-Men to catch them off guard, which portrays him even more as a stock villain, regardless of the fact that he took out a whole military base and magnetized dust particles to give a message to the base before his attack via the air (yeah, that was sweet… anyone that can sign his name in cursive using dust particles would scare the shit out of me).

Overall the comic was enjoyable. Reading a book from that era was a little goofy due to some of the lingo and the attitudes of the characters, but that’s to be expected from someone who reached adulthood in the 21st century. It was a great introduction to the characters, and while the story wasn’t absolutely ground-breaking it was fun and still good. Rather than having to create something absolutely epic that shakes up the foundation of the Marvel U (though, this IS the birth of the X-Men), Stan was just telling a well versed story that held the span of one issue. I’ll give it a B+. It probably would have affected me more if I were picking up the issue back in the day it was printed, though.