It’s a long shot (and a bad joke), but…


I’m tired of it all, kids. Amongst the multitudes of X-Men jibber-jabber and ballyhoo about Wolverine and Gambit (blech!), there’s always the characters that get pushed by the wayside. If I mention to anyone that Cyclops is my favorite X-Man, I get 1) blank stares (mostly from non-comic readers) or 2) guffaws (mostly from mouth-breathing nerds). Do I champion the bores and the constant underdogs? It would seem so. You see kids, once upon a time, I admitted to my friends a love for one X-Man in particular, and was laughed at. According to them, his powers, costume, haircut and essentially everything about him were lame. Sure, he was the ultimate byproduct of the 80s, as evidenced by his resemblance to my brother. That’s right, the blond hair, the hollow bones, I love it all. I have the lamest X-Man obsession of all….


Calm your laughter, please. This is a serious matter, or as serious as discussing comic characters with mullets and luck powers could be. But in an age when the X-Men were forced into the outback and things were looking increasingly rough, there was one X-Man who didn’t take a turn for the darker. It was somebody of a good nature, a transplant from another world entirely. The jaded and cynical may have found him a mere accessory to the rough edged X-Men, but here was the Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling boy with a heart of gold who was magnetic by and of his good nature.

It’s hard to defend this love. It’s like getting caught in bed with a transvestite…by a priest. But much like my love for transvestites, I feel no comic digressions would be complete without my admonition of my love for this X-Man.

Plus, he’s not Marrow.