2. They're Totally Not Analogous To Other Minorities
Spider-Man's all about power and responsibility and teenage angst. The Fantastic Four were a metaphor for the Space Race and American curiosity and the pioneer spirit in the atomic age. The Hulk's about why the bomb is bad. Iron Man was created purposefully to troll hippies by showing capitalists can be nice too. The X-Men had a similar social commentary to play on when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created them back in the sixties. Both have since admitted that they didn't do it on purpose, and it might just be the issues of the age seeping through into the art unconsciously, but the mutant struggle has a pretty clear parallel with the civil rights movement. Since then the comparison has been made more explicit, with mutants standing in for repressed minorities from homosexuals to different races. Which doesn't really work when the X-Men are mostly white straight cis people. That analogy is a total failure, because white people can't be oppressed. Sorry!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
