Marvel's band of merry mutants have been used as the stand-in for every oppressed minority group going. Created in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, the team were retroactively moulded into an allegory for the struggle of racial minorities to achieve basic human freedoms, something that mutants could certainly identify with. It's also been said that Professor X and Magneto represent the two "opposing" figures of the movement, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, respectively. Even the X in their name has been noted as a parallel with the latter's more pro-active approach to gaining rights for his people. That sort of falls down, though, when you take into account that the majority of the main X-Men are white. In the picture above Storm is the only person of colour amongst a sea of pale and pasty types, same as it ever was. The original team was Cyclops, pre-fur Beast, Angel, Iceman and Marvel Girl; has ever such a whitebread team existed in comics? They also don't really work as a metaphor for the current struggle against homophobia, since their only prominent gay character is Northstar. Who's Northstar, you ask? Well, exactly. So if the X-Men don't work as the Marvel universe's persecuted minority, what do they work as? The entitlement to gun ownership, according to Darryl Ayo. People with the ability to cause huge devastation and death, but refuse to rescind or even take responsibility for that potential? It actually makes a lot of sense!
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/
