If you were told that you'd have a superpower by the morning, you'd probably be quite excited, as we've established, but also quite apprehensive, as I hope this article is teaching you. If you woke up with a long, venomous tongue, adhesive spit, finding you could also stick to walls and expel large gusts of air from your lungs, you'd probably think you were dying. Poor Mortimer Toynbee, better known to the insensitive X-Men as Toad, was only ever going to be a villain with these "powers". In the comics, he was bullied as a child after being given up for adoption by his own parents. Unlike many other X-Men, it was clear he was a mutant from birth; his amphibian abilities may have developed somewhat during adolescence, but by that time, it was just a kick in the teeth for the poor boy: his parents didn't want to know him and his schoolmates hated him, and yet when fate dealt him the gift of a superpower, it gave him the ability to talk to frogs and jump really high. He may be shown in the X-Men films to be a nasty, sarcastic slimeball, but spare a thought for Toad. If you were him, you'd hate the world and everyone in it too.
