This blog is going to be about the decade of the 1980s in geek culture. Comic books, cartoons, science fiction, roleplaying games and fantasy novels, computers and video games. But for this very first post, which will be talking about something very important to me on a personal level, I will break the rules a little bit and slip a few months into 1979:
I bought this story shortly after my eighth birthday (in March 1985) at a kiosk that used to exist at this exact location:
The kiosk, according to Google Street View, no longer exists, but the hobby that it triggered in me (comic books) is still going strong even while I'm writing this blog post 33 years later.
The thing is, I had read comic books prior to discovering X-Men. My earliest comic book memories are Disney comics. Other early memories were European series like the well-known Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke, the Native American themed Zilverpijl and Tex Willer and the generational Phantom. I even went on to superheroes like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, but none of these made my brain go "click". All through this material, comic books were just something I read to pass the time.
It wasn't until I discovered the X-Men in March 1985 that my brain went "click", and I deeply fell in love with comics. The complexity of characters, the interpersonal conflicts, the way that old events could come back to haunt later stories, the way that each story had multiple separate subplots -- all of these aspects put together in the same comic book made X-Men feel like it was on a whole higher "level" compared to all other comic books I had ever encountered before.
One of the many things that made X-Men seem deeper and more mature than other comics I'd read was its attention to the psychology of its characters. The way that the pragmatic and reality-oriented Wolverine was more shaken than most others by an enemy that could alter reality. The way that Cyclops, the consummate leader, notices his subordinate's predicament and applies reverse psychology. Moments like these made characters in the series feel much more real, much more human, than in most other comics.
From X-Men #127 onward I always felt, deep down in my soul, that I was a comic book fan first and foremost -- that was the aspect that defined me as a person. Just like for someone, a piano may be the most important thing that defines them. To someone else, maybe, cars. For others, cooking. Or woodworking, or gymnastics. Many people find one thing in their lives that defines them more than anything else, and for me that was comic books and the moment of realization was reading X-Men #127.
Although I should note, from a bibliographically accurate point of view it was not technically the original X-Men #127 that I read then, but its Finnish translated version in "Ryhmä-X 3/1985". For those of you not familiar with the Finnish language, allow me to clarify that the title means "Team-X" or "Group-X" (i.e. the Finnish comic book was titled in a gender-neutral way as compared to the original X-Men) and Finnish numbering was in format m/yyyy rather than the sequential numbering used in the American originals. The Finnish translation also included the next issue, X-Men #128, as well as parts of an earlier issue, X-Men #66. Five years later, in 1990, I would start to buy the American originals (#263 was where I started having an uninterrupted run of American X-Men comics, although I do have some scattered issues from before that) but that comfortably falls outside the scope of this eighties-focused blog, so I won't go any further into that topic.
X-Men contained some pretty dark content, such as this scene where we find out that Joe MacTaggert has been refusing divorce for twenty years simply because of political gain, and he had hospitalized Moira for a week, and that their child was conceived presumably during that domestic violence -- in other words, it's not a big leap of logic to assume that Joe and Moira's child is the product of rape.
One interesting detail in X-Men #127 that escaped me for the longest time is that it mentions the character of Dai Thomas, who was not really a part of the X-Men's world at the time, and would have been a completely random name to most readers. Thomas would some 10 years later (in the late eighties) become a supporting character in the X-Men spin-off series Excalibur, but few people realize that he almost crossed the X-Men's path a decade earlier. Writer Chris Claremont had created Dai Thomas four years earlier in Marvel Preview #3 as a supporting character in a Blade story, of all things. Claremont then went on to use Thomas as a supporting character in Captain Britain's adventures during the late seventies and early eighties -- you can get a full rundown on Thomas' appearances at the Marvel Chronology Project. But details like this -- that even a random police officer called on the phone may actually be a character that is more fully fleshed out in some other series -- writing like that is one of the many reasons why Claremont's writing was so compelling: in so many ways, he saw the fictional world as having coherence, things that showed up in place A might show up ten years later in place B. Everything could be connected.
These are just some of the reasons why X-Men blew my mind and made me a comic book fan for life. I will no doubt revisit the series over and over again in the future, and coming back to this topic will always be like coming home to me.
 |
| X-Men #127 (Nov 1979) "The Quality of Hatred!" |
The kiosk, according to Google Street View, no longer exists, but the hobby that it triggered in me (comic books) is still going strong even while I'm writing this blog post 33 years later.
The thing is, I had read comic books prior to discovering X-Men. My earliest comic book memories are Disney comics. Other early memories were European series like the well-known Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke, the Native American themed Zilverpijl and Tex Willer and the generational Phantom. I even went on to superheroes like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, but none of these made my brain go "click". All through this material, comic books were just something I read to pass the time.
It wasn't until I discovered the X-Men in March 1985 that my brain went "click", and I deeply fell in love with comics. The complexity of characters, the interpersonal conflicts, the way that old events could come back to haunt later stories, the way that each story had multiple separate subplots -- all of these aspects put together in the same comic book made X-Men feel like it was on a whole higher "level" compared to all other comic books I had ever encountered before.
One of the many things that made X-Men seem deeper and more mature than other comics I'd read was its attention to the psychology of its characters. The way that the pragmatic and reality-oriented Wolverine was more shaken than most others by an enemy that could alter reality. The way that Cyclops, the consummate leader, notices his subordinate's predicament and applies reverse psychology. Moments like these made characters in the series feel much more real, much more human, than in most other comics.
From X-Men #127 onward I always felt, deep down in my soul, that I was a comic book fan first and foremost -- that was the aspect that defined me as a person. Just like for someone, a piano may be the most important thing that defines them. To someone else, maybe, cars. For others, cooking. Or woodworking, or gymnastics. Many people find one thing in their lives that defines them more than anything else, and for me that was comic books and the moment of realization was reading X-Men #127.
 |
| Finnish translation "Ryhmä-X 3/1985" |
X-Men contained some pretty dark content, such as this scene where we find out that Joe MacTaggert has been refusing divorce for twenty years simply because of political gain, and he had hospitalized Moira for a week, and that their child was conceived presumably during that domestic violence -- in other words, it's not a big leap of logic to assume that Joe and Moira's child is the product of rape.
 |
| We find out some pretty twisted backstory between Moira and Joe MacTaggert in X-Men #127 (Nov 1979) |
 |
| Joe tries to contact Dai Thomas in X-Men #127 (Nov 1979) |
These are just some of the reasons why X-Men blew my mind and made me a comic book fan for life. I will no doubt revisit the series over and over again in the future, and coming back to this topic will always be like coming home to me.
