Sunday, May 17, 2009

what rocks? (professor xavier)

professor charles xavier
(the martin luther king jr. of mutants) 
(the phil jackson of caped crusaders) 
(the world’s foremost handicapped superhero)

why he rocks: wolverine gets all the hype and cyclops gets all the chicks,  so what exactly does professor charles xavier, the leader of the x-men, get? apparently male pattern baldness and a rusty wheelchair. doesn’t sound like a fair deal. after all, without professor x, it’s a good bet that wolverine would be stuck in the middle of nowhere, playing bass for a loud, lame garage band and pretty boy cyclops would have been forced to gouge his own eyes out (great job blake! wonderful reference to homer’s odyssey) and living out his days as a benchwarmer for a beep baseball. therefore at his core, professor xavier is a life-changer. so what’s the best way to honor a life-changer such as he? i say that if martin luther king jr. gets a holiday, then professor x deserves one too. and it should be a thursday holiday, because there are no holidays on thursdays and a Thursday holiday would create a de facto four-day weekend.

why else he rocks: for giving a good name to peeping toms everywhere. in order to make better use of his astounding telepathic and telekinetic powers, professor x created a device called cerebro, which allows him to tap into the minds and hearts of mutants around the globe. yeah, so basically he uses an omnipotent binocular/microscope to spy on anyone, anywhere at anytime. megan’s law anyone? hold your freaked out horses. professor xavier is a living saint who only uses this enormous voyeur-viewer for good. plus, let’s face it, and i don’t mean to sound like a full-time jerk, but there’s a pretty solid chance that his “powers below the belt” are as functional as his limp legs.

seriously, what’s the deal with his rocking: creating the xavier school for gifted youngsters is all well and good, but what really separates the x-men from the boys is the danger room, the coolest room ever created in the history of history. it’s more expensive than a five-star hotel room, more fun than a chucke e. cheese birthday room and more functional than a bathroom. the danger room is where professor Xavier trains his students for battle as if they were superpowered chess pieces. the room has everything: booby traps, projectile firing devices, flamethrowers, collapsing walls, futuristic force-fields and life-like holographic enemies who attack like there’s no tomorrow. in a nutshell: it’s awesome. in a bigger nutshell: it’s supercalifragilously awesome. the moral of the story is that professor x succeeded where so many great minds have failed, in creating a human-sized version of the board game mousetrap. take that, einstein! if creating a studious sanctuary for the genetically gifted doesn’t earn you a thursday holiday, creating the world’s best battle-training room should be more than enough. after all, we live in a country that places education second to a military-industrial fetish.  

exhibit a: the danger room

exhibit b: the board game mousetrap

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5 comments:

  1. I'm way behind on my X-Men, tried to come back when Mike Carry started since I loved his writing on Lucifer, picked up all the X-Books, realized they sucked, and stopped reading them.

    That being said... wasn't there a story where the Danger Room itself turned out to be some alien creature or some sentient being... or became sentient? And didn't they get the Danger Room tech Star Jammers?

    I don't know what is worse, being geek enough to know this stuff, or not being geek enough to actually know all the details. I have failed on two fronts.

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  2. Beginning with Ed Brubaker's Deadly Genesis mini-series from a couple years back, the going theme is that the Prof has been a manipulative douche bag for a long, long while. He a stone cold gangsta.

    (Retroactive continuity is awesome)

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  3. Cap,

    Why is there not a band named "Retroactive Continuity." I consider this a major travesty.

    bjh

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  4. Great call. Xavier is a BAMF. Although, he IS kind of a douche in the Ultimate universe.

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  5. Oh my stars and garters! More X-Men fans! Yes, I'm a geek and very proud of it. It's not everyday that an average everyday 51 year old mother/grandmother/writer still loves her X-Men after opening that first comic (waaaay back in the 60s)and see how skinny Scott and Warren looked, and how prim and proper Jean Grey looked! I stopped reading them for a couple of years here and there. Had to get married, have kids, get a divorce, all that...but I still came back. Nice to meet y'all!

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