POP CULTURE AND THE MUTANT NARRATIVE: X-MEN ENDURE
The late 1930s and early 1940s birthed the superhero comic book fascination that despite several bumps along the way has endured into the twenty-first century where superhero films are huge box-office successes and pop culture gold mines.
In both the comic book and film universes, superhero reboots are common: Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man have all experienced revised origins in the pages of their comics as well as multiple cycles of films dedicated to the superheroes. The X-Men films from 2000 to 2006 may have had as much to do with the adaptation success of comic books to film as Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man.
X-Men: First Class in 2011 was one such re-boot and enough of a success that X-Men: Days of Future Past is slated for 2014.
Alexander Abad-Santos discusses how the mutant aspect of X-Men narratives can be found nearly universally in pop culture:
In about seven months, I along with a lot of X-Men fans will be getting to the theater an hour early, lining up, and then watching to see if Days of Future Past is what I’ve imagined it would be. What’s kinda great for an X-Men fans,
Beyond Doing the Wrong Thing the Right Way
My nephew is in elementary school, and my parents drive him to school each morning and arrive at his school an hour or two before school lets out each afternoon. This is a rural community in the South where many family members do the same—surrounding the school well before dismissal and often socializing. Recently, my mother told me about parents of a child at that school who are refusing to allow
Gaiman, Prisons, Literacy, and the Problems with Satire
Regarding my recent blog about Neil Gaiman for Secretary of Education (and the edited version at The Answer Sheet), Ken Libby took me to task on Twitter for, among other things, Gaiman’s comment about prisons and literacy: I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth –