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Dorks United
A Review by Chris Bolton

I'm not sure which is the more humbling moment: realizing you used to be a dork, or discovering that the dork still lurks within you, waiting for a chance to rear its pimply head.

I made this chilling discovery in a movie theater during X2: X-Men United, the sequel to the hit film based on the long-running comic book series. The clues have been there all along — in the anticipation I felt for the Lord of the Rings films, for instance, or how my grown, nearly-thirty self joyously converged with my six-year-old self while watching last summer's Spider-Man. But those were mere nigglings. Judging by the box-office grosses of those films, I'm not alone in my appreciation and therefore can't rightly be called a dork for it, since "dork" implies a degree of social ostracization, if not outright exile.

But nothing could have excused the big, stupid grin on my face the first time Wolverine unsheathed his claws — or, worse, the unconscious fist I clenched the moment the burly teenager's skin shimmered into steel; I had to fight back the urge to stand up and cheer, "COLOSSUS!!!!!!"

To investigate this curious matter further, I went straight home and dusted off my trade paperback collection of the all-time classic X-Men story, "The Dark Phoenix Saga." Sadly, the book is out of print. Luckily Marvel is reprinting its classic stories in its Essential series. Each thick book contains about a year's worth of comics, albeit in black-and-white. I've heard a lot of complaints about the monochrome format, but I think it works pretty well, considering how simplistic and garish many of the old coloring jobs were — although, with its thick, black ink lines, one does get the occasional feeling that one is reading a coloring book.

The legendary story appears in Essential X-Men Vol. 2, and if this isn't the highlight of the entire series, well, it's damn close. Stan Lee created the original X-Men, but they never quite took off, and it fell to writer Chris Claremont in the late '70s to redesign the team with new and old members. Think of him as the cool stepfather who took the kids to ball games while their biological father remarried and moved away.

Claremont's reimagining of the X-Men introduced such iconic characters as Wolverine, with his unbreakable adamantium claws, Storm, Nightcrawler, and Colossus. Great as these guys may be, his finest contribution, not only to the X-Men series but to all of comic-dom, was his soap operatic storytelling. The '80s (and, for all I know, '90s and '00s) X-Men reads like an action-packed superhero version of Melrose Place: romances galore, lots of implied sex, and personal friction between the characters. In-between there's the standard saving-the-universe-and-beating-up-bad-guys stuff.

The "Dark Phoenix" storyline is emblematic not only for its emotional and dramatic high-points (nothing makes an impression like killing a major character), but also for John Byrne's first-rate pencils and for the way the new team was finally gelling. There are some cheesy, dated touches like the disco mutant Dazzler; and Claremont's sometimes-rampant, hyperbolic verbosity reminded me how grateful I am that writers like Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman introduced streamlined storytelling and even beautiful prose into comics. But it's hard to fault a story that boasts some fight scenes on a truly epic scale; the introduction of Kitty Pryde, one day to be known as Shadowcat; Wolverine on his own, fighting to help his captured teammates and doing what he does best; and the Hellfire Club, who aren't the most memorable villains but certainly get the job done (and the White Queen's dominatrix outfit no doubt fueled the fantasies of a great many teenage shut-ins — er, but not me, of course).

In a nutshell, the "Dark Phoenix" saga pits the X-Men against one of their own — Jean Grey, a.k.a. Phoenix, a founding member of the original team. Her mutant telekinetic abilities have grown to an incredible degree, but the price of that power is an uncontrollable dark side. When that side takes over, she becomes Dark Phoenix, a god-like being capable of destroying an entire star system without breaking a sweat. After a fierce, heartrending battle, the X-Men succeed in reverting Jean Grey to her normal persona — but the alien Shi'Ar Empire sentences Phoenix to die for killing five billion innocent lives. The X-Men, of course, will fight to the death for their teammate.

All of which leads to the climax — and, arguably, the high point of the whole series — the death of Jean Grey, who kills herself to prevent the uncontrollable Phoenix entity within her from destroying her teammates, her lover — hell, the whole universe. It was the Titanic of the '80s! All those studly guys who laughed at their dates getting misty-eyed as Leo sank into the Atlantic just need to be reminded of Scott Summers, a.k.a. Cyclops, staring helplessly as Jean turns that Shi'Ar laser gun on herself and... oh damn, I said I wouldn't cry. It's just allergies. Really, I'm fine. Something in my throat.

Look, I'm not a complete loser; I understand how silly all of this sounds to people above the age (and maturity level) of, say, fifteen. But for comic-book fans, X-Men was high drama, Shakespeare for the Nintendo generation, and I've never forgotten it.

The problem is, I hadn't really exactly remembered it right, either. Somehow I'd screened out all the silliness about alien civilizations, and galactic federations deciding Phoenix needed to die, and all of that interstellar nonsense that has no business in a superhero saga. And what about the corny dialogue?

Cyclops: "Jean, whatever happens, know that I love you. And I'll stand by you."

Jean: "And I, you, Scott — with all my heart!"

And the romance-novel love scenes where Cyclops and Jean sit on a desert rock, having sex (between panels, I assume) and speaking with astonishingly straight faces about how they love each other so much that they're going to share a psychic rapport?

Rereading the "Dark Phoenix" storyline has been a comforting reminder that, while the dork may still surface on occasion, there is an adult at the helm of this body — one who has discovered that life doesn't consist of superpowers and heroic battles and sweaty sex with beautiful, impossibly proportioned women (well, not all the time), and who understands that mutant abilities make a nice metaphor for feelings of adolescent isolation and a desire to stand out from the crowd — but thankfully, most of us eventually break free of those puberty chains.

Okay, so, there's a dork inside me. I can accept that. Just as long as I remain in control. Should I ever lose control, the results could be catastrophically destructive — much like the Dark Phoenix herself. Or the Hulk. And isn't there a Hulk movie just around the corner?

Whatever you do, don't make the dork angry.

You wouldn't like him when he's angry...