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X-Men ’97 Told the Avengers They Suck
The series undermining Earth’s mightiest “heroes” is delightful fan-service subversion.
That kind of inertia is indefensible, and X-Men ’97 is delightfully subversive in presenting the Avengers — the characters who we have been insistently told, over a decade-plus of blockbuster movies, are humanity’s greatest heroes — as government stooges uninterested in going against humankind because doing so would endanger their higher status. That’s a jarring, condescending introduction for a character who hasn’t done anything to help the X-Men, but Rogue holds her own, disdainfully calling him “America’s top cop” and demanding to know what his team and his uniform stand for if it’s not solidarity with mutants, Americans who actually need the kind of defense he can provide. Instead, it feels like the show’s creator and head writer, Beau DeMayo, is channeling a tradition present throughout decades of X-Men comics, in which characters as disparate as Wolverine, Emma Frost, and even Cyclops rail against the Avengers’ self-importance and refusal of aid.
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