The X-Men are about to become the most important part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it’s about time. The men and women of X have spent most of the last 50 years as the most popular superhero team in comics, so they’ll conquer the box office easily. Their success came out of nowhere in a lot of ways; before 1975, the X-Men were a team that had failed to reach the heights of their Marvel compatriots. After that, they became the most important part of the House of Ideas’ publishing schedule, with creators creating an entire universe of mutant hero and villains. Just about every kind of character you can imagine has appeared in the X-Men comics. Some of them have become superstars, but others haven’t and the MCU could give them another chance.
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Over the years, we’ve met some of the most powerful people in the Marvel Universe in the X-Men comics. Omega-level mutants often have godlike powers and the team has been home to some of the coolest power sets in comics. Darwin is a perfect example of a character with amazing powers, and a great origin, that everybody expected a lot out of. However, Marvel has never been able to make the character work. With the X-Men becoming the center of the Marvel Universe again, Darwin can shine again and the MCU could make up for one of the FoX-Men’s biggest missteps.
Darwin Couldn’t Live Up to His Namesake’s Theories
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The ’00s were a time of change for the X-Men. The ’90s were the time of their biggest successes, yet the books ended up driving readers away as the years went on. Revolutionary X-Men writer Chris Claremont came back briefly in the year 2000, but even he was trying to take things in new directions. The X-Men would go through huge change after huge change in the ’00s, with House of M depowering most of the mutant race and making the X-Men an endangered species.
During this period, we’d get X-Men: Deadly Genesis, a story that retconned Giant-Size X-Men #1 by revealing that the All-New, All-Different team wasn’t the first one Xavier sent to rescue the original X-Men. Each issue of the book would end introducing a new mutant, each of them recruited by Moira MacTaggert to train as her own mutant team. When Cyclops brought news of what happened on Krakoa to Xavier, he asked Moira to send her students, using his telepathy to train them quickly. However, they were slaughtered and Professor X wiped everyone’s memories of them.
Darwin was a member of this group. His mutant powers are basically the ultimate power – his body can adapt to anything. So, if he’s sucked into space, his body modifies itself to survive in the cold, pressureless vacuum of space. If he’s underwater, he grows gills and adapts to the pressure. If he’s on fire, his body will either become fireproof or just turn into fire. His powers are passive, but many mutants started out unable to control their powers but learned to, so the hero had huge potential.
He was basically indestructible and this is what allowed him and the third Summers brother Vulcan to survive. The two of them bonded in one of the attacks, allowing Vulcan to survive the battle and Krakoa being thrown into space afterwards. The X-Men would separate the two of them and Darwin would eventually end up joining the group, going along with Xavier, Havok, Polaris, Rachel Summers, Warpath, and Nightcrawler when they went after Vulcan into space. Darwin’s powers made him a great addition to the team in battle, and he had some cool moments.
A cool powerset isn’t enough to keep a character popular, but it’s often the best place to start. How many times has someone described a new character to you by talking about their powers first? Darwin had the coolest powers you could imagine, powers that would allow creators to do really cool things with him. Now, aura moments also aren’t enough to keep a character cool, but they help. Darwin had those things, but the one thing he didn’t really have was a character.
The main problem with Darwin is that he has a cool powerset with little personality. Creators always focused too much on the powers and didn’t really give us a chance to get to know him. The X-Men are in a growth period; new characters like the Outliers have made a splash, Magik has joined the ranks of ultra-popular X-Men, and various characters are getting solo books. X-Men fans want something different, so bringing Darwin back and putting him somewhere is the right thing to do. He became living code in the Krakoa Era, but his powers mean that he can easily come back.
I think the biggest example of how much Marvel has dropped the ball with Darwin comes from the one time he got adapted, in X-Men: First Class. This is a character whose power allows him to survive anything, but he dies from an explosion. Sure, an internal one, but this shouldn’t have been a problem for him. No one really knows what to do with Darwin and this had held him back. While there have been some great periods for Darwin – like most characters, he prospered in X-Factor under Peter David – they’ve been few and far between.
The MCU Can Use Darwin to Show How Different They Are From Fox
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Darwin is one of those characters that when I first read about him – I was getting X-Men: Deadly Genesis as it came out – I loved his powerset. There was so much potential to the character, something that was proven in stories like “Rise and Fall of the Shi’Ar Empire” and books like X-Factor. However, being a new mutant can be hard; it puts a lot of eyes on you, but it also means that you’re on a team with the most popular characters ever. Darwin grabbed attention, but he couldn’t keep it.
I think one of the things that the MCU needs to do quickly is show that it’s going to do things differently than Fox and bringing in Darwin could prove that. Darwin’s death remains one of the most maligned moments in FoX-Men history, which is saying something. Bringing Darwin into the MCU and actually showing his powers at work the right way would show just how different things are going to be from now on. Can you imagine someone trying to hurt him the same way, him playing along, and then making a joke about how that couldn’t kill him? Give us what we want, Marvel.
Do you think Darwin could be a big name MCU star? What do you think of him? Sound off in the comment section below.
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