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I have always been fascinated by the X-Men. When I was about 10 years old,  I would wake up 5 o’clock in the morning  not to miss any sequel of the  X-Men. These super mutants with their super powers where like a super fantasy for a young boy like me.

X-Men accept being an very exciting cartoon has many  real life dimensions in it.  Topics like discrimination, racism, political instability and  danger for extremism are central themes in the X-Men.  Like in the real world the characters in the X-Men suffer  from identity crisis,  inferiority complexes, guilt and shame. The mutants in the X-Men are divided  into  two groups, one group who want to live in pease, while the other craves on hate. One group sees hope in the future while the  other envision only apocalypse.

During my study in the work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King I encountered many similarities  between these leaders and the leaders of the  X-Men.

The Similarities:

Charles Xavior and Martin Luther King, both where leaders who believed in the good of mankind. They had an  idealistic view on life they believed in forgetting the past and looking at the future. They believed in non-violence by preserving their own identity. They believed in the system and tried to implement laws and rule which protected and supported there  people (mutants and negro’s). They believed in integration and living in harmony with each other as the true path.

Malcolm X and Magneto,  on the other hand were totally the opposite.  They had tuff life from the very beginning. Malcolm X’s  father was killed and there house burned by the Ku Klux Clans. Magneto’s  parents were  executed  in the Nazi camps during the second world war. There hearths where filled  by fear and hate from the very beginning of there childhood.  They had lost all their  faith in the supreme powers.  They believed  profoundly, that the only solution was a complete segregation. Violence  was the only answer to reach pease and total independence. They provoked their followers to get out of there inferiority complexes  which  where opposed on them. Not them but they  are the superior raise and they must rule upon the whites and the non-mutants. Living in pease was not an option because there enemies  will always hate what is different from them.

They fit so beautifully together in this picture, as I write this I  see the  struggle between good and bad they/we are trapped in.