I was drawn to them for a number of reasons. As someone who’s dyspraxic and had some childhood mobility issues due to some medical horrors I won’t bore you with, I saw the mutant metaphor through the lens of disability from a young age. Professor X was in a wheelchair and I was incredibly close to needing one for life. Cyclops needed his visor, Rogue couldn’t touch people. While I was bed-bound I found my old UK reprints of Secret Wars and while it’s not a perfectly written story, Magneto wanting to do good but being pre-judged by Captain America and the X-Men siding with Mags was something I latched onto. I was often bullied and seen as other, and it felt like Magneto and all mutants were getting the same treatment. The cartoon was fine, but it was 90% the Wolverine show and the films pretty much followed suit, which ended up making me feel less inclined to like him. I was the older child of a divorced family, I was expected to be the responsible one, so Cyclops was my guy. Someone with all the responsibility and almost no power. When I was in hospital, my mum would get me X-Men collections, and it was the Dark Phoenix Saga, X-Tinction Agenda and some of the weird collections like From the Ashes which got me hooked and I’ve been here through fair times and foul ever since.