X-Men First Class is out this weekend so Chris and I had plans to see that. Between the two of us, I'm the bigger X-Men fan and I was honestly not interested in seeing this movie. I hated the other movie adaptations. And not just the last one. All of them. Rogue was one of my favorite characters growing up and the changes they made for the movie adaptations were too annoying to ignore. So I didn't have much hope for this movie.

It was alright. Most people I know really like it. And if I didn't know anything at all about the X-Men characters maybe I would have liked it more. The chemistry between Xavier and Magneto was great. Outside of that - meh. I need more than just super heroes I grew up with on the big screen to be dazzled. If you're going to change things to adapt the series to film, make reasonable changes. Not just a series of cameos of characters that didn't even exist until they were created in the mid-2000's (which would be fine if the movie wasn't set in the 1960's).

But, there's a huge problem with the X-Men universe anyway. Lots of deaths and rebirths, characters changing sides, rewriting character histories, spin-offs, cross-overs into other titles (ex. Spiderman, Iron Man) etc. Unless you're hard-core and buying every title every issue, it's hard to keep them all straight. Which characters history is in an alternate history and which one is the proper timeline, blah blah. It''s a sprawling rats nest of crazy they keep piling onto every month.

That's a big difference between ongoing series like Naruto, Bleach, or at one time even InuYasha. While they have a large cast and hardly any characters ever seem to die off (even if they should), there's certainly no alternate timelines, alternate earths, alternate characters, or anything else that confuses a potential reader looking to start.

Of course, maybe a big difference is in time. X-Men has been around since the 60's and none of those Japanese series have. Either way, as much as I loved the X-Men as a kid, it's a difficult comic to read now and I much prefer self contained series like Y The Last Man, Locke & Key, Fables, even the short Empire series.

Anyway, that was a long rant about nothing much. Most importantly, Leki was there to stalk..er greet...us when we got home later that evening. And that's all that really counts.

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