10 Silliest X-Men of All-Time

So, here we go.  The ten silliest X-men of all time counted down in regards to silliness.  Now, before I launch into it there are a few criteria that I’m going to go over at, um, now.  Firstly, I’m including characters from every proper X-team in the history of the franchise.  Nobody is safe from X-terminators to Young X-Men.  Secondly, it’s all 616.  There will be no Ultimate silliness, mangaverse silly or Spike from X-Men: Evolution.  And without further ado let’s start it up.

#10. Maggot.than

Right off the bat his name is Maggot.  Which has got to be the worst name for a super hero.  I mean he’s neck and neck with Dumb Bunny.  The other reason that he’s on the list is the powers: Maggot powers that is.  For the uninitiated Maggot’s power set consisted of his digestive system being bio mechanical maggots that could eat anything and gave him super strength.  Oh, and he turned blue.  Hey, you could always use another blue X-Man.  His greatest contribution was making Dr. Celia Reyes seem much cooler by comparison.  I don’t know.  Do I really need to go any further with this? 

#9. Jubilee

Art by windriderx23

When I was a boy I used to play the six person X-Men cabinet arcade game.  And the one rule is that you never wanted to be Dazzler.  So, why would you want to watch the adventures of a slightly weaker Dazzler?  I get why the character was created: Kitty Pride is over in Excalibur and you need a young girl to complete the Wolverine/ innocent young girl dynamic that people loved so much.  But, Jubilee was no Kitty Pride.  She was a dated, even for the time, Valley Girl cliché/ orphan.  (You can never have enough precocious orphans in your comic books.  I know I can’t.) 

I would use many words to describe the writing of Chris Claremont on X-Men.  Hep is not one of them.  And that’s really a big part of the reason Jubilee is on this list: there’s precious little worse than when you try to make a character hip and it doesn’t work.  During her tenure in the X-Men she even got Cyclops to quote a Technotronic song.  Seriously.  Do I need a better reason than that?  Technotronic people!  Cyclops said literally, “As Jubilee would say it’s time to pump up the JAM!”  That’s almost as bad as when Venom said, “Venom don’t play that!”

#8 Ink

The first thing about Ink is that he was created in Young X-Men.  Young X-Men being a terribly poor substitute for the post Xavier’s meets Hogwarts New X-Men.  Ink is on this list for part of the same reason that Jubilee is: it usually falls flat when you try to make a character hip.  Opposed to Jubilee though, there is nothing to Ink, but his street-wise ways (cuz) and his totally original tattoo powers (Tattooed Man shoots lasers out of his eyes I’ve been told or some such shit).  Oh, and it’s his tattoo artist that’s the mutant and not him (what a twist!).  Super powered tattoos.  Really.  That’s really why he’s so silly.  He’s Vibe ’09 cuz.  

7. M/Penance

I was torn on this one.  On the one I really like the character in X-Factor, but I just can’t let that origin story go.  Here we go, M first shows up over in the “Phalanx Covenant arc” as the bitchy perfectionist rich girl we’ve all come to know and love.  When Generation X proper starts up we’re introduced to rock hard skinned, razor sharp-clawed mysterious mute mutie Penance.  That is not that silly.  What is silly though is that in actuality Penance is the real Monet St. Croix and M is in fact her two younger sisters whose mutant powers are to somehow do the fusion dance and turn into their older sister.  Let that sink in.  And then to make matters odder when the actual M is freed the two twins, Nicole and Claudette, are stuck in the Penance body.  Even later they’re freed from the Penance body which is…what?  Look if you don’t find that origin story silly and convoluted you are way too forgiving.  I’m sorry.

6.  Marrow

Art by Summerset

Yet again we’ve got to start with the back story.  So during the “Mutant Massacre” Gambit saves a little girl with bones sticking out of her face and saves her.  Years later Colossus’ long thought dead cosmonaut brother comes back, starts sipping his brother’s Kool Aid (Callisto) and Mikhail, Callisto and the remaining Morlocks warp to an alternate dimension.  (There’s a lot of fighting that leads up to this.)  Time doesn’t work the same there so a young adult Marrow comes back with the mutant terrorist group GeneNation and starts terrorizing people with mutantness.  The X-Men get involved and Storm ends up ripping her heart out…but she’s got two hearts.  That’s right her other power, aside from the whole lot of bone powers, is that she has two hearts.

Look, characters have been brought back in a lot of silly ways, but two fucking hearts?  That’s just…silly.  Aside from that she’s really a cross between the whole I’m a tormented bad ass Wolverine thing mixed with some of the I’m freaky looking, but you’re the real freaks for judging me, Nightcrawler thing.  Also, having a lot of extra bone is a weak power. 

5. Callisto

They gave her fucking tentacle arms.  That’s really all I got on this one.  Plenty of characters have been briefly replaced by alternate dimension Nazi doppelgangers.  Seriously, tentacles for arms.  Not the being turned into a super model.  It’s the having her arms replaced by tentacles by Masque.  That’s why she’s on the list.

4. Skin

He’s like Mr. Fantastic, but way lamer.  He’s got a few extra feet of skin he can control, and he isn’t the smartest man on the planet.  Do I need more of a reason to put him on this list?  People who lose a shit ton of weight are half way there to being Skin because they’ve already got all the excess skin.  Also, the name is pretty close to Maggot as far as the lameness.  Until there’s another X-Man with organ based powers named Liver, or Wolverine is actually renamed Claws he will take the prize for one of the most literally named X-characters.  Aside from the name and incredibly shitty powers he wasn’t a god-awful character.  As he wasn’t as one note as Ink and not as dated as Jubilee.  It’s just that Skin powers…I’m done.

3. Douglock

I have never understood the popularity of Doug Ramsey.  I’ve also never met a fanboy who was actually all that enamored with the character.  Also, he is one of the few characters that is actually more useless then Skin.  Granted, being really smart and instantly understanding every language would be a great help on a vacation or talking to aliens, but you’re not going to beat Juggernaut by cussing him out in Italian. 

Warlock though I always kind of liked.  He’s like a slightly retarded, but infinitely less annoying Impossible Man.  (Although I have always wanted to start using the term selfriend in casual conversation) And he even beat Impossible Man in a turning into random shit contest by changing colors.  When you put the two together though you get…a lame idea.  Pretty much he would freak characters out by looking like Doug and having his memories, but he wasn’t Doug.  He’s just a tease…for Doug Ramsey. 

Look, I can understand teasing a Jean Grey return, but Doug Ramsey?  It’s just unnecessary or silly if you will.  Also he banged out Wolfsbane.  Which is just another case of Marvel’s love of kind of creepy woman on sentient android action.

2. Whiz Kid

At it’s base Taki, aka Whiz Kid, actually has kind of cool powers with his technoforming.  He can turn any part of a machine into something else.  He can rearrange just about anything into a weapon.  But that really just boiled down to one thing: magic wheelchair.  I know this because at the comic book store I work at I was having a conversation with one of the regulars and we were both trying to think of the sillier character in X-history and we both looked at each other and almost in unison we both said, “magic wheelchair?”  And then I astounded him by remembering “magic wheelchair’s” name. 

In fact before I consulted the stacks for research on writing this I seriously thought his powers were that he had a magic wheelchair.  That’s literally all you ever see him do was magic wheelchair shit.  Ask anyone about the character and they can only remember the magic wheelchair.   Which is probably the exact opposite of the intended affect the character was supposed to have on readers.  And that’s why he’s on the list, and because I seriously thought for years that he just had a magic wheelchair.

1. Cable

Art by Dave-Wilkins

I know what you’re thinking Cable’s been a pretty marketable stable of the X-books since his inception.  He’s got inordinately large guns and another mostly passable solo book at the moment.  He’s a gruff hardass strategist type which people always like.  He, um, has a codename that really has nothing to do with anything, but still sounds kind of cool. 

Despite all of that there is one reason that he is atop this list: he represents everything that is bizarre, ludicrous and just plain silly in thirty plus years of X-Men continuity.  To fully understand this, though, we must start at the beginning when the character was just a gleam behind a pair of ruby quartz shades.  Pretty much Cable’s story begins when Mr. Sinister realized that the spawn of Cyclops and Jean Grey would be a ridiculously powerful mutant.  Only problem was that Jean Grey was thought dead.  Sinister does the logical thing and creates a clone, everyone’s favorite, Madelyne Pryor.  Cyclops and the clone have a baby, which is Cable or Nathan Christopher Charles Summers. 

But wait, there’s so much more.  So, Maddy goes nuts, makes a pact with some demons and becomes incredibly powerful in the dark arts.  Which leads to the Inferno cross over.  The main crux of the plan is the sacrifice of the infant Cable.  Good triumphs and infant Cable keeps going on.  After that his telekinetic powers start manifesting in the form of a force field.  Which is good because people really have it in for the baby.  Like a time displaced adult-ish Franklin Richards.  Which was the oft-overlooked Days of Future Present cross over. 

Eventually though, baby Cable gets infected with the techno organic virus and must be taken into the distant future by the Mother Askani.  The Mother Askani being Rachel Summers: the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey from an alternate reality that got hurdled into the distant future.  In the distant future, the newly rechristened Nathan Christopher Summers Dayspring Askani’son is raised by…Jean Grey and Scott Summers who had their minds transferred into the bodies of  Slym and Redd by their time displaced daughter from an alternate reality.  Cyclops and Jean raise him for twelve years, beat Apocalypse and then get transferred back into their own bodies’ moments after being shunted into the future.  After that, Cable goes back in time to do some mercenary shit before leading the New Mutants.

And that is why Cable is the silliest X-Man in history.  And don’t even get me started on his dealings with Nate Grey.  So, yeah I don’t think I need to say anything else on the subject.

In closing there were many characters that I know you felt were unfairly left out.  Changeling had a very silly hat.  Moira MacTaggart is one of the world’s leading Housekeepers/ Geneticists (Go read, pre Uncanny, X-Men 96 she’s their fucking housekeeper.)  X-Treme is frankly just too easy.  Revanche…yeah.  Strong Guy does have a silly name, but is pretty kick ass overall.  But I had to pick my ten and I’m sticking to them.  There you have it.