But the X-Men had a much more specific mandate. Sometimes they would deal with extraterrestrials -- even "street level" folk like Spider-Man and Daredevil had done that -- but it was more in the nature of "extracurricular activity". Their main job was to deal with mutants, some good, some bad.

Once the All New, All Different X-Men were launched, things started to get a bit vague. Chris and Dave went to all sorts of places that, in the clarity of hindsight, they probably should not have. (Leprechauns?) And certainly mixing in aliens, and even having Cyclops' father revealed as a swashbuckling space pirate. . .

Well, a moment ago I referred to "street level" characters, and really that's what the X-Men are. The threats they face are about as close to home as it's possible to get -- recall the tag line I came up with in "Days of Future Past", "It's 1984 - Do You Know What Your Children Are?" When I was on the book, I tried to keep the stories focused as much as possible on mutants. How successful I was, I leave to your consideration!

••

Don't get me started! As I have complained, moaned, whined and ranted too many times, all of that sprang from a single panel! A single panel in which Chris scuttled my carefully plotted storyline, and robbed the X-Men of the clean, clear WIN I was so sure I had given them.

(In the brief moment I was scripting the X-Books, when marketing ordered the creation of Bishop, the artists, who were the ones really running the show, wanted him to be from yet another alternate timeline. Oh, please! I said. I hate what Chris did to create it, but can't we stick with the alternate timeline we already have?" And we did.)

••

The corruption of meaning might be older than that! I first encountered the word/name when I started reading the poems of Robert Service, in my middle teens. In "The Ballad of the Iceworm Cocktail", the opening verses run like so:

To Dawson Town came Percy Brown from London on the Thames.
A pane of glass was in his eye, and stockings on his stems.
Upon the shoulder of his coat a leather pad he wore,
To rest his deadly rifle when it wasn't seeking gore;
The which it must have often been, for Major Percy Brown,
According to his story was a hunter of renown,
Who in the Murrumbidgee wilds had stalked the kangaroo
And killed the cassowary on the plains of Timbuctoo.
And now the Arctic fox he meant to follow to its lair,
And it was also his intent to beard the Artic hare...
Which facts concerning Major Brown I merely tell because
I fain would have you know him for the Nimrod that he was.

Service there uses the term sarcastically, and being unfamiliar with it, for a long time I thought it was a term of disparagement.

What impresses me, assuming what I've read is correct, is that the use of the name as an insult, seems to have come from uneducated people watching Bugs Bunny.

***

Yup.  Unfortunately, Looney Tunes was the first place I heard the word used.  Never crossed my mind again until I got into aerospace and started studying the history of the De Havilland Comet jetliner.

Madlyne Prior by Bowen Studios.

That's pretty much everything that went wrong with the X-Men summed up in one statue!