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It's sad to think it needs "explaining". The concept Stan Lee came up with was so simple, so clear, so easy to explain. Mutants are people born with an "extra" ability. Wings. Eyebeams. Ape-like qualites. This served the book for sixty plus issues, tho it was, to be sure, never a chart-buster.

Then it went away, and when it came back there were already inklings of what was about to go wrong. We had Storm, whose vaguely defined power to "control the weather" soon became as fluid as Green Lantern's power ring, basically serving her in whatever form she needed. (Does warping the unstable molecules of her costume into an evening gown really constitute "controlling the weather"?) There was Nightcrawler, whose list of powers was as long as this tail, and growing. And pretty soon the idea of just who or what constituted a mutant became so garbled that I really did get a letter to FANTASTIC FOUR from a fan who described them as his "favorite mutants". "Mutant" and "super-powered being" had become interchangable.

sigh

Didn't help when the book itself started shifting and changing into whatever Chris (and later writers) wanted it to be. It's a book about magic! It's a space-faring title. It's about time-travelers from the future! It's about alternate timelines (just to make sure the X-Men never, ever, ever WIN. If they win here, it just means they lost over there.)

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And it was only thru my intervention -- I was scripting over Jim and Whilce's "plots" -- that Bishop was not from a different "alternate future"! That was how he was presented to me, and I said "Oh, come on! We already have one incredibly tangled thread coming out of an existing 'alternate futue'! Do we really want to add another one?"

Puts me in mind of the fans who complained when I suggested -- in interviews, never overtly in the books themselves -- that for Superman's powers to work as they do, at least some of them would have to be psi. I was scolded for trying to make Superman too "realistic".

I, of course, have been bitching about this for a long time. As more and more fans come into the business, and, more importantly, as fewer and fewer of the Old Guard remain to show them how to do it right, increasingly we see the "professional" comics turning into what amounts to little more than fanzines --- and fanzines have always been the domain of those "story ideas" that should never, ever get into the real books. Only now they do.

And a lot of that is all about explaining everything. When I have encountered fans who object to some explanation of a point I have offered in one of my stories, it is almost always from the stance that that would not be the explanation they would have offered (which is usually far more complicated). So, it is not sufficient that Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider an a confluence of elements happened to be just right for him (and we would like to think him alone) to get the abilities of the spider transfered into him by the radioactive venom. There has to be more to it. Like a meta-gene. Or like him being already a mutant.

Not, in other words, just a regular guy. So many fans don't want the characters to be "regular guys". They, the fans, are themselves "regular guys", after all, and they know that if a radioactive spider bit them, they would not get any powers out of it.

On the other hand, they love the "dark" characters, like Wolverine or the Punisher, who, they know in their hearts, behave how they, the fans, would behave if they had the powers or the weaponry.