I just finished rewatching X-Men: First Class. It’s not a film without issue, as I’ve discussed elsewhere*, but it is still rather good in many ways, and it reminded me of the awesomeness of Professor X. The most unusual aspect of his awesomeness doesn’t occur until late on in the film (spoiler alert?), but as I just finished watching it, the end is foremost in my mind.

I’m talking about how Charles Xavier is a badass in a wheelchair.

**

And it’s not the central facet of his character, being in a wheelchair. He’s a badass who happens to be in a wheelchair (in part because he was badass to begin with), not a wheelchair bound dude who has been made special because disability is a Super Special Topic, or because he has to be Super Duper Awesome for us to care about him when he’s in a wheelchair. That’s pretty awesome.

I was trying to think of other badasses in wheelchairs, and I am coming up pretty short. There’s Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker/Susannah Dean of course:

She’s undeniably badass, and I’m not entirely convinced she couldn’t take Professor X in a fight, superpowers or no superpowers. O’course, I’m fairly sure there are some who resent the character as a typical example of the Stephen King Super Duper Minorities Show, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Yes, she’s black AND disabled AND mentally ill AND a she, but there are precious few positive badass examples of any of those categories in literature.

My first real awareness of the civil rights movement came from reading of Odetta’s personal experiences and powerful relation to the emotion behind Rosa Parks’ refusal to move from the ‘white only’ section of the bus in 1955. Whilst I’m not convinced of the medical accuracy of the depiction of her multiple personality disorder, as someone with experience of mental illness I appreciate the hell out of its presentation as something more than a dark malevolence seeping at the edges of ‘normality’. She’s takes charge of herself regardless of and in response to her mental illness; she is not rendered a poor, helpless thing by it; she is not left dependent on the care of others. And as a woman I damn well appreciate having such a badass role-model, in more words than I can express. Is it overkill that she be disabled, too? Or is that just another way of dismissing one of the precious positive examples in literature that those who have suffered marginalisation can identify with?

OK, so I guess I do think that Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker/Susannah Dean is another badass wheelchair user, but after that I’m running low. Professor X is not the only disabled superhero - there’s Daredevil, of course - but for a subject that actively invites discussion of what it is to be ‘differently abled’ (i.e. with abilities deviating from the norm, not as a patronising attempt to avoid use of the (also admittedly awkward) term ‘disabled’) there do seem to be strikingly few. And even if I’m wrong about that, Professor X has still got to be the most striking, and probably earliest. He’s awesome.

I’d be interested in hearing about other examples of disabled superheroes, especially pre-Xavier. But in the meantime, I’m just going to celebrate the sheer epic levels of win embodied by his character.

*OK, there’s actually a lot of squee in that review, and if I were writing it now I might have dared more criticism than I did at the time, but the major points are highlighted.

** As far as I can tell there are NO online images of James McAvoy in Professor X’s wheelchair, as he is at the end of X-Men: First Class. I tried to get a screengrab, but the Powers That Be seem to have gone to extreme lengths to make duplication of any images from the film (even stills, which was all I was after) impossible. For this reason, I am unable to include an image of the young Professor as an icon of badassery. Instead, I offer you the below, which was merely the most inexplicable (if delightful) of the images I dredged up on searching for ‘James McAvoy wheelchair’ or ‘Professor X wheelchair’ and so forth: