[Insert Your Joke Here]: Charting the X-men Nookiescape

I've often heard the claim that comic books are simply soap operas for teenage boys. This is, of course, ridiculous. Comic books aren't about complex romantic relationships tempered with unrealistic domestic entanglements, foreign espionage and the intricacies of a dynamic hospital staff.

Everyone knows that comic books are really about escapist wish fulfillment for middle aged man children, women with anatomically impossible gifts, and ultra violent psychopaths with dubious qualifications as foster parents. Oh, and complex romantic relationships tempered with unrealistic domestic entanglements and foreign espionage. None of that hospital crap though.

The romance connections between comic book characters is something that every writer treats differently. Some make it a focus of character motivation and growth, and others treat it with a distance and disdain that illustrates how little experience they have with it themselves.

It's never really been questioned that there is a certain amount of romantic entanglement between some characters. What I'd never really realized before is simple how much of it there is. Not until I saw this obsessively detailed chart of the romantic connections between X-man characters.

Two things become immediately clear. First, some people have a lot of spare time. This kind of detailed rendering of social connections, including different rankings for activities from flirtation to dating, to marriage, requires some real dedication to your craft. Your craft presumably being unhealthy voyeurism of comic book characters.

Secondly, Wolverine is a veritable nexus of Getting Some. Guys like Wolverine is why your work place has to have a regulation on fraternization. Apparently the ladies like a fellow who appears to stuff his t-shirts with shag carpet and might accidentally kill them during one of his frequent fevered nightmares.

After giving this chart a couple of look overs, my favorite part has to be the complexity. There are few normal relationships in the X-men. There are so many complications that the chart is difficult to make any sense of. My favorite part is that a special dotted line had to be added to indicate a relationship with someone from an alternate reality, because it happens so frequently.

X-Men Universe Relationship Map [UncannyXmen.net]