The geek shall inherit the earth

Out of the raging media storm, where 10 billion images per second vie for attention with sparklingly superior resolution, come the exaggerated snarls and airbrushed gazes of the X-Men. It's hard to miss them as a multi-million dollar marketing tsunami strikes the UK. The mutants are taking over and this time they have enough money to make you notice.

The superheroes arrive on cinema screens and in the public consciousness, however, at a time when the comic books that created them are struggling against extinction. While manga and coffee-table graphic novels enjoy widespread acceptance in Japan and the rest of Europe, the media-illiterate commentators of Britain and the USA, waxing lyrical over the latest Lara Croft adventure, or seeking depth in an East-Enders episode, persistently dismiss the work of comics creators as irrelevant and childish.

I've spent the past 15 years making up best-selling stories for DC and Marvel comics, the publishers of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and the X-Men. From corporate franchise properties like Judge Dredd and the Justice League of America to personal and creator-owned work like Kill Your Boyfriend and The Invisibles, I've been able to write any kind of story I ever wanted to and have it illustrated by masters of pop art.

I've watched with interest the stealthy but none the less grand theft of style and content from my beloved comic book medium, ideas magpied into the mainstream so fast that everything I see on crap TV or in the new action movies is something I previously read in a much better comic. But there's a last-ditch rescue at work here as a great American art form enters a strange and possibly life-saving relation-ship with Hollywood.

Forget the celebrated failures - Tank Girl, Howard the Duck, The Phantom. As more and more graphic fiction migrates onto the screen, the beleaguered comics deserve, at the very least, an acknowledgement of their place at the root of expanding pop culture and recognition for their over-whelming contributions to the common visual language of the media.

Bryan Singer's ripped-back film adaptation proves that the story behind almost 40 years of accumulated superhero soap opera remains simple and effective. The X-Men are representatives of a posthuman species, superior to our sapiens, on the next rung up the evolutionary ladder. They are beautiful, misunderstood super-monsters banding together in cool neo-Fascist uniforms to fight against our ignorance for a better tomorrow.

Where humankind is directionless, existential, post-ironic, the X-Men are focused, united in noble intent and here to make the world a better place. They are, in short, the perfect antidote to a 20th-century legacy of social disintegration, neurosis and fragmentation.

Consider also the success of Buffy, the Crow, Angel, Blade, Harry Potter and the terrorists of The Matrix. An obvious question springs to mind. Why are superheroes suddenly so popular again?

Like their mutant heroes, the scorned and rejected creators and fans of the comics are back in the spotlight for another 15 minutes. Peek below the waterline of the X-Men phenomenon and you'll find a vast, submerged culture, a colourful parallel world still thriving beyond the horizon of acceptability. This is the radiation of mad concepts which the entertainment and advertising giants are placing at the forefront of a corporate techno-utopian dream.

Several cloned sheep, a few embryo harvests and a sequenced human genome into the new century and the class geeks are beginning to look like the only reliable guides to this overlit, super-accelerated Matrix simulation we are all learning to live in.