Mortimer Toynbee— or Toad, as most of us know him, was never one of my favorite villains in the X-Men universe. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to draw a cute fan-art of him because he’s an X-Men staple, and when written / drawn well, he can be a pretty cool addition to the wide wonderful super mutant world. There’s a gooey nudie version on my site
Anti-Heroes.net in the Fan-Boy section. Here’s the thumbnail!
The thing about him is, I like different aspects of him from different X-Men media. Like, I like the retooling of his powers in X-Men the first motion picture, his look and personality in X-Men Evolution, and his voice actor in Pryde of the X-Men. The fact that so many different perfectly valid instances of this one character exist got me to thinking about one of my main gripes with the franchise in general.
My problem is and has always been the inconsistency with different instances of the same character. I used to go on these huge rants about how goth Rogue in X-Men Evolution is wrong, or how non-speaking Storn in Wolverine and the X-Men is wrong, or how broken-english, slow-acting Colossus in every media that’s not the comics is wrong.
I’ve now come to finally realize that depending on the interpreter, the characters in the series can be written and drawn ANY FRIKKIN’ WAY THEY WANT. Nowadays there is no one correct way to interpret X-Men. They can be as far away from their original iteration as possible and it’s PERFECTLY OKAY.
Wolverine can be the level-headed leader. Cyclops can be the loose cannon. Emma can be the mom. Storm can… not exist. You can’t get mad anymore– the characters are more like… guidelines. You can’t say “Oh, Nightcrawler would never do that.”
I know this may seem kinda obvious to some of you but I was kinda hung-up on what I saw as bad interpretations of my favorite comic series– even modern issues of the comic series itself. Am I over it? Nah– but I think I much better understand why it’s happened now. And to cope, I’ll just continue to draw them all gay with drippy dicks.
