Not Wheelchair Accessible

 

This Professor Charles Xavier.

This is his school for, “Gifted Youngsters.”

Charles Xavier has been crippled for most of his adult life and has a net worth of millions, if not billions. His School for Gifted Youngsters has been modified to include an underground hanger that exits thought a fold-away tennis court, or alternatively through a waterfall. The facilities themselves have been destroyed and rebuilt numerous times. At no point has there ever been a wheelchair ramp. There are elevators, which can take him into the sub-basement where he houses Cerebro, but he can’t get up the front steps.

Similarly, he’s often found to be addressing the public, but while he may take the Blackbird on covert missions, he’s unlikely to fly it out to meet with the U.N., as it’s highly classified and illegal. He doesn’t have a handicap van.

How does he get around then? Does he have Collossus carry him around everywhere? For a long time in the 90’s he had a hoverchair made with Shi’ar technology.

Look how bulky that thing is. That’s like driving an electric car. Doors would have to be at least 4’ wide for that to squeeze through. Also, when people see a school teacher in a hover chair, they’ll start to ask questions like, “Where’d he get a hover chair?” and, “How do I get a hover chair?” Professor X has technology that will help cripples the world over, and he’s not sharing it. Professor X is a dick.

The X-Men are supposed to be a group of misfits, and Professor X’s wheelchair bound status is supposed to invoke sympathy in the reader. No one in the world is less inconvenienced by their disability than Professor X. Cyclops, for instance, can’t take off his ruby-lens glasses or he’ll destroy the ones he loves. Angel in considered a freak because of his wings. Beast tries to cure his gorilla-like condition and instead turns himself blue and hairy. Jean Grey is a woman. Professor X is a multi-millionaire with his own person army of super heroes who lives in a mansion, fucks space aliens, and can control anyone’s mind to make them believe he has hair. On top of that, he’s regained his ability to walk more times than he’s died and come back to life, which he’s also done. There’s a lot of soap opera drama in the X-men, and the Professor regaining the use of his legs was supposed to be a jaw-drop moment back in the day. It’s happened about five or six times over the years, though, so it’s gotten a bit ridiculous. I think in the space of time the only other famous wheelchair-bound comic book character lost her ability to walk and regained it, Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl, a.k.a. Oracle, he was able to walk again about four times. It makes sense when you consider he lives in a universe where people have the super power to heal anything, like Elixir and about twenty other X-Men. What doesn’t make sense is how he keeps losing the ability to walk again. You can only drop boulders on someone’s spinal column so many times.