In this week's issue of Marvel Comics' Uncanny X-Force series, written by Rick Remender and drawn by Jerome Opena, I was pleased to come across the panel above in which the character Dark Beast (the evil doppelganger of our world's Hank "Beast" McCoy--a loooong story) quotes a few lines from the Robert Burns poem "To A Mouse". Not only does Remender feed Dark beast some choice Burns' lines, but also gives the equally literary Archangel (our universe's Warren "Angel" Worthington who is now evil--an even longer story) to offer a mutant twist to Steinbeck's use of some select words as the title for his novel Of Mice and Men.
While it is not infrequent for me to come across these sorts of literary allusions, I always feel a sense of vindication as to their literary worthiness when I do. I look forward to sharing this with my high school students when we read the novel this school year, although I realize that 90% of them have no idea who X-Force is other than to naturally associate it with the vastly inferior movie versions of the same characters.
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