The X.C.?

This article is hokey and melodramatic in all the best (?) fanboy ways, but I love the news that O.C./Gossip Girl/Chuck auteur Josh Schwartz will be adapting X-Men First Class for the big screen. Written by Jeff Parker and illustrated by Roger Cruz and Colleen Coover, among others, this was easily the best X-book on the market until its untimely cancellation this year. Set in the present but focusing on the original X-team of Beast, Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman and Angel when they are just starting at Xavier's school for gifted mutants, the book used this time warp concept to return to an earlier, funnier, more self-reflexive period in Marvel's history, when they weren't afraid of standalone stories, self-parodic asides and goofy back-up features. Cruz and Coover's beautifully cartoonish art enhanced this feel of old-school fun, and the whole project was a marvelous riposte to the overwrought melodrama that usually infects the X-books (their well-intentioned but heavy-handed tales of prejudice always reminded me of Oz's line on Buffy: "That's great, Larry-- you've really mastered the single entendre").

This kind of self-aware fun makes Schwartz the perfect screenwriter for the project. Let's just hope there's a place for Adam Brody as the young Beast...

(h/t to Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin for the link).