Poll of the Day > Do the X-Men get paid?

(+) Yeah! (+)

It seems like most of them don't have jobs
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I assume they get free room and board and that's it

Depends on what time period you're talking about.

Early on, the premise was basically that Xavier is straight-up rich, so he's essentially paying for their room/board/tuition at the school and they get a modest allowance for clothes/general life stuff, since constantly risking your life to save the world doesn't leave a lot of time to hold down regular jobs or anything. Later stories don't really touch on the question at all (in spite of it being relatively pertinent), mainly at times when the school is destroyed and the X-Men are mostly operating as a mobile unit or working out of other places (the implication is apparently that they're still able to draw on Xavier's resources - even when Xavier is blatantly missing - but it's never really spelled out).

In newer stories, once the school is rebuilt and reopened, the implication seems to be that at least some of the students are paying tuition (though why anyone would want to pay to send their kids to a school that gets attacked every other week is beyond me) while the X-Men themselves are mostly on the books as teachers (meaning they're getting paid - in spite of the logistical problems inherent in the fact that they're all completely lacking anything resembling educational certifications or even realistic qualifications).

Also, at various times when Xavier's money is completely unavailable (ie, like when the original X-Men formed X-Factor, or when some of them were operating as the Defenders or Champions), it's mentioned that Angel is also pretty damned wealthy, and he's usually willing to put his money behind whatever team he's part of.

Marvel's usual take on things with the X-Men is not worrying about where the money is coming from, because that's sort of beyond the point.

With the Avengers, though, it's been explicitly been spelled out that every member is paid a modest stipend (about enough to live on, nothing extravagant), as well as being allowed free room and board at the Mansion (or Tower, or Compound, or Hydrobase, or whatever depending on where and when we're talking about). It's part of why Spider-Man used to want to join the team (until he realized he'd need to reveal his secret identity to the team to clear government background checks, because the team had at least partial governmental approval and access to government resources and information). THAT money comes from a specific holding company created by Tony Stark, using some of his own family wealth (and the original Avengers' Mansion was literally family property he owned at the time they formed), that exists solely to help fund the Avengers' operational costs and help offset the fact that people on call 24-7 to save the world generally can't hold down regular jobs.

That being said, plenty of Avengers DID hold down jobs of one sort or another (She-Hulk continuing to practice law, Wonder Man acting, Captain America acting as an artist drawing for ad campaigns, Iron Man still running his own company, etc.), if they were able to get jobs that allowed them to deal with constant unexpected absences from work.


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Thank you PO
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No, they get to rest at night knowing they did a good deed such as killing a bad guy without giving them their right to a trial.

no they are communist and kind of a cultist. Those who get out of the school probably pays xavier with their high paying job (sort of like tom crusie and john trovalta). Those who live in the school work for free and pray to be love by the world, but majority are to defected to live among the human civilization, and if they leave they will have to live in a mutant village.
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PKMNsony posted...

No, they get to rest at night knowing they did a good deed such as killing a bad guy without giving them their right to a trial.

Shadow King, Legion, Mister Sinister, Apocalypse... would you even want to give madmen like those a chance to be found innocent, or additional opportunities to escape?

Jury panel members drop dead after Mister Sinister has been declared innocent and released...
Mister Sinister: Silly me, it seems I forgot to disable the neural parasites.
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While not the x-men,

It's been said that the avengers get a stipend from stark but most of them return the checks.

That's some 80s-90s era information though.

Maybe it was similar w the x men?
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Depends on what time period you're talking about.

***PO's Great Wall of Text***

I was also under the impression that Beast had an obscene number of patents under his belt from which he drew a considerable income from, along with a number of other Muir Island Alumni.

also, regarding Spider Man, i was under the impression that during Doc Ock's stint in his body he was flabbergasted at Parker's finances and also set him and Aunt May up for life by filing a great number of profitable patents in his name.

it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they were all tied up in Stark's or Richards' hedge funds, but given that there are almost as many "super scientists" as there are bruisers in the Marvelverse, i'd think there's more than enough funding to go around for most. in fact, I'm kind of with Octavius on this one, there is literally no reason for Parker to be poor at all.

I would also imagine a great deal of wealth finds its way from Wakanda to various hero teams if needed.
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PKMNsony posted...

No, they get to rest at night knowing they did a good deed such as killing a bad guy without giving them their right to a trial.

only the good guys ever die though

and usually for only a week or two

then they get better
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PKMNsony posted...

No, they get to rest at night knowing they did a good deed such as killing a bad guy without giving them their right to a trial.

Almost none of their villains die. If they did, the comics would run out of steam. The few that have died have done so under extraordinary circumstances -- like Sabretooth begging to be killed -- and then came back anyway.
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PKMNsony posted...

No, they get to rest at night knowing they did a good deed such as killing a bad guy without giving them their right to a trial.

Other than Wolverine, the X-Men were pretty heavy with their own "no killing" sort of rule for decades. So much so that most of them had huge problems with Wolverine (Angel actually quit the team specifically because he refused to be on the same team as Wolverine), and towards the end of the 80s the X-Men had a huge moral debate about whether or not they should be killing bad guys (and in spite of deciding that, yes, maybe some bad guys really DO need killing, they still really don't kill anyone for years).

It's not until the 90s and the overall GRIMDARK XTREME taint washed across most comics that the X-Men became more casual about killing, and they've even sort of backed off that just a bit lately.

Probably the most proactively willing to kill the team has ever been was when Cyclops set up a secret black ops X-Force group comprised of all the most killing-est X-Men and led by Wolverine to go murder villains before they become a major threat, and a lot of the other X-Men gave him shit for it after it came out (and even Wolverine was a bit bothered by the idea, which was part of the reason why they wound up on different sides during Schism).


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HellHole_ posted...

only the good guys ever die though

and usually for only a week or two

then they get better

As they've literally said in the comics, "Mutant heaven doesn't have pearly gates, it has revolving doors."


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my favorite comic is the punisher one with the parents making porn with their children.
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I love how bucky and uncle ben are the two people that can't come back from the dead. Well bucky is back. Now we just got to wait for uncle ben return. I know he came back for a couple of issues.
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bucky isn't as integral as uncle ben is to spiderman

uncle ben is peters like, whole mythos and reason for being spiderman

bucky is just a stupid moron
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Ok. They get X amount of dollars for X amount of work.
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HellHole_ posted...

bucky isn't as integral as uncle ben is to spiderman

uncle ben is peters like, whole mythos and reason for being spiderman

bucky is just a stupid moron

Bucky was a huge part of Captain America's mythos for decades. You had Bucky clones, Bucky robots, Bucky impersonators, black guys becoming Bucky until Marvel decided it was racist. It never ended.
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yeah but bucky isn't integral to captain america being captain america

captain america was committed to being cap before the timeskip

meanwhile peter was only dabbling in being a superhero until ben died, and that's when he really took off with it and took it seriously

i mean, everyone knows the line, right? with great power comes great responsibility

what does bucky have?

"oh, cap, sup dude, can i borrow that porn mag?" idk
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I was actually surprised they didn't eventually make an alternate reality Uncle Ben into a Villian eventually, they did just about every other freaking thing you can imagine in the spiderman comics, but not that.
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wolfy42 posted...

I was actually surprised they didn't eventually make an alternate reality Uncle Ben into a Villian eventually, they did just about every other freaking thing you can imagine in the spiderman comics, but not that.

Uncle Ben becomes Spiderman after Peter is horribly murdered.
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ernieforss posted...

I love how bucky and uncle ben are the two people that can't come back from the dead. Well bucky is back. Now we just got to wait for uncle ben return. I know he came back for a couple of issues.

The old axiom in comics used to be "No one stays dead in comics except Uncle Ben, Bucky, and Jason Todd."

And then two of those three came back.

It's always funny when, every few years or so, both Marvel and DC go through a phase where they're like, no, we have to make death meaningful again, and they basically tell all their writers they're not allowed to bring anyone back any more. And that mandate usually lasts about 2-3 years before they drop it and go back to the status quo of constant resurrections and returns.

DC was adamant that "death is final now!" in the aftermath of Blackest Night, and that lasted until the New 52 reboot. And Marvel was pretty firm on the "no bringing anyone back!" rule back in the early 2000s (which pissed off Joss Whedon at one point), but they pretty much gave up after Decimation/Civil War.

The irony is, a lot of that recent trend of bringing everyone back from the dead started with Jean Grey, and she's probably the one character who's actually STAYED dead for the last decade or so (well, at least until they introduced her time-displaced past self into the mix).



wolfy42 posted...

I was actually surprised they didn't eventually make an alternate reality Uncle Ben into a Villian eventually, they did just about every other freaking thing you can imagine in the spiderman comics, but not that.

Ben is apparently moral and upstanding in every conceivable universe he exists in. But there were at least a couple of What If? comics where he survived but Aunt May died (or they both survived) where Spider-Man tended to turn out worse.

The implication being that it isn't just Ben's advice or paternal influence that gives Spider-Man his moral center, but his literal death. Spider-Man without a dead Uncle Ben isn't Spider-Man.



dragon504 posted...

Uncle Ben becomes Spiderman after Peter is horribly murdered.

Hey, it worked for Batman. Alternate universe Thomas Wayne who becomes Punisher-Batman after Bruce dies in Crime Alley was pretty cool.


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1. Is Professor Xavier's school accredited? Or is it a scam?
2. What is his net worth?
3. Can he get a boner without using his powers?
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TheCyborgNinja posted...

1. Is Professor Xavier's school accredited? Or is it a scam?
2. What is his net worth?
3. Can he get a boner without using his powers?

To be fair, he's currently dead, so the answers to those questions are:

1) He doesn't have a school.

2) Zero.

3) No.


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Okay, let's pretend it's the movie canon.
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TheCyborgNinja posted...

Okay, let's pretend it's the movie canon.

If we're calling Logan canon, then literally nothing about that post is different.
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oh, xavier died again?

he'll be back in a few movies as per usual
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Comics are as awesome as they are horrible.
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TheCyborgNinja posted...

Comics are horrible.

+1

Wolverine worked as a lumberjack.
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