Includes index.

Introduction: You are about to embark on an X-perience with the strangest heroes of all? -- X1-origins : the X-factor in the existential -- The lure of the normal : who wouldn't want to be a mutant? / Patrick Hopkins -- Amnesia, personal identity, and the many lives of wolverine / Jason Southworth -- Is suicide always moral : Jean Grey, Kant, and the dark Phoenix saga / Mark D. White -- X-istential x-men : Jews, supermen, and the literature of struggle / Jesse Kavaldo -- X2-evolution : consciousness, conscience, and cure -- Mad genetics : the sinister side of biological mastery / Andrew Burnett -- Layla Miller knows stuff : how a butterfly can shoulder the world / George A. Dunn -- X-women and X-istence / Rebecca Housel -- Mutant rights, torture and X-perimentation / Cynthia McWilliams -- When you know you're just a comic book character : deadpool / Joseph J. Darowski -- X3-united : human ethics and mutant morality in the X-verse -- Magneto, mutation, and morality / Richard Davis -- Professor X wants you / Christopher Robichaud -- Dirty hands and dirty minds : the ethics of mindreading and mindwriting / Andrew Terjesen -- The mutant cure or social change : debating disability / Ramona Ilea -- Mutants and the metaphysics of race / Jeremy Pierce -- X4-the last stand : war, technology, death, and mutant-kind -- Mutant phenomonology / J. Jeremy Wisnewski -- War and peace, power and faith / Katherine E. Kirby -- High-tech mythology in X-men / George Teschner.