In 1990, through an act of autoeroticism that can only be described as “blasphemy in multi-colored parachute pants,” Vanilla Ice successfully impregnated himself. The gestation time was only a matter of seconds, and what burst forth from that ill-conceived union of shellacked hair and mismatched shoes was the decade fondly looked back at as either “the ’90s” or “that period between 1989 and the new millennium when we all went insane.”
It was a time of EXTREME. Our chips were EXTREME. Our salsa was EXTREME. Our sodas, our burgers, even our television shows were EXTREME. The Ghostbusters? EXTREME. G.I. Joe? EXTREME. Apparently nothing could count as truly existing unless the blood vessels on your forehead were popping like the possessed collars of a thousand drunken frat boys. Everything was loud, everything was colorful. Subtlety packed a checkered tablecloth, tied it to the end of a stick and hopped a train. It was just … so hype, man. Too damn hype.
Just like every inch of pop culture, comics were not immune to adrenalized insanity. Image was everything, and soon … Image was everything. Marvel and DC both followed suit, and … hoo-boy, you’ve never seen so many gritted teeth and jutting veins. Rob Liefeld and the multitudinous ghosts of Rob Liefeld laid claim to so much newsprint in those early years that our comics needed volume control.
As with all things, there is a point of saturation. A time when the universe at large has to say “we have taken this as far as it can go, it’s time to move on.” Call it the Fred Durst effect. At some point, we, the collective minds of humanity, realized that Limp Bizkit needed to stop being a thing, and so we decided, in one hive-mind burst of pure elemental energy, to forget they ever existed. Even finishing this sentence, I can’t remember what I was talking about when I started it. See? Powerful.
Which brings us to X-Treme.
Now I am not one for mocking comic characters, and I will not be doing that here. I like to appreciate things. So let’s all appreciate something. This character. This Adam-X, the X-Treme. This man who is approximately 90 percent Schick Quattro, he was a blip in comic history. He came, he saw, he extremed, and then mostly vanished save for occasional appearances here and there. He never truly became the next Deadpool, Shatterstar, Gambit or whatever uber-success that they wanted him to be.
But he got a damn action figure.
I mean … that was the ’90s. X-Treme got a figure, and you and I and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch and Kriss Kross all have to respect that.
X-Treme had a costume made out of Wolverine’s throbbing erection, and he could make your blood ignite.
Stop for a minute and think about that. This dude could cut you with his suit of many blades, and then make your blood burn. Could Poochy do that? Hell no. In a time when literally every other character being created had a name that was either Bloodblud, Bluhdlud, Bloodybuddy or Captain Bloodenstein, this guy just went straight to the source and fried you with your own blood.
The action figure itself was decidedly un-X-treme. I mean, it was okay, and featured the standard articulation of the time, but he didn’t even have a sideways baseball cap on. I still kind of dug his figure, though, because duh … he looked like the singer from RattCinderellaWarrantPoison was bitten by a radioactive Ginsu knife. And he had two axes that slid into holsters on his back. I thought that was pretty nifty, even though his axe tossing action feature meant that he couldn’t hold his axes well at all. They were very loose, to facilitate the axe throwing — so Adam dropped his axes a lot. Like, a lot a lot. X-tremely clumsy, you might say. Even taking these pictures he kept dropping them, and I was reminded of how X-tremely angry I got at the damn things.
You might say it made my blood boil.
His bitchin’ braids meant that he had no neckticulation. But I like to think that somebody like X-Treme doesn’t really move his head. He’s so awesome he just waits until the world revolves into view.
But seriously, you guys and gals — in the ’90s, X-treme got an actual action figure. If that doesn’t licky boom boom down, I don’t know anything anymore.
