Luck Be a Mutant Tonight—The Strange Lives of the X-Men’s Longshot

There are some people who are just born seemingly lucky.

You know the type.

It’s the guy who meanders through life without a plan, but somehow manages to fall into money, or be at the right place at the right time when a job offer comes along, or maybe accidentally walks into Scarlett Johansson’s dressing room and instead of her throwing a rock or filing a restraining order like that time I did that, she casually invites him in for drinks.

Like I said, you probably know the type.  And hate him.  Mostly out of jealousy.  It’s understandable.  But, in reality, luck is really just an illusion at best, something we can’t really control no matter how many rabbit feet or boxes of General Mills cereals with stereotypical ethnic cartoons on them we carry around.

However, for the sometimes X-Man known as Longshot, lucky isn’t merely a misleading adjective, but rather a part of his very being.

For example, the four fingered alien guy got more women than the Playboy Mansion and somehow never had to ditch the mullet.

First appearing in his own miniseries by creators Ann Nocenti and Arthur Adams in 1985, the man known only as Longshot was immediately a mystery, a person on the run who had no idea exactly what he was running from, and knowing only as much about himself as we the readers did.