A Marvel? Maybe

Ryan Zacchio can hardly contain his excitement when he talks about the X-Men.

The 15-year-old Huntington, N.Y., resident gushes when he describes the Marvel Comics world of Professor Charles Xavier and his band of good mutants, who fight to protect the humans who shun them. He can’t help but grin when imagining what it will be like seeing the ferocious Wolverine, with his miraculous healing powers and lethal admantium claws, come to life Friday in “X-Men.”

An X-Men fan since he was 7, it’s easy to understand Zacchio’s excitement. After all, he’s been waiting for this movie more than half his life.

“I definitely want to go see it when it first comes out,” he said. “I’m just such a big fan. I just love X-Men. It’s been with me a long time.”

Zacchio isn’t alone. Just log on to any Internet search engine, type in “X-Men” and then watch the flood of sites devoted to those uncanny mutants. Read the ranting of rabid fans, who worry that Hollywood, and more specifically director Bryan Singer (of “The Usual Suspects” fame), will destroy the characters they’ve been following since the Stan Lee-created comic debuted in 1963. (X-Men has numerous spinoff titles and is the biggest-selling comic book property of all time, with worldwide sales of more than $400 million.)

For instance, complaints have already been aired via the Internet about Wolverine losing his mask for the film, and fans worry that Hugh Jackman, an Australian actor whose previous credits include stage musicals, won’t be able to summon the ferocity the Wolverine role demands. Singer, who admits he didn’t know a lot about X-Men when he signed on to direct the film, surrounded himself with experts in hopes of avoiding mistakes an X-Men devotee would spot. Regardless, fans say Singer is in a tough position.

“It’s like ‘Star Wars: Episode I.’ The hype is just huge,” said 19-year-old Paul Rovinsky, of Huntington Station, N.Y., who has been an X-Men fan for eight years. “Unless they really pull this one off, it’s going to be a letdown for a lot of people.”

Stephen Boomgaard, 28, who started reading X-Men nearly 20 years ago and now works at Collector’s Kingdom comic shop in Huntington Station, said the scrutiny is inevitable. “If there’s anything different from regular X-Men continuity, I’m sure people will be complaining,” said Boomgaard. “But as long as it’s a good movie, people will like it and, hopefully, they’ll forget the differences.”

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So what inspires such devotion, which has made X-Men (aside from Spider-Man) probably Marvel’s most popular comic?

“There are a lot of different characters that people can relate to,” said Mike Bradley, 33, owner of Collector’s Kingdom. “A lot of the X-Men fans who come into the shop, and friends of mine, will talk about the book but will always identify with one of the characters. And there’s a lot of female characters in the book as well as male characters, so it’s positive role models all around.”

Boomgaard agrees but said it goes deeper than that. “Society’s against them. . . . When you’re a teenager, you feel like everybody’s against you at one point or another.”

The outcast theme has long been central to the X-Men story line and continues in the movie. Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) runs a secret school where he trains mutants to use their powers to defend humankind from the evil mutants, led by Magneto (Ian McKellen), who believes peaceful coexistence with humans is impossible and is intent on taking over the world.

Unlike traditional comics, in which heroes are viewed almost as godlike, the mutants more often than not are feared by humans. There’s even a grandstanding senator who stirs up hatred of mutants and wants to register them all with the government. Born in the ‘60s, X-Men is essentially a civil rights tale: a fairly weighty issue for the world of comics, which have often been viewed as kids’ entertainment.

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That’s part of the appeal, Bradley said, telling the stories of “people who are different. That could be anybody. They have powers above the normal person, but in a way, it is their handicap because they want to be viewed as normal.”

Despite such deeper themes, when it comes right down to it, most fans admit they would simply be happy with an exciting story that’s well told and features some cool special effects. And, in years past, a lot of comic book movies have failed to deliver the goods. Marvel has had a particularly bad run of luck.

There was the “Howard the Duck” debacle, cheesy versions of “The Punisher” and “Captain America,” and a version of “The Fantastic Four” that was never even released. (Devoted fans pass around bootleg copies.)

Bill Thatner, 35, who works at Fourth World Comics in Smithtown, said that sometimes comic book stories simply don’t translate well to the big screen.

“The fact is, movies are movies and comics are comics,” said Thatner, who lives in Patchogue and has been an X-Men fan for about 20 years. “On a comic book page, a colorful spandex costume, somebody dodging bullets, using these crazy powers, it works. There’s a good suspension of disbelief. You can get away with things on a comic page that you can’t do in a movie. You take a strapping male figure, or female figure, and put color on them, OK, that’s a superheroic figure in spandex. You do that with someone in a movie, you get Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘Running Man,’ a big guy that looks silly.”

So will the screen versions of the X-Men look like a bunch of ordinary people dressed up in goofy costumes, or will they look like honest-to-goodness superheroes and live up to true fans’ expectations?

Ryan Zacchio is betting on the latter. “Because of the computer technology we now have, it’s probably going to be very good,” he said. “I think it will do very good box office wise. . . . Even the newest people who’ve never even heard of it and are going to see it will get fascinated by it.”