Jesus is not the only Messiah whose resurrection has been celebrated in recent weeks. Many superhero comic book fans are looking forward to X-Men: Second Coming #1, which begins a new chapter in the recent apocalyptic travails of the X-Men.

For those of you who have never cracked a comic, seen one of the movies or learned about the fan-boy zeitgeist through osmosis, the X-Men are evolved humans who have mutant abilities. And over the last decade the mutant community has hit some hard times. Writer Grant Morrison got a kick out of a genocidal plot that killed millions of mutants; the X-Men disbanded at one point; and currently the only ray of hope is a young girl with the shockingly original name of Hope.

Mutants will be saved, of course, because the X-Men is an incredibly successful franchise.  But this won't be the last such narrative in comics: stories about cultures on the edge of ruin saved by messiahs are perennially popular.

Messiahs are a common theme in comic books. Superhero comic creators frequently play with the Christ allegory, and some comics blur the line between Messiah and Anti-Christ. Perhaps no comic writer does this more frequently than Mark Millar, author of Wanted (adapted into a film with Angelina Jolie), and Kick-Ass, coming soon to a theater near you. Millar's brilliant Superman: Red Son imagines that Superman had landed in Russia instead of Kansas and illustrates the improbability of universal saviors. Even more provocative is his comic book miniseries American Jesus, which illustrates how one person's Messiah can easily be another person's Anti-Christ.

But that's not news to us in today's political culture. While the Messiah shine has fallen off Barack Obama and more people are coming to terms with him as a moderate, others are still looking for messiahs on the Right (Sarah Palin) and Far Right (David Brian Stone, aka Captain Hutaree) who will cast out evil from the nation. Messiahs can't be moderate; they have to be representatives of a pure ideology. This means that messiahs are not complex creatures and they do not entertain compromise.

Scholars and journalists who keep an eye on the interplay between popular and political culture need to be willing to press politicians on their use of elements of the Messiah narrative. That storyline is entertaining in comic books, but unworkable and potentially dangerous in the real world.

Rebecca Wanzo is an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at the Ohio State University. Her first book, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, looks at how citizens frame stories about suffering to make their claims intelligible to the state. Her current book project, The Melancholic Patriot, examines representations of African American citizenship in comic art.