I’m going to go ahead and blame io9 for firing up the nostalgia centers of my brain and derailing my morning productivity.

In Cyriaque Lamar’s post, The 5 most tear-jerking X-Men deaths, he twice references a relatively obscure Uncanny X-Men Annual from 1993 that was one of my absolute most treasured possessions (age 7-15).

I was a huge X-Men fan. I didn’t own a lot of my own comics (This beautiful building housed the only comic shop for 100 miles or so), but I was obsessed with the X-Men TV show on Fox and read every print page my friends/cousins had.

Uncanny X-Men Annual #17 was of a markedly different tone from the cartoon or the bound reprints of ‘60s X-Men I convinced my parents to buy when we went to Media Play. Terminal illness, unrequited (and viciously manipulative) love, forced hallucinations, acid fantasies, time travel, rogue cop vengance and Mastermind’s disturbingly AIDS-style death made for a shock to my young system, and I dug it. I dug it hard.

Beyond storytelling, the art was heavily stylized (credited to Jason Pearson), in a way I hadn’t seen in comics before. Not a lot of shading with dark, bold colors. It was incredible.

The most important part, in hindsight, was the fact that this one issue allowed me to claim a favorite Marvel character that I could almost guarantee no one else would even know about: The X-Cutioner.

This rogue FBI agent loaded himself up with enough Shi'ar, Z'nox and Sentinel armor and weapons to make Iron Man look like a Model T and used it to fulfill a pretty broad goal: Kill all mutants that have killed anyone.

He appeared as such a small blip in the huge Marvel universe that claiming him was a point of elite pride in my nerdy little circle. Looking back, it was probably a pretty important step on my long path of trying to out-niche everyone in every possible genre. It’s a habit I relished in for years before I witnessed other out-nichers in action and realized how irritating those people can be to deal with from the outside.

One of the major efforts of my adult life has been to make myself generally less insufferable. I’ve tried to embraced pop in every aspect of culture and I feel like I’ve been pretty successful.

But every couple of years, something pops up that reminds me of one of the hundreds of long car trips where I pored over that comic in the back seat, and I suddenly swell with esoteric, youthful pride. Increasingly, though, that pride is quickly degrading into “Damn, I’m getting old.” 1993 was a long damn time ago.