SPIDER-MAN

Peter Parker has held some strange jobs, but the strangest came with a reference from a dead man. Before his death, Wolverine had grown convinced that one of the students at the Jean Grey School was a mole working for an enemy of the X-Men — and that no mutant could investigate without the telepaths, loyalties and family ties of the school clouding the answer. So Logan's last request sent in the one hero with no X-gene, no history in the house, and no idea which teenager he was supposed to be watching.

In Spider-Man & the X-Men #1 (2014), by Elliott Kalan and Marco Failla, Spider-Man arrived on staff as the school's new guidance counsellor, assigned a hand-picked 'Special Class' drawn from the students Logan had flagged: Rockslide, Hellion, Glob Herman, Shark-Girl, Eye-Boy, Ernst and No-Girl. The faculty — Storm at their head — were openly baffled that a non-mutant who would not even unmask had been handed their most difficult kids on the word of a man no longer alive to explain himself.

The counselling lasted about one field trip. A class outing to the museum ended with the entire group kidnapped by Sauron and Stegron the Dinosaur Man, a villain pairing sixty-five million years in the making, which meant Spider-Man's first lesson plan became an extraction. Underneath the slapstick, the assignment stayed deadly serious: somewhere in his register of misfits sat a traitor, and the only teacher they had was the one person in the building who did not know it could not possibly be him.