The X-Men #1

"The X-Men"
Cover date:  September 1963

Written by:  Stan Lee

Drawn by:  Jack Kirby

Inked by:  Paul Reinman

Lettered by:  S. Rosen

“And now, prepare yourself for one of the most exciting reading experiences of your life! For you are about to enter the fascinating, unpredictable world of... THE X-MEN!”

So it all starts here in 1963. The X-Men were a concept created by Stan Lee in his role as Marvel's primary ideas man and writer of the 1960's. He said that he decided that they were born with their powers because it was starting to be difficult to craft an origin for every superhero that he created. So he invented “mutants.” What came about because of laziness in setting up an origin for each super power inadvertently created a very fertile premise of people born “different”. Not much of that is evidenced here, and it may not have even been a solid thought in Lee's mind, but it would set up a deeper concept in the book and the characters that was much more relate-able to readers in a sociopolitical way than just connecting with the personalities of the characters themselves, the way other heroes such as Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, etc., were.

Again, not much of that is found in the issue itself. There is a brief mention by Professor X that he formed his school out of a desire to protect the world from evil mutants and that he feared that normal humans would not accept mutants, but it almost seems like a throwaway line. After all, there's not much difference between mutants as presented in this book and other heroes celebrated by the public such as, again, Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, or any of the Avengers who debuted as a team simultaneously with the X-Men. Very little to set up the “protecting a world that fears and hates them” angle that has been a mantra for the concept at times over the years. It is, however, a pretty brilliant throwaway line that will pay creative dividends down the line. The man was a genius: even his afterthoughts are worth mining for almost 50 years worth of stories.

On to the issue itself.

We open with two panels of Professor Charles Xavier sitting quietly in what is described as the “main study” of his Westchester county private school. It turns out that the main study doubles as the Danger Room (though I don't believe it's explicitly named in this issue) with a lot of sub-standard Kirby-tech for training his students, the X-Men. The X-Men themselves are Cyclops, Angel, Beast and Iceman – although Iceman curiously looks like he should be named Snowman (he even dons a carrot, a broom and some buttons for a face in an early scene when he's clowning around). And why are his boots visible, but none of the rest of his costume is when he's powered up? We never see a scene of him powering up or powering down, but we do see him putting his boots on at one point after he's powered up to head off into battle. Are we meant to assume that there's a 16 year old boy running around completely nude except for a pair of boots and a layer of powdery snow? If so, this Xavier fellow and his “private school” should perhaps be investigated.

We are introduced to the Professor's “X-Men” by way of a training sequence, but not before Cyclops and Angel help to make him more comfortable by reclining his Lay-Z Boy for him and covering his legs with a blanket – right there in the middle of their training room. Professor X is a bit of a drill sergeant here, and throughout the issue, with all maneuvers and reactions to his commands being expected within what seem to be a random number of seconds that he feels they should be completed. He also seems oddly impressed that Iceman has such “astonishing” reflexes for a 16 year old. Aside from the fact that you'd expect a 16 year old boy to have pretty decent reflexes, when you add it to the possibility that the boy is running around in nothing but a pair of boots, it seems a little creepy.

The training sequence itself is rather perfunctory and is not only here to fill the pretty high action quotient of a Silver Age superhero comic, but to introduce the powers and personalities of these brand new characters. Though perfunctory by the standards of the day, the sequence, and all of the action here and later in the book, is deftly handled by Jack “King” Kirby. At this point, Kirby was probably being stretched a bit thin, and this doesn't stand up as his greatest or most detailed work. But the guy was a great visual storyteller and even when he's not at his best, he's very dynamic and expressive and everything that he's drawing makes sense in terms of layout, body language, and facial expression. And it's just plain fun to look at. The guy epitomizes the look and feel of Silver Age Marvel. The fact that all of the X-Men (and the Fantastic Four, for that matter) wear the same basic uniform is probably out of necessity because the guy was doing so much work at the time that drawing painstaking detail in individual costumes in one book would have been insane. But because each character has his own visual look, there is never any confusion as to who is who. Cyclops has his visor. Angel has his wings. Beast wears no gloves or boots, is hunched over, and has very large hands and feet. And as previously mentioned, Iceman ONLY wears the boots. And I don't really need to explain why Marvel Girl, later in the issue has her own visual look to differentiate her, do I?

Speaking of Marvel Girl, at the end of the boys' training session Professor X announces her arrival, a young lady by the name of Jean Grey. Three of the guys, Cyclops, Angel, and Beast go gaga. Iceman seems completely uninterested and says so. Perhaps Professor Xavier is influencing, with his thoughts, his young student – the naked but booted 16 year old with the astonishing reflexes. Angel already exhibits his tendencies to be a bit of playboy by hitting on Jean. The Beast tries the same, but that's a hopeless case from the get-go. A young Slim Summers (Cyclops – he's not yet named as Scott) does the polite thing by bringing her a chair. But she doesn't need that. She moves the chair with the powers of her mind(!). She oddly, and inaccurately, describes her powers as teleportation, though it's later corrected to telekinesis within the same issue. She was probably thrown by what I can only imagine must have been the stench of man-ass, sweaty jock straps, and used jizz rags that permeated the school as only a bunch of teenage boys and an old man in a wheel-chair lived there before she arrived.

So with all of the introductions of our heroes out of the way, the scene shifts (in the middle of the page!) to the introduction of the “Miraculous Magneto.” He's one of those evil mutants that Professor Xavier mentioned earlier. Of course, this being the first issue, we do not have the ret-conned back story of Magneto and Xavier being former friends – and we still wouldn't get it for almost 20 years. In fact, we have none of the Magneto back story that made the character so rich and impressive, and one of the greatest comic book characters ever developed. Magneto as seen here, and for the next two decades, is firmly cast from the cackling, world-domination mold of super villains. This is the Magneto that only John Byrne and Grant Morrisson seem to prefer. We've never heard of a mutant prior to X-Men #1, but now we've seen 7 of them. It must have just been a coincidence that a never before seen mutant super villain has popped up to try to overturn the US government, only to be thwarted by a group of never before seen mutant super heroes instead of some already-established non-mutant heroes populating the burgeoning Marvel Universe. So it goes in debut issues of comic books of the Silver Age. And most other genre fiction of any era.

Magneto invades the Cape Citadel missile base (those places were hotspots of super villain activity in the early 60's!) and displays an impressive array of magnetism-based (of course!) super powers that are often very similar to telekinesis against the US military until the X-Men shows up. He gives them quite a run for their money and while they do defeat him, he gets away and there isn't really much of a clear-cut victory. This theme will be repeated, not only with Magneto, but with many villains over the next several decades. The X-Men do, however, make a good impression on the general at the base, who promises to sing their praises. So maybe that fear that normal humans won't trust or accept them is already being shunted out of the book? Stay tuned to find out!

So that's X-Men #1. I may or may not be interested in comparing and contrasting whatever it is I'm currently reading and commenting on for this blog to what has come since, but in the case of the first issue, it's difficult not to. It's been a long time since I read any of these early issues, and I'm always struck by the differences in pacing ans storytelling compared to modern comics. In this debut issue, the premise of the book is set up, we meet every central character, learn their code names and real names, learn what their powers are, their personalities are laid out explicitly, we meet the villain, they have a fight, and everything is tied up at the end of the issue. That's 23 pages of well-paced story that never seems to be moving too fast or slow, packed with action, while still making a lot of time to set up the premise of the series and characterization for the entire cast. In a modern comic, this would have been enough plot to fill up at least 4 issues, probably 6, of a debut arc in a new comic. Wolverine or Deadpool would have had to show up to get anyone to care, and it would have been launched on the heels of a senses-shattering, line-wide mega-crossover that might or might not have broken the Internet in half. The entire 6 issue arc would take 5 minutes to read from beginning to end, whereas this one issue took me probably 30 minutes, including just a few of them devoted to taking notes. In serialized fiction, there surely has to be some kind of middle ground.

There are, of course, a lot of very quaint Silver Age moments, plot points, and lines of dialogue (and exclamation points!!!!!) scattered throughout. The rules of superpowers and pseudo-science in the Marvel Universe (if there even was such a concept at that point) are still in their infancy in 1963, so when I see lines of dialogue about Professor X controlling the X-Men's jet with the power of his thoughts from a remote location on the ground, I don't mind. Likewise, narration such as “Just as the hunter missiles are attracted by heat, so are the Iceman's ice grenades attracted by the missiles' speed” can be chalked up to a quaint view of science. But Angel taking the time to hang hang up his shirt and suit before changing into costume before rushing headlong into battle is just downright charming. And of course later characterization and ret-conning makes a lot of this issue feel “off” but you can't hold that against it. That's the nature of ongoing characterization and ret-cons in serialized fiction created by ever-shuffling creators and styles.

I once read an essay of some sort by an author I can not remember on a website I can not remember on a number of subjects that I can not remember – in fact, I think I quit reading it shortly into it because I felt it was a whole lot of hogwash – but if I find it, I'll follow up with the info in the comments. One of the main points that I took away from it, with regard to these early issues, is that despite the X-Men being seen in the decades following their debut as a revolutionary, counter-culture concept that embodied the plight of minorities and other downtrodden sectors of society, they were actually a very counter-revolutionary concept in that they policed “evil” mutant “revolutionaries” from the beginning. They acted as law enforcement among the mutant population to thwart the more embarrassing or problematic members of their race to make nice with a “world that fears and hates them.” I think that misses the point entirely, especially when you look at the villains they were fighting early on. Magneto, here, and in most of his subsequent appearances over the next couple of decades was very much a terrorist hell-bent on world domination, working toward the ascendance of the mutant race at the expense of the rest of the human race, with mass-murder just beyond his reach. Sure, one person's “terrorist” may be another person's “revolutionary” but I think we can all agree that genocide or oppression on a global scale and the overturning of governments to suit only one man's desire for world domination, ostensibly for his race, but more likely to sate own despotic tendencies, is not something that any HERO would abide by. And in the context of the kind of stories being told, in the era they were being told, it's very difficult to see the concept as counter-revolutionary. This is, first and foremost, and always has been, a super hero book with a fight between good and evil, right and wrong. That its creator planted the seeds that others would expand on, of a whole new race of people, born with different qualities than the mainstream of their society, added weight and timeleness to the concept over the decades, whether it was being applied to actual race, religious persecution, homophobia or anything else. It's one of the few super hero comic book concepts that lends itself to any time or place on earth. The books characters did, starting with Chris Claremont's run as writer and several of his successors, become more “counter-revolutionary,” more likely to side with their mutant brethren, even if they were adversaries (especially Magneto), than governments who were likely to persecute them. But that started in the 1980's, when comics were becoming grim and gritty and “serious” and for adults rather than just for children (if they were even for children at that point at all). What the Silver Age X-Men are is an analogy for different races co-existing and integrating, even if it isn't really spelled out or only paid lip-service in this issue. But they're also super heroes that have to go up against “bad guys”. Still, this was a pretty heady and important concept for a super hero comic being published in the 1960's.

I've gotten pretty far afield of recapping and commenting on this issue, but that point had always stuck in the back of my mind and it came to the forefront as I was re-reading this issue and was reminded that X-Men were fighting a would-be tyrannical despot using terrorist means, and not the abstract concept of a mutant rights revolutionary when they went up against Magneto for the first time – many, many years before he was developed into a mutant rights revolutionary with an interesting back story and motivation.