base and our greatly-overmatched quintet of teenagers finding some clever means of driving him away, and that was all very well, but it was the stuff at Xavier’s school that I really cared about.
Man, if I wasn’t a mutant, I sure wanted to be! At least, if it meant I’d get to go to a cool school like that…
Oh, I knew it was all fantasy, but it was a much more attractive fantasy than I’d ever seen in comics before. Most superheroes—well, who’d want to be Batman, really? Not only is he an orphan, but he’s spent his entire life working and training and exercising. Superman’s too alien to really identify with. And all those guys were adults, anyway.
Nor did kid sidekicks really work for me. I never saw myself as anyone’s sidekick—and I wasn’t anyone’s ward, whatever the heck that meant. It seemed vaguely creepy.
The whole crime-fighting thing just seemed so unrelated to the world I lived in. The worst crimes I encountered in Bedford were things like bicycle theft.
But boarding school I understood. Playing jokes on your classmates I understood. Having a crush on the cute girl in your class I understood. And a school where everyone’s weird—well, as Syndrome pointed out in “The Incredibles,” when everyone’s special, no one is, and at that age I didn’t like standing out.
I liked that even though they were kids, they were the X-Men, not the X-Teens. It seemed as if they were getting respect with that name.
And ganging up to fight a supervillain with the wholehearted approval of the headmaster was just too frickin’ cool for words.
I loved X-Men #1. Loved it.
But I didn’t see #2. It never showed up at Dunham’s. Neither did #3 or #4. And the local drug store or Woolworth’s still didn’t have any Marvel comics that I could see, just DC and Gold Key and Archie and Harvey. (They didn’t carry ACG, either—I never in my life saw an ACG comic for sale new, but Dunham’s used to get stacks of them. I could never figure that out.)
After awhile I decided that X-Men #1 must have been a one-shot; I never saw any more in the stores, never heard anyone mention the series. It’s probably hard to realize nowadays just how little information was available to a comics-reading kid back then, with no comics shops, no internet, no Previews, no Wizard. I had no way of knowing X-Men was still going.
I never forgot that first issue, though; I would fantasize about attending a school for mutants, about discovering that I did have a mutant power more significant than thumbs that bent backward.
And then finally, years later, when I was in my teens, I came across more issues of X-Men. I don’t remember exactly which issues they were; something from late in the original run. I was flabbergasted—the series hadn’t been canceled! It was still going! I bought the two or three issues eagerly and took them home and read them.
I was so disappointed!
Because these weren’t the X-Men I remembered, the teenaged students at a special boarding school; oh, they were the same characters, but somewhere in there they’d grown up and become just another bunch of superheroes. What fun was that? Almost everything I’d loved about the first issue was gone. They still had cool mutant abilities, but so what?
I dug out my tattered copy of #1 and re-read it, and yes, it was just as good as I remembered it—and they’d taken all the good stuff out, somewhere between #2 and #60.
So I didn’t look for any more; I didn’t buy them when I came across them.
And then in 1975 I came across #95—I’d missed the first couple of appearances of the new team, but I saw that one and bought it.
I was twenty-one, reading comics again after a hiatus; my mother had given my copy of X-Men #1 to a church rummage sale while I was at college, but I still remembered it fondly, so I picked up #95.
It was still a superhero team, not the real X-Men—to me, the real X-Men were teenage mutants, not adults—but it was pretty good, so I started buying the title again.
There was some semblance of the original concept; Professor X was collecting and training mutants. But it was mostly superhero stuff, and they were adults.
When Kitty Pryde was introduced my hopes rose; someone had remembered that Xavier was running a school, not a superhero club! But the focus was still on the superheroics.
Over the years these glimpses of the original concept kept appearing. The New Mutants started out as an attempt to get back to the roots, but almost immediately became another superhero team—teenagers, yes; inexperienced, yes; but they were spending more time in Brazil and Ireland than in classrooms in Westchester. More young mutants appeared over the years, but somehow the stories almost always seemed to focus on the adults, on superheroing, rather than on what I had loved back in 1963 and still desperately wanted to see—stories about growing up mutant, and about attending a school for mutants. Not a school for superheroes; a school for mutants. A school where everyone accepted that yes, you’re different, and that’s okay, we’ll teach you to handle being different.
And looking back forty years, I realize that what I saw in that first issue and wanted more of was the same thing that modern kids are getting from the adventures of Harry Potter. Sure, the conflict with Voldemort keeps the plot moving, but what the readers really love is Hogwarts. Rowling knows that, and keeps the focus on the school, on Harry’s classes and teachers and classmates and sports, as much as on the larger adventures.
Alas, Marvel has never managed to maintain that focus; over and over, writers have recognized the appeal of the school setting and tried to drag the stories back to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, but time after time they have slipped away again, to New York and Genosha and a thousand other places, chronicling the struggles of mutant against mutant, and mutant against human. The X-Men have not just been another bunch of superheroes, I’ll grant them that; they’ve served as a metaphor for discrimination and oppression of every kind, and that’s a good thing.
But it isn’t what I found in the first issue. I wasn’t black or gay or Jewish, I wasn’t oppressed or discriminated against, but I still sometimes felt like an outcast, a weirdo, a mutant. I didn’t particularly want to be a hero, or save the world; I just wanted to be accepted despite being who I was.
Xavier’s school was initially, for me, a fantasy of a place where everyone, no matter how weird, was accepted for who they were. No one tried to make them normal. No one pretended they were all alike. The students were all pushed to perform to the best of their ability, no matter how bizarre those abilities might be.
And I wonder whether that might explain the curious sales history of the X-Men titles.
X-Men was not a hit in its original incarnation. When Stan Lee recreated Marvel Comics in the 1960s he threw a lot of ideas out into the market; some clicked, like Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, and some didn’t, like Ant-Man and Captain Marvel. Hard as it may be to believe now, the X-Men were one of the less-successful creations; they didn’t have anything close to the sales figures of the FF or ol’ Webhead. The title struggled on for a few years, then went to reprints for a few more, before being reinvented and relaunched in the mid-1970s.
But once it was relaunched, it quickly became a hit, and by the mid-eighties was Marvel’s top-selling title by a fairly wide margin; it made up such a large part of the business that some comic book shops considered Uncanny X-Men (as it had been retitled) to be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. What had changed in there? Why was the concept a flop in 1963 and a major hit in 1975?
Oh, there were changes in the comic itself—the addition of Wolverine and Nightcrawler and Storm certainly didn’t hurt, as they’re great characters. The art, especially during the Byrne/Cockrum period, was better than it had been for most of the early issues. I don’t think that really accounts for it, though. What had changed was the rest of the world.
In the summer of 1963 the 1950s were still lingering. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated yet, the Beatles weren’t yet on the charts, the Vietnam War was a matter of a few military advisors in a country most Americans still