The Idler

Mutant Genius

GREG ROWLAND examines the early days of the Marvel misfit mutant adolescents, the X-Men taken From Idler 26, Summer 2000

I was nine years old when my school sent me to The Society for Gifted Children. They were fed up with me finishing projects too early and correcting my teacher’s numerous factual errors. My teacher, who is now dead, used to send me outside when I finished my work ahead of schedule. My mutant powers - to navigate through realms of infinite banality at super-speed - were later rewarded when I became a consultant to the advertising industry. But back in ‘76 I was sent outside to paint the walls. My powers were useless, as though Hinchley Wood Primary School was built of Kryptonite.

So, because the teachers couldn’t deconstruct a little boy who was both bright and naughty, they tried to offload the problem on this Gifted Children society. I went along for the society’s open day and quickly realised that I was seriously outclassed. A bespectacled three year-old read out the Latin names of plants from a book. One eight year-old had built a computer out of Lego. I consoled myself with the fact that they were emotionally stunted - having put all their effort into just being clever, they’d neglected all the other aspects of their personality. This was made clear to me when a little boy asked me down from the climbing frame. “Hello,” he said. “What’s your gift?” For the first and last time in my life I didn’t know what to say. I was just appalled. But I did remember to say to my Dad that I never ever wanted to hang out with those kids ever again.

I had been cheated really. I had in my mind an entirely different School for Gifted Youngsters. It was run by Professor Xavier and you needed to be a super-powered mutant to gain entrance. Yes, my friends, for it is true. The day I was invited to the Society for Gifted Children was the day I thought I was joining the X-Men.

I never did join the X-Men but I did give them a pretty good run for their money and often guided them telepathically with such psychic subtlety that they never even realised that I was helping them. But this summer, the X-Men leave the cultural ownership of the comic-book reading cognoscenti and meet the big bad world of corporate media hype full on. The X-Men is this year’s big Hollywood movie. My psychic connection with the old gang will be well and truly severed. They belong to the world of PR and merchandising now. But once, many years ago, the X-Men were all mine.

The X-Men were born in 1963, sired by the mighty pen of he who is Stan Lee, the supreme creative genius of the superhero genre. Stan was really on a roll in the early Sixties. He had revolutionised comic books with the creation of the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, The Hulk, Iron Man, Daredevil and Doctor Strange. Yet still he strafed onwards, ever onwards. Marvel Comics was still a bit player compared to the gargantuan rival DC Comics, who owned Superman and Batman. Stan wanted to rule the comic book world. And, by the end of the Sixties, this mission was accomplished. It didn’t take a marketing genius to realise that teenagers might be popular with comic book reading public, and that superhero teams would likewise shift pulp in a big way. The superhero team offered a clear buying proposition. You got a bunch of heroes all interacting and fighting bad guys in a single comic. It was a value for money thing. But teenagers were normally relegated to side-kick status, like Robin the Boy Wonder, Speedy (the Green Arrow’s little chum who, in the more socially relevant comics of the Seventies lived up to his name by developing a serious drug problem) and Aqaulad, Aquaman’s completely crap side-order of halibut. Stan Lee hated kid sidekicks, but had noticed that a DC book which united several of these, The Teen Titans, was selling pretty well. Marked by attempts of middle-aged writers to get “hip” to the new youth culture, it was full of crazy baddies like the Mad Mod who said “gear” a lot. But this was not Stan’s way.

The X-Men were a team of teenage superheroes, announced as “The Strangest Teens of All”. They were certainly strange, but, in the context of your average comic book reading geek, they weren’t all that weird. The X-Men were superpowered mutants, whose DNA had been altered at birth to give them incredible abilities. The narrative premise was pretty deep. Unlike the Fantastic Four - Marvel’s first family - or the mighty Avengers, the X-Men received no plaudits from society at large. Because they were mutants (technically known as “Homo superior”) they were hated and feared by the world. The X-Men could never appear on Ed Sullivan or have the Beatles attend their big showbiz wedding (as was the case for Mr Fantastic and the Invisible Girl). The X-Men were basically as paranoid as fuck. They could be found out any minute. They were outsiders, reviled by normal folks for being strange and elevated above the masses. Again, the concept perfectly mirrors the tensions of the average teenage comic book-reader - a mix of paranoid insecurity, alienation and secretive visions of ego-warping self-aggrandisement.

So the X-Men needed a convincing front. Professor Charles Xavier, the wheel-chair bound mentor of the group, who himself was a mutant with telepathic abilities, sorted this out. He set up his School for Gifted Youngsters in a big posh house and trained the X-Men to battle baddies in the specially constructed “Danger Room”. Xavier built a machine called Cerebro which identified mutants. The X-Men would then have to go and get them and either recruit them or fight them. But, this being comics, they normally fought them, got upset and went home. The recruitment thing was a matter of some urgency as the X-Men weren’t the only bunch of super-powered mutants on a mission. But before we meet the baddies, I should tell you a little more about the individual X-Men and why they were so cool.

The X-Men, you see, symbolise the grim epiphanies of puberty. Just like Alice in Wonderland, the merry mutants are all about weird changes to your body and feelings.

Cyclops (Scott Summers) is a skinny lad who has powerful energy beams that come out of eyes. This would be pretty cool, apart from the fact that he has no control over them. So he has to wear a visor or protective shades the whole time. Cyclops fancies Marvel Girl - the glamorous girlie member of the band - but can’t risk snuggling up to her for fear of what his dangerous optic emissions might do. Do you get it? Cyclops emits strange powerful things from out of his body that are part fun, part pure worry. They can go off at any minute. How clear do I have to make this analogy?

But the other X-Men were fairly happy with their mutant lot. Hank McCoy, the super-agile Beast, had overgrown hands and feet and was rather hairy. So The Beast is all about those changes that boys go through that make them, rather disturbingly, look more like monkeys. But Hank is a happy soul with a tendency towards literary hyperbole that would have made SJ Perelman proud. He’s a smart chap but later had a little error of judgement when he decided to accelerate his mutation with drugs. He became blue and furry, a lesson to us all.

The Angel, a handsome and rich devil who had huge white wings sprouting out of his shoulder blades really had it made. The chicks loved Warren Worthington III. Being posh, good-looking and able to fly represents the sum of any adolescent fantasy of the idealised self.

Then there’s the daft Iceman, who was like a frozen version of the Human Torch, throwing hard snowballs at people. My theory flounders a bit here. But he could make ice-cream come out of his body, which is a useful skill at parties. But, in the end, Iceman was always a bit of shmucky kid.

Finally the token bird, the lovely Marvel Girl, was a powerful telepath and had telekinetic powers. She proved that girls really could fuck with your head.

Now the baddies. And, once again, when you dig beneath the surface, it’s heavy stuff. Diametrically opposed to the X-Men is Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Now Magneto is a complex guy. He’s strong, having control over one of the primal forces of the universe - magnetism - but that’s not as important as his political beliefs. Because of his Romany origins, Magneto had grown up in a concentration camp. So, when he realised he was a mutant as well as being part of a persecuted ethnic minority, this sent him over the edge. Or was he really over the edge? Sometimes Magento wanted mutants - Homo superior - to take their rightful place as rulers of the world. Pretty standard super-baddie fare. But at other times his demands were more conciliatory, asking for a free independent state for mutants. Sometimes Magneto was good, sometimes he was very bad. But he was always driven by a moral vision for his people. The X-Men were all about assimilation and co-existence with Homo sapiens. But the regular folk were having none of it. They built robots called sentinels to track down and immobilise mutants, they had riots, they sent them nasty letters and insulted their hair-styles with nary a thought. The “moral” X-Men were, in the public eyes, no better or worse than the “immoral” Magneto. The reader was left in a profound moral quandary. You can make a million analogies - Magento is Malcolm X whereas Professor X was Martin Luther King. Or that Magento was an Israeli Hawk while Xavier was an assimilatory New York Jew. This is pretty heavy stuff for your average twelve year-old. These moral questions are still being played out in the X-Men comics, over thirty-five years later. Magento currently democratically rules a newly established mutant-nation called Genosha. It’s quite nice there apparently.

The old Brotherhood of Evil Mutants had some excellent baddies, most of whom went semi-straight in later life. My personal favourite was Unus the Untouchable. Unus’ mutant power provided a force field around him that meant he was untouchable, hence his name. Unfortunately it went out of control after he fought the X-Men. Just like Tantalus (so my posh friend tells me) he couldn’t touch food or anything else for that matter. He was trapped by his own powers. A quick wank was therefore entirely out of the question. Poor old Unus!

But, perhaps because of the moral greyness around the original X-Men, they were never as popular as the rest of the Marvel superhero stable. The “Strangest Teens of All” struggled on with poor sales until their comic was cancelled in 1970. Cult status amongst the cooler comic geeks was just not enough.

So, the trail goes quiet until the mid-seventies whereupon the Business Manager at Marvel comics had a creative idea. It was the only creative idea that he would ever have, but it would have huge implications for the comic book world. He reasoned that Marvel sold a lot of comics outside the United States, so why not do a superhero team full of international characters? The Marvel editors, themselves second-generation fan-boys, saw this as a chance to revive the X-Men with a new cast.

So, in 1976, Giant-Size X-Men number 1 introduced the New X-Men to the world. Cyclops and Marvel Girl were still around, but the Beast, Angel and Iceman did their derring-do elsewhere in the Marvel Universe.

The new cast included a blue mutant called Nightcrawler who had a prehensile tail and could teleport. He smelt of sulphur though - there’s always a downside. He was German and said “Unglaublich!” a lot. There was also Colossus, a good Russian Leninist who became a really strong bloke made out of organic steel. An image straight out of Soviet realism and the Stakanovitch cult, Pyotr Rasputin showed just how culturally and politically pluralist the X-Men had become. We also met Storm, a dazzling Kenyan beauty who controlled the weather with her mutant abilities. She also had a penchant for nude flying through refreshing showers of her own creation. This probably didn’t hurt sales.

But the big draw would prove to be a character called Wolverine. He was short chap who came from the Yukon, he was older than the others and had a hairy chest and big bushy side-burns, kind of like Gaz out of Supergrass but really hard and with superpowers. And, check this baby, he was never without a half-smoked cigar clamped in his mutie mouth! Fortunately, Wolvie could get away with this as one of his powers was an incredible ability to heal himself of any ill. This was combined with a berserker battle savvy, unbreakable steel bones and nifty metal claws that came out of his wrists (with an excellent “Snikt!” sound effect). Wolverine was a different order of hero. He was nasty, capable of extreme violence and hard to control - like Vinnie Jones before he became a soft nancy actor. He was a parody of machismo but, it was later revealed, was capable of some tenderness (although I hated that particular story-line). The kids absolutely loved him. We could get psychoanalytical on Wolvie’s ass and suggest that he represented Freud’s fantasy of the immortality of the ego - that the body and self cannot be destroyed no matter what is done to it - but I don’t think that he’d appreciate it.

The new X-Men soon gathered a head of steam under the creative stewardship of writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne. Over the next fifteen years Claremont would create an unparalleled mythology around the X-Men which saw the comic book rise to the top of the sales charts, eclipsing even Spiderman and Batman.

But the real highlight of this period was the Death of Phoenix story. A few years previously the old Marvel Girl had undergone a radical transformation into Phoenix, a being of unimaginable power. At one point this all got a bit much for the poor girl. She saved the universe single-handedly but in a lapse of concentration managed to destroy an entire planet full of peaceful people who looked like radishes. The inter-galactic community were not happy about this and ordered her death, which, after a lot of fighting and intrigue, was duly meted out. This particularly upset Cyclops, who had, after thirty years of shilly-shallying, finally declared his love for Phoenix/Marvel Girl. She actually died! This caused one big commotion in the geek world. (Of course she came back to life a few years later, but that’s not important.)

But let’s travel forward to the Nineties. The business heads at Marvel had cottoned on to the biggest success story in comic-books since Batman. Now there were about a dozen monthly X-books (X-Men, X-Man, Uncanny X-Men, Generation X, X-Factor, Mutant X, Excalibur, the New Mutants, Cable, Apocalypse, Untold Tales, The Hellfire Club to name a few) dealing with the new X-Men, the original X-Men and their hordes of supporting characters. Over half of Marvel’s output involved mutants in one guise or another. The creative spark couldn’t support this many stories. The kids still bought it in droves but the magic, for the old fuckers like me, had truly worn off. The X-Men lived only in fond memories and had been overtaken by the needs of the military-industrial complex.

And now, with the film’s release in August, the process seems to be complete. It may actually be a pretty good film, judging by the cast and the trailers. I just wanted to tell you about the time when the X-Men were a secret and select little club that only the weird and alienated were entitled to join. Soon, everyone will be a mutant nouveau and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters will be as over-subscribed as the latest stupid dot.com share issue. But I remember the real X-Men, untainted by big business and global media, structuring the pleasures and pain of growing up into the non-mutant world.

The final paragraph of this article is being telepathically projected to you. Please clear your mind and concentrate on the void. Once you have received the message please do not hesitate to act upon it. Professor X is waiting. Thank you.