The X-Men are one of Marvel's most enduring franchises.
From famous mainstays like Wolverine and Storm to more out-there characters, they've starred
in endless movies and comics.
But with all that material, there are a lot of lies.
Here are things you might get wrong about X-Men.
More casual readers might look at a team of heroes gathered together by a guy who calls
himself Professor X and assume that Charles Xavier named his team after himself.
In the pages of their very first adventure, however, Xavier mentions that the X-Men are
named for having "X-tra" abilities, and while it's not very convincing, we'll just have
to take his word for it.
In real life, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby wanted to give their book a more straightforward
title: The Mutants.
When they presented the idea to Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, he liked the concept, but
not the name.
He told Lee that readers weren't smart enough to know what a mutant was and requested a
change.
"This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
Looking back, it's pretty easy to give Goodman the credit for being right on this one, but
we're left wondering about the same thing Lee did once he got the new title approved.
Before that comic came out, nobody knew what the "X-Men" were, either.
Superpowered misfits who protected a society that hated and feared them!
Abilities that often felt more like a curse than a super-power!
Evil forces gathering against them in a group known as the Brotherhood!
A mysterious leader in a wheelchair who would eventually be revealed to have more than his
share of secrets!
When the X-Men hit the stands in 1963, those elements ensured that readers had never seen
anything like this before…unless they were reading DC Comics a few months earlier.
Uncanny X-Men #1 debuted in September 1963.
In June of that same year, however, Marvel's Distinguished Competition published My Greatest
Adventure #80, introducing the world to a team called the Doom Patrol.
Made up of outcasts from society, the Doom Patrol fought the strange crimes of the Brotherhood
of Evil and were led by the Chief, a mastermind in a wheelchair who had gathered them all
together.
Sound familiar?
While Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani's Doom Patrol stories hit the shelves first, there's
been a lot of debate over who was actually getting ripped off, or whether it was all
a coincidence, with Drake referring to Stan Lee as an idea thief in interviews.
Despite their early similarities, however, the two teams would take some wildly divergent
paths as they continued, and unfortunately for the Doom Patrol, the X-Men would absolutely
become the more popular version of that idea.
"We are the future, Charles, not them."
The X-Men are the kind of massive franchise that broke sales records with over six million
copies sold when the second X-Men title was launched in 1991.
As hard as it might be to believe, though, that wasn't always the case.
When The Uncanny X-Men debuted, Marvel Comics was riding high on the success of a string
of hits that started with Fantastic Four and continued with Spider-Man, but not everything
worked out so well.
Even Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's first attempt at The Incredible Hulk, for instance, only
ran for six issues.
X-Men was never actually canceled, but it sure did come close.
Despite starting off with what seemed like a foolproof formula for success, the new title
never caught on.
In 1970, X-Men #66 became the last issue of the series to feature new stories, and seemed
like it would be the last issue, period.
Eight months later, the series returned as a reprint title, perhaps because of the popularity
the Beast was seeing elsewhere.
That went on for 27 issues of recycled stories, but in 1975, Marvel gave the series another
shot by relaunching the title with Giant-Size X-Men #1.
This story had a brand new direction, a brand new cast, and before long, Marvel had one
of the biggest hits in superhero history on their hands.
While they're often overshadowed by later additions like Wolverine, the original five
X-Men will always be the ones who were there when everything started.
Cyclops, Iceman, the Angel, Marvel Girl, and Beast form the cornerstone on which everything
else was built, and no matter what else happens, they'll always call the X-Men their home.
Unless they bailed on a sinking ship and then spent 20 years getting as far away from Charles
Xavier's merry mutants as they could while still technically existing in the same universe,
that is.
That's what happened with Hank McCoy, better known to superhero fans as the Beast.
While the original X-Men comic itself was never that popular, fans loved the combination
of his monstrous looks and genius intellect, which appealed to a somewhat nerdy fan-base.
By the early '70s, the Beast had bounced into solo stories in the pages of Amazing Adventures,
where he famously turned himself blue and furry, and didn't stop there.
Before long, he had joined up with the Avengers, where he would develop a friendship with Wonder
Man that would define his character for a decade, and also spent some time on the Defenders.
It wasn't until 1991 that he returned to the X-Men.
Of course, while he's the most successful, he's not the only original X-Man who was looking
for a new gig when the book almost got canceled.
Cyclops and Marvel Girl would remain with the team through the 1975 relaunch, but Iceman
and the Angel wound up in the Champions alongside Hercules, Ghost Rider, and Black Widow, as
one of the most random teams in Marvel history.
They're mostly known for fighting Swarm, a Nazi whose entire body is made of bees.
Not exactly the prestige of the Avengers.
The famous "Phoenix Saga" is arguably the central touchstone of the entire X-Men franchise.
It tells the story of Jean Grey being possessed with a cosmic power that corrupted her and
led her to destruction on a truly cosmic scale.
Eventually, after destroying an entire planet and murdering its entire population to satisfy
the Phoenix's endless hunger, Jean was put on a trial on the moon and killed.
Sort of.
Not really.
See, the real Jean never did all that stuff at all, since she was busy being in a coma
at the bottom of Jamaica Bay.
This one gets a little complicated, but here's the short version: Chris Claremont and John
Byrne's original plan for the ending of the Phoenix Saga was to have the Phoenix "locked
away" in Jean's mind.
Jean would then return to Earth without her powers.
Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, however, insisted that after killing a billion aliens, Jean
had to die, and that was that.
Years later, though, a series called X-Factor was in the works that would reunite the original
five X-Men, including Jean.
Marvel needed to revive her, but also to separate her from her cosmically genocidal past.
The solution?
The Phoenix wasn't Jean and never had been.
In the pages of Fantastic Four, of all places, Byrne revealed that when Jean was "resurrected"
as the Phoenix the first time, after crashing a space shuttle into Jamaica Bay, it was actually
just the Phoenix Force itself taking Jean's form and memories.
The real Jean had been down there in a cocoon for years, until she finally emerged, perhaps
ironically, like a phoenix.
If you grew up getting most of your information about the X-Men from trading cards based on
comics from the '90s, then you know three things about Wolverine for sure: His bones
and claws are laced with an unbreakable metal called Adamantium, he was a product of the
sinister Canadian super soldier program called Weapon X, and his real name is Logan.
"What's my name?!"
"Your name is Logan."
The good news is that the first two are still pretty accurate, and also mark one of the
only times the words "sinister" and "Canadian" are ever put next to each other.
It's that third one that could use some updating.
In 2001, Marvel decided to make Wolverine's mysterious past a little less mysterious with
a miniseries accurately titled Origin.
This story revealed that Wolverine was actually James Howlett, who grew up as the sickly son
of an extremely wealthy family.
Little Jim was, of course, a mutant, but his powers manifested as the result of his father
being murdered in front of him, trauma that sparked the first of many memory issues.
Also, owing to the all-consuming power of coincidence, he spent his childhood in love
with a girl who bore a striking resemblance to Jean Grey, and being picked on by a bully
who was pretty much just Sabretooth.
In 2009, this expanded origin also made it into the movies in the also accurately titled
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, where the bully actually did turn out to be Sabretooth.
Everything ends up tied together, but they never really explain why "Jimmy" takes the
last name of the man who murdered his father.
Maybe that was just one of the things that he forgot along the way thanks to being shot
in the head with adamantium bullets, but is that really a bad thing?
We wouldn't mind losing all of our childhood memories if it meant we never had to remember
this movie's version of Deadpool.
The X-Men franchise contains some beloved characters, but there's no question at all
about who's the most popular: it's absolutely Wolverine, who clawed his way to the top to
become a pop culture icon.
That's another thing that took a few years to happen.
When Wolverine was introduced in the pages of Incredible Hulk #181, they had no real
intentions beyond just filling an editorial mandate to give the Marvel Universe a Canadian
superhero.
In fact, his creators even figured that, like other mid-'70s Hulk adversaries like the Man-Beast
or the Cobalt Man, Wolverine would probably show up a couple of times and wind up on the
forgotten pages of the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe.
When an international team of X-Men was created a few months later, though, Wolverine seemed
like a natural fit alongside other pre-existing characters like Sunfire and Banshee, even
though artist Dave Cockrum, who co-created newcomers like Storm, Nightcrawler, and Colossus,
wasn't really a fan of the character.
Even in those early X-Men issues, though, Wolverine's never really the focus.
He was just a piece of the ensemble cast, to the point where he didn't even make it
on the covers most of the time, even when all the other characters do.
That all changed with the arrival of John Byrne, who seemed to like Wolverine a lot
more than Dave Cockrum did.
Not only did he put Wolverine front and center on the cover, his very first issue was a starring
role for the Canadian X-Man that began to chip away at his mysterious past.
Then came 1977's Uncanny X-Men #132, where Wolverine survives a devastating attack and
spends the next issue clawing his way into rescuing the rest of the team, that he really
stepped into the spotlight.
Needless to say, he hasn't left it since.
For a guy mostly known for carrying improbably huge guns, Cable is tough to explain at the
best of times.
You can be forgiven if you choose to accept the simple explanation that he's Cyclops and
Jean's son from the future.
That's good enough, and complicated enough, for most people.
It's not quite the whole truth, though.
The actual answer?
Well, while Jean was presumed dead because her cosmic alien clone body killed itself
on the Moon, Scott Summers met and eventually married a woman named Madelyne Pryor, who
looked exactly like Jean with a slightly different haircut.
The reason for that resemblance was, of course, that she was a clone of Jean created by Mr.
Sinister.
Anyway, she got pregnant and gave birth to Nathan Summers, who was infected with the
techno-organic virus and sent to the future to be raised by Mother Askani, who actually
was Scott and Jean's daughter Rachel, but from a different future.
She also brought Scott and Jean to the future to raise him, which they did under false names,
spending years in the post-apocalyptic 37th century before returning to the present day
after mere moments.
Then Nathan changed his name to Cable (nobody's quite clear on why) and came back to the present,
where he was eventually murdered by a younger version of himself from another timeline.
So, you know.
Pretty simple stuff by X-Men standards.
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