- When the X-Men were being created, Stan Lee thought
it would be an interesting idea to make
Professor Charles Xavier the leader of the X-Men,
physically limited, since his mind was already so powerful.
And when you introduce a character trait like that,
you are, of course, going to need some explanation
in continuity about how he lost the use of his legs.
The sad thing is that he didn't just suffer a crippling
accident once, but actually quite a few times.
Every time Professor X gains the ability to walk again,
the comics status quo just puts him right back
in a chair, and that's not fair.
So how exactly did Professor X become paralyzed?
Well, it's kind of a long story.
(upbeat music)
Welcome to Comic Misconceptions.
I am Scott.
And Professor X is one of those characters
that I thought I knew, until I started researching
for this video.
On the surface, he seems pretty straightforward.
He's a mentally powerful mutant who is paralyzed
from the waist down.
But I wanted to know what was the accident
that put him in that chair.
And because this is comics, of course it's
needlessly complicated, so sit up straight
and let's begin.
Seriously, sit up.
Your posture is just, it's atrocious.
In Uncanny X-Men number 20 from 1966,
we see how he lost the use of his legs for the first time.
A young Charles Xavier went searching for a mysterious
walled city in the Himalayas.
What he found, when he come upon it,
was that certain civilians were being mind-controlled
by alien technology to keep every other citizen in line.
Xavier, being the kind of person that he is,
got together a band of rebels to overthrow
the city's ruler, whose identity was unknown to everyone
who lived there.
But one of the rebels was actually a minion
of the evil ruler and sabotaged Xavier's plan.
Thinking on his feet (exhales loudly)...
That was, that was in poor taste.
Thinking quickly, Charles manages to lead the rebellion
through all the traps set for them, and they take the palace
for themselves.
But Charles goes to confront the leader all by himself,
who's revealed to be an alien named Lucifer
who was trying to do what all aliens want to do
and lead an invasion of Earth.
Just as Xavier learns his name, Lucifer hits a switch
on the wall that for some reason was preprogrammed
to release a massive stone block from the ceiling.
And that stone landed on Charles, crushing his legs.
Lucifer got away that day, and Professor X reveals
that it was this encounter that was one of his main reasons
why he founded the X-Men in the first place.
He needed a team for whenever Lucifer attacked again.
And this is exactly what happens.
The next time Lucifer showed up, the X-Men were there
to foil his plans.
Lucifer's superiors didn't like how incompetent he was,
so they banished him to a nameless dimension
outside of space and time.
Lucifer might have disappeared from existence,
but the damage he caused to the professor
was still present.
And that would remain the status quo for a while,
until Uncanny X-Men number 167 from 1983,
when Professor X's body is completely destroyed.
You see, there's a race of parasitic aliens called the Brood
that spread across the universe injecting their eggs
into anything that moves.
And when the eggs hatch, the host body is completely
consumed and transformed into a member of the Brood,
which looks like giant insects.
Xavier, well, he got really unlucky and not only had
the eggs of just any Brood inside of him,
he had the Brood Queen embryo.
It burst out of his body and attacked the X-Men.
And right as Wolverine and Cyclops were fighting over
who gets to kill it, the professor's consciousness
comes through.
He might be physically gone, but his mental transformation
was incomplete, so they decided to try
and fix Professor X.
They learn they can't reverse the metamorphosis
but they can clone his body from an old tissue sample
and upload his consciousness to the new cloned body.
The procedure works and Xavier's new body even has
the benefit of having working legs, though he does
have to train himself to walk again, which makes sense.
His new body and new legs would serve him well
until the Muir Island Saga.
Mur, Mur Island?
Myur, Myur...
I don't know how to pronounce that.
Let's say Muir Island Saga, from 1991,
when a powerful being known as the Shadow King
posed a threat to the X-Men.
Now, the Shadow King is basically solely made
of psionic power, and he's able to possess people,
making them do whatever he wills.
And much like Lucifer, Professor X says that
the Shadow King was the reason why he created
the X-Men in the first place.
Make up your mind, Chuck.
It's one of the most powerful things in existence,
but you can't even keep your story straight.
Perhaps that mind of yours would be better
in someone else's hands.
Yeah, anyway, to defeat the Shadow King,
Xavier has to go into the astral realm
and battle him psychic-ly.
Shadow King has a deep hatred for Professor X.
He knows that Charles felt agony and frustration
when he was disabled, and he wants to return
the professor to that former state.
He starts by breaking Xavier's legs since his physical body
reacts to the psionic attacks.
Then the professor's whole body starts breaking.
Thankfully, the other X-Men joined the fight
in the astral plane.
But here's the thing, when you go into the astral plane,
your physical body just lies there.
So with no one to protect Professor X's body,
Shadow King, who was currently in possession
of the professor's son, David, threatens to crush
Charles' body if the X-Men continued to attack.
Professor X gives the command for them
to defeat Shadow King no matter the cost.
The X-Men are victorious in their fight
and go to the professor who reveals
that the Shadow King had gotten one last shot in
and shattered Charles' spine.
He once again cannot walk.
You'd think that that might be the end of it,
but it's not.
For this next part, we need to travel all the way back
to before Charles was born in a story from 2002.
It's revealed that Charles actually had a twin sister
who died in the womb.
It gets a little weird here, but she was essentially
the exact opposite of Charles, like nega Xavier.
She tried to kill Charles in the womb,
but Charles fought back with his telepathic powers
that were apparently already advanced.
A race of aliens known as the Shi'ar have a name
for this concept, and that name is one that
I will butcher.
It's the Mummudrai.
The basic idea is that everyone faces an anti version
of themselves before they are born.
Charles appeared victorious.
However, the evil entity survived and was able to build
itself a body somehow and had become known
as Cassandra Nova.
Cassandra launched a Sentinel attack that killed
16 million mutants.
When she was captured by the X-Men,
she tried to escape using her immense psychic powers,
but Emma Frost snapped her neck,
and then Professor X shot her a bunch,
so that's definitely one way to do it.
As it turns out, she actually swapped consciousness
with Professor Xavier so that her mind would be
in his body and his mind would be in her dying body.
Sound familiar, Superior Spider-Man?
Part of Cassandra's plan was to introduce
Nano-Sentinels, those tiny versions of those giant
mutant killing machines, into the X-Men's bloodstreams
in order to weaken them.
To try and restore the professor and everyone
weakened by the Nano-Sentinels, Cyclops contacts
a healer named Xorn, who we'll talk more about
in a minute.
Xorn heals the X-Men of the Nano-Sentinels
floating around in their bodies, and attempts
to take down Cassandra, who is still wreaking havok
inside Charles' body.
He lunges at her and screams, "I can heal you!"
But it doesn't really seem to do anything.
Later, when they finally stop Cassandra
and restore the professor's mind to his body,
it's revealed that he can walk again
because Xorn had actually healed his spine.
This lasted for about a year before it was shown
in New X-Men number 146 that Xorn was really Magneto
who was presumed dead during the Sentinel attack
that was launched by Cassandra.
It was also revealed that he hadn't actually healed
Professor X's spine.
Rather, he used those Nano-Sentinels coupled
with his mutant power over magnetism to "glue"
his spine together.
But now Magneto was ready to make his move
on the X-Men, and that all starts with releasing
the Nano-Sentinels and making Charles paralyzed again.
Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail here,
but the key thing to know is that this wasn't
really Magneto.
Xorn was just impersonating him in a really complex plan
that involved using the face of Magneto as he would
go about doing horrible acts of violence
as a way to convince humanity that mutant-kind
needed to be eradicated.
The plan kind of ended up working, though,
but also Wolverine sliced Xorn's head off, so, no.
So was that end then?
Did Professor X remain permanently paralyzed?
Of course he didn't (chuckles).
During the House of M event in 2005,
Scarlet Witch used her vast powers to greatly alter
the reality in a number of ways,
and one of those reality changes was the apparent
death of Charles Xavier.
But when they went to his grave, they discovered that
there's no body buried there.
When reality was restored, Scarlet Witch had reduced
the mutant population down to only a few hundred
around the world.
She didn't kill all the mutants but simply took away
their powers.
Meanwhile, Charles Xavier is still missing.
Not even Cerebro can find him.
He eventually comes out of hiding after a few months,
and surprise, surprise, he can walk again.
He briefly explains that when Scarlet Witch remade
the world, she gave him the ability to use his legs again
but took away his telepathic abilities as a way of showing
him "what being a cripple really was."
Do not worry, my friends.
He did gets his powers back not long after,
and he maintained both his telepathy and ability to walk.
And this was the status quo of Professor X
for quite some time, actually all the way until
he was killed in Avengers versus X-Men by Cyclops
in 2012.
And that's basically all you need to know about how
and why Professor Charles Xavier seems to continuously
lose and gain the use of his legs.
Oh, man, that was a lot of stuff.
You know who made it easy?
The Ultimate Comics.
Magneto just throws a metal sphere through Xavier's spine,
end of story.
I know I didn't cover every single time that Professor X
has gotten to ability to walk.
I just wanted to cover what I think are the essentials.
The story of him temporarily being able to walk again
in Uncanny X-Men number 297 is a really touching tale,
but it only lasted for one issue, so it's not
super important, though I just did mention it,
so I guess you win this time, Jubilee.
What do you guys think?
Does Professor X having or not having the ability
to walk impact his character or personality at all?
Which story did you like the best?
Let's talk about it all in the comments below.
And if this is your first time hanging out with us here
at NerdSync, we make new videos every week
that ask questions and examine comics beyond
the surface because we believe that doing so
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Once again, I'm Scott.
You can find me on Twitter and Instagram.
And I will see you right here on Friday
for a tie-in video.
I will see you.
You better be here.
All right, I'll see you.