or able to fly or run faster than light, or stretch himself like Silly Putty. These weren’t aliens or super-scientists or magicians.
They were mutants. I knew about mutants. I suspected I was a mutant.
Seriously, I did. My parents had worked on the Manhattan Project, building atomic bombs, during the Second World War—who could say I wasn’t a mutant? It wasn’t as if I fit in very well with the other kids at school or anything. I was brighter than most of them, and not very athletic, and sometimes felt as if I were missing social skills the others took for granted. It didn’t occur to me until years later that maybe my father being the only college professor in town might have something to do with it, since most of the other kids had parents working for the same handful of companies right there in town instead of commuting to Somerville. Their families all knew each other; my parents’ social contacts were elsewhere.
I never considered the fact that neither of my parents was from New England originally, and I therefore spoke with a different accent than the other kids. (Any time I did start to talk like a New Englander, my father would “correct” me until I stopped. The only thing he never got used to about living in Massachusetts was what the natives did to innocent R sounds.)
The possibility that most kids sometimes feel left out I would never have believed for a second.
No, when I was eight atomic mutation seemed a much more likely reason I didn’t feel completely at ease with my peers than any of those others.
And here was a comic book about a bunch of young mutants who had been collected together to defend all us mutants from the fear and hatred of normal people. You bet I latched onto that.
Of course, I didn’t have wings or shoot energy beams from my eyes; the closest thing I had to a superpower was double-jointed thumbs. Still, we were all mutants together, I was sure of it.
So I devoured X-Men #1, then passed it on to my sisters, as family rules required—but when everyone had read it I got it back, and made sure it did not go up to the rainy-day box in the attic with all the other comic books. I kept it and read it again and again. The main plot was something about Magneto taking over a military 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
