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Chapter 15: Outsider Heroes
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Chapter Fifteen Outsider Heroes THE SILVER AGE: COURTING THE COLLEGE CROWD 111 of 1963, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men, a group of men and women who are born with a mutant gene that gives them each a different superpower. The X-Men would become Marvel’s most potent metaphor for the human condition. Lee maintains that the inspiration for the mutants came from “laziness.” “It was just laziness,” he laughs. “With all the other characters, the Fantastic Four got their powers from cosmic rays, the Hulk got his power from gamma rays, Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider …. I was running out of rays, and insects to bite people! And I realized I wanted to do a lot more heroes and I thought, well, if I just say that people are mutants, you know, mutations exist in nature, and they exist in fruit and animals and people, so I’ll just say a lot of people who were born that way. And then I don’t have to dream up gamma rays, or radioactive spiders, and it made it very easy for me. So it was just laziness.” In the world of the X-Men, mutants’ powers begin manifesting themselves at puberty. With these characters portrayed as teenagers, they served as a profound metaphor for puberty itself. After all, as the legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont said, “To me, the purpose [the X-Men] serve, is you take a kid in their adolescence. Everything is in flux, physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, they’re trying to build a coherent view of themselves in the world, except the rules are changing every day! Your voice is breaking, your body is growing, you’re being swept by hormones, and impulses, and questions! You’re being required to make choices and decisions that will affect the rest of your life, but you’ve got nothing to go on, because you’re only like 14, for God’s sake!” Jon Bogadnove agrees: “The X-Men are a metaphor for puberty, in that kids are perfectly normal until they reach puberty, and then these strange traits, and their true identity, these powers and abilities take hold, and it makes them outcasts in society.” What better metaphor for all this than a mutant? The idea smacks not only of Lee’s influence—his other Marvel characters like Spider-Man and the Thing were often a metaphor for In September In September The 1964 storyline featuring the Sentinels marked the first time that the X-Men were used as a metaphor for racism. It wouldn’t be the last. outsiders, teens, and minorities—but also Kirby’s as well. The X-Men started out as a superhero team with five characters: the leader, Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, who has supreme telepathic powers; Angel, aka Warren Worthington III, who flies with the aid of huge birdlike wings; Hank McCoy, the Beast, who has the strength and agility of an animal; Scott Summers, whose eyes release dangerous optic blasts; and Jean Grey, a gifted telepath and protégé under Professor X. In fact, all five are students of the professor, and they all live and study at his “School for Gifted Youngsters” in Westchester, New York. And this is where Jack Kirby’s influence stands out most clearly. Kirby was perhaps best known for being a “world-builder,” able to create whole universes of characters and ideas with remarkable ease. His influence can be seen in other characters like the Fantastic Four, which resemble his 1950s-era DC characters the Challengers of the Unknown, and the FF supporting character Silver Surfer, which Lee admits was mostly Kirby’s idea. Considering that Lee’s and Kirby’s Fantastic Four was responsible for more spin-off characters than any other Marvel title of the 1960s—FF characters from this era include such Marvel mainstays as the Black Panther, Galactus, the Watcher, the Inhumans, the Skrulls, the Kree, and Wyatt Wingfoot—Kirby is as responsible as Lee for what we know today as Marvel Comics. And of course there’s the fact that Captain America, the most durable Golden Age character from Marvel’s “Timely Comics” era, was a Kirby cocreation . In fact, if there’s any one person who could be credited as Lee’s co-pilot in charting the Marvel Universe, it’s Kirby, who cocreated nearly every Marvel superhero during the 1960s. His story ideas and visual concepts were instrumental in the...