Tag: jean grey

X-Men #4

The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants!

Featuring: X-Men
Release: January 3, 1964
Cover: March 1964
12 cents
Sensational script by: Stan Lee
Dynamic drawings by: Jack Kirby
Imaginative inking by: Paul Reinman
Legible lettering by: Art Simek
23 pages

The Scarlet Witch seems to be wearing green on the cover.

Pedantic notice. The title of this comic is “The X-Men”. After 3 issues, I decided I was tired of typing that. It’s easier to just call it “X-Men”. I will be doing that from now on. Same for “The Avengers”. I’d already been doing that for “The Amazing Spider-Man” without really thinking it through.

I should be paying more attention to the taglines. They are dubbed “X-Men: The most unusual teen-agers of all time!” Last issue had the same subheading. In #2, it was “the strangest super-heroes of all time. The covers of the first two issues dubbed them the “strangest super-heroes of all”.

I feel it should be pointed out that we’ve already met some pretty darn unusual teenagers, notably Human Torch and Spider-Man. So the tagline may be somewhat hyperbolic.

This issue introduces the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Not what I would name my group of mutants. And it’s not clear who, if anybody, named them that. The cover of the comic and the title of the comic call the group that, but the group is not named within the story.

Professor X calls them “evil mutants”, but he has often referred to “evil mutants”. I could never tell if he was speaking generically, or specifically referring to Magneto’s group. I still can’t.

Designation issues aside, introducing a team of villains to battle the X-Men is a good idea, since they themselves are a team. It’s hard to show a team always fighting against a single individual, even though that’s mostly what the Fantastic Four have done. It’s a bit surprising they are yet to come up with a team of villains for them. They’ve come close. Red Ghost had his Super Apes, and that was now four, er, members who could each match one member of the FF. But I have trouble counting that as a team since they are apes. Dr. Doom recruited the Terrible Trio, so again we had 4 people, each meant to face off with one FF member; but that was not so much a team of super-villains as it was Doom and three henchmen.

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The X-Men #1

X-Men

Featuring: X-Men
Release: July 2, 1963
Cover September 1963
12 cents
Written by: Stan Lee
Drawn by: Jack Kirby
Inked by: Paul Reinman
23 pages

Paul Reinman is not a name we’ve seen a lot. The internet tells me we’ve seen him ink Kirby once before in our reading, on Incredible Hulk #1, but he was not credited in that issue. That issue relied heavily on the mood created by night and shadow, so it needed a good inker. This issue requires an entirely different feel, but Reinman again delivers.

So, anyways, hey! It’s the X-Men! That’s a good new addition to our growing cast. They were really big when I started reading comics in the early ’90s. And they’ve had a whole bunch of movies now. So this is pretty exciting. We get to see how it all began.

And did you know the X-Men and the Avengers debuted on the very same day? How wild is that? We’ll cover Avengers #1 shortly.

We learn the X-Men are a team of mutants, really the students at a school for mutants, which also acts as a haven. Professor X is the teacher. He trains his students to use their powers to benefit mankind, and to fight evil mutants, like Magneto.

The word “mutant” is important, but pretty new to us. It’s worth reflecting back on Amazing Adult Fantasy #14, where we first encountered the word in our reading. I’m not sure what Marvel comic was the first to ever use the word, but I know who to ask. In that story, Tad Carter is revealed to be a mutant with telepathic and telekinetic powers, because his father had been exposed to radiation before he was conceived. He receives a telepathic summons and goes to join a secret society of self-described mutants with a variety of powers, who wait in hiding until humanity is ready to accept them, when they can usher in a new golden age.

We heard the word again in two other comics published this very day, July 2, 1963. Namor, the offspring of a human and a Sub-Mariner, with powers beyond either race, self-described as a mutant. And Merlin, wizard of King Arthur’s court, explained his seeming wizardry was actually because he was a mutant with powers of telepathy, teleportation, and levitation.

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