Marvel Comics Group is the biggest comic book publisher of all. Supporting this behemoth are comic book ‘families’ with origins dating back to the early 1960s, the Silver Age of comics. If you open any issue of Previews magazine and browse through the Marvel section (this section comes as a separate ‘free’ companion to Previews), you will see several related books that focus on Spider-Man or the Avengers or the X-Men.
I guess if you visited Marvel in the early to mid-60s and told them that the X-Men would become a major cornerstone of their business, they probably wouldn’t believe you. After all, the X-Men, so prominent these days in print, video games, and movies, was the lagging publication of the Silver Age. Sales were so lousy that the original X-Men run was even canceled after issue no. 66! From issues 67 to 93, Marvel published reprints of previous issues.
1974 saw the publication of the historic Giant-Size X-Men no. 1 that introduced the new team: the X-Men team we know today, including the X-Man superstar, Wolverine.
And the old team? The original X-Men? Iceman, Beast, Angel, Jean Gray continue to be active in the Marvel universe. Cyclops became part of the new team and leads the X-Men to this day (circa 2012).
However, the old stories have largely faded into obscurity; On comic book forums on the internet, when fans talk about the early X-Men problems, they are usually referring to the numbers 94 and up. At this point, it’s worth noting that the original X-Men experienced something of a resurgence during the early issues of X-Factor and legendary writer / artist John Byrne came up with a series called X-Men: The Hidden Years that tells the story. of the original X-Men from number 66, the last number of the original run, to number 94, the first number of the new team.
Recently, I had the opportunity to read these first issues of X-Men. Original issues are relatively expensive, especially number 1, but black and white reprints of the Essential X-Men volume 1 commercial paperback are available; The fully colored collections are also available as Marvel Masterworks.
The first thing I noticed was how simple the tales were compared to today’s elaborate multi-topic stories. It was really refreshing to be able to choose a comic and feel that the creative team behind it considered it important to tell the reader the story without making it necessary for the reader to have read the issue before or the issue after. The longest story arc was issues 14 through 17 involving the Sentinels, but even then each topic in the arc contained a brief summary of what happened before.
All of the original X-Men have matured since those early issues when they were still teenagers, and some of them, like the Beast and the Angel, have undergone dramatic physical changes. But in these pages I saw the X-Men as they were originally conceived. It is a credit to Lee and Kirby, Thomas and Gavin and the other creatives with them that I was able to easily adjust my perception from my current point of view to adopt the tropes of the Silver Age. I was able to approach these comics considering how a reader from the 60s would possibly approach them. The Silver Age marked the return of the superhero from a long haitus that spanned the 1950s; The last time superhero comics had this much visibility was in the 1940s. Readers of 1963 and 1964 would have taken an X-Men comic and looked at it in awe. Imagine that: a man with wings, another made of ice, the Beast climbing the side of a building with gigantic bare feet, the graceful Marvel Girl with her telekinetics (known as telepathy during the first few issues), and best of all Cyclops with its wonderful optical explosions.
It’s funny that some elements of the X-Men that I found boring turn out to be wonderful when viewed in the context of these early issues. I have always believed that the Angel was useless, for example. His wings were too vulnerable; it is nothing more than a flying target. Not so in these first numbers, here his speed and agility in flight is celebrated; The Angel is useful to his teammates in rescue situations and the way Kirby and Gavin interpret him shows very clearly how he likes to fly. It could be that in the new X-Men themes too much emphasis was placed on pure fighting prowess, a trait that the Angel, not including his Archangel form, was not particularly good at. Another noteworthy mention is the Beast. Hank McCoy in human form is wonderful to watch compared to his later animal forms; it’s smart, it’s fun, and the Boundary Beast is an effective dashboard visual.
I also note that this is the weakest iteration of the X-Men, and that’s not a disdain. Cyclops faints if he uses his optical blasts too much. Jean Gray can only lift small objects. This is not a powerful team; which only adds to the suspense of each topic, as both the X-Men and the reader are aware of the limitations of the team.