False Things About The X-Men You've Been Believing

The X-Men are one of Marvel's most enduring franchises, rising to popularity in the late '70s and staying there for decades. There are all kinds of X-Men, from now-standard folks like Wolverine and Storm to more out-there characters like walking wax-man Glob Herman. Together they've been the source of nine blockbuster movies, multiple animated series, and, of course, thousands of comic books.

With that much material, however, it's almost impossible to know everything about Marvel's Merry Mutants. Even if you're a die-hard fan with a love of trivia, even if you know Admantium from organic steel and the M'Kraan crystal from ruby quartz, something's bound to slip through the cracks. We're here to help, though, with a list of false things you may have been believing about the X-Men. Read on, and next time you get called out on a mistake, you won't have to blame it on Charles Xavier planting false memories. 

Superpowered misfits who protected a society that hated and feared them! Abilities that could be as much of a curse as they were a benefit! Evil forces gathering against them in a group known as the Brotherhood! A mysterious leader in a wheelchair who would eventually be revealed to have complex machinations of his own and more than his share of secrets! When the X-Men hit the stands in 1963, those elements ensured that readers had never seen anything like this before! Unless, of course, they were reading DC Comics a few months earlier.

See, Uncanny X-Men #1 debuted in September 1963. In June of that same year, however, Marvel's Distinguished Competition published My Greatest Adventure #80, introducing the world to a team called the Doom Patrol. Made up of outcasts from society — including a racecar driver who was so badly injured that his entire body was replaced with a robot, a sci-fi mummy who could project his radioactive shadow out of his body for 60 seconds, and a 50-foot actress — the Doom Patrol fought the strange crimes of the Brotherhood of Evil and were led by the Chief, a mastermind in a wheelchair who had gathered them all together.

Sound familiar? Yeah. While Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani's Doom Patrol stories hit the shelves first, there's been a lot of debate over who ripped off whom, or whether it was all a coincidence. In an interview, Drake even went as far as saying he was "more and more convinced that [Stan Lee] knowingly stole the X-Men from The Doom Patrol." Despite their early similarities, however, the two teams would take some wildly divergent paths as they continued — and unfortunately for the Doom Patrol, the X-Men would absolutely become the more popular version of that idea.

One thing you often hear from casual X-Fans is the franchise was originally created as a metaphor for the civil rights struggle of the '60s. (Professor Xavier was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., and Magneto by Malcolm X, etc.) If you really look at comics, though, making that connection usually signals a poor understanding of the X-Men, and probably a poor understanding of Dr. King and Malcolm X, too.

To be fair, the metaphors for the civil rights movement, as well as modern issues of equality, do exist as a central part of the X-Men today and have for several decades. It's an easy leap to make, too, with the hatred and fear of differences as an allegory for racism when you're dealing with obvious mutations like Nightcrawler or Beast, and with more subtle mutations in stories about mutants "coming out" that resonate with the LGBT community. Some of the most memorable X-Men stories have involved those themes, like the religious intolerance seen in God Loves, Man Kills and the dystopia of internment camps in the classic "Days of Future Past."

But those ideas were added into the X-Men well after they were created. While we associate a lot of those ideas with the cultural upheaval of the '60s, the X-Men of 1963 were definitely not meant to incorporate those ideas. Instead, mutants were just a convenience of storytelling, in that they were heroes that Lee and Kirby didn't have to make up origin stories for. As for Xavier and Magneto, it should be noted that Dr. King never started an extra-governmental paramilitary strike force under the guise of a school, and that Magneto's political motivations (and his status as a Holocaust survivor) weren't part of his original character either. Xavier has often been written as seeking peaceful coexistence, and Magneto was written from the start as having relatively sympathetic goals for a "supervillain," but likening them to real-life civil rights leaders is at best painting them with the broadest possible strokes, and at worst is dismissive of the work they did.

If you grew up getting most of your information about the X-Men from trading cards in the '90s, then you know three things about Wolverine for sure: His bones and claws are laced with an unbreakable metal called Adamantium, he was a product of the sinister Canadian super soldier program called Weapon X (one of the few times that the words "sinister" and "Canadian" are written next to each other), and his real name is Logan.

The good news is that the first two are still pretty accurate, but the third one could use some updating. In 2001, Marvel decided to make Wolverine's mysterious past a little less mysterious with a miniseries accurately titled Origin. It revealed that Wolverine was actually James Howlett, who grew up as the sickly son of an extremely wealthy family. Little Jim was, of course, a mutant, but his powers manifested as the result of his father being murdered in front of him, trauma that sparked the first of many memory issues. Also, owing to the all-consuming power of coincidence, he spent his childhood in love with a girl who bore a striking resemblance to Jean Grey, and being picked on by a bully that looked a whole lot like Sabretooth.

While he still prefers "Logan" — actually the name of the senior Howlett's murderer, who may also be Wolvie's biological father — Wolverine acknowledged his real name once all of his missing memories were restored.

While they're often overshadowed by later additions like Wolverine, the original five X-Men will always be the ones who were there when everything started. They will always be identified first and foremost with the X-Men! Unless they spent 20 years hanging around in completely different corners of the Marvel Universe, that is.

That's what happened with Hank McCoy, better known to superhero fans as the Beast. While the original X-Men comic itself was never that popular, Beast was the most successful character by far. Fans loved the combination of his monstrous looks and genius intellect with a more fun-loving attitude than characters like the Hulk or the Thing, and by the late '60s, the Beast had bounced into solo adventures in the pages of Amazing Adventures. Before long, he had joined up with the Avengers, where he would develop a friendship with Wonder Man that would define his character for a decade, and also spend some time on the Defenders. It wasn't until 1991 that he returned to the X-Men.

Of course, while he's the most successful, he's not the only original X-Man who abandoned what looked like a sinking ship. While Cyclops and Marvel Girl would remain with the team through the 1975 relaunch, Iceman and the Angel wound up in the Champions alongside Hercules, Ghost Rider, and Black Widow, one of the most random teams in Marvel history. Not exactly the prestige of the Avengers.

The X-Men franchise contains some beloved characters, but there's no question at all about who's the most popular: It's easily Wolverine, who clawed his way to the top to become a pop culture icon.

That wasn't always the case, though. When Len Wein and Herb Trimpe introduced Wolverine in the pages of Incredible Hulk #181, they had no real intentions beyond just filling an editorial mandate to give the Marvel Universe a Canadian superhero. Trimpe would even refer to him as "one of those secondary or tertiary characters" that was used "with no particular notion of it going anywhere," much like other mid-'70s Hulk adversaries like the Missing Link, the Man-Beast, or the Cobalt Man. When an international team of X-Men was created a few months later, Wolverine seemed like a natural fit alongside other pre-existing characters like Sunfire and Banshee, even though artist Dave Cockrum wasn't really a fan of the character.

Even in those early X-Men stories, though, Wolverine's not really the focus — those stories mostly revolve around Cyclops and Storm. While Wolverine has an alluring mysterious past that's doled out piece by piece — readers weren't even sure that the claws were part of his arms and not just weapons until a year into his tenure as an X-Man — he's an ensemble player until Uncanny X-Men #132 in 1977. That was the story where Wolverine stepped into the spotlight, and he hasn't left it since.