Stan Lee didn’t provide teenagers with super powers just to heighten reader identification. He used their tender years against them to intensify the drama. Inexperience and immaturity were, after all, conditions around which compelling plots could be constructed.
So the Human Torch impulsively quit the Fantastic Four at the end of their third issue, and the overconfident Spider-Man got beaten by Dr. Octopus in his third issue, and an entire team of teenage mutants was defeated by one old man.
“Fresh from their initial victory, Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman, and Angel aren’t short on pride or teenage superheated enthusiasm for everything,” noted comics historian Lane Kareska. “Whether they’re bickering, rescuing construction workers from a falling brick wall, or chasing one another around the Danger Room, they do it with cocksure aplomb and a spray of exclamation marks (‘Fun time’s over, chickadees! This isn’t Sadie Hawkins Day!!’) Like your little brother’s friends this is a squad of kids that needs to get the shit kicked out of them.”
Teleportation might seem kind of a passive power with which to hold the uncanny X-Men at bay, but in The X-Men 2 (Nov. 1963), it certainly does the trick.
The mutant villain’s ability to instantaneously be elsewhere makes him the king of the underworld, and thwarts the teenage heroes’ attempt to stop him from stealing vital national defense plans.
In these early, experimental years, Marvel villains might be middle-aged or even seemingly elderly. The Vanisher bears a certain resemblance to Spider-Man’s foe, the Vulture. Perhaps Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko were exploring a theme there —good versus evil symbolized as idealistic youth versus corrupted maturity.
The Vanisher is vanquished by an unlikely superhero who turns out to be the most powerful of all — Prof. Charles Xavier, the mentor with the mental powers, who blots out the Vanisher’s memory of his abilities and reduces him to childish confusion. The fact that Xavier is a man in a wheelchair adds to the irony and to the series of understated but positive messages Marvel would send to its readers about disability.
Ever the reassuring teacher, Xavier tells the X-Men, “I have left you to your own devices until now! You have not done badly considering your youth and your lack of experience! For you were up against a powerful foe!”
Xavier’s lesson is left for the last panel, when he says, “Always remember, my X-Men, the greatest power on Earth is the magnificent power we all of us possess … the power of the human brain.”
“It’s interesting to see how the comic is finding its feet, as Stan and Jack still haven’t realized what the book is about,” observed comics historian Don Alsafi. “This is most starkly illustrated in the opening scenes, when Warren Worthington III, the Angel, finds himself mobbed by adoring and love-struck fans — as if the X-Men are celebrity superheroes just like the Fantastic Four! This disparity between the X-Men’s beginnings and what the book would later become is further emphasized by Prof. Xavier’s relationship with Fred Duncan, an FBI agent in the Department of Special Affairs who has been tasked to work with the X-Men in order to more efficiently combat mutant threats. In other words, the X-Men are not simply unfeared by the public at this stage in their development — they’re positively depended upon. Heck, the government even loaned them a special plane!”
That cozy situation wouldn’t last, comics historian Don Markstein noted. “The general public of the Marvel Universe doesn’t distinguish between good and evil mutants — all, no matter how they use their powers, are objects of hatred and fear,” Markstein said. “Thus, the X-Men function as a metaphor for racial and religious minorities, those persecuted for their sexual preference or other differences, or just the alienation and uncertainties of the teenage years themselves.”
Because we readers are invited to sympathize with the X-Men, we rarely put ourselves in the position of that fearful, cowering general public. But consider: they’ve seen teenagers who can quick-freeze and power-blast a city, led by a shadowy figure who can wipe out someone’s memories and very identity with a thought.
The public’s anxieties about mutants are, in fact, pretty reasonable, particularly to American citizens who, in 1963, were still well enough read to remember Lord Acton’s dictum.
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