What Are The X-Men?

(see also, the "special class" from New X-Men).

Sure enough.

in the early 90s Wizard put out a special X-Men issue, and inside it was a sort of term-paper that was supposed to have been written by Cypher which theorized that mutations at the cellular level were the result of irradiated & overworked mitochondria...

The Mutants Bad/Irradiated Humans Good dichotomy is just another example of Stan Lee's incredibly poorly considered plotting

I dunno if that's the case...who was good? not Spiderman, not X-Men, not the Hulk...the Fantastic Four was led by a famous scientist with a very public profile, and none of them ever felt the need to hide their pre-irradiation identities; Captain America was a patriot hero from WWII; Thor was a Greek god...who are we talking about? Iron Man? Daredevil?

Besides, the mutants-as-persecuted-minority element didn't really come to the fore supposedly until Claremont...

Xmen #1 was all about the persecution of mutants! The whole initial run was a poorly structured civil rights metaphor.
Good guys in the Marvel Universe are exactly what you just said: Cap, FF, Avengers, DD, everybody on the roster except for hulk (teenage rage), spidey (teenage angst) and xmen ("what's happening to my body")

Yeah the "dirty muties, don't let them near our daughters" thing was there from day 1. It was actually the safer route to explore than "puberty omg".

Now I'm imagining some poor kid, instead of waking up with sticky sheets, his bed's on fire.

the movies flirted with a lot of those ideas and then quickly shied away into safer boogaboogaCIA Gyrich territory which I'm pretty sure is why the later movies started to lose interest for me.

Okay, you've got a real live Norse God striking thunderbolts from heaven and a war hero emerging from stasis to fight a terrorist paramilitary organization (imagine cyberFDR fighting in afghanistan) and a plutocrat engineer who flies a robot suit powerful enough to destroy a city and the public outcry is over a girl with telekenesis, a kid who freezes water vapor and a guy with wings on his back? These priorities never made sense to me.

Marvels never really got a toehold on the subject either; think it's ripe for someone to rip into the next time they revamp the universe

Heh - I think every Marvel fan has had this conversation at some point. I eventually reconciled it in that the established heroes are older, work in the open, represent America overtly and/or work directly for the government. FF and the Avengers have dealt with PR from day one. Mutants on the other hand, play into the fear that humanity is being replaced and dominated ala race fears - Your next-door neighbor could be a mutant! Is Spider-Man secretly a mutant!? - and of course, the X-Men originally worked in secret with a hidden, militant refugee school and most of their public outings are fighting other evil mutants. Also, these heroes tend to be younger and more rebellious as well.

I'm not sure DD automatically counts as one of the "good guys" in this argument - he's gone to the dark side many times, and the street heroes (Spider-Man, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, etc.) have generally been in the grey area in the MU, in regards to their public personas.

does marvel own a trademark on mutants? the whole DC 'meta-humans' tag feels really clunky.

sorry I haven't read any of the original run of the X-Men; I'm going by the commentary on Doc Casino's new blog (which is good fun by the way)(linked over in the X-Men Runs S/D thread)--did everyone knoow right away that Stark was IM? Bcz if so then I dont feel it's that difficult to believe that a bunch of very famous rich people who have no discernable reason to screw with the status quo and who have always been upfront with how they attained their superhuman abilities gaining the public trust, as opposed to mutants who were born (different) with those powers and seem to be maladjusted within the social framework.

The public not necesarily knowing the difference between X-Men & the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is only a slight suspension of disbelief.

Sure I'm with you there, but superpowered/paranormal/mutant/ultrascience... it's like whatever right? The average guy in the street is okay with invisible girl but not jean grey?

wasn't the idea behind the allred x-force that as soon as you put them on reality TV, the public is cool with mutants? (The Fantastic 4 were presumably already media darlings)

I'm not sure how this idea came about because reality TV stars are about the most loathed people on earth.

well they're also the most loathsome but still

Wasn't it established at some point that the FF (and maybe Spider-Man?) are actually "latent mutants" whose powers were just released (and not created) by their radioactive exposures? Or am I making that up?

Got me. I'm thinking original Marvel Universe.

I like "meta-humans"! Invasion was the best-thought-out giant linewide crossover ever.

This question ultimately is not answerable in any satisfying way besides going back and time and keeping the X-Men in a separate universe from the get-go. The movies, for example, make a lot more sense (on this point if no other). The BEST in-universe reason for people to fear mutants is the "your kid could be one! Your neighbor could be one!" quality, which makes sense up to a point, but everybody is right that in the real world you can't imagine every Joe Schmoe possibly keeping track of which famous super-powered people were mutants and which weren't.

To some extent, that might strengthen anti-mutant causes - - like, I bet when all those kids got killed at the beginning of Civil War, there would have been tons of people exploiting public ignorance and insisting mutants were responsible. But, basically, yeah, it doesn't add up.

btw, thanks for the shoutout Drugs A. Money! The Claremont run is strongly associated with the the "mutant racism" theme, but forksclovetofu and WmC are right that it's part of the 60s run too. I think Claremont gets the credit partly because a) he used the theme a lot more as a springboard for stories b) he built several major storylines around it, and maybe most importantly c) he fused it with the book's soap-opera blueprint. That is, the intensity and the drama of the book was (by about midway through his run) about the X-Men as OUTLAWS, a gang on the run from EVERYBODY. So they were both persecuted mutants, and also persecuted individuals, which is why they could sustain such a close-knit family (and thus, all the soap opera material). The theme resonated across the book as a whole. If that makes sense?

At the same time, of course, there are tons and tons of Claremont stories that have none of that going on - like, for instance, any of the five or six times that he pits the X-Men against Arcade, or all the outer-space stuff that would come in when Cockrum was drawing it.

iirc and fwiw the going origin story up until the 90's was some alien race basically setting a science experiment in motion by tinkering with humans' genes, i thought it was reasonably satisfying cuz it allowed for some seriously unscientifical ('alien' science does strange things to a man) but not quite 'magical'(marvel magic is mostly annoying) spins on mutancy, in theory, but at the same time i don't remember that origin being appealed to for any stories during my reading (mostly the claremont years) so maybe that theory was supplanted at some point.

No, I think the "Celestials did something to Earth's distant past" was pretty much standard issue through the period.

I started a thread about the impossibility of mutant/other superhero distinction a while ago:

In the Marvel universe, mutants are hated and discriminated, right? So how do the haters tell the difference between mutants and regular superheroes?