Note: This will be the first of what I hope will be an ongoing series for this blog. That is, reviews of older classic titles that I’m “discovering” for the first time. In this case, it’s Marvel’s first issue of the X-Men.

A few years back, I splurged to purchase a set of the Marvel DVD-ROM collections featuring complete runs of various series in PDF format. The Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Captain America, Spider-Man, the Hulk… I think the only sets I missed were Iron Man and Ghost Rider. I’m not particularly a fan of reading comics on the computer screen; I think ink on paper is much easier on the eyes. Also, I think the visual storytelling of the comics (in terms of panel layouts, pacing of page turns, etc) suffers when the onscreen display dimensions don’t match the original format the comics were designed for. On the other hand, these scanned collections have their advantages: $50 for a DVD collection equaled out to perhaps 10 cents per issue on a collected print run of a title, and it’s much easier to store all these series of comics on disc, as opposed to having them bagged, boarded, and boxed in the closet. These scanned PDF versions gave me an easy way to read hundreds of comics that I would never otherwise be able to afford, providing “reading copies” of entire series that I had always heard about but never actively collected.

I confess that I’m not much of an X-Men fan. Around the time when I was actively collecting comics in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the X-Men franchise had become for Marvel what the Legion of Super-Heroes franchise had become for DC: a cult favorite superhero title with so many layers of character continuity and long-running subplots that it had the reputation of being impenetrable to new readers. And since I had neither time nor resources to invest in reading hundreds of issues of backstory, I tended to avoid the X-Men and all its related spinoffs.

But now, with DVD-ROM in hand, I have decided it is time for me to start from the beginning and try and get a sense of what all the fuss was about, not just for the X-Men but for the early “Marvel Age” of comics in general. I’ll start here with X-Men #1, but I’ll be moving on through the rest of the DVD-ROM sets as well. No promises that I’ll make it all the way through these collections anytime soon, but I’ll do what I can to record my progress on this blog for anyone interested to see a somewhat jaded comics reader taking a trip down memory lane to discover the early days of Marvel Comics for the first time, from the very earliest issues.

The X-Men #1 (link to GCD index page.)
Cover date: September 1963
Credits: Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
(Copyright: © Marvel Comics, all images used for review purposes only)

The story: As an introductory story, this works great. A few brief captions are all that’s needed to provide an “origin” for the heroes — that is, there’s no cosmic rays or alien rockets or magic rings, these characters simply have mutant powers because they are born that way. The story starts at the heroes’ headquarters, where we meet Professor X giving a training lesson to the four X-Men (Cyclops, Angel, Beast, and Iceman), and then later we see the arrival of the new recruit Marvel Girl. With all the heroes introduced, we then shift over to the villain of the story: Magneto. As he takes over an army base and all its weapons, the young X-Men are sent on their first mission to save the world from Magneto’s ambitions.

What worked in this story: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby together, that’s what worked! If viewed in the abstract, this could be considered a fairly generic “new heroes fight powerful villain” story with melodramatic stock characters if anybody else had written or drawn this. Yet the dynamism of Jack Kirby’s art, and the sheer enthusiastic energy of Stan Lee’s scripting make me willing to accept the characters and the concept. The combination of their art and writing just grabs me as a reader and pulls me along for the ride so fast that I never have a chance to stop to notice any of the odd story quirks along the way.

What kind of quirks, you ask? Well, here’s a few panels that seemed odd during my second read through…

Verbosity overflow: The “Marvel method” of scripting (in which the dialog is only scripted after the basic plot outline has been drawn) allowed Lee & Kirby to create some masterpieces, but it can also have its flaws. This might be the case of a writer being too wordy, or an artist not allowing for enough space, or a combination of both. But regardless of the cause, I pity the poor letterer who was stuck trying to make this panel work…

Comic book science: Time for a quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.”

I had to stop and read this panel three or four times: “As the… missiles are attracted by heat, so are the Iceman’s ice grenades attracted by the missiles’ speed…” This sounds as if it’s being offered as some sort of scientific explanation, and yet… huh? Coldness is drawn to speed? Really? I don’t understand, and yet… I see it happening right there on the page, so I guess it must be true. Who am I going to believe, common sense or my own two eyes?

Odd choice of words: I’m really curious about future X-Men issues now. Was this an accidental typo, or did Stan Lee really intend to redefine “teleportation” to mean “telekinesis”. And if so, then what word will he use later to describe someone who actually has the power of teleportation?

Final thoughts: Apparently the theme of “downtrodden heroes hated and feared by the world” which I now associate with the current X-titles would come later. Here in their first adventure, the military is cooperative in letting the X-Men take care of Magneto for them, and by the end they appear to be sincere in their gratitude after the victory. No complaints from me; given the gloomy grit of modern superhero comics, I can appreciate a good old fashioned happy ending.