Free Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

together more often—for an issue every month, to be precise. “The Avengers are on the march,” wrote Lee, “and a new dimension is added to the Marvel galaxy of stars!” It wasn’t just bluster. Bringing these heroes together forced Lee to further differentiate their individual personalities and voices, and allowed Kirby to show off his skill with complex visual choreography, balancing multiple characters within the confines of single panels.
    Shockingly, Lee and Kirby managed to roll out another super-team comic the same month, with all-new characters. The X-Men followed the adventures of a group of super-powered teenage mutants who were enrolled at the private school of Professor Charles Xavier, a wheelchair-bound psychic. Under Xavier’s leadership, the valiant but inexperienced X-Men—Scott Summers, the self-serious and laser-eyed Cyclops; Hank McCoy, the acrobatic, simian-shaped whiz-kid Beast; Bobby Drake, the jocky, clowny, snowball-generating Iceman; Jean Grey, the redheaded telekinetic Marvel Girl; and Warren Worthington III, the feather-winged scion Angel—used their abnormal abilities to halt the schemes of bad-apple mutants like the metal-commanding Magneto. On their downtime, the guys practiced combat maneuvers, gathered among bongos and beatniks at Greenwich Village’s Coffee A-Go-Go, or panted at an endlessly patient Jean Grey. * But despite the banter that streamed between its adolescent heroes, The X-Men was the bête noire of The Avengers —like Spider-Man, the mutants were viewed with suspicion by the very society they fought to protect, an angle that became even more pointed as time went on. “Look at the crowd! They’re livid with rage! Just like Professor X always warned us . . . normal humans fear and distrust anyone with super-mutant powers!” cried Angel in X-Men #5, which was written shortly after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by white supremacists. A few issues later, after the Beast saved the life of a young boy, a mob chased him down and tore his clothes anyway. Was it a coincidence that the nonviolence-preaching Professor Xavier and his archenemy, the by-any-means-necessary warrior Magneto, lined up so neatly as metaphors for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? “Remember, we are homo superior,” scolded Magneto, plucking the Nietzschean term from an old science-fiction novel. “We are born to rule the earth. . . . Why should we love the homo sapiens? They hate us—fear us because of our superior power!” If the casually liberal Lee was laying out for readers where he stood on bigotry, it was also clear that he felt there were appropriate limits to the reaction to that bigotry: the hard-line Magneto and his protégés labeled themselves the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. “By any means necessary” was hardly a superhero catchphrase.
    However subtle it may have been, The X-Men ’s connection to the civil rights struggle was one of Marvel’s earliest acknowledgments of the fissures in American society. * In just a few years, the very concept of patriotism would polarize the country, and the idea of reintroducing Captain America—a character known as the “Sentinel of Liberty,” and literally wrapped in the United States flag—would have been almost unthinkable for a company courting the kids of America. As it was, the Captain America that returned to comics in 1963 in the pages of The Avengers #4 was a walking anachronism, a man out of time. The newer heroes found him in the sea, unconscious and encased in a block of ice, his youth preserved. “All those years of being in a state of frozen suspended animation,” exclaimed the Captain, “must have prevented me from aging!” But it didn’t prevent him from feeling guilt over the fate of his former sidekick Bucky (who, it was explained, had died just before Captain America went into a deep freeze), or a deep longing for the simpler times of the 1940s. The revived Captain