Brian Cronin

by Was Superman a Spy?

  IN 1971 ROOMMATES Gerry Conway and Len Wein were writing for Marvel Comics and DC Comics, respectively (although both would switch back and forth a number of times during the decade). During this time rooming together, within months of each other, Conway debuted Man-Thing (based on a plot by Roy Thomas), a green misshapen monster who lives in a swamp, and Wein debuted Swamp Thing, a green misshapen monster who lives in a swamp.

  Both men deny that they knew what the other one was working on, and it is believable because both men were aware of a 1940s character called the Heap, who was a green misshapen monster who lived in a swamp.

  Like Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling (see pages 74-75), the two men most likely just shared the same influences. This is notable when taking into consideration the debut of the Doom Patrol and the X-Men.

  The Doom Patrol first appeared in 1963, in DC’s My Greatest Adventure #80. The X-Men first appeared a couple of months later in X-Men #1. Like the mutant X-Men, the members of the Doom Patrol are all unable to fit normally into society anymore. They are all notable celebrities who were transfigured in acidents, like racecar driver Cliff Steele, who awoke after a fiery crash to learn that his brain had been transferred into a robot! Both books are about misfit superheroes that are not accepted by society and are led by a brilliant man in a wheelchair (Dr. Niles Caulder for the Doom Patrol and Dr. Charles Xavier for the X-Men).

  Page from Airboy Comics, vol. 10, no. 3, by Ernest Schroeder.

  Doom Patrol creator Arnold Drake certainly believes that the X-Men were based on his creation, even though for Stan Lee to use his idea he would have had to have heard about it well before the Doom Patrol made its debut, given the amount of time needed for the production of the comic. Drake felt that it was extremely possible that some staffer told Lee about the project.

  Admittedly, Drake’s scenario is probable, as there was often communication between the companies, especially back in the days when almost everyone involved lived either in New York City or its outskirts.

  However, the X-Men are not so similar to the Doom Patrol to make Drake’s claim convincing. There are many more dissimilarities than there are similarities. And the similarities that do exist are not the most original of ideas. Reluctant superheroes? The Thing from the Fantastic Four had already that down pat. The Fantastic Four also has its own professor type, who happens to stretch, just like Elasti-Girl, one of the original members of the Doom Patrol.

  So while Arnold Drake went to the grave believing that X-Men was ripping off his Doom Patrol, there is not enough evidence to give his claim that much merit, although the coincidence is certainly an amusing one.

  AS MENTIONED (ON pages 67-69), the Comics Code Authority at one point had overly strict guidelines for what was allowed in the comics. Often, as described on the aforementioned pages, the comic book creators would enjoy having some fun with the strict rules, which is certainly the case for Neal Adams and Roy Thomas during their run creating X-Men. The two men did not work on the book together for that long, only about six issues in total, but they are well remembered by fans. During their run, they introduced a new X-Men villain named Sauron. Sauron is a mutant who transforms into a pterodactyl-like creature and can hypnotize people and drain their “life force.”

  What Sauron really was, was an attempt by Adams to get around the Comics Code ban on vampires. Vampires aren’t allowed? Okay, then the X-Men will face a mutant who transforms into a flying creature, hypnotizes people, and sucks the “life force” out of them.

  A similar situation occurred in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, but in that case it was Stan Lee taking advantage of the relaxation of the Comics Code (see pages 109-11). As soon as vampires were technically allowed to be used in comics, Lee wanted Roy Thomas to get together a vampire character as soon as humanly possible, and within a couple of weeks of the guideline changes, Thomas had created Morbius the Living Vampire, who first fought Spider-Man then later became somewhat of an ally.

  Readers often make the mistake of thinking that Morbius was also an attempt to get around the rules (that is, the rules that forbade vampires) with a sort of linguistic trick: the rules did not say anything about living vampires! But that was not the case. Lee and Thomas wanted a character they could theoretically turn into a protagonist, so they wanted to differentiate him from a typical vampire. It is understandable, though, considering the turnaround time for the creation of Morbius was so short, that it appears as though they were going to create him before the Comics Code changes went into effect. That is not the case.

  NIGHTCRAWLER WAS ONE of the most interesting new characters in Giant-Size X-Men #1. A German, Kurt Wagner, had the appearance of a demon but in reality was a jovial mutant who was very much a religious person. He was also a teleporter who fancied himself a swashbuckler, since he grew up idolizing the films of Errol Flynn. Wein and Cockrum, and later Claremont especially, did a wonderful job twisting the stereotype of the evil-looking character. As great of a character as Nightcrawler is, X-Men fans almost missed out on having him as a member of the team, because Dave Cockrum originally intended for him to be a DC Comics character!

  Cockrum came to the X-Men from a stint on DC Comics’ Legion of Superheroes , a comic about a group of young heroes in the distant future. Cockrum was one of the more creative artists working in comics during the 1970s and ’80s, and he was constantly creating new characters that he wanted to use in his comics. During his time on Legion, he pitched DC a variety of new characters as well as a spin-off book about a group called the Outsiders.

  The Outsiders was going to be a team of heroes that were not accepted into the Legion of Super-Heroes, but still operated in the same time period as the legion but as an unofficial team. Nightcrawler was going to be one of the members of the team, without any real difference in his appearance at all (although presumably, he would not have been German in the Outsiders).

  Luckily, DC editor Murray Boltinoff felt that Nightcrawler was too funny looking, so Cockrum was able to bring Nightcrawler to the X-Men, where he has remained a popular member for thirty-plus years.

  ANOTHER X-MAN WHOSE genesis was in Cockrum’s Outsiders pitch is Storm. In the X-Men comics, Storm is Ororo Munroe, the daughter of an American photojournalist and a Kenyan princess who lost her parents during the Suez War when a fighter plane crashed into her family home. Ororo survives the disaster, but while covered in rubble she develops deep claustrophobia. When Professor Xavier finds her, she is living in the deserts of Africa, where the people are worshipping her as a goddess, because she is using her mutant ability to control the weather to bring them rain.

  The creation of her character, though, was a good deal more complicated than that. She was born out of, not one, but five separate designs Cockrum had done in the past. Storm’s main look is based on a combination of two other proposed Outsiders, Trio and Quetzal. Cockrum and Wein decided to merge those two designs with a third proposed Outsider character, Black Cat, who could shape-shift into a cat. Then they decided that shape-shifting into a cat was not impressive enough, so they merged the visual for this new Trio / Quetzal / Black Cat character with the powers of a fourth proposed character, Typhoon, who could control the weather. Finally, Cockrum had done some design work on X-men, and he took a few aspects of his early redesigns for Marvel Girl’s costume (including a cape) and added them to the hybrid character. The end result was Storm, who is one of the most famous members of the X-Men, particularly due to being heavily featured in the X-Men films, in which she is played by Halle Berry.

  ONE OF THREE new X-Men who made appearances before Giant-Size X-Men #1 (Banshee and Sunfire were the other two), Wolverine first turned up in the pages of The Incredible Hulk #181, where Wolverine fights against the Hulk on behalf of the Canadian government. Wolverine is a scrappy little fighter (he stands about five foot three) who has unbreakable metal claws and the ability to heal from injuries. Wein came up with the character when he wanted Hulk to fight a Canadian-inspired character, and after doing some re
search, Wein discovered that wolverines, who keep mostly to Canada, have the tenacity and fighting spirit you expect from a proper super-hero.

  When he took over from Len Wein, Chris Claremont followed Wein’s plot directions for most of the characters. Wein did not put too detailed a plan into place for the characters, since no one knew if the book would be popular enough to keep from being canceled. But one character Claremont took in a substantially different direction was Wolverine, who Wein wanted to be, surprisingly, an actual wolverine!

  A reoccurring character in a number of Marvel books during the 1970s was the High Evolutionary. The most prominent geneticist in the Marvel Universe, he often lets his genetic experimenting take him over to the point where he acts as if he is a godlike creator of beings. His base of operations is on Wundagore Mountain. He mutated a number of animals into serving as his personal bodyguards, the Knights of Wundagore.

  Originally, Wein planned for Wolverine to be one of High Evolutionary’s subjects, a mutated wolverine that escaped and now thinks he is a man. Wein gave clues to this effect in his early issues of the series. In X-Men #98, a technician gets a reading on Wolverine that suggests he is not a full-fledged mutant. In addition, Wolverine’s claws were intended by Wein to be gloves he wore rather than part of his skeleton. They were to be retractable claws that would telescope out and retract back into the casings of the glove.

  Wein also intended for Wolverine to be a teenager like the rest of the new X-Men, but he was always drawn with his mask on in his early appearances in Hulk and X-Men, and when Dave Cockrum finally drew him without a mask on, he looked clearly older than the other X-Men. Wein would note at the time, “You just put thirty years on that guy,” but the new look lasted.

  Check out (on page 173) which Marvel superheroine ended up inheriting Wolverine’s unused origin.

  WHEN WOLVERINE BEGAN on the team, he was mostly a background character. Wein saw his personality as being like a wolverine, so he’d be irritable and always wanting to fight. Wein used this type of personality to play Wolverine off of his teammates, as the guy who irritates everyone. When Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum sat down to plan out their run, each man seemed to have a favorite character: Claremont’s was Nightcrawler, while Cockrum had an affinity for Colossus, the quiet Russian gentle giant who could transform into superstrong and invulnerable “living steel.” When Wein and Cockrum were laying out X-Men, their intent was for Colossus to be the star of the comic, which is why he was given a costume that is made up of primary colors such as yellow and red. Whoever the star of the X-Men was, it sure wasn’t Wolverine. That is, until John Byrne joined the title. But what drew Byrne to Wolverine? The answer was as simple as Wolverine’s nationality.

  John Byrne was born in England, but when he was a child, his family immigrated to Canada, which is where Byrne grew up. So when he took over from Cockrum as the artist for X-Men, he knew that Cockrum and Claremont both had their favorite characters, so he chose the short Canadian fellow as his personal project.

  Byrne specifically spotlighted the dark side of Wolverine (in one early issue in the Claremont-Byrne run, Wolverine kills an enemy guard instead of simply wounding him—it seems quite commonplace nowadays, but at the time it was a bold thing to show a character killing without being absolutely forced to). Soon the character was becoming more and more popular. The story featured in X-Men #132 and #133 was probably the clincher.

  In that story, the X-Men are held captive by the evil Hellfire Club. In a battle with the Hellfire Club, Wolverine is smashed through the ground, into the sewers, and left for dead. The Hellfire Club proceeds to capture the rest of the team members. The issue finishes on a cliff-hanger. There is a spotlight on the sewer, and the reader sees a hand pop out of the muck. It is Wolverine, and the final panel is a beautifully illustrated view of the badly beaten Wolverine looking up to the sky (his body and face covered in shadows from the grates) and shouting, “Okay suckers—you’ve taken yer best shot! Now it’s my turn!”

  In the next issue, he rescues the X-Men and kills a good many Hellfire Club guards in the process. That story line most likely cemented Wolverine’s popularity, but, just to make one last addition before he left, Byrne gave Wolverine a new dark brown and tan costume before he departed Uncanny X-Men to take over The Fantastic Four.

  CHRIS CLAREMONT AND John Byrne had been developing a story line involving one of the X-Men, Jean Grey, for a long time. In X-Men #100, Jean Grey seemingly sacrifices her life to pilot a space shuttle to Earth with the rest of her teammates. But in the next issue, when it crashes she emerges as the Phoenix. She apparently had tapped into some deep reserve of power within her mind and was now much more powerful than she had ever been before.

  For the next couple of years, she seems like the same Jean Grey that everyone knew before, but, eventually, an illusionist mutant named Mastermind slowly breaks down her mental barriers and appears to turn Jean to the dark side, making her a member of the Hellfire Club. Jean breaks free of this, but slowly but surely darker aspects of her personality begin to surface, and eventually she begins to see herself as a separate personality, the Dark Phoenix. The power is too much for her mind to handle, and she flies into outer space and devours an entire sun, destroying a planet of aliens. She returns to Earth, and the X-Men face off against her and, ultimately, using all of his mental powers, Professor Xavier is able to control her and bring back the normal personality of Jean Grey. However, when the Dark Phoenix destroyed the planet, a multi-planetary commission of alien leaders determined that Jean Grey had to pay for the alien deaths, so they capture her. The X-Men fight valiantly, but in the end, knowing that her evil personality could return at any moment, Jean decides to sacrifice herself, throwing herself in front of a laser and dying in the arms of Cyclops, her soul mate.

  That was how the story appeared in the comics, but that was not how Claremont and Byrne wanted the story to end. In their original version of the story, the X-Men try to protect Jean, but they fail, and then the alien forces use a device to eliminate her powers. For the next year or so, the readers would experience what it would be like to go from being one of the most powerful beings in the universe to being a normal human. Ultimately, Magneto would tempt Jean with a return of her powers, which would be the centerpiece of the next big X-Men story line.

  That was the plan, but then editor in chief Jim Shooter stepped into the mix. Shooter felt that if she “only” had her powers taken away from her, that would not be a fair price to pay for murdering the planet of aliens. He felt that for such an act, she had to die, so he forced Claremont and Byrne to rewrite the story line.

  Of course, this being comic books, a few years later, based on the idea of a comic book fan named Kurt Busiek (who later became a popular comic book writer in his own right), Marvel brought Jean Grey back to life, using the argument that the Phoenix was really a cosmic force that traded places with Jean Grey, so that it could experience life as a human, and Jean Grey was such an influence upon the cosmic being, that, though she was only a copy of Jean Grey, she was still willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good (their original version was later reprinted in a one-shot called Phoenix: The Untold Story).

  ONE OF THE more enduring legacies of Chris Claremont’s tenure as writer of Uncanny X-Men was the work he did with the character of Magneto. As created, Magneto was your typical bad guy, willing to destroy the whole world in a fit of pique. Claremont turned him into a tortured soul, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who feared that the same would happen to mutants, and he would not let that happen. Of course, in a strange twist, Marvel at one point decided to essentially do a reverse of what they did with the Thing and take away Magneto’s Jewish heritage.

  As with the Thing, Marvel was loathe to actually come out and state that Magneto was Jewish, because they did not like to address religion in their books. But during Claremont’s time writing X-Men, it could not have been clearer if there were neon signs pointing at Magneto blinking the phrase “He is
Jewish.”

  Over the years, Magneto discussed his time in Auschwitz, and everything he described there was consistent with being part of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who, horrifically, were forced to do the dirty work of the Nazis in the death camps, like carting the dead bodies to be burned. Only Jews were in the Sonderkommando, but even so, in X-Men Unlimited #2, Marvel decided to turn its back on those years and specifically gave Magneto’s origin as a Gypsy of Sinte descent named Erik Lensherr.

  The decision came from editorial, and whatever the motivation was at the time, it has not been discussed, although it was likely for the same reason that Stan Lee preferred not to discuss religion in the comics—why court controversy if you can avoid it? Ultimately, the “incontrovertible” evidence proving Magneto’s history in X-Men Unlimited was, well, debunked—explained away as an excessively elaborate fraud by Magneto in 1997’s X-Men #72. So while he has yet to be positively identified as Jewish in the comics, it appears that Marvel has returned him to that state, and Sir Ian McKellen’s performance as Magneto in the X-Men films appears to portray him as Jewish, as well.

  IN THE EARLY 1990s, Marvel Comics was in the midst of a humongous sales boom, with some titles selling over a million copies. In 1991 Marvel launched a second X-Men title. The first issue of the book indeed sold an uncanny seven million copies! During this time period, there were a number of young, popular artists who were really driving the sales of the Marvel titles. On X-Men, the artist was Jim Lee. Like John Byrne before him, Jim Lee began plotting the book with Claremont. However, as time went on, Lee wanted to have more and more of an influence over the book’s direction, and when there was a difference of opinion between the two, the editor of the book, Bob Harras, tended to side with Lee, since Lee was seen as more directly responsible for the book’s skyrocketing sales.