Mind Candy

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Behind the counter at the front was Mr. Dunham—or rarely, Mrs. Dunham—who was invariably reading, interrupting his current book occasionally to glance at his customers and make sure we weren’t doing any damage.

  And on one side of the counter were two or three big stacks of old comic books, in various states of disrepair. The intact ones cost a nickel apiece; the ones missing the cover or inside pages were two for a nickel. Even when the cover price for new comics had gone from a dime to twelve cents a couple of years earlier, the Dunhams had held the line at a nickel.

  This is where we bought most of our comics, my sisters and I. Marian, the oldest, would look for anything with horses in it, which mostly meant old Dell westerns featuring the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but she also bought Tarzan and sometimes a few superhero titles. Jody, the next-oldest, was a big Superboy fan. Me, I liked anything with spaceships or monsters. I don’t think the younger two were buying any of their own yet in ’63, but they’d look at our purchases when we got them home and passed them around.

  None of us bought Marvel comics much; the Dunhams didn’t get very many in. The local outlets for new comics in Bedford, the racks in the drugstores and five-and-dime stores, didn’t usually carry any Marvels, that I saw; I think it must have been a local distribution problem. Also, I think even then a lot of Marvel readers kept their comics, rather than selling them to the Dunhams.

  They did get a few, though, and we’d thumbed through battered copies of Strange Tales and Tales of Suspense and Incredible Hulk, but we didn’t generally buy them. They seemed weird and, frankly, sometimes a bit stupid—the Hulk and the Thing never did anything clever, they just kept hitting the bad guys until they fell down, and didn’t the Human Torch set a lot of things ablaze throwing those fireballs around? Iron Man always seemed to have exactly the gadget he needed, and Dr. Strange didn’t make any sense at all. The colors all seemed muddy. My eight-year-old self didn’t appreciate these now-classic issues, and my sisters despised them. There were never any Spider-Man or Fantastic Four issues, or we might have been a bit more enthusiastic.

  But then one day I dug through the pile of comics at Dunham’s and found a comic book that didn’t look quite like anything I’d ever seen before. The title was X-Men. I’d never heard of it—which wasn’t surprising, since what I’d found was the first issue, and it was only a couple of months old at that point. The cover image of the five strange-looking heroes confronting the bizarrely-garbed Magneto caught my fancy; I handed Mr. Dunham my nickel and took my prize home, where I curled up in the big yellow chair in the living room and started reading.

  And I was captivated immediately.

  The first element that grabbed me was that these weren’t grown men battling criminals in the streets of some imaginary city; these were teenagers at a boarding school in Westchester County. I knew where that was; I knew about boarding schools. And these characters acted like teenagers, more or less, playing jokes on each other, mooning over silly crushes, and so on.

  We were introduced to them one by one—Iceman, Beast, Angel, Marvel Girl, Cyclops, and the headmaster, Professor X. And I thought they were all unbelievably cool.

  For one thing, none of them were called “Lad” or “Lass.”

  For another, they had personalities. I don’t remember much of the plot after all these years, but I still remember Iceman pulling on boots and hat and sticking a carrot on his nose to look like a snowman, I remember the Beast hanging upside-down from the ceiling while reading a book, I remember Marvel Girl trying hard to please the Professor by strengthening her telekinesis with practice, I remember Angel shyly turning away as he unstrapped the wings he’d hidden under his clothes.

  And their powers, while fantastic, seemed somehow more realistic than most of the superheroes I’d seen. No one here was invulnerable, or able to fly or run faster than light, or stretch himself like Silly Putty. These weren’t aliens or super-scientists or magicians.

  They were mutants. I knew about mutants. I suspected I was a mutant.

  Seriously, I did. My parents had worked on the Manhattan Project, building atomic bombs, during the Second World War—who could say I wasn’t a mutant? It wasn’t as if I fit in very well with the other kids at school or anything. I was brighter than most of them, and not very athletic, and sometimes felt as if I were missing social skills the others took for granted. It didn’t occur to me until years later that maybe my father being the only college professor in town might have something to do with it, since most of the other kids had parents working for the same handful of companies right there in town instead of commuting to Somerville. Their families all knew each other; my parents’ social contacts were elsewhere.

  I never considered the fact that neither of my parents was from New England originally, and I therefore spoke with a different accent than the other kids. (Any time I did start to talk like a New Englander, my father would “correct” me until I stopped. The only thing he never got used to about living in Massachusetts was what the natives did to innocent R sounds.)

  The possibility that most kids sometimes feel left out I would never have believed for a second.

  No, when I was eight atomic mutation seemed a much more likely reason I didn’t feel completely at ease with my peers than any of those others.

  And here was a comic book about a bunch of young mutants who had been collected together to defend all us mutants from the fear and hatred of normal people. You bet I latched onto that.

  Of course, I didn’t have wings or shoot energy beams from my eyes; the closest thing I had to a superpower was double-jointed thumbs. Still, we were all mutants together, I was sure of it.

  So I devoured X-Men #1, then passed it on to my sisters, as family rules required—but when everyone had read it I got it back, and made sure it did not go up to the rainy-day box in the attic with all the other comic books. I kept it and read it again and again. The main plot was something about Magneto taking over a military base and our greatly-overmatched quintet of teenagers finding some clever means of driving him away, and that was all very well, but it was the stuff at Xavier’s school that I really cared about.

  Man, if I wasn’t a mutant, I sure wanted to be! At least, if it meant I’d get to go to a cool school like that…

  Oh, I knew it was all fantasy, but it was a much more attractive fantasy than I’d ever seen in comics before. Most superheroes—well, who’d want to be Batman, really? Not only is he an orphan, but he’s spent his entire life working and training and exercising. Superman’s too alien to really identify with. And all those guys were adults, anyway.

  Nor did kid sidekicks really work for me. I never saw myself as anyone’s sidekick—and I wasn’t anyone’s ward, whatever the heck that meant. It seemed vaguely creepy.

  The whole crime-fighting thing just seemed so unrelated to the world I lived in. The worst crimes I encountered in Bedford were things like bicycle theft.

  But boarding school I understood. Playing jokes on your classmates I understood. Having a crush on the cute girl in your class I understood. And a school where everyone’s weird—well, as Syndrome pointed out in “The Incredibles,” when everyone’s special, no one is, and at that age I didn’t like standing out.

  I liked that even though they were kids, they were the X-Men, not the X-Teens. It seemed as if they were getting respect with that name.

  And ganging up to fight a supervillain with the wholehearted approval of the headmaster was just too frickin’ cool for words.

  I loved X-Men #1. Loved it.

  But I didn’t see #2. It never showed up at Dunham’s. Neither did #3 or #4. And the local drug store or Woolworth’s still didn’t have any Marvel comics that I could see, just DC and Gold Key and Archie and Harvey. (They didn’t carry ACG, either—I never in my life saw an ACG comic for sale new, but Dunham’s used to get stacks of them. I could never figure that out.)

  After awhile I decided that X-Men #1 must have been a one-shot; I never saw any more in the stores
, never heard anyone mention the series. It’s probably hard to realize nowadays just how little information was available to a comics-reading kid back then, with no comics shops, no internet, no Previews, no Wizard. I had no way of knowing X-Men was still going.

  I never forgot that first issue, though; I would fantasize about attending a school for mutants, about discovering that I did have a mutant power more significant than thumbs that bent backward.

  And then finally, years later, when I was in my teens, I came across more issues of X-Men. I don’t remember exactly which issues they were; something from late in the original run. I was flabbergasted—the series hadn’t been canceled! It was still going! I bought the two or three issues eagerly and took them home and read them.

  I was so disappointed!

  Because these weren’t the X-Men I remembered, the teenaged students at a special boarding school; oh, they were the same characters, but somewhere in there they’d grown up and become just another bunch of superheroes. What fun was that? Almost everything I’d loved about the first issue was gone. They still had cool mutant abilities, but so what?

  I dug out my tattered copy of #1 and re-read it, and yes, it was just as good as I remembered it—and they’d taken all the good stuff out, somewhere between #2 and #60.

  So I didn’t look for any more; I didn’t buy them when I came across them.

  And then in 1975 I came across #95—I’d missed the first couple of appearances of the new team, but I saw that one and bought it.

  I was twenty-one, reading comics again after a hiatus; my mother had given my copy of X-Men #1 to a church rummage sale while I was at college, but I still remembered it fondly, so I picked up #95.

  It was still a superhero team, not the real X-Men—to me, the real X-Men were teenage mutants, not adults—but it was pretty good, so I started buying the title again.

  There was some semblance of the original concept; Professor X was collecting and training mutants. But it was mostly superhero stuff, and they were adults.

  When Kitty Pryde was introduced my hopes rose; someone had remembered that Xavier was running a school, not a superhero club! But the focus was still on the superheroics.

  Over the years these glimpses of the original concept kept appearing. The New Mutants started out as an attempt to get back to the roots, but almost immediately became another superhero team—teenagers, yes; inexperienced, yes; but they were spending more time in Brazil and Ireland than in classrooms in Westchester. More young mutants appeared over the years, but somehow the stories almost always seemed to focus on the adults, on superheroing, rather than on what I had loved back in 1963 and still desperately wanted to see—stories about growing up mutant, and about attending a school for mutants. Not a school for superheroes; a school for mutants. A school where everyone accepted that yes, you’re different, and that’s okay, we’ll teach you to handle being different.

  And looking back forty years, I realize that what I saw in that first issue and wanted more of was the same thing that modern kids are getting from the adventures of Harry Potter. Sure, the conflict with Voldemort keeps the plot moving, but what the readers really love is Hogwarts. Rowling knows that, and keeps the focus on the school, on Harry’s classes and teachers and classmates and sports, as much as on the larger adventures.

  Alas, Marvel has never managed to maintain that focus; over and over, writers have recognized the appeal of the school setting and tried to drag the stories back to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, but time after time they have slipped away again, to New York and Genosha and a thousand other places, chronicling the struggles of mutant against mutant, and mutant against human. The X-Men have not just been another bunch of superheroes, I’ll grant them that; they’ve served as a metaphor for discrimination and oppression of every kind, and that’s a good thing.

  But it isn’t what I found in the first issue. I wasn’t black or gay or Jewish, I wasn’t oppressed or discriminated against, but I still sometimes felt like an outcast, a weirdo, a mutant. I didn’t particularly want to be a hero, or save the world; I just wanted to be accepted despite being who I was.

  Xavier’s school was initially, for me, a fantasy of a place where everyone, no matter how weird, was accepted for who they were. No one tried to make them normal. No one pretended they were all alike. The students were all pushed to perform to the best of their ability, no matter how bizarre those abilities might be.

  And I wonder whether that might explain the curious sales history of the X-Men titles.

  X-Men was not a hit in its original incarnation. When Stan Lee recreated Marvel Comics in the 1960s he threw a lot of ideas out into the market; some clicked, like Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, and some didn’t, like Ant-Man and Captain Marvel. Hard as it may be to believe now, the X-Men were one of the less-successful creations; they didn’t have anything close to the sales figures of the FF or ol’ Webhead. The title struggled on for a few years, then went to reprints for a few more, before being reinvented and relaunched in the mid-1970s.

  But once it was relaunched, it quickly became a hit, and by the mid-eighties was Marvel’s top-selling title by a fairly wide margin; it made up such a large part of the business that some comic book shops considered Uncanny X-Men (as it had been retitled) to be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. What had changed in there? Why was the concept a flop in 1963 and a major hit in 1975?

  Oh, there were changes in the comic itself—the addition of Wolverine and Nightcrawler and Storm certainly didn’t hurt, as they’re great characters. The art, especially during the Byrne/Cockrum period, was better than it had been for most of the early issues. I don’t think that really accounts for it, though. What had changed was the rest of the world.

  In the summer of 1963 the 1950s were still lingering. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated yet, the Beatles weren’t yet on the charts, the Vietnam War was a matter of a few military advisors in a country most Americans still hadn’t even heard of. People trusted the government—after all, our leaders had seen us safely through World War II and were fighting the Cold War to protect us all from Communist tyranny. Conformity was seen as one’s patriotic duty. And most kids read comic books—those stacks at Dunham’s turned over pretty quickly, and every kid I knew had a few comics at home, even if they were just Archie or Richie Rich titles.

  A comic book where the heroes were mutant weirdos did not suit the temper of the times, to say the least. Remembering those days, I think most kids probably found the X-Men to be pretty creepy. I didn’t, I loved them—but I was an oddball, a suspected mutant.

  There were enough oddballs like me to keep the book going, but not enough to make it a success.

  But then the phenomenon known as “the Sixties” happened. The counter-culture began setting its own standards, with Zap Comix existing alongside the mainstream fare like “Gilligan’s Island.” Long-haired kids took pride in being called “freaks.”

  And except for a temporary surge during the “camp” craze triggered by the “Batman” TV show, comic book sales plummeted. When I started reading comics in 1959, every kid read them; by the time X-Men sales peaked in the 1980s, if I mentioned that I collected comics I would sometimes be asked, “Are they still publishing those?”

  Comics went from being a mass medium to being a specialized taste; by 1975 reading comics marked a kid as something of an oddball.

  And the natural audience for the X-Men was always oddballs and misfits.

  Furthermore, the counter-culture had spread the idea that conformity was a trap; the Vietnam War had destroyed faith in authority. More people were admitting their differences, rather than trying to suppress them. People who were different from the norm were no longer automatically seen as creepy and threatening.

  That comic book I fell in love with in 1963 had just been a dozen years ahead of its time. The world caught up with it eventually, but X-Men was there first.

  I’m glad it was, because when I was eight going on nine
, reading about the Beast and the Angel and Iceman and Cyclops and Marvel Girl, I took great comfort in its existence—in knowing, because this comic book was being published, that I wasn’t the only kid in America who felt as if he were growing up mutant.

  Sgt. Fury’s Family Affair

  Originally published in North Carolina Veterans’ News

  This article is about Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, heroes of a couple of hundred comic books back in the 1960s and ’70s.

  If you haven’t already turned the page in disgust, stay with me for a moment. I am not a fan of Sgt. Fury. I’m not a fan of war comics in general, although I do read them sometimes.

  However, I recently acquired, cheap, a stack of Sgt. Fury, all in very nice condition. I think I originally intended to sell ’em at a profit, or maybe I just bought them because I can’t resist cheap stuff, but as a matter of policy I read them, all in one sitting. I read every comic I acquire, no matter how stupid it may appear, in hopes of turning up unsuspected gems. That’s how I came to read eighteen issues of Sgt. Fury all at once, which brought me to a realization.

  These are not war comics at all.

  Marvel always advertised them as being “the war comic for people who hate war comics”, and they meant it. Despite the presence of hordes of Nazis and the occasional Italian Fascist or Imperial Japanese, these are not stories about World War II.

  What are they about, then? They’re about the Howling Commandos. And no, I’m not just playing with words. Some of the Sgt. Fury annuals were set in other times and places. It didn’t matter if the Howlers were in occupied France, South Korea, Vietnam, or outer space—all that changed were the backgrounds and the enemy uniforms. The stories are not about the war, but about the camaraderie among the men who fought. Doesn’t matter where they fought; you could do the same stories about Roman Legionnaires. The Nazis aren’t characters, for the most part, but just part of the background, the constant threat that the Howlers face. Not much of a threat, either. As people who did like war comics pointed out, Sgt. Fury’s adventures never bore any resemblance to reality whatsoever; they were pure macho fantasy. Any one of the Howling Commandos could easily fight his way home through anywhere up to three German divisions—two, if he’s sick, and just one if he’s seriously wounded and slowly bleeding to death. The German army is never any real danger except by pure dumb luck. Howlers are too stubborn to die.