X-MEN

   US COMIC-book series, created by Jack KIRBY and Stan LEE for MARVEL COMICS in 1963. It had a 66-issue run, and then ran reprints until \#94 (1975), when new stories resumed featuring the new team of X-Men that had been introduced in Giant-Size X-Men \#1 a few months earlier. Kirby drew the first 11 issues and Lee wrote the first 19. Many highly regarded artists have worked on the series over the years, notably Neal ADAMS, John Byrne, Dave Cockrum, Jim Lee, James STERANKO and Barry Windsor-Smith;while later writers have been Roy Thomas (\#20-\#43, \#55-\#64 and \#66), Arnold Drake (\#44-\#54), Denny O'Neil (\#65), Len Wein (\#94-\#95 and GiantSize \#1) and Chris CLAREMONT (\#96-\#279). Claremont has now left the series, after a dispute; his 16-year unbroken writing run is a record for a Marvel title.X-Men, now retitled The Uncanny X-Men, differs from apparently similar costumed- SUPERHERO comics in that the X-Men, "feared and hated by the world they have sworn to protect", are all MUTANTS. Ignorance and fear of mutants was the subtext to the 1st run, and in the2nd series much emphasized by Claremont, who saw the comic as showing "racism and prejudice . . . and what it's like to be a victim of it". He most successfully realized this theme in God Loves, Man Kills (1982), an X-Men GRAPHIC NOVEL in which a fundamentalist televangelist launches acrusade against mutants. X-Men was the best-selling US comic for most of the 1980s, its success spawning numerous miniseries and the ongoing The New Mutants (1983-91), X-Factor (1986-current), Excalibur (1988-current),Wolverine (1988-current), Marvel Comics Presents (1988-current) - an anthology title with Wolverine the main story - X-Force (1991-current) and a second X-Men (1991-current). Nearly all the traditional sf themes, from GENETIC ENGINEERING to TIME TRAVEL, have been used in X-Men.

RH