CREATOR CHAT

X-Men Creators

Get the lowdown on the mighty mutants from X-Men co-creator Stan Lee, along with famed writers Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson and Grant Morrison, and acclaimed artists Neal Adams, John Byrne and Marc Silvestri...

"I wanted to do a new team of heroes and I said to myself, 'I've run out of radioactivity and gamma rays and cosmic rays -- what excuse can I find for these guys getting super powers?' I took the cowardly way out and said, 'Wait a minute -- what if they were just mutants? In fact, I originally wanted to call the book The Mutants, but Martin Goodman, who was my publisher at the time, didn't like that name. So, okay -- since their leader was Professor Xavier, and they each had an 'X-tra' power, I decided to call them the X-Men... Of course, I always wondered -- if nobody would know what a mutant was, how would they know what an X-Man was? But I had a name for the book and I didn't want to make waves. That's how we ended up with X-Men."

"There were things you couldn't do because of the Comics Code in those days. For instance, the Comics Code wouldn't let you put a vampire in a comic book story. So I wondered if it was possible to come up with a character that was just like a vampire, but would still pass the Comics Code. If you look at Sauron, he's basically a vampire, but an energy vampire. What is blood? Blood is energy. It's what makes your body move. He takes your energy out of your body and you look all wrinkled. I couldn't have him turn into a bat because that was too obvious. What else flies and has leathery wings? A pterodactyl. Okay. So a pterodactyl bites somebody. He gets sick and seems to die. But he comes back to life by drawing energy from someone else. Sauron was basically a vampire and the Comics Code never spotted it."

"The beauty of writing X-Men at that time was that nobody had any expectations at all. We were so far beneath the radar. It was Dave (Cockrum) and me and the X-Men. We were like, 'What outrageous thing can we do now? How about a space battle?' Dave would go, 'Whoa, yeah, space battle, yeah! Starship, binary stars -- eat your heart out, Star Trek!' It was all the stuff that we wanted to see and no one would ever do. You know, alien space battles and demons. Let's kill off Jean! Nobody'll see it coming! And then we'll bring her back! We wanted to do stuff that we enjoyed and stuff that was fun. Let's blow up Kennedy Airport! Let's throw in homages to John Carter, Warlord of Mars! Let's bring back Magneto and have him beat the living daylights out of the X-Men! It was almost like, 'Can you top this?' In this issue: leprechauns!"

"He was an irredeemable, unrepentant, nasty son of a bitch... Dr Doom was the noble guy; Dr Doom was the tortured soul. Roger Stern summed Magneto up best, based on his very first appearance: Magneto is the kind of guy who leaves activated atom bombs to cover his escape. This is not a nice guy. This is not a freedom fighter."

"What was great about this crossover was that it was one of the early ones, and it grew out of a story itself. Other creators could play if they wanted to play, but they didn't have to. It wasn't required. So we created this whole big intertwining thing of mutants being slaughtered by bad guys. We even made a chart that people could follow if they went out to the comic book shop. It was kind of like a maze that showed you which books to read first. We wanted to call it the 'Merry Marching Marvel Mutant Massacre,' but for some reason the sales department wouldn't let us do that. It may have been in bad taste, I guess..."

"Larry's probably the most manly man in comics, I'd say. With Bob Harras, you just wanted to please him because you wanted to make him happy. With Larry Hama, you wanted to please him because you didn't want him to kill you... I loved Larry's stories: he wrote like he was. He presented Wolverine as the manliest man in comics, bar none. There was a reason why he was covered in hair! I'm only kidding about Larry. He's actually one of the sweetest guys I know. (I have to say that or he'll kill me.)"

"For me, it was the idea that these are our children. The X-Men represent the next generation. The next generation always frightens the older generation, because basically, our children are our replacements. We're going to die and they're going to carry on. For me, who's a young guy and a punk rocker of the '70s, the X-Men are the kids who are going to change the world. That's why the rest of the world hated them, feared them and wanted to stop them. That was the angle that I came up with -- it's the children versus the adults."

These interviews and more are in Comic Creators on X-Men