UPDATE: The reboot’s own writer has now landed on a similar read, with the MCU’s Lee Sung Jin saying the X-Men are for everybody and that the film leads with universally relatable characters first.
The most repeated piece of X-Men lore ever told is a myth, and it just got debunked by one of the men who built the franchise.
John Byrne, the legendary artist behind the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past, sat down with The New York Times this week to promote his new alternate-reality hardcover X-Men: Elsewhen.
Along the way, he casually detonated the origin story fans have been repeating for fifty years: that Stan Lee created the X-Men as a metaphor for the civil rights movement, with Professor X as Martin Luther King Jr. and Magneto as Malcolm X.
According to Byrne, that framing came later, and Stan simply went along with it.
“Xavier is F.D.R. and Magneto is Hitler”
Byrne tells the Times that anyone who actually reads the earliest issues will see a very different template.
“Xavier is F.D.R. and Magneto is Hitler,” he says, pointing out that early Magneto is even draped in Nazi trappings.
Per Byrne, fans persuaded Stan Lee that he had been writing a racism allegory all along, and Stan’s response was essentially “Sure, why not?”
That should sound familiar. It is the same pattern that produced every “the X-Men were always political” argument you have seen online for the past decade.
The mutant metaphor did not start as a statement about race, and it did not start as a statement about LGBTQ identity either.
It started as a superhero book about outsiders, and readers poured their own meaning into it. It’s not something limited to a small segment of the population; it’s something that all fans can relate to. That’s the point.
Byrne even cites the late Marvel writer and editor Roger Stern on the real appeal: the fans saw themselves in the X-Men because the X-Men were outsiders who only hung out with their own kind.
So the claim that the book was activist by design from issue #1 is fan mythology that certain types of fans found convenient to ratify.
Elsewhen sells out as Byrne calls it his swan song
The news peg here is that Byrne, now 76, is back.
X-Men: Elsewhen, published last week by Abrams ComicArts, revisits the X-Men at the exact point Byrne walked away in 1981, with one massive change: Jean Grey was never killed. Phoenix lives.
The first of three planned volumes immediately sold out its initial print run.
Byrne says the project began strictly for his own amusement, ran as daily installments on his website, and was never supposed to become a real book.
He is calling it his swan song, and the third volume will reportedly end with a text page explaining where the unfinished stories were headed.
Byrne takes a shot at Frank Miller’s Wolverine
Byrne admits he shoots from the lip, and the interview delivers. He says he never cared much for Frank Miller’s take on Wolverine, calling the artwork beautiful but the character unrecognizable to him.
His own view of Logan is considerably darker than anything Marvel publishes today.
Byrne describes Wolverine as “quite literally a homicidal maniac” and sketches a scene he says he would never draw, in which Logan guts Kitty Pryde at the breakfast table over nothing and keeps eating his cereal.
With the X-Men now front and center in the MCU heading into Avengers: Doomsday, expect the fight over what the franchise “really means” to get louder.
Byrne’s answer is the one nobody arguing online wants to hear: it meant whatever the readers decided it meant, and Stan Lee was happy to take the credit.
