X-Men

▪ comic-book series

      American comic-book series featuring an ensemble cast of mutants born with superhuman powers that resulted from an anomalous X gene in their DNA.

      The original version of the X-Men, created in 1963 by writer Stan Lee and illustrator Jack Kirby, was a team of teenage superheroes (never exclusively male, despite the name) operating under the cover of a boarding school and led by a telepathic professor. Although the setting and their powers' genetic origin were unique, the X-Men stories were fairly standard battles against malevolent super villains, and by 1970 interest had waned, the series lapsing into reprints of old stories.

      In 1975 the series was relaunched with the young British writer Chris Claremont, who featured many new characters and started a nearly 17-year-long run that transformed the series from a commercial failure into one of the most influential and lucrative comic books of its era. Claremont used the mutants, who were feared and hated by the general public among whom they operated, as a metaphor for racial and social intolerance. The characters grew into realistic adults, and the long-running, open-ended plots became a template that almost all later X-Men writers followed.

      Although the cast of the series constantly changed, mainstays included brooding, eye-beam-wielding field commander Cyclops, feral and haunted Wolverine, African weather goddess Storm, and steel-skinned, big-hearted Colossus. By the early 2000s Marvel Comics was publishing a dozen or more X-Men-related comic books each month. The first of several animated X-Men television series debuted in 1992, and a live-action film franchise began in 2000.

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