X-Men: 5 Best And 5 Worst Writers

By Percival Constantine /

4. Stan Lee

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I can already hear the gasps. Yes, Stan Lee, the man who created the X-Men, was also one of the X-Men€™s worst writers. As I mentioned before, Lee may have created the idea of mutants as an allegory for minorities, but he didn€™t do very much with this. His run only lasted for the first nineteen issues of the book€™s history, and although he created Magneto, the character was extremely underdeveloped by him. In the early issues of the X-Men, Magneto was not the tragic character he€™s come to be regarded as, but rather a stereotypical comic book supervillain. Even his history of being a Holocaust survivor and an old friend of Professor X came from Claremont. The entire period was extremely unremarkable. Despite the introduction of Magneto, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, the Sentinels and the Juggernaut, most of the X-Men€™s foes were easily forgettable mutant criminals and alien invaders. Even among X-fans, this era isn€™t regarded with any particular fondness. Towards the end of Lee€™s Silver Age Renaissance, some of his later concepts didn€™t really get the same attention he devoted to the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. And some of those, like the X-Men and Daredevil, suffered as a result. Although Lee did create some famous characters, they were fairly one-dimensional under his pen. The work of developing these characters mostly fell to future writers, particularly Claremont.