20 Comic Characters That Are Total Rip-Offs‏

4. X-Men

"The strangest superheroes of all!" claimed the first issue of Marvel's merry band of mutants, and they weren't lying. Exaggerating a bit, maybe. Since then the story of Charles Xavier and his team of young heroes learning to control their burgeoning powers to protect the very humans who fear them has spilled out into a multi-pronged epic that's as messy as Wolverine's photo albums and hard to explain as Wolverine's photo albums, with countless new and strange mutants being introduced all the time.

Totally a rip-off of: Doom Patrol

X-Men #1, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, was published in September of 1963. That's just three months after the first appearance of the Doom Patrol, who on their debut were dubbed the "world's strangest heroes!" Which is a pretty weird coincidence. As is the fact the Doom Patrol were defending a society that mistrusted and feared them, and were lead by an intelligent older gentleman who was confined to a wheelchair.

Speculation has abounded for years about whether Stan Lee ripped Doom Patrol off for the X-Men, with some suggesting that three months would be way too fast a turn-around for a new comic (although not unheard of from the House of Ideas, especially with Kirby in his prime). Doom Patrol co-creator Arnold Drake has supported this theory, suggesting that creatives who freelanced for both DC and Marvel could've tipped Lee off on the idea half a year before the team were introduced.