10 Defining Rules Of Iconic Characters (That Came Later Than You Think)

If there is one thing that defines X-Men against the rest of the canon of Marvel heroes, it's that the mutant heroes don't just fight to stop the machinations of the Brotherhood but also fight against society's prejudices.

The X-Men are widely perceived today as analogous to the civil rights movement contemporary to the comic's 1963 creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with Professor X as a Martin Luther King equivalent and Magneto as Malcolm X. Their early comics didn't really give much indication of this potential, though.

The original X-Men comics were marketed with "In the sensational Fantastic Four style!" plastered across the covers and, sure enough, the new team took after the more popular Marvel First Family in being beloved celebrities in-universe. In X-Men #2, for instance, wealthy handsome playboy Angel is mobbed Beatlemania-style by a horde of girls demanding autographs and kisses. Hardly the lot of an oppressed and feared freak of nature.

The government and the FBI, meanwhile, worked with Xavier and his team rather than trying to tie them down with mutant registration laws.

A little of the sense of mutants as an oppressed minority began to creep in during X-Men's original run before its 1970 cancellation. But it was really with the revived and revamped version spearheaded by Chris Claremont in the late 70s Uncanny X-Men title that this possible subtext became literal text.

Helped by pushing privileged white guys like Angel aside in favour of the more diverse, international and visibly "othered" characters seen as core X-Men today (the likes of Storm, Nightcrawler, and Wolverine), mutant rights then became Marvel's way of endorsing real world civil rights.