In response to my last Deck Log Entry, on the tortuous romance of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Girl, my pal, the Silver-Age Fogey, raised the question, “How old WERE Reed and Sue?” This invited a bit of discussion among the other respondents. I took it as a challenge to see if I could determine the couple’s relative ages based on what information was provided to us in the Silver Age.
I thought on this much during the recuperation from my total knee replacement. Stan Lee’s tales of the Fantastic Four never provided a specific answer. But he did provide a few details, maybe enough that, like one of those logic puzzles that provide a few facts (“Philbert is older than Mary but younger than Cosgrove”; “Cosgrove is a bank vice president”; “”Bushrod and Mary have been married for ten years”) in which one can deduce the answer to a question (“What colour is Mary’s hair?”), perhaps we can determine how old Reed and Sue were, or at least hit a reasonably close mark.
First, we start with one premise: that Stan Lee advanced the time of the Fantastic Four’s adventures in lock-step with the actual years, at least at first. In 1961, the Smilin’ One would have no way of knowing that the Marvel Universe he was creating would be thriving sixty-four years later. More likely, he expected it to peter out in five years, tops. Therefore, there was no problem in synchronising Marvel Time with real-world time. On occasion, comments in the stories backed that up.
That was until about 1965 or so, when the series shifted to setting one adventure over three or four or five issues, and taking up the next one immediately after the previous one had ended. At that point, keeping the length of the F.F.’s adventures in sync with the real world became difficult, if not impossible.
But, for the stories published from 1961 to 1964 or so, it’s safe enough to presume a year-for-year standard.
In studying the first thirty-five issues or so of Fantastic Four, I determined that Stan Lee’s scripts provided at least three salient facts which had a bearing on Reed and Sue’s ages. Let’s dive right into it, shall we?
Fact № 1: Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were veterans of World War II.
This was established in “A Visit with the Fantastic Four”, from Fantastic Four # 11 (Feb., 1963), in which Reed and Ben reminisce over their early days. Besides the fact of their wartime service, much can be extrapolated, with a reasonable amount of accuracy, from this sequence, especially when put against other Marvel comics published.
F.F. # 11 tells us that Ben Grimm served as a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps, while Reed Richards was an Army officer assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, working behind the lines. But exactly when did they enter the service?
As Reed states, “We hardly had time to pack away our diplomas” before joining the war effort. This strongly suggests that Richards and Grimm joined the service immediately after they graduated from college. College graduations typically take place in the early summer, June or July. The first summer in which the U.S. was involved in the war was in 1942. If Reed and Ben graduated in 1942, then directly entered the armed forces, even an accelerated pipeline for commissioning as officers and then training wouldn’t have put them into the war effort until late 1942, probably November or December of that year.
How do we know that it was the summer of ’42 that they joined up, and not the summer of 1943 or ’44? For that, we go to another Marvel title, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. In “Midnight on Massacre Mountain”, from Sgt. Fury # 3 (Sep., 1963), Fury and his Howlers meet with Major Reed Richards leading a team of Italian partisans. What helps pinpoint the time is the fact that Howler Junior Juniper is still alive. (He would be killed in action in the next issue.)
That becomes a critical fact in the Richards/Grimm war timeline as shown by “The Howlers’ First Mission”, from Sgt. Fury # 44 (Jul.,1967). Just as the title indicates, this tale is a flashback to the Howling Commandos first action in the field. The story states that the Howlers’ first foray took place in the autumn of 1942. It snows during this mission, so it could be as late as November, 1942. All accounts place the time of Junior’s death early in the Howlers’ operational existence. He was still alive when the Howlers met Major Richards, so that couldn’t have been much later than January or February, 1943.
That establishes that Reed and, by extension, Ben entered the military in the summer of 1942. (That Reed was a major, a field-grade rank, as early as the beginning of ’43 is unusual, but not unheard of; promotions often came quickly in wartime, especially in the case of one with Reed’s credentials.) And that nails down Richards and Grimm’s ages. They graduated from college just before entering the service, and the usual age one graduates from college is twenty-one.
NOTE: I know that twenty-one is not a hard fact. Many people graduate college before they reach twenty-one. I did, and I’m not nearly the genius that Reed Richards was. And that goes to something that needs addressing. In all of my calculations of age and dates, there is a margin of error---a year or so one way or the other. Please bear in mind throughout this piece that I provide the most likely figure, and that this margin of error applies. First, that keeps me from having to repeat this caveat throughout, and second and more important, it doesn’t significantly alter my findings.
So, if Reed and Ben were twenty-one years old in the summer of ’42 (or, at least, turned twenty-one sometime during that year), that means that they were born in 1921. That makes their ages at the time of Fantastic Four # 1 a simple matter of math. Under the “Marvel year = real year” premise, Reed and Ben were forty years old, or verging on it, at the time of their fateful trip to space, shortly before November, 1961.
Now that we’ve established the ages of Richards and Grimm at the time of F.F. # 1, what about Sue and Johnny Storm? The other two facts have a bearing on this, but before we get to them, there is an indication of Sue’s age from F.F. # 11, as well.
During his wartime remembrances, Reed reflects, “All the time I was at the front, I dreamed of the day I’d return home---to the girl who was always in my thoughts! To the girl I’d left behind . . . “ He is talking about Susan Storm, to Sue’s embarrassment. Reed goes on to point out that they had once been kids living next door to each other.
Yes, there’s a lot of slop in the characterisation of “kids”, and it can even approach “ick” territory, as many a post-Silver-Age discussion on this has pointed out. But if we go with what Stan Lee had in mind when he wrote this, I think it avoids any disturbing patches of weeds.
Aye, I know that there could be a wide separation of ages, as evidenced in Richard Willis’ comment on my previous Deck Log Entry, that his grandmother was twelve and his grandfather, twenty-one, when they met. But that’s an uncommon situation, and likely not what Stan Lee had in mind. What’s telling is Reed Richards’ comment about “the girl I’d left behind.” That indicates more than just a casual relationship between him and Sue. At least, they had been dating before he left to join the Army.
More germane to this piece, though, is that Reed’s comment about Sue as “the girl of his thoughts” places his age and Sue’s as relatively close together. Maybe not the same age, but we’ve established that Reed was twenty-one when he went to war, so the youngest Sue likely was at that time was eighteen. (Again, yes, Sue might’ve been younger---there are probably many who would state that, when they were twenty-one, they had some romantic attachment to someone seventeen or sixteen or younger. But, also again, I don’t think that Mr. Lee had any thoughts of approaching some sort of statutory violation when he stated Reed’s pining for Sue during the war.)
If we take Sue as, at least, being eighteen when Reed was twenty-one, that puts her year of birth as 1924, or ’25. Again, doing the math, which means Sue was thirty-six or -seven, at least, when the events of F.F. # 1 took place.
So, that seems to answer the question put forward by this Deck Log entry: Reed was forty and Sue was around thirty-six when the Fantastic Four’s adventures began. Well, it would---except that the next two facts leave some messy wrinkles in that estimation.
Fact № 2: Susan Storm is older than her brother, Johnny.
Aye, I know mentioning that is gratuitous. Scarcely an early ‘60’s issue of F.F. went by without Sue mother-henning or lording it over Johnny that she was the older sibling. But it does have a bearing on how unsimple it is to specify Sue’s age when put against . . .
Fact № 3: Johnny Storm was still in high school at the time of Fantastic Four # 1.
Strange Tales # 101 (Oct., 1962) kicked off a solo series for the Human Torch, and issue # 103 (Dec., 1962) directly shows us that Johnny Storm still attends high school. Later stories in the series iterate that fact. Before we can use that info to pinpoint Johnny’s age, it would be helpful to narrow down his grade level. I believe we can do that to a reasonable degree---thanks to a panel on the first page of Strange Tales # 101.
There was a problematic conceit in the Human Torch’s series---that no-one, at least in Glenville, knew that Johnny Storm was the Torch. The idea that Johnny Storm had a secret identity was difficult to buy, given how openly public he and his teammates were in Fantastic Four. It proved to be too insulting to the readers’ intelligence to be sustainable, and the notion was dropped in Strange Tales # 106 (Mar., 1963). Before then, though, Stan Lee and his brother, Larry Lieber, who scripted the Torch’s series, tried valiantly to make a secret identity for Johnny work.
In early issues of Fantastic Four, Johnny had become the Human Torch in front of some of his school buddies---one, in F. F. # 1, and three more of them, in issue # 4 (May, 1962). In order to justify Johnny’s existence as the Torch being hidden, Strange Tales # 101 included a panel explaining that these four pals of his had been sworn to secrecy. The text even explained that the friends were no longer in Glenville, having graduated from high school.
This is our wind vane to Johnny’s age at the start of the Fantastic Four series. If Johnny’s four friends graduated from high school in 1962 (again, Marvel year = actual year) and Johnny is still in high school, then he was at least one grade behind his four schoolmates. Eighteen is the typical age for high-school graduation, so that’s how old Johnny’s buds were in 1962. Most probably, Johnny was just a year behind them, so he was seventeen years old at the start of his Strange Tales series.
Fantastic Four # 1 came out almost a year before that; thus, Johnny would’ve been sixteen years old for the events of that issue.
Are you beginning to see the problem?
My earlier calculations put Sue Storm as being thirty-six or -seven at the same time. Meaning there was a twenty-year difference in ages between big sister and little brother. Now, in and of itself, that’s not unheard of. I’m sure one or more of you, my regular correspondents, know of an example in which a couple’s eldest child was twenty or more years older than its youngest child (and probably with lots of other offspring in between).
If it were that simple to write off in the case of Sue and Johnny, then I’d dash off a few concluding remarks and end this entry right here. Unfortunately, Fantastic Four # 32 (Nov., 1964) gives us a headache.
That’s the issue in which we are told the only real details about the Storm family, in a flashback recalled by Sue. The Storms were a happy, loving family of four---eminent surgeon Franklin Storm; his wife, Mary; and their children, Susan and Johnny. One evening, Dr. and Mrs. Storm were en route to a medical society banquet when their auto suffered a blow-out and plunged over an embankment. Mary Storm was grievously injured and, despite his surgical skill, Dr. Storm was unable to save her life.
Storm’s life hit the skids. Giving up medicine, he drank and gambled away his life’s savings. Finally, he inadvertently killed the underworld loan shark who called in his markers. The father of Sue and Johnny was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison.
This account provides some view of Sue and Johnny’s ages at the time---and it doesn’t fit the situation of a twenty-year difference between the two siblings. There is one panel depicting the Storm family, just before the parents left on that fateful drive. Artistic discretion usually makes nailing down exact ages difficult---it’s often to get within a year or two, without any help from the text---and that’s the case here, with Jack Kirby’s art.
In the panel, Johnny Storm could be anywhere from ten years old to fourteen. We’re aided by a statement he made in the previous issue, that he thought his father was dead. That suggests that he was too young at the time of his father’s decline and imprisonment to be told the truth. So, let’s split the difference and say that, in the panel, Johnny was twelve years old.
Now, let’s look at Sue. Mr. Kirby depicts her as being mid- to late-teen age. Even if Sue was nineteen, and that’s pushing it, it means we’re looking at only a six-year age difference between her and Johnny. If one wanted to squint a little at how Kirby drew them, it could go even as long as a ten-year separation in age. But it doesn’t help. That one panel skews any possibility that Sue was twenty years older than her brother.
So, is there any way to square this scene with the results of Fact № 1? Believe me, gang, I worked hard on this---after all, I had experience from putting together the relative ages of Clark Kent and Lana Lang and Lois Lane from my Deck Log Entry # 175, “Superman and the Younger Woman”. There were only two ways to go.
Possible Resolution One: Reed Richards being a genius and all, he graduated from college at a younger age, as many have suggested. Say, at eighteen. He couldn’t have been much younger than that, else he wouldn’t have been eligible for military service, and it’s a fact that Richards entered the Army right after receiving his undergrad degree. But his military service still presents a problem: there’s no way, even if a wartime situation, that the Army would’ve promoted an eighteen-year-old Reed to major and assigned him to the critical task of leading a group of underground fighters. No matter what his I.Q. was. There’s more to command than just intellect.
Possible Resolution Two: We go the other way, and presume that Sue was much younger. Now, we’re getting into the “I’m twenty-one and she’s twelve” territory. If we make Sue younger than twelve at the time that Reed was in the Army, we run up against his statement, in FF # 11, that he and Sue had lived next door to each other when they were kids, even by the most liberal definition of “kids”. But even with Sue at twelve years old, we’re confronted with Reed’s musings about Sue as “the girl he’d left behind; the girl who was always in his thoughts.” That’s definitely unpalatable to put in the mind of a grown man---and most certainly not what Stan Lee had in mind when he wrote it. So, this possibility is out, too.
Establishing Reed and Ben as having fought in World War II seems to present a stumbling block. I can see why Mr. Lee did it. Both he and Jack Kirby had served in World War II, and to those of that generation, being a WWII vet was viewed as a benchmark of manhood. They, no doubt, wanted to present the senior members of the Fantastic Four as manly. Of course, at the time, Lee and Kirby had no idea what a sticky wicket Reed and Ben’s wartime service would turn into as the Marvel Universe continued for the next sixty years.
Even so, Marvel persisted in identifying Richards and Grimm as World War II veterans for the longest time. In Fantastic Four Annual # 11 (1976), when the F.F. teamed with the Invaders on a time-hopping mission to World War II, Reed reminds Ben that their younger selves are just getting into the war. Given that continuity-bound Roy Thomas wrote that tale, it’s not so surprising. However, the notion was pushed to the breaking point five years later, in Marvel Two-in-One # 77 (Jul., 1981), when much of the story has Ben Grimm recalling a WWII mission he undertook with Sergeant Fury and the Howling Commandos.
To the question of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl’s relative ages, Reed’s status as a WWII vet wasn’t the problem, really. The rub was linking Sue as a contemporary to Major Richards. As we’ve seen, that makes it impossible to put a age difference between them that’s workable with Johnny’s age. A better approach would’ve been to establish Sue as having come into Reed’s life post-war. She could’ve been that pretty secretary down the hall when Reed was working on his doctorate or designing rocket ships for the government. A romance between a mid-thirties Reed and a twenty-three or -four-year-old Sue is plausibly May-to-December. And it would put Sue only ten years older than Johnny---not ideal but, again, if you squint . . .
We should cut Stan Lee some slack for not handling it that way. In 1963, he was juggling the production of a dozen titles, and he often went with story ideas that sounded good “right now”, without a thought toward the long-term implications. For example, the very premise of the X-Men was that they were students learning how to use their mutant abilities, yet Lee had them graduating from Professor Xavier’s school in X-Men # 7 (Sep., 1964)---even though the original title would run fifty-nine more issues. And, in Sgt. Fury Annual # 1 (1965), he sent the Howling Commandos to fight in the Korean Conflict, undercutting the drama of the Sgt. Fury series by ensuring that all of the squad had survived World War II.
Therefore, the ages I suggested for the Fantastic Four in 1961---Reed and Ben, forty; Sue, thirty-six; and Johnny, sixteen---could be calculated, but not internally reconciled. Unless one wanted to do a retcon, say, by revealing that Sue and Johnny were frozen in a block of ice from 1943 to 1961.
Wait a minute. I think that idea’s already been done.
Replies
You said that Reed and Ben served in peacetime. In your opinion, how old were they when they joined and how long did they stay in the armed forces if there was no war?
Details. You figure it out. My point is that the easiest way to eliminate the discrepacies in the timeline is to ignore Reed and Ben's WWII service.
In order to overcome those contradictions, you have chosen to ignore (or reinterpret) the visual clues supplied by Jack Kirby in the panel from Fantastic Four #32 you reproduced above.
Either you missed something, my friend, or else, I am misreading you. I did not ignore or reïnterpret the visuals of that panel from Fantastic Four # 32. In fact, I pointed out that it's the very thing that undermines my calculations of Sue Storm's age from the info provided in F.F. # 11. I'm not ignoring that panel to support a finding; rather, I'm using to tear down a finding.
From the information provided in F.F. # 11, one can, with near certainty, calculate that Reed Richards was forty years old in that first issue of Fantastic Four, and that Sue was thirty-six or -seven.
However, that panel of the Storm family throws a huge spanner wrench into those numbers. The panel depicts Sue and Johnny as youngsters. Depending on how you perceive it, Johnny could be anywhere from ten to fourteen years old, and Sue is in her mid- to late-teens, no more than nineteen, at most. That means, taking both youngsters' ages at the extreme, there couldn't be more than a ten-year gap between them. That fouls the notion that Sue was thirty-six in F.F. # 1---because we know Johnny was sixteen or so at the time, and, since Kirby's panel shows, at most, a ten-year difference between his and Sue's ages, then Sue couldn't be thirty-six.
It's why I couldn't come up with an answer. There's no getting around the paradox of Sue's age.
Now, I certainly understand ignoring story elements that run against our personal perspectives of the heroes. I do it, myself. The lead story in Superboy # 133 (Oct., 1966), "Superbaby's First Foster-Parents", tell of Superbaby being adopted by another couple before the Kents could return to the orphange and apply. Nope. Doesn't count. I reject this story outright. It's an inelegant complication to the basic origin story. And how about when Professor Xavier contemplates his love for Jean Gray, in X-Men # 3 (Jan., 1964)? That didn't happen, either. I chose to disregard it---despite the fact that a number of pros and fans can't let go of it and try to come up with some way to reconcile it.
It's a free-wheeling thing. If one wants to depict, or believe, that Speedy was a charter member of the Teen Titans, then all he has to do is ignore Teen Titans # 4 (Jul.-Aug., 1966) and # 11 (Sep.-Oct., 1967), which categorically stated that the Boy Bowman wasn't. Taken to an extreme, this is what Young Turk comics writers do when they have a Neat Idea for a character and they don't want to be bothered by all those pesky stories that came before.
I set out to deduce what the ages of Reed and Sue were based on what information had been given us. It would've been much easier for me to say "This doesn't count." Then, I could've produced an answer. But the fact of it is that Stan Lee's scripting, without an eye toward cohesiveness (nor did he expect to have to consider it), renders an accurate determination of Reed and Sue's ages impossible. And that's what I said.
So, what did I miss, Jeff?
According to X-Men #1, Xavier's mutation stemmed from his parents' work on the Manhattan Project. That indicates he's much younger than I (and most people assume) — young enough an interest in Jean wouldn't be out of line (teacher/student issues aside). But if Stan and Jack were thinking that way (as opposed to just saying "Manhattan Project" because it was a cool origin) they obviously dropped/forgot it as Xavier was old enough to fight in Korea. So yeah, best to forget his interest.
The Beast's parents were affected by radiation after WWII as seen in X-Men #49 (O'68) as were the Whizzer and Miss America which resulted in Nuklo in Giant-Size Avengers #1 (Au'74).
Sunfire became a mutant due to the radiation from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima as explained in X-Men #64 (Ja'70).
Most Silver Age mutants seemed to have been born after 1945 but were all their parents affected by radiation?
Most Silver Age mutants seemed to have been born after 1945 but were all their parents affected by radiation?
Somewhere in Silver Age X-Men it was mentioned that atomic testing and experiments had raised the general background radiation to a level where the second generation of mutants -- the original X-Men's generation -- could happen spontaneously. Henry McCoy was the only one of the original five X-Men to have a pre-birth radiation source identified (that I recall). He was also the oldest of the original five.
There was no explanation for Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who were the same age as the X-Men, so my presumption as a boy is that they were from the first generation of ex nihilo mutant births. Their "origin" was as orphans who were rescued from an angry mob by Magneto, thereby becoming loyal to him. When, years later, the first Vision and Scarlet Witch maxiseries established Magneto as their father, I slapped my head and said "OF COURSE!" It explained everything, Including that Magneto and Quicksilver had the same odd-colored hair. And Wanda and Pietro gained their mutant genes the old-fashioned way, by inheriting them. And how did Magento happen to be stumble upon them when they were in trouble? Pretty coincidental. Unless he's their father. An estranged father just might keep an eye on his errant children without revealing himself -- unless necessary, like when they were about to be murdered. It was a perfect explanation for years of X-storytelling! (And it had been my head canon explanation for years.)
Then Marvel made them NOT mutants to align with the movies, which gained nothing and lost everything.
I really liked the Mahattan Project explanation. It accentuated Xavier's importance as an early mutant (if not the the actual first), and it explained why mutants were a modern phenomenon (they were products of the atomic age, where slightly higher levels of radiation were likely in various pockets of the environment). Later, Krakoa could be explained easily as the product of atomic tests in the Pacific, and that's why there was never a living island before.
But as you say, establishing Xavier as Korean War veteran (The X-Men #12-13) makes Xavier too old to be born to parents who got pregnant during WWII. He would have had to have been born in the '30s to be the right age for Korea.
That opened the door a sliver, and Chris Claremont kicked it open. He pushed the arrival of mutants back to ancient Egypt (En Sabah Nur), with Nathan Essex experimenting on them as soon as was feasible (Industrial Revolution). He introduced a whole cadre of immortal mutants who had been around forever, not to mention some important long-lived mutants who preceded the Atomic Age (Wolverine, Sabretooth, Mystique). For me, this catastrophically changed mutant history, raising more questions than it answered. (Why no mention of mutants in history? Why was the general popularion unaware of their existence? Why didn't Hitler or Napoleon try to enslave them to conquer the world? What were the X-Ternals doing for hundreds of years? Was Apoclaypse taking a really long nap?). Plus, it reduced Xavier's stature to a Charlie-come-lately with a really bad plan (teenage soldiers) instead of the first mutant overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of other, dangerous mutants and scrambling to do what he could to stop them (teenage soldiers). The only part of this I liked was Magneto's origin being pushed back to World War II, as establishing him as A) Jewish and B) Romany and C) a survivor of the Holocaust gives him tremendous backstory and motivation. I didn't care for his redemption arc -- he was a ruthless mass murderer in his early appearances, which left its mark on me -- but his actions now have an explanation.
I also liked the idea that mutants were really rare, which set off desperate, escalating attempts by various elements to recruit them when they appeared. Now they're as common as brown-eyed babies, which not only reduces the coolness factor, but means that writers are coming up with lots of super-lame powers and/or no characterization. I'd rather they had remained rare, with each new one having a story reason to come into existence, with some craft and care put into their backstory/personality, and whose arrival plausibly threatens the status quo. Now it's three new mutants per issue of the biggest line of books in comics, whose names I instantly forget.
As to Jean, I"m with the Commander on that one. It was a rare misstep for Stan Lee, whose storytelling instincts were usually as steady as a compass. I'd forget it entirely except as an example of Lee's editorial savvy, as he memory-holed it himself nearly instantly. It's a rare editor who can edit himself.
Having threadjacked shamelessly for the last several graffs, I'll return to the subject at hand: The ages of Reed and Sue. And, honestly? I try not to think about it. As the Commander says, it can't be reconciled in the Silver Age unless you start selectively ignoring parts of the various Sacred Texts, and when that happens, everyone has begun crafting their own personal head canon. And post-Silver Age ... well, Spider-Man's been in his 20s for how long? It just doesn't matter any more. They're all essentially immortal, and they're whatever age works for the story. All that matters is their ages in relation to each other, which is Reed, Victor and Ben are about the same age, and they're older than Sue, who is older than Johnny, who's about the same age as Peter Parker, and they're all older than Franklin, who is older than Valeria. After that, it's tally ho.
Commander Benson said:
I don't look at that panel and insist that "Sue is in her mid- to late-teens, no more than nineteen, at most." I can squint my eyes and think she might have been a smigde older, maybe 23 or 24, which doesn't help much but does bridge the gap a little more.
I think you did as good a job as feasible given the material you were working with. It is indeed obvious Lee and Kirby weren't thinking long range, not that I blame them for that. As a friend of mine pointed out a while back, Ben's a WW II legend (every kid in America knew his name, Reed says once) but nobody ever treats him as such.
One thing that strikes me about Reed's wartime service is that he's out in the field, showing (as you've observed in the past) that he's a man of action as well as a thinker. If they'd dreamed him up today he'd be in the Manhattan Project or the like because Smart Guy/Tough Fighter don't go together in pop culture.
I really liked the Mahattan Project explanation. It accentuated Xavier's importance as an early mutant (if not the the actual first), and it explained why mutants were a modern phenomenon (they were products of the atomic age, where slightly higher levels of radiation were likely in various pockets of the environment).
I didn't mind your deviation into the X-Men at all, Cap. In fact, it made me reflect. I never got too deep into the X-Men. One key aspect of it didn't make sense to me---with the public antagonism of mutants in the Marvel universe, why did the X-Men go on record as being mutants? After all, nobody accused the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man or Giant-Man of being mutants, and those heroes' powers were just as varied and picturesque as those of the X-Men. It always struck me that, if they had kept their mouths shut about being mutants, they would've avoided all of that public antagonism.
(I know, I know . . . to-day it's all about "I'm loud---I'm proud---I'm a mutant!" Why should they have to hide the fact that their mutants? I say, maybe not hide it, but don't advertise it, either. It's tough enough being a teen-age super-hero without inviting the unthinking public to be against you.)
I never gave a thought to the time-line paradox created by intitally stating that Charles Xavier was born to parents involved in the Manhattan Project, then insisting that he was a Korean War veteran. I agree with you that putting him in Korea undid a premise with more impact---and more logic. With Professor X as the first mutant, or one of, then everything falls into place. His young-adult years of adventuring, before his legs were shattered, was as much about trying to locate other mutants, as it was for the heady experience of it. And as the premier (or close enough to it) mutant, he felt a responsiblity for guiding other mutants and beneficially incorporating them into the world of normal folk. That gave Xavier a status that, as you pointed out, dissipated when he became just the next mutant to be born.
If we look at the Manhattan Project as the early birthing source of mutants (and, in the real world, we scarcely understood the terrible effects of radiation back then), then, as you also say, Cap, it explains why a gathering of mutants didn't take over the world and enslave us Homo sapiens back in the tenth century or something.
It helps to bear in mind the time when Stan Lee created the X-Men---around the late summer-early fall of 1963. I remember quite well how the early 1960's were a time of huge optimism in America. We firmly believed that science would solve all of our problems, and the future looked bright. (The assassination of President Kennedy took a lot of the wind out of those sails.) So, Stan Lee's idea that the X-Men, and their mutant foes, were the result of science gone awry was topical---and incisive.
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