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Who or what could be stranger than Dr Strange? After creating the Master of Black Magic in April 1963 Stan Lee gave his answer in July that same year: the X-Men.
But the original X-Men were not the X-Men I have known and loved through the 90s animated series, Wolverine and the X-Men, and Bryan Singer’s films. They were simultaneously one of Stan’s most impressive feats in characterisation but also one of his greatest failures.
Every writer can learn from how Stan created the X-Men.
Stan faced a problem. He wanted to create a superhero team but he’d hit the FF with cosmic rays, Bruce Banner with gamma rays, and sent a radioactive spider to bite Peter Parker. He was running out of miracles to grant his heroes powers.
Stan described what he did next as the coward’s way out. The heroes would be born with their powers rather than receive them by some turn or twist on that highway called Fate.
I disagree that what Stan did was cowardly. Einstein said that we can’t solve our problems with the thinking that created them. Stan solved the problem of where the X-Men would come from by throwing out the thinking that made the problem. He thought he needed a miracle but he couldn’t find one, and he ditched the need for a miracle. The characterisation gridlock he was stuck in then melted away. Stan solved his problem by overcoming the thinking that created it. This is what makes a “Eureka!” moment.
“How Stan Lee Created the X-Men” is a story that every writer should sit down and listen to when they find themselves in that same gridlock, that seemingly inescapable and circular grind between two irreconcilable needs of your writing, that Stan was in and that every writer finds themselves trapped in at least once.
But the original X-Men are also a lesson in how not to write characters
They’re a badly orchestrated band. There are five original X-Men (Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Ice-Man, and Jean Grey), and except for those last two they’re all the same character. Cyclops, Angel, and Beast stand peering out the window watching Jean arrive at their school for the first time, and there’s not a fingernail’s worth of difference between their dialogue. “Wow! She’s a living doll!” Cyclops says. “Look at that face…and the rest of her!” Angel says. “All of a sudden, I’m in no hurry to graduate from this place,” Beast says. All three are horny teenage boys. There’s not the nuance, the fine shades, of character in Disney Channel high school sitcoms that have dumb nerds and popular brainiacs in one show, or in the trio of Jim, Judy, and Plato in Rebel Without A Cause who are all troubled teens but with completely different troubles. These teenagers made Stan’s original X-Men taste bland like vanilla for me. A band that sings one song all in the same key just sounds flat.
Stan forgot this when making the X-Men, and it turned his eureka moment of characterisation into a cautionary tale for all writers about character.
William Barker-Writer and Philosopher 