Marvel Masterworks: X-Men, Volume 1 is a mixed bag. Jack Kirby’s art is wonderful. The writing is okay, the caveat being that the same two storylines are repeated ad nauseum in the first ten issues. For those not in the know the X-Men are mutants, aka Homo Superior. Their genes give them miraculous powers, which is good. What’s not so good is that plain old humans, Homo Sapiens, hate and fear them. The X-Men are led by benevolent telepath Charles Xavier, who is dedicated to protecting humankind from existential threats and also evil mutants. It’s interesting that Xavier works to protect humanity rather than his own kind, a paradigm that changes later.
The evil mutants are led by Magneto, who in this volume is a Dr. Doom clone. Magneto believes that human beings are scum. He’s assembled a group of mutants, aka The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, to conquer humanity. Later, Magneto and Charles Xavier become two sides of the same coin, but here they are oil and water.
There are two storylines. In the first, Xavier discovers the existence of a new mutant. He sends his X-Men to recruit this new mutant, but the mutant always turns out to be evil. See: The Vanisher, The Blob, The Sub-Mariner, Unus the Untouchable. In the second, the X-Men fight Magneto and his band of evil mutants, as they try to a. conquer the earth; b. recruit mutants to their cause. Both Xavier and Magneto are terrible at recruiting mutants, Magneto because he’s a homicidal maniac, Xavier because he’s creepy. Would you want a teacher who could read your mind? At least with Magneto, you get to hang out in his cool lairs, asteroids and islands with big magnet skyscrapers.
Reading this volume gave me the impression that the creative team was in a state of perpetual deadline Hell. It’s not that the stories are bad, but reading the same two plots gets repetitive. One of the better issues is the introduction of Ka-Zar and the Savage Land, because it probably started life as a ten-second pitch session (Tarzan in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World!) that gained legs.
Marvel Masterworks: X-Men is worth a read, because it’s Jack Kirby and also because it introduces a number of iconic characters in Marvel history, even if we don’t see a lot of these characters nowadays. These are the issues that laid the groundwork for some classic stories.
Abandoned Places 