Former Marvel Comics President Stan Lee debunks the myth that the X-Men were always woke.
Stan Lee at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con in San Diego, California. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
In the wake of the debut of the first X-Men ’97 trailer and the revelation that Morph will be made into a “non-binary” character numerous individuals began perpetrating the lie that the X-Men have always been woke and been allegories for racial and sexual orientation injustice.
X-Men Updates posted on X, “The X-Men have and will always be symbols for inclusion and diversity. If you’re a bigot and have a problem with that, you’re not an X-Men fan and you don’t understand the slightest thing about them.”
X-Men Updates on X
READ: ‘X-Men ’97’ To Embrace Evil Transgender Ideology By Describing Morph As “Non-Binary”
In response to a Geeks + Gamers thumbnail criticizing making Morph non-binary, KC Walsh wrote, “Whose gonna tell these chuds the X-Men invented ‘woke.'”
KC Walsh on X
Mightykeef on X also responded to the Geeks + Gamers thumbnail, “I can’t stress how incredibly stupid you look for saying X-men, out of all things….is turning woke.”
He added, “Themes like identity politics has always been in X-men, in either the comics, animated series, or movies.”
MIghtykeef on X
In response to claims like these, Rippaverse founder Eric July showcased an interview Stan Lee did in 2007 on Coast to Coast with George Noory with guest host Ian Punnett.
At one point in the interview, Lee said, “Now, take the X-Men. I was just originally trying to get an interesting group of characters with interesting powers and I thought it would make it twice as interesting if the public didn’t really like them that much and if they had a worry about their reception by the outside world.”
He continued, “Little by little I began getting mail saying how great it is that I’m doing these stories about bigotry and the evils of bigotry and so forth and race hatred. And I guess I was doing that, but I was doing it subconsciously. That wasn’t the main purpose.”
Uncanny X-Men #1 (1963), Marvel Comics
In another clip from the program, Lee addresses the idea the characters are an allegory for being representatives of the LGBTQ+ community.
He says, “No, it was the furthest thing from my mind.”
Uncanny X-Men #1 (1963), Marvel Comics
Lee also discussed the X-Men’s origins in a two-hour interview conducted for the Living Television Collection back in 2004.
In that interview he stated, “Oh! The X-Men, how I did that. Well, there’s a funny a story, everything is a funny a story. After I had done the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man, I think the X-Men came next. The X-Men and one other. I think Daredevil. They’re about the same time.”
“Anyway I wanted to do another group, another group of superheroes, but I was getting tired now of figuring out how they get their superpowers. I couldn’t have everybody bitten by a radioactive spider or exposed to a gamma ray explosion,” he explained.
Lee then recalled, “And I took the cowardly way out. I said to myself, ‘Why don’t I just say they’re mutants. They were born that way.’ We all know there are mutants in real life. There’s a frog with five legs, things like that. So I won’t have to think of new excuses. I’ll get as many as I want and yeah, he’s a mutant, that’s all.”
Uncanny X-Men #1 (1963), Marvel Comics
He then pitched this idea to his publisher, “I had the idea and I made up some characters that I loved and I went to my boss, Martin, he was still publishing at the time. I said, ‘I have an idea for a book called The Mutants.’ I wanted to call it The Mutants. He said, ‘It sounds like a good idea, Stan, but, you know, nobody’s going to know what a mutant is. Our readers wouldn’t understand. Get another name.’”
“Well, I felt he was wrong, but what the hell he was the boss. So I went back and I gave it some thought and I thought they have extra power. They were led by a guy named Professor Xavier so I said well, ‘I’ll call them the X-Men’ even though one was a girl,” Lee shared.
Uncanny X-Men #2 (1963), Marvel Comics
READ: Rumor: Marvel’s Initial Idea For X-Men Is To “Focus More On The Female Members Of The Team”
Lee continued, “I went back to Martin. I said, ‘Hey, all right, how about this name, The X-Men.’ He said, ‘Yeah that sounds fine use that.’ So, as I walked out of his office I thought to myself, ‘If a reader isn’t going to know what a mutant is, how was the reader going to know what an X-Man is.’ But I didn’t want any trouble. I had my name and I just let it go.”
“But I often felt I don’t understand the workings of the executive mind,” he concluded.
Uncanny X-Men #3 (1964), Marvel Comics
He told a similar story to Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics for AMC back in 2017.
He explained, “I had already done Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Fantastic Four and my publisher said, ‘Give me another book, Stan. We’re going strong. Let’s do some more.’”
“Well, in order to get a new superhero, you have to think of what are his or her power is. That’s not too hard. But you have to figure out how do they get that power, and that’s a little difficult. I can’t have them all be bitten by radioactive spiders,” he stated.
Uncanny X-Men #4 (1964), Marvel Comics
READ: America is Over the MCU: Fantastic 4 and X-Men Lost Their Audience Years Ago
He recounted, “So I had already given them their powers. And then it hit me. What if they’re mutants? What if they were born that way? I thought that was brilliant, and I ran into my publisher. And I told him about the characters. And I said, ‘We’ll make them mutants, and we’ll call the book The Mutants.’”
Lee went on, “And he said, ‘No, Stan, that’s no good because our readers wouldn’t know what a mutant is.’ And I said, ‘You don’t have enough respect for our readers. They will know. Or else they’ll learn by reading the story.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t like the name The Mutants.’ So I had to think of something else ’cause he was the boss.”
Uncanny X-Men #4 (1964), Marvel Comics
He then recalled, “So I thought, after a while, each of them has an extra power, maybe I’ll call them the X-Men. That could sound kind of dramatic. So I ran back to him and I said, ‘Okay, how about if we call them X-Men?’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s great.’”
“And as I walked out of his office, I thought, ‘If a reader wouldn’t know what a mutant is how will he know what an X-Man is?’ But I wasn’t about to make an issue of it. I had my title and that’s why their leader, I called him Professor Xavier, ’cause it began with an ‘X,’ and that tied in with the X-Men and so forth,” Lee concluded.
Clearly, Lee did not make the X-Men woke and thus they were never always woke, but one only needed to read original X-Men comics to have realized that in the first place.
Uncanny X-Men #6 (1964), Marvel Comics
What do you make of Stan Lee’s comments?
NEXT: X-Men ’97 Showrunner Confirms Show Embraced Woke Casting
I swear KC Walsh has to be a basement dweller, with the way he throws the word “chuds”.
I got directed to your shitrag of a website from GoogleNews, I made sure to tell it to never show me “stories” from your early 00’s WordPress site ever again.
Let’s get a few things straight before I continue: I’m a 36 year-old straight white male, because I know you and everyone involved in this site are obsessed with race and gender, even though you claim only the people you hate are. It’s important you know that someone from the group that nutsacks like you claim to speak for speak against the garbage you’re peddling here.
A site supposedly about theme parks peddling ragebait conspiracy theories. You must’ve really been hard-up for views and clicks and decided to jump on the bandwagon of labeling anything that slightly bothers you as “woke”, so you can continue to incite anger and get engagement from your audience. Such a pitiful, common tactic now instead of actual criticism and nuanced discussion. Mention “woke”, get your followers mad about something minor, keep the “outrage” going, get clicks, repeat. You’re all the same.
The term “woke” didn’t even exist in the mid-60’s when Stan made the X-Men. The quotes you’re posting are true, however they don’t paint the full picture. Sites and channels like yours are never interested in the full story. Stan Lee was thrilled that people interpreted the X-Men this way, and continued to push his own stories and writers in that direction.
Do you have any idea how many X-Men stories, even before the early 00’s had stories about bigotry and the evils of intolerance? You’re making an episode about the 90s animated series…do you realize that there was a hate-group on the show, that wore hoods, called the “Friends of Humanity” that had a hateful right-wing politician at the forefront that stoked anti-Mutant hatred? Do you realize that Stan Lee had creative input and approved of this when he was still on Marvel’s board? The lack of depth behind your perspective is hilarious. Stan completely embraced that take on the X-Men material and was honored that people received his writing that way. It took on a greater degree of meaning than its origins, and was so happy about it.
If he wasn’t, why wouldn’t he have left the property long ago? If the X-Men animated series debuted today, you drooling morons would be throwing around your favorite W-word that you apply to everything, all to get clicks and views. I just wanted to watch the show in peace, but commentary from you cockroaches ruins all media nowadays. Stop engaging with properties from nerd culture. It was made by and for the socially outcast, the kids who didn’t get picked for b-ball, the kids who got bullied. Either embrace that like I have (because I was a kid that needed heroes) or accept that this material isn’t for you anymore, if it ever was.
You and the rest of your ilk clearly never understood what it was really about. Even a few short years later after introducing the X-Men, Stan brought the first black female superhero into comics, a Native American on the team, a Japanese hero, not that fake-fans like you would know that. You would’ve labeled it “woke” then, idiot. He embraced that viewpoint quickly, and then he stopped writing and simply approved storylines anyway. The X-Men left Stan Lee’s hands a long, long time ago, with many of the greatest stories being written by Chris Claremont, who was and is progressive to this day.
You’ll keep making your clickbait, outrage-farming crap. Grown men getting mad over the orientation of a cartoon character. Pathetic.
-Stan Lee, 1968