X-Men Epic Collection 1: Children of the Atom by Lee, Kirby, Roth and Thomas
1963-1966
The X-Men debuted in September 1963 and the legend goes that it wasn't very good. It was nearly canceled and barely survived to 1975 when it was rebooted under Len Wein and Chris Claremont with Giant Size X-Men 1, where it then went on to be the number one comic for decades. I am a huge X-Men fan. Not obsessive, but in the 80s and early 90s, I would have been classified as obsessive, and today, X-Men are the single largest block of my comics collection. Yet I've read almost no silver age X-Men except for the brief Neil Adams run in the late 60s. I decided I would change that.
Epic Collection 1 collects issue 1 through 23, and unlike later collections, there are no annuals, crossovers, or miscellaneous appearances. I wish more of these Epic Collections were like this.
It's hard to see mutants as a parallel for other minorities when they spend half their time fighting "evil" mutants
Right from the start, the stories in this are not great. While some of the villains become legendary characters, there are villains who never came close to being legendary. And the characters are not nearly as well defined as they would be in the Bronze Age comics. Xavier has very poorly defined abilities, shifting from issue to issue. Magneto appears a lot, probably in about 10 of the 23 issues, and though he has magnetic abilities, he can astrally project himself and do other things that future writers would ignore.
The famous single page where Xavier thinks about being in love with Marvel Girl. It was panel six of a page where all the boys on the team are horny for the single female on the team (except Scott, he's in love)
Of the original five X-Men, Beast stands out most as a character. He's smart and in his free time he writes equations with his feet, which would have been Kirby's joke, but then Stan Lee pulls out the thesaurus to write his loquacious dialogue. It's easy to see the contemporary character's roots here.
Cyclops is a stick in the mud; when the team is given free time, everyone goes out to have fun, and Cyclops stays back to feel sorry for himself. His other main feature is a thought balloon every issue pining over Marvel Girl.
Marvel Girl's only character is to wish Cyclops would acknowledge her and take her out.
Iceman is initially defined as a prankster, but in later issues would be shown as Beast's best friend, and gets to play off of their relationship.
Angel is never really a character, simply a character design. The closest he gets to showing his personality is in his over-confidence in his success. Reading his original appearances, I understand why he was so completely revamped as an angsty bad boy in the 80s. I'm not a big Archangel fan, but he is a better defined character than he was as the Angel.
Cyclops on this page is pure Kirby
Kirby's art here isn't his best. A lot of it feels like 1950s style. Occasionally it pops out and you see the bold blacks, and I love it, but overall, this is not exciting Kirby art. The character design is great though. You get so used to seeing these characters that you forget just how strange it is that the leader of the team shoots red force beams out his eyes. It's a really weird concept.
I just love this image so much
Beast also stands out from a design standpoint; Kirby really emphasizes the massive feet and toes on him. It's been decided that he will be a blue-furred character from here on in in Marvel continuity, but he's pretty cool without the fur. I think a lot of artists just had difficulty making his feet look as weird as Kirby did. 
From Pussey! by Dan Clowes
Iceman starts out looking like a snowman, much like the Thing starts out as a lumpen rock before being refined into his famous design. In issue 8, snowy Iceman becomes icy Iceman and never goes back. It's interesting to see Kirby evolving his character design.
At first, the stories are focused on mutant themes: finding mutants and fighting mutants. Issues 1 has Magneto, 2 has the Vanisher, 3 has the Blob, and 4 has the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants with Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, Toad and Mastermind. That's great initial line up of villains. But Magneto is overused until he his taken off the board with a ridiculous story in issue 11 (A powerful being, The Stranger, is discovered and both the X-Men and Magneto investigate. The Stranger is revealed to be an alien on Earth to collect mutant specimens, and takes Magneto and Toad back to his alien world with him.) Other winners in the early run are Juggernaut and the Sentinels. Kirby created a huge amount of characters, and there are a lot more that stuck around than ones that fell through the cracks. We don't hear much from Unus the Untouchable these days.
Lucifer's boss, Dominus
One of the subplots in the early run is about a space alien, Lucifer, who was responsible for the loss of Xavier's legs. One of the reasons Xavier formed the X-Men was to stop this menace. The character never really works and when Roy Thomas takes over as writer he quickly wraps up this plot, and the character doesn't appear in X-Men again.
The creators were all feeling their way toward what the X-Men were, and there were naturally going to be some dead ends.
The original Cerebro was quite different
Other trademark X-Men ideas appear in a different form. The Danger Room is there early on, but it is very much like a gymnasium obstacle course, though not too different from what would be in the early Claremont run. Cerebro is nothing like Cerebro I've ever seen. It's a 1960s stereo with names of specific mutants on it. The X-Men of the movies and cartoons didn't spring from nowhere, it evolved over decades and under different writers and artists. And you always have to remember with these books: none of the people working on them thought that adults would be following these stories half a century later. These were disposable books for kids.
Very subtle, Professor. Nobody will know you're secretly the leader!
From issue 12, Kirby is credited with breakdowns, with Alex Toth doing a bland fill in before it's taken over by Werner Roth (credited as Jay Gavins), who then takes over as full penciller in issue 18. Stan Lee is credited as plotter/scripter until Roy Thomas takes over in issue 20. Roth's art is unexceptional for the most part. He feels like someone more suited to 1950s westerns or romance comics. He apes Kirby action in places, but it doesn't seem like it comes natural to him.
Roth had some nice hatching
Occasionally though, he draws a character in a clean line and it looks incredible. It'll be just one panel over two pages, but if he drew like this all the time, he would have been like Bruce Timm before Bruce Timm.
Look at Marvel Girl's face and mask! It's perfect!
Thomas gives the book a jolt of energy though. He takes care of Lucifer immediately, but he seems more specific in his writing than Stan Lee was. Lee was giving quick elevator pitches for stories, "The X-Men fight mutant hunting robots!" And the artist drew that pitch for 20 pages. Thomas seems to be injecting more specific occurrences into the story, like Beast and Iceman going on a double date together with their Greenwich Village girlfriends Vera and Zelda.
This is pretty funny
I'm looking forward to the next Epic Collection to see how the book evolves. Roth is not an artist I love, but Thomas is a writer I'm interested in knowing better. Most of his work was before my time. I mainly know him from his stories in Avengers with the Vision and Squadron Supreme. It seems so crazy that a fanboy off the street managed to insinuate himself so deeply into Marvel at the height of its heyday.
I enjoyed reading this collection. I didn't love it, but it's so weird to see the original five X-Men as teenagers in a school, not as adults. It's the roots of the X-Men. I would never recommend this to someone as a starter X-book, or even as a sample of Marvel in the 60s, but if you've already read over 200 issues of X-Men and you're all in on the concept, this is an interesting book and has little treasures to uncover.
Other notes about the book:
-There are a number of continuity errors. I don't know if the writer or the letterer was at fault, but I was surprised. It's nice that Marvel stays true to the original vision/can't be bothered to fix them.
Who is this mystery man named Bobby Blake?
-The Kirby in this book isn't the best Kirby, but when the Kirby comes out, it's great. I wish I understood his skill better as a kid, because I skipped over a lot of great Kirby books in the four-for-a-dollar bin as a young collector.
That's what I'm talking about
-Epic Collections tend to recolor the front and back covers. Is it better than the original coloring? Is the modern X-Men logo better than the original? How about that little Angel flying over the logo every month? There was a lot of magic going on in the 60s Marvel books.
-In the mid 80s, X-Men was the number one book, but the only issues of the original run available were the Neal Adams series. Instead, I bought the Official Marvel Index to the X-Men, an encyclopedia of the golden age stories.
Art by Sandy Plunket and P. Craig Russel
Each issue would have a lengthy breakdown. I loved reading X-Men, but at a certain point it became a kind of studying. Boys and men have this competitiveness in their circles, be it comics or baseball or video games, where when a friend doesn't know some trivia, others snort derisively, "You didn't know that?" It's gross, I did it too, and it hammered in some obsessive traits into me at that age. If I couldn't play sports even remotely well, at least I could know more about X-Men than all my friends.
I read every single one of these entries
The entries give creator credits, list the characters that appeared, notable items that appeared, gave a synopsis, and helped you become a better Marvel Zombie.
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