Meet the original ‘X-Men’

I was reading a recap of “The Inside Man,” last week’s episode of TV’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., over at the website Vox, and was struck by this comment:

When the X-Men first burst onto the scene in 1963, their story — about a group of mutant kids with weird powers — introduced a new kind of superhero. The superheroes who’d come before them were loved by society, but the X-Men were shunned for their strange powers and weird appearances.

In a few months, the latest movie in the X-Men series, X-Men: Apocalypse, will also find humans and mutants at odds.

While many — including the writer of the Vox piece — may think that this theme originated in the Marvel Comics back in the 1960s, it’s actually much older. Let’s go back 75 years to the pulp magazine Astounding.

From September through December 1940, A.E. van Vogt‘s story Slan was serialized in four parts in Astounding. In 1946, Arkham House published a slightly revised version as a hardcover, van Vogt’s first book.

Slan follows a mutant boy, Jommy Cross, as he skirts capture by the human authorties. The humans feel threatened by the mutants, called “slans,” who are smarter and stronger. But the slans themselves are divided by a war between those who have telepathic abilities and those who don’t.

The novel spans decades, as Jommy grows into an adult and explores the boundaries of the humans and the mutants, battling both at times. In Slan, as in X-Men, there are both good and bad slans — who, by the way, are called a portmanteau of their creator’s name, Samuel Lann. Some mutants who want to destroy or enslave the humans as much as the fearful humans want to destroy the slans, while other slans want to live in peace among the humans.

In But Without Horns, there’s even more conflict between humans and mutants. But Without Horns is a novella written by Norvell W. Page for the pulp Unknown. It appeared in Unknown‘s June 1940 number.

Of course, Page is better known today for the non-stop, violent adventures he wrote for The Spider pulp. And But Without Horns isn’t that much different in that sense.

The novel opens in media res with the murders of FBI agents in a midwestern city and FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., in an apparent state of siege, with the director holed up in his office. Fortunately, Walter Kildering, a gray-eyed, analytical agent, has already figured out what’s going on and identified the mysterious “Unknown” who seems to be killing at will and at great distances with a mysterious “Blue Death.”

(I thought it was humorous that Page nicknamed the villian “Unknown,” which of course was the name of the pulp. Apparently Page, like van Vogt, had written the story in answer to a challenge by the magazine’s editor, John W. Campbell, that no one could write a novel about a believable superman.)

Miller has deduced the Unknown to be someone named John Miller:

As to what he is— undoubtedly, a mutant of the human species. …

“(He’s) a monster” — Kildering’s voice was soft — “or a superman. Different from the human species, but sprang from it, as men and apes sprang from the mutations of a single primordial species.”

“And this time, we’re the apes, huh?” (FBI Agent Bill) Mayor rasped. “He’s got to be destroyed!”

Miller is an evil twist to the X-Men’s Professor Xavier‘s powers and Magneto‘s motivations. Not only can he murder individuals from a distance using his mind, but, by somehow amplifying his powers through the electrical grid, Miller is also able to kill off a whole swath of people in a midwestern city whom he “did not deem smart enough to live.” Miller takes control of the city, then begins expanding his territory. Kildering fears that Miller won’t stop until he controls the entire country.

What makes the novel so interesting is that you never actually come face-to-face with Miller. He’s always out of the frame, so to speak, with Kildering and his two loyal agents always in pursuit, always just behind the smarter Miller.

Beside enslaving humans, Miller wants to breed a new population of mutants. At one point, Kildering wonders how many more mutants might be out there.

The X-Men stories reflect the same us-versus-them mutant theme that was already fully formed in the stories by van Vogt and Page in the early 1940s.

I’ve read both novels in the past month. Slan and, in particular, But Without Horns clearly fall into the written-for-the-pulp-magazines category of storytelling. Both focus on action and moving the plot along, with little attention paid to mood-setting descriptions, characterization, or anything but cursory motivations. But if you go in expecting that, rather than more “literary” work, then you can easily enjoy the stories.

The issues with both stories are available as scanned files online with a bit of searching.

Both are worth reading because they inspired an aspect of today’s pop culture, the X-Men and similar mutant stories. In fact, most popular genres found in everything from comics and fiction to movies and TV were created — or at least coalesced — in the pulp magazines.