Bad Teacher? The Regrettable Professor Charles Xavier 1963-1966 (The Year In Comics #35)

 

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36 posts down, 16 to go; 52 consecutive weeks worth of columns at Sequart seemed an unlikely project when it kicked off, and now the finishing line's in sight. This week's post in The Year In Comics series is the second part of a look at Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's X-Men, which managed to be both socially radical and politically conservative all at the same time, and should you be at all curious, it can be found here. 

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But if you've popped in and you've understandably no interest in the above, then why not waste away a nano-second or two on the evidence that the X-Men's founder was not just cruel and incompetent, but quite possibly mentally disordered as well?

The Marvel Comics of the early Sixties were, of course, never intended to make sense on anything other than their own terms. As such, they were designed to entertain, and to do so on a ferociously inventive, panel-to-panel basis. And if the laws of physics were entirely irrelevant to that process, then so too were the traditions of more polite fictions and the conventions of psychology too. Beyond the broadest of character types, Marvel's various stars were free to shift aspects of their personalities from page to page, from story to story. That anyone would read back through these tales and start to fannishly note the inconsistent and the unlikely probably rarely if ever crossed their creator's minds at first. As such, it's incredibly doubtful that anyone at Marvel noticed what an irredeemably selfish human being Charles Xavier, the founder of X-Men, had accidentally and repeatedly been portrayed as. Yet no matter how hard today's reader tries not to regard the Professor's thoughts and actions in those early comics as evidence of a core personality, the likes of his declaration above - from X-Men #17, February 1966 - are hard to ignore. We tend to struggle not to expect some measure of internal consistency in our serial fictions, and so it's a challenge to push aside the notion that Professor X really did believe that he'd never failed before. Is it possible that this Xavier is so deluded that he'd never noted the terrible things that he'd previously done to his students? Can he truly believe, for example, that he'd always "protected" his "X-Men" and never "failed" in his attempts to do so? (Panel: X-Men #17,by Lee, Kirby, Roth, Ayers)

Xavier's concern that he might have failed to protect his students comes as they're trying to recover from a brutal punch-up with the mutant-hunting robots known as the Sentinels. The Professor may not consider that he's previously done anything to betray his duty of care to his X-Men, but it's worth considering that this particular scene sees the Beast with his leg in plaster while Iceman is lapsing into a delirium. Whatever happened before, there seems to have been a fair degree of serious harm done to the teenage, unworldly foot-soldiers of the X-Men. To what degree is Xavier responsible for the pain that his students are suffering? Were the X-Men simply unlucky when it came to the Sentinels' arrival on the national stage? (Panel; X-Men #17, Lee, Kirby, Roth, Ayers)

Three issues before - in The X-Men #14 - Xavier was faced with the evidence of a press-fuelled moral panic directed at America's mutant minority, and he declared to himself that it's the "one thing I always feared - - a witch-hunt for mutants!". Oddly enough, though Xavier has apparently long worried about such a traumatic business, he doesn't appear to have done anything about it. There's no sign of his involvement in any political campaigns to establish mutant rights, and he's no contingency plans in place to deal with the sudden escalation in prejudice and risk. This is a man who's supposedly not only unquestionably benevolent, but a super-genius too. He would surely have noted the hard-won progress of the Civil Rights movement in the Republic of the day, and yet he doesn't appear to have either supported the fight against prejudice - in order to establish tolerance as a social norm as well as a legal principle - or deduced from it the probability that an armed threat would inevitably come from anti-mutant extremists. The Marvel universe was awash with super-science, after all. Even a middle aged career anthropologist such as Dr Trask was capable of creating an army of sentient, intelligent robots when he put his mind to it.  Xavier should have been not just expecting the worse, but preparing for it. And yet, because he didn't, "his" X-Men stumble without adequate preparation into a show-down with the Sentinels, bereft of broader support or even adequate planning. Only their uncommon fortitude, unexpected good luck and - admittedly - their Danger Room training saves them from dissection and worse. (Panels; X-Men #14, Lee, Kirby, Roth, Colletta)

Yet the Sentinels incident was hardly the first time that Xavier had "failed" to "protect" the X-Men. In the same comic in which the Sentinels first appeared, the X-men were shown recuperating from a terrible beating at the hands of Xavier's brother, the Juggernaut. As Xavier oversaw the recovery of his own personal para-military of trusting teenage operatives, he appeared to have no concerns at all about his responsibility for their war-weary condition (Panel: X-Men #14, Lee, Kirby, Roth, Colletta)

Yet just one issue before, Xavier had admitted that he'd failed to warn the X-Men that his step-brother was a magically-powered engine of destruction who might one day turn up with something less than fraternal good wishes on his mind. That failure to inform and prepare his students resulted in another terrible beating for most of the X-Men. What's perhaps most telling about Xavier is that he'd left his brother buried beneath a mountain and had made no subsequent effort to either rescue him or at the very least ensure that he stayed incapacitated. True, Cain Marko had been mystically transformed into an inconceivably mighty - and supposedly "evil" - creature just before he was buried alive, which meant that disturbing his living tomb would inevitably bring serious challenges with it. And yet, Xavier had had more than a decade to track down methods of either curing his half-brother or ensuring that he stayed underground forever. Instead, the Professor just ignored the situation, and that's despite believing that "no power on Earth (would be) capable of stopping him" if the Juggernaut escaped. Rather than develop a strategy for either helping and/or defeating his brother, Xavier simply left him where he was. The man's capacity for ignoring problems, or perhaps even repressing them entirely, was truly formidable, but it was his students who tended to have to face the consequences of his unwillingness to get things done. (Panel: X-Men #13, Lee, Kirby, Roth, Colletta)

But then, Xavier never did seem to think in anything other than an occluded, short-term fashion when it came to the X-Men. He was quite happy to let the apparently world-threatening menace of Lucifer go free without even wiping his memory of the teams existence in issue 9, for example, an inexplicable act of magnanimity which would once again come back to bite him and his students. Never one to attend to things today when they might be delayed for a decade or  so, Xavier appeared desperate to avoid doing anything which might involve protracted effort. (Even his solo mission to track down Lucifer in X-Men 7 to 9 seems remarkably unthought through, a mission undertaken without his students which eventually relies on their ill-planned, last-minute arrival.)  Indeed, Xavier never seemed as happy as he was shown to be at the end of X-Men #12, when chance and design had conspired to ensure that all previously seen "Evil" mutants had either reformed or been prevented from behaving badly. Never has a man longed to know that all his responsibilities were over, it seems, although both the Juggernaut and the Sentinels were in fact just around the corner.(Panel; X-men #9, Lee, Kirby, Stone)

It had always seemed to be that way. Xavier tended to towards high ideals and short-term, careless thinking. In the team's very first adventure, the Professor ordered the team into battle for their debut mission when Magneto attacked a US Army base. What immediately became obvious is that Xavier had provided his students with no clear plan at all. The X-Men were simply thrown into a situation in which they'd little information and no back-up at all. Though Xavier had focused with some diligence on training his students to function as a team, he'd entirely ignored the possibility of creating, for example, operational links between them and the Republic's various armed forces. The first time the Army had heard of the X-Men was when they appeared on the scene of a mutant-created disaster. Given that Xavier had already forged some useful links with the American state, it would surely have made sense if he'd have created the conditions by which cooperation between the X-Men and the authorities was possible. Instead, he simply threw a gang of costumed children into what was effectively a war-zone and encouraged them to win the day. Xavier should surely have been locked away for a very long time indeed for child endangerment. (Panel: X-Men #1, by Lee, Kirby & Reinman)

Yet Xavier becomes more and not less irresponsible and manipulative as the X-Men's adventures continue. At the conclusion of X-Men #4, he pretends to have had his mental powers removed by a bomb of Magneto's in order to test their ability to function without him. As Marvel Girl declares in the following issue; "From now on we will be alone, for the first time! ... without the professor to guide us and help us!" (Panel: X-Men 4, Lee, Kirby, Reinman & Roussos)

Not only does Xavier pretend to have had his telepathic abilities erased, but it appears that he also acts as if he's had most of his fundamental cognitive capacities diminished too. (If he hadn't, he'd still have been able to advise the X-Men, which would've defeated the purpose of his "test" of them.) As is typical in the X-Men issues of the period, domestic chores devolve apparently without discussion onto the shoulders of Jean Grey, who appears to have been given the responsibility of supervising and indeed entertaining the Professor. One can only speculate what other functions she needed to help him with, and yet all the time the shameless Xavier is entirely well. (Panel: X-Men #5, by Lee, Kirby, Reinman)

In the absence of their mentor's guidance, the X-Men find themselves embroiled in a battle in outer space with Magneto and the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants. It's a showdown which the X-Men barely survive, and yet ... (Panel: X-Men #5, by Lee, Kirby, Reinman)

... when they return, they discover the broadly-smiling, pipe-smoking Xavier, who declares that he'd never lost his powers, or indeed any of his vigour. It was all part of the young mutant's "final exam", to be allowed to stumble into deadly off-Earth situations while still traumatised over their role model's suffering. "Hurrah!" declare the loyal and dense-headed X-Men, who never seem to cotton on to the fact that Xavier's a devious, callous, manipulative, self-satisfied egoist who constantly imperils them in the name of his ill-thought through grand design. (Panel: X-Men #5, by Lee, Kirby, Reinman)

But never mind, he's "proud" of them, they've "passed" the test "with flying colours", and no-one actually died as a result of Xavier's reckless play-acting! Hurrah for good old Charles Xavier then, one of the most repellent of all Marvel's first wave characters as well as one of the most admired. Not a man to trust your children with, or at least, not if the reader were to trust in the detail rather than the spirit of the early Marvel era stories. But then, it's a good job that we know that the detail of those wonderfully absurd boy's stories isn't to be taken seriously, isn't it, although I do rather like the idea of Xavier the butterfly-minded egomaniac and the X-Men as a crowd of terribly unimaginative foot-soldiers. (Panel: X-Men #5, by Lee, Kirby, Reinman.)

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