Editing Marvel Comics (section)

===The X-Men===
The second major team-focused product from Marvel, the X-Men are a group of mutants - a newly emerging human subspecies who possess powers and/or deformities as a result of an awakened "X-Gene". Led by the visionary civil rights activist Charles Xavier, they seek to promote peace and equality between humans and mutants, whilst battling against myriad mutant criminals - most prominently Magneto, a charismatic magnetism-controlling Jew who, having seen his human family destroyed by the Nazis, is determined to prevent similar atrocities from being carried out against mutants.

Floundering during the Silver Age, it was the Bronze Age when the X-men stepped forward and truly took off, since they combined the super soap opera formula with an ability to stand in for any of the various Civil Rights movements of the time.

Hands down the '''biggest''' sub-universe of the Marvel universe. Seriously, there are literally dozens if not hundreds of X-Men and multiple spin-off teams of mutant heroes, usually designated with an X- prefix. Some of the more notable members...
* '''Cyclops:''' Original leader of the X-men. Possesses ocular force energy beams, but can't turn them off, due to brain damage. Sadly has come to be perceived as an uptight stick-in-the-mud and mostly defined by his borderline obsessive relationship with Jean Grey. Except for the brief period where he was dating Emma Frost.
* '''Jean Grey:''' Incredibly powerful telepath and telekinetic. Infamous for dying and being resurrected - the reputation is exaggerated, but she can't shake it off. Iconic for her love triangle between herself, Cyclops and Wolverine, despite the fact she married Cyclops for quite a while.
** '''The Phoenix:''' Rather infamously, she has been resurrected by a cosmic force of destruction known only as the Phoenix Force. This tends to be very bad because it requires Jean to focus a lot in order to prevent it from going wild and destroying shit.
* '''The Beast:''' Henry McCoy, possessing the brain of a genius and the brutish strength & agility of a gorilla doped to the gills on speed and coke. Originally just looked like a guy with really big feet, he accidentally mutated himself into a hairy, gorilla-like monster in the 80s and it stuck. Originally a fun-loving jokester who was so beloved he managed to serve on both the X-Men and the Avengers, but since around the 2010s, has become increasingly portrayed as an evil incompetent screwup.
* '''Storm:''' African mutant with the power to fly and manipulate the weather, including throwing lighting and subzero winds at people. Originally of uncertain ethnicity, with it being noted that her mutation caused her to display a melding of physical traits from different human ethnicities (with cat-like eyes, for good measure!) but was retconned into being pure-blooded Kenyan. Spent some time as leader of the X-Men after Cyclops cracked and couldn't handle it.
* '''Nightcrawler:''' One of the rare mutants whose physical deformities were evident from birth, Nightcrawler looks like a blue devil, but has the heart of a swashbuckling, fun-loving action hero, and is a deeply devout Catholic. Mutation gives him ambidexterity, superhuman agility, prehensile feet and a prehensile tail, and the ability to teleport.
* '''Colossus:''' Russian mutant who can transform his body into living steel, gaining superhuman strength and durability in the process. At one point actually gained the powers of the Juggernaut, turning an already massive metal man into a massive metal man who is nigh-unstoppable.
* '''Angel/Archangel:''' One of the original X-Men, a millionaire's son with massive white-feathered wings. Famously got abducted by Apocalypse and forcibly transformed into a living superweapon with metal wings that can shoot feathers like flechettes and blue skin.
* '''Rogue:''' A former villain who was introduced taking out Carol Danvers, aka Ms. Marvel. Possesses the ability to drain "life force" from others with a touch, rendering them unconscious and granting Rogue a copy of their memories and, if possible, superpowers. For most of her history has possessed "flying brick" powers due to siphoning so much life force from Carol Danvers that she almost killed her. Can't turn her powers off, forcing her to cover up. Has had a long, messy, on-off relationship with Gambit.
* '''Gambit:''' The most "90s" member of the team. Louisiana thief with the ability to activate the kinetic energy in anything he touches... basically, he can cause whatever he touches to blow up. Actually is only operating on, like, a shadow of his full power, having had brain surgery to cut off most of his full abilities. At full strength, would have the ability to completely and totally manipulate kinetic energy, which includes blowing shit up by looking at it, turning ''people'' into walking bombs, and assuming an energy form that can travel between planets and dimensions. Very few people remember this anymore.
* '''Emma Frost:''' Formerly a teacher for a rival and villainous group of mutant teens, she went straight(ish) and joined the X-men. Incredibly powerful telepath, but also can shapeshift into a living diamond form, in which she gains super strength and nigh invulnerability.
* '''Psylocke:''' Originally just had psychic powers, but after swapping bodies with an assassin (leading to the iconic look people remember her with), she developed her power to the ability to [[Soulknife|create weapons out of her own mind]].
* '''Iceman:''' One of the original five, Bobby Drake has the power to turn into and generate ice. Usually depicted as the most light-hearted of the original team, and described as transparent about his feelings instead of being cold like one would expect from an ice-themed character. He was notably retconned into being gay in 2015, which was subject to [[skub]] at the time due to his prior history of womanizing and how it was handled.
* '''Kitty Pryde:''' The initial younger team member, effectively being the team little sister when she was introduced, she has the power of intangibility. She's cycled through several superhero names like Sprite, Ariel, Shadowcat, and the Red Queen.
* '''Rachel Summers:''' The original time-traveller member, Rachel is the future daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey, and inherited her mother's powers. Born in a dystopian ''Days of Future Past'' timeline, where the Mutant Registration Act made mutants into fugitives hunted by giant robots called Sentinels. Rachel was made into a "Hound" forced to hunt down other mutants. She would escape, astral project into the past, and bond with the Phoenix Force as well which boosted her powers to physically time travel. She's stuck around since, and has generally been the most stable of the Phoenix hosts.
* '''Cable:''' The other well known time-travelling Summers child, and one of the characters most representative of the 90s. Nathan Summers is the son of Cyclops and the Jean Grey clone Madelyne Pryor. He possesses great telepathic and telekinetic powers, but they are mainly used to keep the techno-organic virus he's infected with in check, which is responsible for his metal arm.

Of minor note: X-Men is the premier comic for "Comic Book Death", where it's hard for the audience to take a death seriously because the next writer will undo it. Just about ''all'' of the above have either "died", or "for real died", or even "we mean it, he's not coming back (and to prove it, here are his replacements)", and been brought back. To quote the comic itself: "Sometimes it seems that in mutant heaven there are no pearly gates, but instead revolving doors." In 2020 they just stopped even pretending and gave them them the ability to out-right resurrect the dead at no cost but time.

With an extraordinarily large cast of protagonists and antagonists, there have been a '''lot''' of different mutant-related groups in the canon. Some examples on the heroic side are:
* '''The X-Men:''' The original team of mutant vigilantes assembled by Charles Xavier to try and promote human/mutant relationships, mostly by battling renegade mutants.
* '''The New Mutants:''' The second band of mutant teenagers gathered onto the Xavier Institute, and effectively the third team assembled by Xavier (there were two iterations of the X-Men first). Were mostly defined as "the junior X-men", and so fell out of fashion as the group aged up, although its former members retain a particular bond. A later team with the same kind of basic group identity was '''Generation X'''.
* '''Excalibur:''' A short-lived Great Britain-based team of mutants.
* '''X-Factor:''' Mutants who seek to promote better human/mutant relationships by registering themselves with the US government and serving as a government-directed and overseen task force.
* '''X-Force:''' Former New Mutants who were lured away from Xavier's teachings and chose to follow the more violent and "pro-active" methods of Cable instead.
Villainous counterparts include:
* '''Brotherhood of Mutants:''' The first and original "mutant villain team". The very first version was a generic "mutant villain league" under the control of Magneto, and was known as the Brotherhood of ''Evil'' Mutants because, hey, it was the 60s. The second iteration, started by Mystique, set the template for the group's identity to follow: mutants who believed in Magneto's philosophy that mutant safety required militant action, Eventually shook off the "Evil" part of the name in an attempt to be taken seriously.
* '''The Acolytes:''' A sub-group of the Brotherhood of Mutants; extremists of Magneto's philosophy who also worship Magneto as a divinely blessed messiah come to save mutantkind from the evils of humanity.
* '''The Mutant Liberation Front:''' Anarchistic militant racist mutant supremacists who sought the extinction of baseline humanity. Founded by Stryfe, an evil and insane clone of the time-traveling mutant Cable.
* '''Hellfire Club:''' A secret society of filthy rich mutants who use their powers to acquire ever-greater wealth and political/social power.
* '''Clan Akkaba:''' Mutants who follow the teachings of the genocidal "Might Makes Right/Survival of the Fittest"-obsessed super-mutant Apocalypse, whilst also worshipping him as a living demigod. They've been around for centuries.
* '''Marauders:''' Mutant assassins and mercenaries organized by Mister Sinister, who provides them with immortality of the "clone backups" variety in exchange for working for him. A little-remembered offshoot of the Marauders are the ''Nasty Boys'', who are basically Mr. Sinister's personal goon squad, and far less murderous (and intimidating) than the Marauders.
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====Wolverine====
Rude, mouthy Canadian midget with [[troll]]-like [[regeneration]], heightened senses, and ultra-sharp retractile claws in between his knuckles. Originally introduced as a minor Hulk antagonist, he was originally the least popular member of the 70s revival team, where he graduated to main character. Luckily for him, Chris Claremont rescued him with a murky yet [[grimdark]] backstory and surprising character depth as the bloody-handed anti-hero of the team who nonetheless wants to overcome his savage instincts.

Wolverine's backstory has undergone a ''lot'' of changes, tweaks and retcons over the years, justified through a combination of massive amounts of trauma (it's literally been stated that his healing factor will actually try to blot out the most painful memories as a survival mechanism) and repeated attempts by various evil organizations to brainwash him into their personal killing machine. The ''simple'' version of the story is that Wolverine was born in the 1800s to a wealthy home owner's wife who'd had an affair with the gardener. When that gardener killed her husband, the man Wolverine (then called James Howlett) believed to be his dad, he attacked the man in a rage and accidentally killed him when this triggered his mutation, stabbing the man to death with his claws. This drove his mom insane, and James fled into the wilderness, eventually taking up the name of James ''Logan'' to cover up his tracks. He bummed around for decades, as his healing factor stopped him from aging once he reached maturity, and he would frequently hire on as a soldier. In the early 1970s (originally 1974), he would be kidnapped by a secret joint American-Canadian commission called "Weapon Plus", which decided to use him for the Weapon X project: an attempt to brainwash mutants into expendable soldiers and assassins. He was tortured, repeatedly brainwashed, and had nigh-invulnerable metal called "Adamantium" bonded to his skeletal structure. Wolverine eventually broke free, but the combination of all the surgical tinkering with his brain and the sheer trauma of what he'd undergone left him with near-total amnesia; he didn't even remember that his claws were a natural part of him, instead believing they were primitive cybernetic implants installed as part of the failed "make a super-assassin" project. Rescued in the wilderness, he was brought onto Canada's Department H, their fledgling super-operative program, and he battled the Hulk during a brief incursion into Canada. But Wolverine felt no loyalty to the Canadian government, and when Professor X came around, he quit Department H and joined the X-Men. And that's when the story really began...

For the longest time, Wolverine's claws actually ''were'' said to be genuinely mechanical implants; there was even a brief period of time in which he was portrayed with metallic "chutes" implanted in his arms so the claws could safely emerge without injuring him, but that wasn't [[grimdark]] enough and so it got replaced with him having to carve through his own flesh every time he popped the claws and relying on his regeneration to keep him from bleeding out. Then came the famous early 90s story where Magneto nearly killed Wolverine by ripping out his Adamantium, which exhausted his healing factor, making it less effective, and revealing his claws had been a part of him all along.

Wolverine has his own rogues gallery, though the most iconic members of it are '''Sabertooth''', who is basically Wolverine's evil counterpart, '''Omega Red''', a Russian serial killer with a healing factor implanted with knock-off Adamantium retractile tentacles and subdermal armor.
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