Editing X-Men (section)

==Meta-History==
The story goes that Stan Lee invented the X-Men in the 60s when he decided that, if [[Marvel Comics]] was going to focus on [[supers]], it'd be handy to have a one-size-fits-all origin story for heroes, villains and side-characters. After all, how many aliens, mad scientists and lucky survivors of freak accidents could there really be? Thus, the concept of [[mutant]]s was born.

The X-Men debuted in the 60s and, frankly, didn't do too well. With a comparatively dark and negative view of the future in an age where the Silver Age "science explorer" Fantastic Four were still king, the X-Men just didn't really gel with the market. It didn't help that [[DC Comics]] had come up with their own take on the idea of a team of super-freaks protecting a world that hated, feared and misunderstood them in the form of the Doom Patrol.

Then came the Bronze Age of Comics... in the 70s, the civil rights movement took off, and the sexual minorities were hot on its heels. Marvel saw an opportunity; after all, mutants had already been characterized as a minority race within humanity in their own right, and now the fact that mutants spontaneously arose at random could be tied in to the growing idea that non-heterosexuality was not a choice nor a perversion, but simply a quirk of genetics. Thus they brought the X-Men back with a new team, emphasizing the diverseness by expanding the roster beyond the original 4 WASP boys and 1 WASP girl. Whilst the "mutants stand in for minorities" angle has always been contentious (after all, it's not reasonable to be scared of the gay guy down the street, but it ''is'' reasonable to be scared of the teenage girl next door who can pop your head like a zit if she thinks about it), it worked. Combined with the decision to turn the X-Men into Marvel's own Superhero Soap Opera, as soaps were a cultural phenomena taking America by storm in the 70s, and the X-Men soared to popularity, growing to become arguably Marvel's biggest superhero team in pop culture, even their answer to the Justice League.