What else could the letter X stand for when you are an old time comic geek like me? The Children of the Atom...mutants...bound together in a world that hates and fears them. Even back in the mid-sixties, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were savvy enough to realize there were real world prejudices that could be mined for comic book stories.
Suddenly your black neighbor is not such a threat when there are people out there who can destroy buildings with a look or read your mind. How would the ordinary world react against a villain whose experiences in the Holocaust (Magneto) made him the most dangerous terrorist on the planet? If you knew he was obsessed with never experiencing the same kind of genocide again, would you be with him or against him?
Believe it or not there was a time when the X-men was a reprint book on the verge of cancellation until a little Canadian mutant (and several others) named Wolverine joined the team in the late 70s. There has been no stopping the title ever since. There are no fewer than ten titles currently printed a month that contain mutant characters. The X-Men aren't going away anytime soon.
