The problem is not staying on for 16 or 17 years -- I mean, theoretica — X-Men (comics)

"For me, the whole idea was that the number was small enough that they could be expunged if the world got determined about it. You know, that it was something that the Avengers, if they wanted, could deal with. That was what gave Magneto so much of his passion and focus. In terms of defending his people, they really were dancing along the edge of extinction and they really did need someone like him. The difference, and the reason that the school was so intent on remaining clandestine, was that if they were exposed, they could be destroyed."

"I like the very large themes that are in this and the comic books which were originally kind of an allegory for the Malcolm X/Martin Luther King debate."

"Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Colossus. Children of the atom, students of Charles Xavier. MUTANTS-feared and hated by the world they have sworn to protect. These are the STRANGEST heroes of all! Stan Lee presents: The Uncanny X-Men!"

"Magneto’s an old terrorist bastard. I got into trouble—the X-Men fans hated me because I made him into a stupid old drug-addicted idiot. He had started out as this sneering, grim terrorist character, so I thought, Well, that’s who he really is. [Writer] Chris Claremont had done a lot of good work over the years to redeem the character: He made him a survivor of the death camps and this noble antihero. And I went in and shat on all of it. It was right after 9/11, and I said there’s nothing f*****g noble about this at all."

"The X-Men, I did the natural thing there. What would you do with mutants who were just plain boys and girls and certainly not dangerous? You school them. You develop their skills. So I gave them a teacher, Professor X. Of course, it was the natural thing to do, instead of disorienting or alienating people who were different from us, I made the X-Men part of the human race, which they were. Possibly, radiation, if it is beneficial, may create mutants that’ll save us instead of doing us harm. I felt that if we train the mutants our way, they’ll help us - and not only help us, but achieve a measure of growth in their own sense. And so, we could all live together."

"This was a period when we were experimenting with the atom bomb. People were wondering what the effects would be. Everybody worried ‘Would we all become mutants? We played around with this ‘mutation thing’ and I came up with the X-Men, who were associated with radiation and its effects on humanity."