The X-Men (1963) #2

 

Cover by Jack Kirby

Cover Date: November 1963

On-Sale Date: September 1963

Synopsis: The Vanisher steals the USA's defense plans, with the intention of selling them to "the Communists". The X-Men aren't able to stop him, so Professor X steps in to give him a mind-wipe.

CHRONOLOGICAL NOTES

Sadie Hawkins Day is a real thing, and it originated from Al Capp's Li'l Abner comic strip. Get this wild idea: apparently on Sadie Hawkins Day, women can ask men on a date! What a trip.

This day is usually said to fall on November 13th, so this issue can happen on any other day of the year except for that one. Vital information!

There's not much going on chronologically here, but it does establish that Xavier has made contacts in the FBI at some point in the past. Fred Duncan will be a not-too-frequent presence in the Silver Age before quietly disappearing from the 1970s onwards.

COUNTING THE DAYS

This issue doesn't really have much chronological information, and could take place at any point after X-Men (1963) #1 (but not on Sadie Hawkins Day).

Day 1:

• The flashback on page 5 and 6 is relayed by Professor X via telepathy, and shows the Vanisher robbing a bank with his teleportation powers.
• Pages 1 to 10, and the first 2 panels of page 11, take place on the same day. The X-Men do a lot of training while the Vanisher shows up at the Pentagon to say that he plans to steal the USA's defense plans "within the next few days".

Day 2: The last three panels of page 11, pages 12 to 16, and the first two panels of page 17 take place the next day, after newspaper reports about the Vanisher's exploits. Vanisher recruits an army of goons, the X-Men are brought in by the FBI, and they fail to stop the Vanisher from stealing the plans.

Day 3: The last three panels of page 17, page 18, and the first three panels of page 19. Newspaper are reporting on the defeat of the X-Men, who are sitting around like a bunch of chumps. The Vanisher makes demands for 10 million dollars, but Professor X has a plan.

Day 4: The last three panels of page 19, and pages 20 to 22 happen the next day. The Vanisher shows up at the White House with his goons to collect his ransom money. The X-Men fight the goons, while Professor X wipes the Vanisher's memories.

The X-Men (1963) #1

 

Cover by Jack Kirby

Cover Date: September 1963

On-Sale: July 1963

Synopsis: Professor X introduces Marvel Girl (Jean Grey) to the X-Men, who currently consist of Cyclops ("Slim" Summers), Angel (Warren Worthington), Iceman (Bobby Drake) and the Beast (Henry McCoy). Magneto attacks a missile base, and the X-Men go fight him until he leaves.

CHRONOLOGICAL NOTES

Iceman says here that he's a couple of years younger than the other X-Men. Note that Jean isn't there yet, so this comment doesn't apply to her.

Iceman's age is established as 16 years old.  That puts his birth in either XY -16 or -17 (see my initial post for an explanation of how I'm reckoning the timeline). Combined with his comment from above, that puts Cyke, Angel and Beast at around 18 years old.

The ages of the X-Men are further established, as Beast is said to be the oldest.  Again, Jean isn't on the scene yet. It's possible Cyclops isn't including himself in this comment, but we know from later issues that Beast is indeed the oldest of the original team.

Jean is introduced to the team. Given that she's starting at a new school, I'm inclined to say that places this story either around August/September (the beginning of the US school year) or in January (around mid-year enrolment).

It's also curious given later revelations that Jean doesn't know the nature of the school, but we can assume she and Charles are just being secretive in front of the others.

Xavier gives a very truncated history of how he decided to form the X-Men. His parents having worked on the first A-bomb project has to be written off as a topical reference. In the early days radiation is used as the main explanation for how mutants occur, but this doesn't work as Xavier's origin unless he's only meant to be about 20 years old. But while the reference is topical, we can still use it as a guide for Stan and Jack's intentions, and the placement of later stuff in Xavier's timeline, such as when his parents died.

The first atomic bomb program was undertaken by the UK and Canada in August 1941, called the Tube Alloys project. Assuming Xavier's parents worked on that project, that would have them as both still alive in XY -22 (1941 being 22 years before 1963, the publication year of this issue).  The US atomic bomb program, the Manhattan Project, didn't get going until 1942, so if I go with that - and it is the more likely option - it has them still alive in XY -21.

Finally, check out Xavier lying his arse off in that final panel. Presumably he's talking about a "childhood accident" because he doesn't want to admit to his students that there's a possibility they'll get their legs crushed by a space alien named after the devil.

This is our first look at Magneto (aside from the cover, of course). There's not a lot to go on here, except for Magneto's claim to have been preparing for months. That's vague enough to wedge in just about anything. He later disrupts a missile launch, and a newspaper claims that this is the sixth such launch this "phantom saboteur" has disrupted.

COUNTING THE DAYS

This is the very first X-Men comic, so it happens in XY 0, probably in either January or September to match up with the school year.

• Day 1: Pages 1 to 11, and the first four panels of page 12 take place in a single day, seemingly. There's scope to insert some gaps in here if I need to, and given the number of retcons over the years I suspect that I will.
• Day 2: The last three panels of page 12, and pages 13 to 23, take place the day after Magneto disables the missile.

Solve for X: The Impossible Task of Making an X-Men Chronology

Anyone who reads X-Men comics for any length of time says it can't be done.

They say it, and they're probably right.  After all, with thousands of comics and hundreds of creators spread over nearly 60 years, it's no wonder that the X-Men don't have a coherent timeline.  Very few of the franchise's writers have ever tried to have it make sense, and when you have multiple creators steering the ship simultaneously, the timeline of the X-Men is bound to be scattershot at best.  Factor in the sliding timescale of the Marvel Universe at large, where all of the comics since Fantastic Four #1 happened a perpetual "10 years ago" and keep getting dragged forward in time, and making sense of the timeline of the X-Men really does look impossible.

Readers of my other blogs may be aware that I love an impossible, never-ending task, and this is one that I've been working on for some time.  For years I've been reading X-Men comics, painstakingly recording every reference to the passage of time, and trying to make it all fit.  I'm well aware that it can't be done.  There are too many discrepancies across too many books.  Even so, I enjoy doing it, and finding the places where it does work.  The little bits of serendipity, the minor revelations that come from taking a chronological view of the series...  You know, stuff like Unus the Untouchable probably having a run with the WWF Championship.  I find it rewarding and I've put a lot of work into it, so I figured why not start up yet another blog.

So yes, I'm trying to create a comprehensive timeline of X-Men comics in order to determine how long it's been since X-Men #1, and how old everyone is supposed to be.  When there's so much contradictory information in the books, one of the things that needs to be done is to figure out what information takes precedence.  I have some basic guidelines that I follow:

• The core X-Men books take precedence over everything. Usually that means Uncanny X-Men, but it can also mean Astonishing X-Men, New X-Men, etc. The core X-Men books will generally overrule the spinoffs, and the x-books will generally overrule things when characters make guest appearances in non-x-books.
• Current-day books take precedence over continuity inserts. What that means is that the information in books like X-Men: The Hidden Years or X-Men: First Class, which are set in earlier time periods, will be ignored in favour of the books that were coming out at the time. If First Class sets a story in Summer when that doesn't fit with what was going on in Uncanny X-Men, that's something I'll have to toss out.
• I tend to take "omniscient narrator" caption boxes as exactly that: omniscient.  Characters can make mistakes, and I'm willing to get creative with things they say or think, but I put a little more stock in the captions unless they're also from a character's perspective.

One thing I'm not doing is trying to fit the timeline into specific years.  Certain events from the past, such as the childhoods of Magneto and Wolverine, are absolutely tied to a certain time period, but eventually there comes a point where the Sliding Timescale must come into effect.  For this purpose, I designate the year that X-Men (1963) #1 happens as "X-Men Year 0" or XY0.  I could have gone with XY1, but a lot of the math is easier when I have it as XY0.  Things that happen after X-Men #1 will count up (XY1, XY10, etc.) and things that happen before will go into the negatives (XY-1, XY-10, etc.).

So going forward I'll be doing a post on every X-Men comic, and noting down all of the relevant chronological information.  When I hit the end of every year of the X-Men's publishing history, I'll post the timeline as it stands at that point.  Eventually that timeline is going to get pretty big, perhaps too big for a single post, but I'll figure that out when the time comes. For now I'll be analyzing comics, at a proposed rate on of one every day or two.  I'm almost guaranteed not to survive the experience, but I've never let that stop me.