FIRST STORY: "The Sinister Shadow of Doomsday" (15 pages)  The X-Men try to stop Factor Three from engineering a conflict between the USA and the USSR, but run into trouble.

What you need to know:
The Changeling belatedly starts to realise that the Mutant-Master just might be a bit mad.  You'd have thought the whole "trigger World War III" thing might have tipped him off sooner, but there you go.

The X-Men steal two aircraft from Factor Three's HQ before escaping, which they'll need to race around the world for the next two issues.  The Changeling actually raises the obvious question of why two working aircraft happened to be hanging around in a building that Factor Three were going to blow up.  As we establish next issue, the Mutant Master's logic is a bit warped here.  He let them go so that they'd be blamed for his plan if it was foiled, but he's also confident that they won't foil it.  So, er, why release them...?

A more innocent time:
Factor Three's plan for the X-Men is... to brainwash them and then immediately blow them up?  Eh?

The X-Men go behind the Iron Curtain.  Naturally, it's full of soldiers in huge overcoats who call one another "Comrade."  (Mind you, they're not the bad guys in this story, which is downright open-minded by Silver Age standards...)

The Changeling really is dumb as a post.  At the start of the issue he points out that the Mutant-Master needs him because he's immobile.  On page 9, he remembers that this doesn't really matter because the Mutant-Master is on "a mobile platform [which] allows him to move about almost as freely as I."  So not very immobile after all, then.

Comments:
Action story time.  Lots of running around trying not to get shot by American and Russian soldiers, and a bit of fighting with supervillains.  As I said in the Comments for the previous issue, the storyline looks decidedly dated nowadays, although the action sequences are okay. 

Don Heck takes over on pencils with George Roussos on inks.  The result is alarmingly erratic, with some rather nice pages but a few extremely ropey ones.  Page 4, in particular, is horrible.  But to give it its due, it's quite energetic stuff.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X, Cyclops, the Angel, the Beast, Iceman and Marvel Girl I

SUPPORTING CHARACTER
The Banshee (behind the scenes)

VILLAINS
Factor Three: The Mutant-Master, the Blob, the Changeling, Mastermind I, Unus the Untouchable and the Vanisher

SECOND STORY: "A Man Called... X" (5 pages)  Scott Summers is nearly lynched after using his powers in public, inspiring Charles Xavier to try and find him.

What you need to know:
This is the first "Origins of the X-Men" back-up strip.  The strip ran in issues #38-57, explaining how Scott, Bobby, Hank and Warren came to join the team, and giving details on the X-Men's powers.  Jean doesn't get an origin story, because we saw her join in issue #1 (although you'd have thought they could have done a story about how she was invited).

Marvel's sliding timescale has already set in.  This story is set in "the middle 1960s."

Scott Summers uses his powers in public to save some people from a falling air conditioning unit.  Naturally, they try to lynch him, because that's what Marvel Universe bystanders do.  This is apparently the first time that the existence of mutants becomes public knowledge.   (Although that requires a bit of logical fudging - superpowers had been public knowledge in the Marvel Universe since World War II, so why are they so surprised that Scott's got them?)

News reports of Scott's powers cause an anti-mutant backlash, which again doesn't quite fit with continuity - the X-Men didn't develop a major anti-mutant problem until Bolivar Trask came along with issue #14.  Anyway, this inspires Xavier to go and start recruiting his X-Men.  He goes to Washington and meets up with Fred Duncan, a long-forgotten supporting character from the early days of the title.  Duncan resurfaces in the lead strip a few months later.

Xavier says that he became a recluse after Cain was buried in the cave-in in Korea.  That was just plain wrong, even at the time, because we knew Charles went on to do some global backpacking, fight Lucifer and lose the use of his legs.

Nonetheless, it's pretty clear that Xavier is meant to be living alone in this story.  That clashes hopelessly with Scott Lobdell's later retcon, which has Amelia Voght living at the Mansion at this point (and walking out when Scott arrives in issue #42's back-up strip).  That's just one of those tacit retcons which nobody noticed - at the time, this strip had been out of print for decades and almost none of Lobdell's readers would have read it.

Although it's not made entirely clear in this issue, later chapters confirm that Scott's scene takes place in Washington DC.  The orphanage is supposed to be "upstate."  However, Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #3 placed the orphanage in Omaha, Nebraska - presumably an error, but it stuck.

A more innocent time:
"Behind triple locked steel doors, in a forbidding, seldom-visited section of Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, stand row upon row of cold, silent file cabinets..."  Yes, it's the 1967 equivalent of using a computer database for a framing device - three panels of filing cabinets.  Tons of the bloody things. 

Fred Duncan is watching footage of Scott Summers on a cine projector.

Roy Thomas slightly overdoes it with the narration.  Does Xavier really need "a pair of trained eyes" to read the newspaper?

Comments:
The "Origins of the X-Men" strips are a bit of a continuity backwater.  They weren't even included in the early seventies reprints, when Golden Age stories were dusted off and published in their place.  At the time of writing, only the Cyclops arc is in print (in Marvel Masterworks: X-Men vol 4).  The Cyclops and Iceman stories were included in Amazing Adventures (a little-remembered X-Men reprint title) during the 1980s; the others have never been reprinted. 

In the 1990s, Joe Casey and Steve Rude's miniseries X-Men: Children of the Atom was intended to kick all of these strips out of continuity and replace them with a modernised version.  Aside from the contrivance of moving all the founding X-Men to the same school, Casey's version is superior, certainly when considered as a whole.  "Origins of the X-Men" is episodic and bitty, and has largely faded into obscurity.  Nonetheless, Children of the Atom was never accepted into continuity.  As the most recent edition of the Official Handbook confirms, "Origins of the X-Men" remains the canonical version.

As for this particular story, it's a five-page back-up strip which doesn't make a tremendous amount of headway.  Perfectly alright in its role, though.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Charles Xavier (last in X-Men vol 2 #-1)
Scott Summers (last in the second story in Classic X-Men #42; in flashback only)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Fred Duncan (chronologically earliest appearance)
Bill (chronologically earliest appearance; next in issue #2)

Updated: 22 November 2004

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