Mind Candy. Lawrence Watt-Evans

I read horror comics?

      Because there weren’t any. If there had been, I’d have read them, even if I had to sneak them into bed and read them under the covers, the way I snuck my radio in to listen to rock ’n’ roll.

      See, it ties back in. It’s all Dr. Wertham’s fault that I wasted my childhood with that other stuff, instead of horror comics, and didn’t wind up as rich and famous as Stephen King!

      Talk about a misspent youth!

      The X-Men and I: Growing Up Mutant

      Originally published in The Unauthorized X-Men

      Bedford, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1963—I was eight years old, about to turn nine, a skinny blond kid with four sisters and a brother, living in a big old Victorian house a block from the town common. I got a dime allowance every Sunday—or possibly I’d just gotten a raise to twenty cents, I’m not entirely sure, but it doesn’t matter; either way, it wasn’t very much, and I tried to stretch it as far as I could. Most weeks I would walk up to the corner, where there was a tiny block of stores, too small to be called a shopping center, to spend it.

      At the north end of the shops was the Bedford Tailor, which I have never set foot in to this day. At the south end was Harry Silverman’s little grocery, usually referred to simply as “the corner store,” where my sisters and I bought penny candy—which really cost a penny back then, and certain varieties could be had for less, such as these strange green squares called “mint juleps” that you had to soak in your mouth for a minute before they got soft enough to chew which were two for a penny, and Chum Gum, the world’s cheapest chewing gum, which came three sticks to the two-cent pack.

      I’d usually spend a nickel at Harry’s, mostly on mint juleps and Chum Gum just because you got more for your money.

      But the rest of my money I saved for the middle of the three-store block. That was Dunham’s Used Books, which was jammed full of marvels—stacks and stacks of science fiction paperbacks along one wall, shelf after shelf of strange old books filling most of the shop, hundreds of books dating back as far as the middle of the 19th century. One long shelf held dozens of yellow-bound volumes of the adventures of Tom Swift, Jr., many of which eventually found their way into my possession.

      Behind the counter at the front was Mr. Dunham—or rarely, Mrs. Dunham—who was invariably reading, interrupting his current book occasionally to glance at his customers and make sure we weren’t doing any damage.

      And on one side of the counter were two or three big stacks of old comic books, in various states of disrepair. The intact ones cost a nickel apiece; the ones missing the cover or inside pages were two for a nickel. Even when the cover price for new comics had gone from a dime to twelve cents a couple of years earlier, the Dunhams had held the line at a nickel.

      This is where we bought most of our comics, my sisters and I. Marian, the oldest, would look for anything with horses in it, which mostly meant old Dell westerns featuring the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but she also bought Tarzan and sometimes a few superhero titles. Jody, the next-oldest, was a big Superboy fan. Me, I liked anything with spaceships or monsters. I don’t think the younger two were buying any of their own yet in ’63, but they’d look at our purchases when we got them home and passed them around.

      None of us bought Marvel comics much; the Dunhams didn’t get very many in. The local outlets for new comics in Bedford, the racks in the drugstores and five-and-dime stores, didn’t usually carry any Marvels, that I saw; I think it must have been a local distribution problem. Also, I think even then a lot of Marvel readers kept their comics, rather than selling them to the Dunhams.

      They did get a few, though, and we’d thumbed through battered copies of Strange Tales and Tales of Suspense and Incredible Hulk, but we didn’t generally buy them. They seemed weird and, frankly, sometimes a bit stupid—the Hulk and the Thing never did anything clever, they just kept hitting the bad guys until they fell down, and didn’t the Human Torch set a lot of things ablaze throwing those fireballs around? Iron Man always seemed to have exactly the gadget he needed, and Dr. Strange didn’t make any sense at all. The colors all seemed muddy. My eight-year-old self didn’t appreciate these now-classic issues, and my sisters despised them. There were never any Spider-Man or Fantastic Four issues, or we might have been a bit more enthusiastic.

      But then one day I dug through the pile of comics at Dunham’s and found a comic book that didn’t look quite like anything I’d ever seen before. The title was X-Men. I’d never heard of it—which wasn’t surprising, since what I’d found was the first issue, and it was only a couple of months old at that point. The cover image of the five strange-looking heroes confronting the bizarrely-garbed Magneto caught my fancy; I handed Mr. Dunham my nickel and took my prize home, where I curled up in the big yellow chair in the living room and started reading.

      And I was captivated immediately.

      The first element that grabbed me was that these weren’t grown men battling criminals in the streets of some imaginary city; these were teenagers at a boarding school in Westchester County. I knew where that was; I knew about boarding schools. And these characters acted like teenagers, more or less, playing jokes on each other, mooning over silly crushes, and so on.

      We were introduced to them one by one—Iceman, Beast, Angel, Marvel Girl, Cyclops, and the headmaster, Professor X. And I thought they were all unbelievably cool.

      For one thing, none of them were called “Lad” or “Lass.”

      For another, they had personalities. I don’t remember much of the plot after all these years, but I still remember Iceman pulling on boots and hat and sticking a carrot on his nose to look like a snowman, I remember the Beast hanging upside-down from the ceiling while reading a book, I remember Marvel Girl trying hard to please the Professor by strengthening her telekinesis with practice, I remember Angel shyly turning away as he unstrapped the wings he’d hidden under his clothes.

      And their powers, while fantastic, seemed somehow more realistic than most of the superheroes I’d seen. No one here was invulnerable, or able to fly or run faster than light, or stretch himself like Silly Putty. These weren’t aliens or super-scientists or magicians.

      They were mutants. I knew about mutants. I suspected I was a mutant.

      Seriously, I did. My parents had worked on the Manhattan Project, building atomic bombs, during the Second World War—who could say I wasn’t a mutant? It wasn’t as if I fit in very well with the other kids at school or anything. I was brighter than most of them, and not very athletic, and sometimes felt as if I were missing social skills the others took for granted. It didn’t occur to me until years later that maybe my father being the only college professor in town might have something to do with it, since most of the other kids had parents working for the same handful of companies right there in town instead of commuting to Somerville. Their families all knew each other; my parents’ social contacts were elsewhere.

      I never considered the fact that neither of my parents was from New England originally, and I therefore spoke with a different accent than the other kids. (Any time I did start to talk like a New Englander, my father would “correct” me until I stopped. The only thing he never got used to about living in Massachusetts was what the natives did to innocent R sounds.)

      The possibility that most kids sometimes feel left out I would never have believed for a second.

      No, when I was eight atomic mutation seemed a much more likely reason I didn’t feel completely at ease with my peers than any of those others.

      And here was a comic book about a bunch of young mutants who had been collected together to defend all us mutants from the fear and hatred of normal people. You bet I latched onto that.

      Of course, I didn’t have wings or shoot energy beams from my eyes; the closest thing I had to a superpower was double-jointed thumbs. Still, we were all mutants together, I was sure of it.

      So I devoured X-Men #1, then passed it on to my sisters, as family rules required—but when everyone had read it I got it back, and made sure it did not go up to the rainy-day box in the attic