Previous Post In one of the early issues, Xavier said to the X-Men that he had lost his legs when he was a child. In X-Men # 9 : - Nothing suggested that Lucifer is an alien warlord. - The dialogs suggested that Xavier & Lucifer have known very well each other for a long time. - Xavier allowed Lucifer to go free (**). Why would he do it if Lucifer works for alien invaders ? - The costume of Lucifer is a cross between the costume of Mentallo (***) and an Hydra uniform. - Juggernaut had not appeared yet in the comic book (he will in X-Men # 12) - Lucifer seemed to have some kind of telepathic/hypnotic ability. In my opinion, the original idea was to make Lucifer a childhood acquaintance of Xavier and not an alien invader. Perhaps, Lucifer would have been the brother of Charles Xavier. (****) Of course, since Stan Lee dropped the title without explaining anything, I don't blame Roy Thomas for giving some different explanation. My comment about Xavier being the true survivor of the camps is only a personal idea (*****). I think that, given his attitude in the first issues of the comic book, Magneto should never have been described as a survivor of the camps. Evenmore, if he is the most iconic archvillain of the X-Men. This idea was not a philosophical comment about the ambiguous nature of good & evil. It is tasteless. Nowadays, it is impossible to correct this mistake because all media have described Magneto as such. (**) Like the Blob & Unus who were both mutants. (***) Mentallo appeared later. I suppose that the idea of an evil telepath was recycled. (****) Perhaps, this idea was actually used for another character : Maximus the Mad is the younger brother of Black Bolt and he has some telepathic powers. (*****) In a 1960s comic book, it would have been too much of a sensitive topic.

Xavier tells a story about Cain Marko driving his car off a cliff in an attempt to scare a college-aged Xavier that went wrong. Cyclops asks if this is the incident that cost Xavier his legs. Xavier replies that this happened "Years later, at the hands of the man you know as Lucifer." This a follow-up to the earlier comment in Uncanny X-Men #9.

Thus, Stan Lee established in a line of dialogue that a post-college, adult Xavier was crippled by Lucifer. In fact, it's even vaguely possible that Stan did this in contradiction to the penciller's intent, given the old Marvel Method. The problem is really that Uncanny #12 screws around with Xavier's age, making him a Korean War vet.

Roy was stuck with the idea that an adult Xavier lost the use of his legs in an encounter with Lucifer. However, his making Lucifer an alien does contradict Lee, in that Lucifer was clearly described as a human being in the final panel of Uncanny X-Men #9. But I don't see where you find Lucifer is a telepath; the closest he gets is shoving a gadget to his forehead which is triggered by a mental impulse, and that makes him no more telepathic than, say, Henry Pym with his cybernetic helmet or Reed Richards with his weird "encephalo-gun." No, Lucifer comes across mostly as a gadget-using baddie than a superhuman one. Compare Magneto, who simply had mental powers almost identical to Xavier's in the first issue, before this was quietly dropped.

The concentration camp idea strikes me as one that would probably never have occurred to Lee to use in a comic, I agree.

The real problem is that, even by Silver Age standards, Lee's version of Lucifer was painfully generic, a mad scientist type with no discernible motive and no particularly distinctive gimmick or personality. As with Diablo, Lee may have been working backwards from a distinctive name...maybe no coincidence that both uninspired (by Lee's standards -- he himself has said that Diablo is is least inspired notable creation) villains have "the Devil" as their reference point. Lee was better when he gave his villains motives beyond mere malignity.

More generally,. X-Men was pretty clearly the last book on the list when Stan and Jack plotted things out. Stuff is tried and dropped issue-by-issue there: the Beast is a dumb brute for two issues, then he gets his familiar personality; Cyclops's eyebeams tire him out initially, and then this limitation seems to vanish; Jean's power is referred to as both telepathy and teleportation; Magneto is a telepath for a single issue, and Xavier is sometimes a telekinetic. I wouldn't assume much if any long-term planning was going into the book until some time after Roy took over, really.