428 MUTANTS
to help mankind!!... some hate the human race, and wish to destroy it! Some feel
that the mutants should be the real rulers of Earth! It is our job to protect mankind
from... from the evil mutants.” In those early issues, the X-Men are met with applause
and admiration among humans. In X-Men #2, Angel is accosted by a group of teenage
girls enamored with him, while Cyclops is thanked by a group of construction workers.
Resentment and angst do not have a presence in the fi rst few issues.
Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants create much of the groundwork for
alienation and antagonism between humans and mutants in issue #4, but the metaphor
of mutant as representative outsider was still negligible. Human-mutant relations took
a turn for the worse in X-Men #14 with the fi rst appearance of the Sentinels, mutant-
hunting robots created by Bolivar Trask. Th ey would return in stronger new forms and
larger numbers in the years to come. However, this issue revealed the strong antagonism
and growing application of mutant as outsider narrative that mutant-related titles and
stories have capitalized on ever since.
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, academics and fans have drawn parallels between
mutants and various minority groups, especially in terms of ethnicity or sexual orien-
tation. For example, some discussions have proposed Charles Xavier as the Martin
Luther King Jr. of mutants with his utopian vision of peaceful human and mutant co -
existence, with Magneto as the Malcolm X fi gure who believes mutants have to violently
achieve their ends. In the X-Men movies in the 2000s, the language used to explain
being a mutant corresponds to that of non-heterosexual identity, with scenes where
teen mutants “came out” to their parents or parents tried forcibly to remove the mutant
(homosexual) gene from their children.
Th e Sentinels became the fi rst in a line of mutant hunters who capture or execute
mutants for the protection of mankind, or at the behest of a villain. Over the years,
they have gone through many transformations as diff erent X-Men enemies (Bolivar
Trask, Stephen Lang, Sebastian Shaw, Cassandra Nova, etc.)and have modifi ed and
re-launched against the X-Men or the mutant population in general. Th e repeated and
haunting fear is the capture, enslavement, and eradication of mutants in a form akin to
the Jews and other minorities in the Holocaust. In several story arcs, this fear is solidi-
fi ed when glimpses of the future reveal a world ruled by Sentinels, with mutants mostly
dead or enslaved. Th is was best captured (and habitually returned to) in the storyline
“Days of Future Past” in Uncanny X-Men #141–42 (1981). Th is genocide analogy was
pushed further in X-Men #181 (1984) when the long-time adversary of mutant-kind,
Senator Robert Kelly, began work on launching the Mutant Registration Act, a law
requiring forced registration for all mutants and thereby marking them much like any
exploited group in a society where genocide occurs. Although used sporadically in the
comics throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it never developed much further on its own,
but it did act as a prototype for the Superhuman Registration Act; a law that spawns
the events in the major crossover series Civil War (2006).
Many other mutant-killers and hate groups have been created over the years to
reinforce the theme of mutant as ultimate outsider and victim. In Uncanny X-Men
