Mutations show at puberty. Except for… Nightcrawler… Storm… heck, even Hank! That foot and hand size were there since he was born, and he’s part of the original lineup. So, issue one.
For the biological stuff, pretty much anything and everything, but there part of the issue is that every writer has his own version of Marvel Science and most of them wouldn’t be able to tell which part of the microscope is your eye supposed to be on.
Homo Sapiens Superior, later corrected to Homo Superior by someone who knows his species from his subspecies, was Chuck. Dude’s to PR what I am to Swan Lake.
A couple of comments:
Mutants weren’t universally feared and hated in the very early X-Men comics. In fact, the X-Men were mobbed like they were the Beatles in one early issue. Somewhere around issue 7, give or take, The Blob and Unus the Untouchable dressed up like X-Men and robbed a bank and that kinda soured things, and by issue 14, you got Bolivar Trask and the Sentinels and full-on anti-mutant paranoia. But that still wasn’t a major theme in the X-Men until Claremont took the prejudice thing and ran it into the ground.
In 50+ years of X-Men there has been exactly one (1) good reason given for anti-Mutant paranoia: Per the Grant Morrison X-Men, mutants will outnumber homo sapiens within 20 (40?) years. Plus “mutant culture” is a huge thing among Homo Sapien kids and that fuels prejudice. You don’t have to worry about Spider-Man or the FF replacing humanity.
As an aside, the problem with anti-mutant prejudice=anti gay/Jew/black prejudice is that on a purely objective level, mutants can be that dangerous. How many “destroy the world with a casual thought” mutants have there been? 50? 100? There have been zero black/Jew/gay humans who could do that.
There was a story about a 13-ish year old kid who woke up in a town that was completely deserted for like a 30 mile radius. All there was was little piles of dust and clothes on top of them. Wolverine ended up going in and telling the kid that his power turned on for the first time that night and he disintigrated everyone in that 30 mile radius. Just like that. Poof. All dead and dust. Wolvie ended up having to kill the kid because the power couldn’t be turned off. And in 40 years, 51%+ of people on the earth are going to be mutants? This is a legit reason to fear them. As opposed to blacks/Jews/gay people (all of whom have been said are what mutants are a metaphor for)
I dunno, issue #46 (July 1968) contains a flashback to the formation of the team. Cyclops is the first member and while trying to recruit Bobby Drake (soon to be known as Iceman), the two run afoul of a rather less-than-adoring lynch mob. It may be a tad retroactive, but I daresay persecution was a theme early on, even if Claremont eventually overdid it and Bryan Singer really went to town on the idea.
I think it was three or four issues into Claremonts run where the X-Men need to go into space for reasons, so they just roll up on a government rocket testing facility and ask to borrow a spare spaceship. And the General in charge is like, “Well, you’re the X-Men, so I guess it’s okay.” About a year later, the government’s building giant purple murderbots to kill them.
I think Morrison also made a good move by making the majority of mutants pretty gross looking. It’s pretty easy to buy bigots making this kid’s life hard, while giving a pass to this guy.
Well, very nearly zero, but I don’t like to brag.
Actually, I think that the only way that mutants really work as a metaphor for an oppressed minority is by putting them in a world with other, non-mutant super-powered beings. If the world is divided between humans, who have no particular powers, and mutants, who can do all sorts of crazy shit, then it’s pretty rational to be afraid of mutants. But if you live in a world where there’s tons of people who have incredibly dangerous super-powers, but you only hate the ones that have them because they’re mutants, that does a lot to justify the comparison. Sure, it’s not rational to hate mutants, but be okay with the Fantastic Four - but bigotry by nature is not rational.
I see, thank you 
And that reminds me, Mystique as a blue child kind of took me out of the X-Men First Class movie, I always thought she had been born normal and turned blue at puberty, in fact I thought that really was the rule for mutants.
On a sidenote I didn’t like the Xavier/Raven adopted siblings thing in that movie either, that relationship just didn’t ring true.
It would have made more sense to promote the positive parts of mutants, that they’re just humans with special abilities which they basically are.
Except that if they’re going to be given a separate Linnean classification at all, mutants should be considered a subspecies: Left to their own devices, they can and do freely interbreed with “normals”.
It used to be…but the writers had fun and introduced a bunch of mutant children, so now there’s a grade-school continent of X-Men!
(I can’t remember their names… One negates mutant powers nearby him; another projects mental images.)
(Hey, I’m still giggling at Goldballs.)
Leech and Artie. Not exactly new characters, though: they’ve been around since the early '80s.
Them’s the ones. And they can’t have been around since the 80’s: they’re still just kids! 
Anyway, it was one of the ways the Merry Marvel Mutant Moiety moved from the “manifesting at maturity” meme.
(I can’t help it. Stan Lee pointed a gun at my head.)
Since they’re in the same universe, why is it that with all the high tech genius of Reed Richards and Tony Stark, Professor X is still in a wheelchair?
For a while he was in a levitating wheelchair using extraterrestrial tech. That was kinda cool. But Tony Stark could probably whip up something every bit as good, and if he couldn’t, Forge could.
Reed Richards could also, but it would be about ten feet high, with lots of gew-gaws and folderol and “Kirby-tech” attached all over its surface.
Actually, no, he isn’t…I think he’s currently dead (been a while since I’ve read the X-Men, so he might have been resurrected again), but last time he was alive, the chair was gone. I’m not sure how he got the ability to walk back, that time. (Chuck gets his ability to walk back, then loses it again, several times in his history.)
Sounds inconveniently limited - wouldn’t the ability to walk forward be more useful?
Last times I remember was in Morrison’s run (Xorn restored his ability to walk, then took it away when he was revealed to be “Magneto”). Xavier then lost his powers as part of the House of M/Decimation storyline, but regained his ability to walk (supposedly due to how Scarlet Witch decided to re-make reality). He regained his powers in the Rise and Fall of the Shi’Ar Empire storyline, kept his ability to walk, and kept it until he got killed by Dark Phoenix Cyclops in AvX.
