Professor X

It has long been believed that Martin Luther King Jr. served as the inspiration for the X-patriarch. Men's Not only was the comic published amid the height of the American Civil Rights Movement, but it also clearly serves as an allegory. In his dreams, humans and mutants will live in harmony. Racist police brutality on television prompted the introduction of The Sentinels, uniformed robots that seek mutants. The first black superhero was introduced by creator Stan Lee three years after the X-Men, demonstrating his apparent involvement in the movement.

Unexpectedly, Professor X was really modeled after David Ben-Gurion, the first prime leader of Israel, at least starting in 1975. Following the cancellation of Lee's X-Men in 1970, Chris Claremont took over at this point. Claremont stated in 2016 that any association with MLK would have "med tremendously presumptuous" to him as an English-born white man. A better model seemed to be Ben-Gurion, who after World War Two established a warm home for the Jewish diaspora.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
First appearance: The X-Men #1 (September 1963)
Created by: Stan Lee (writer)Jack Kirby (artist/co-plotter)