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Yeah, someday I’ll sign up for the forums. Like I don’t waste enough time on the blog already!

Anyway, is Juggernaut really a mutant? What’s his power, if so? The power to find gems that turn him into an unstoppable fighting maching?

What’s the answer?!?!?!?!?

Jugernaut is not a mutant, but you don’t have to be a mutant to be an X-Man!

Stupid loopholes!

There have only been, I think, three to five nonmutant X-Men depending on how you count. Mimic and Juggernaut are the two obvious ones, and some people count the Skrull Wolverine, Amanda Sefton 9since she was in the Muir Island X-Men), and Fantomex (since Cyclops might be construed as inducting him in “Planet X”).

There are also lots of fun arguments to have about Longshot, who is an artifically-created genegineered character who has since been said to be a mutant, which makes no sense to me….

Other non-mutants who were (arguably) X-Men: Moira, Siryn, Maddie Pryor, and Joseph. And while Psylocke may be a mutant, she not really homo-superior since she’s only half human. I don’t know what the deal with Revanche is.

Now I have been reading the X-Men for some thiry years now. I collected the entire run and then sold it for an engagement ring (but that’s another story). Yet I am impressed by the collective knowledge here.
Mimic is not a mutant? Psylocke? I never knew that. What then are they?
As for non-mutants, what about the Native American couple who lived at the mansion for a while. What were their names? Who turned them into Native Americans (cause they didn’t start out that way)

That was Tom Corsi and Sharon Friedlander,
They were turned in native americans by the Demon Bear, way back in the New Mutants

Man, I love the Demon Bear. I like Tom and Sharon just kind of disappeared into them and came out as natives. Even back then, I thought - What the crap?!?!?

I would still count Psylocke as a mutant. Her powers don’t come from Otherworld, do they? If they do, why are they different from Brian’s or Roma’s? I don’t know.

Someone will probably know this better than I do, George, but Betsy and Brian’s father (right?) was from the same realm that Merlin and Roma inhabit. So they were only half-human. But someone can probably fill in the back story better than I can, because I can’t be bothered to dig through my long boxes.

And I’m not sure if all these ancillary characters count. Stevie Hunter, anyone? All of them - Stevie, Tom, Sharon, Moira - were support staff more than anything else. Can we get a ruling - Official X-Men or not?

Wait. Siryn isn’t a mutant? I thought she was the mutant daughter of mutant Banshee, who passed on his screamy powers to her.

And I always counted Longshot and Shatterstar (if you’re branching out to other X-teams) as non-mutants. They’re genetically-engineered Mojo aliens or something.

The Mimic gained his powers in the ever-popular 1960s lab accident. The one in Exiles is a mutant, but has a different origin as far as I know.

And while Longshot is an artifically-created humanoid, that hasn’t stopped any number of Marvel comics and creators from stating that he is in fact a mutant ont he grounds that he apparently has the x-gene.

I didn’t think Siryn could count as a mutant because her abilities aren’t different from her father’s.

She has the X-gene, she’s just not technically a mutant. I guess that’s true for Cable, Rachel, and Polaris too.

Yeah, during the 80s, they came up with this absurd definition of mutant as being someone who has DIFFERENT powers than his or her parent. After all, you can’t “mutate” if you’re just following the genes of your parent.

So, by that definition, Siryn would not be a mutant. But it’s silly - because what ELSE would she be? Although I’ve seen an enterprising No-Prizer explain that Siryn’s powers are different enough from Banshee that she WOULD count as a mutant under the silly definition (something like “She can do X, which Banshee can’t do).

Mimic IS a mutant, according to a retcon in some Marvel Comics Presents issues. The explosion just activated his powers (see also : Polaris).

That’s not an absurd definition, it’s true: a mutant organism displays genetic traits not carried by either parent. An apple seed that grows into a rose bush would be a mutant. A rose that grows from that bush would not.

So by that, we can indeed take Rachel and Cable off the list. But Polaris? Magneto’s not her real dad, so why her?

Last time I checked, Polaris was indeed the daughter of Magneto.

That’s nonsense : your are a MU “mutant” if you have the X-Factor gene. There are some “latent mutants” who need something special to get powers (like the Mimic, or Polaris, whose powers were activated by Mesmero around X-MEN #50).
If you’re the son or daughter of mutants, you will probably be a mutant too, because the X-Factor gene will likely pass down.
There are numerous kinds of heavily mutated humans in the MU (hello, Spider-Man !), but they’re not mutants, because they don’t have the X-Factor. There are even mutated mutants (the Genoshan mutates, for exemple).

I think the Neo were supposed to be something else entirely (with a super-duper-X-Factor ?), but I can’t be bothered re-reading those horrible stories.

This is the reason I always use biological mutants (the actual definition) and X-gene mutants on the X-board. So Siryn and Polaris are X-gene mutants, but not biological mutants (though Polaris would still probably score for her true mutation: green hair). Rachel and Cable have time-travel powers that Jean hasn’t, so they slip by on that. Thanos is a biological mutant because of his purple, leathery skin, but not an X-gene mutant. Warlock was said to be a mutant because of his non-agressive behaviour unlike the rest of his race, so he’s also a biological mutant, but not an X-gene carrier. The problem is that Marvel uses both definitions along each other.

I thought that Stan Lee’s motivation for making the X-Men mutants was because it would make things like powers and origins simpler to explain…

Yow, I’m dizzy (no offense Dizzy) with these definitions. I agree with the technical definition submitted, the offspring’s genes must be different from the parents, to be considered a mutant. HOWEVER, as far as the Marvel-verse sees these individuals, as non-human due to the difference in their chromazones, they are indeed mutants.
The deciding factor- what would a sentinel do with them?

Brian, that definition is not a retcon at all. In real-life a mutant is someone who has a genetic trait that does not appear in either parents DNA, hence the mutation. If you simply inherit your parent’s traits, your DNA hasn’t mutated at all. You simply inherited a trait. Even Stan Lee himself in interviews defined mutant as someone with a trait neither parent possessed. This is one of the reason Siryn was retconned to have extra powers that Banshee didn’t, so that she can now be a “true” mutant rather than just someone who inherited powers.

Even if one disagrees with the definition, it wasn’t an 80s retcon. It was a definition that Stan and Jack worked with from the beginning. If anything the “inherited” mutants are the retcon.

To all the people who say that Siryn isn’t different from her father, that’s been changed by various writers.

First “difference” introduced is that she could talk while she screamed. The latest power difference introduced is her vocal trance, as shown by Peter David.

If you want to extend this to the New Mutants (not saying you should, I’m just sayin’, and someone referenced Shatterstar already…) Warlock was not a mutant, either. I vaguely remember some strange back-bending to suggest that he was a mutant member of his race in spirit, because he had compassion and caring, which other members of the Technarch supposedly did not. But that’s stretching the definition even farther than the Longshot explanation.

I bet one of the boring X-Men, like Wolverine or Gambit, gets #1.

But this countdown is a cool idea.

By the way, T., PAD has apparently just retconned away her power to talk and scream at the same time as of X-Factor #8. Sensible, really, since as some have pointed out, it’d mean she has two independently functioning throats, larynges, and windpipes.

Thanks for the info Omar.

But that’s why she’s popular with all the boys!

I know Polaris has, at various times, THOUGHT Magneto was her father, and he’s treated her as a daughter (she seemed to be the “Cousin Oliver” in House of M). But has it now been established as fact? If so, when?

Yeah, Polaris, according to the comics, is currently “officially” Magneto’s daughter.

Polaris was revieled as actually being Magneto’s daughter right before she came back from genosha. She had blood tests done that confermed this. Is she older or younger than Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch? Also that would mean that Zeladane from the savage land would have to be related also, becouse Moria told Lorna that she would have to have been related to steel her powers in an issue around issue 254 or so.

If you want to extend this to the New Mutants (not saying you should, I’m just sayin’, and someone referenced Shatterstar already…) Warlock was not a mutant, either. I vaguely remember some strange back-bending to suggest that he was a mutant member of his race in spirit, because he had compassion and caring, which other members of the Technarch supposedly did not. But that’s stretching the definition even farther than the Longshot explanation.

In Warlock’s case, I could buy it actually: a mutated gene making his brain a bit different and his thought processes a bit different. I’m not a big fan of “genetics determine behaviour”-theories, but a genetic component to behaviour is certainly possible.

But Marvel’s “mutants” have never been mutants in the biological sense. They’re basically a subspecies of humanity that naturally develop superpowers. So saying that Siryn, Cable, and Rachel Summers aren’t mutants is just silly; “mutant” just happens to be the (biologically inaccurate) term the Marvel Universe media uses to describe a member of a human subspecies that has some “X-gene” mumbo jumbo.

Looking at the list, I’ve gotta say: Rachel Summers ranked higher than Professor X? Revanche ranked higher than Forge? The gods must be crazy.

The relationship between Zaladane and Lorna Dane is really confusing, actually. Leaving aside that it makes no internal sense — how did Lorna’s female relative wind up in the Savage Land as some kind of sun-god priestess? — there’s the nasty little fact that Lorna was adopted by her aunt, and got her last name that way. Meaning that “Dane” isn’t her birth name. As the X-Danglers list last seen being kept by Paul O’Brien notes, they’re likely cousins. And in the MU, cousins — like Banshee and Black Tom, weho are both mutants and are immune to each others’ powers — are at times fairly genetically close.

The real trouble is in the ill-thought-out basis of the “relation.” Basically, Claremont noticed that Gerry Conway’s creation “Zaladane” had the word “Dane” in it, and decided to treat the two characters as related for the purposes of a story whose own purpose I was never too clear on. And the issues in question were Uncanny #273-5.

Regardless of the connection to the immediate parents by means of a transfer of powers, the children of mutants who carry the mutation are still, themselves, mutants, simply because they carry the mutated form of a human gene. A mutant is simply one who is subject to a mutation, which is speaking not in the sense of their family tree, but in the sense of the human genome, the species as a whole. If you have, say, an abnormally large nose, which you inherited from your father, it is not a valid argument to say that you, in fact, have a normally-sized nose, and it is your father who actually has a gargantuan proboscis.

Now, in the sense that Marvel uses it, the x-factor may very well be a marker along the genome which, if subject to mutation, ensures the individual has a proclivity for the development of abnormal qualities, whether superpowers or physical alterations. As there are a wide variety of mutants, it is entirely likely that the x-gene does not itself determine these changes - a theory that leaves the possibility open for the “secondary mutations” that have been toyed with over the past few years.

And, just to clear up a point, mutations are pretty much what brings about evolution. Without mutations, there would be no variations within a species, and natural selection would not occur.