Someone is fostering--yet again--the theory that Professor Charles Xavier of X-MEN is also the person chronicled as "Odd John" Wainwright from ODD JOHN by Olaf Stapledon. I raised some objections, and got rather interesting remonstrances, including someone saying I obviously hadn't read ODD JOHN recently or wasn't familiar with same.

Um.

Despite my citing Odd John as one of my specific sources for MINDMISTRESS under "Sources".

Well, could be. Let's see.

Are there resemblences?

Well, both are intelligent somewhat telepathic mutants/homo superior who are set apart from humanity. Of course, the very same thing could be said of anyone in "Odd John"'s colony. (Oddly enough, it was THAT comment that caused the person to say that about not reading recently.)

Certainly in that sense they resemble each other.

Of course, the exact same thing could be said of Jean Grey, Psylocke, Metallo, Captain Comet, the protagonist of DYING INSIDE, Lone of MORE THAN HUMAN, the Tomorrow People....

Do they physically resemble each other?

Wellllllll....

"Odd John" was aptly named. He had a huge head, spindly fingers, thin arms, huge eyes, and a woolen covering of hair at least covering part of his head. He was often described as "freakish". Nor was he crippled.

Prof. Charles Xavier looked like a normal bald man---like Yul Brynner, or the actor who played Picard on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. No wooly skull cap. No enormous eyes. No long, spindly fingers. No huge head. Oh, and he was crippled, thanks to an incident when he was a young man.

Plastic surgery can do wonders, but there, you have to question what can be done. Expanding the size of the head seems beyond even present day plastic surgery...

It seems...(struggling for a word that will do it justice, and giving up...)

Unlikely.

Are they alike in personality?

Well, both search for other mutants to get together in one place. I'll give them that...

Professor Charles Xavier searched for other mutants to shelter them, to train them, to foster his dream of coexistence with humanity. That homo superior, and homo sapien, could live together in harmony.

Odd John very specifically did not care about humanity. Said he would have exterminated us if he could, but submitted to the death of his island and the rest of his colonists rather than betray the spirit of that colony, of the homo superior model...

He had no interest in saving humanity, said it couldn't be done. That humanity was like an insect, crawling out of a basin, and would continually fall again and again...(and when the narrator objected that an insect could sometimes use wings, Odd John said sadly, "No wings. No wings.")

Another point, he described his rage and loneliness by screaming,

"Cattle! Cattle! A world full of cattle! God, how they stink!"

Then he turned to his narrator, who he called in arrogance/amusement, "Fido",

"Sorry, Fido old man, that was a lapse..."

Notice a very British turn of phrase there in the "old man"...

In other words, in one you have a dedicated teacher and altruist, with a dream of homo sapiens and homo superior living together...a mutant Martin Luther King...

In the other, you see someone who gave up on humanity, who was dedicated to finding the homo superior spirit, who would have eliminated us if he could, who felt common humanity were cattle, or (in the case of his narrator) dogs, comparatively. Who felt other men were stupid, a conclusion he came as a young child, just learning numbers, when he found out men count on base ten instead of base twelve because it was easier to count ten on your hands...

An elitist and a searcher after his race's true spirit.

Um.

Forgive me if I say they don't seem alike in outlook and personality, either.

Are they alike in background?

Well, let's see. Charles Xavier, in both X-Men #1 and the first Juggernaut story, said his father was a nuclear physicist, named Brian Xavier, who died in an explosive nuclear accident. (Charles looked between eight and twelve at the time.) His mother, Sharon, remarried. His only sibling was a step-sibling, Cain Marko (and yes, that is an obvious pseudonym) who corroborated his story at every detail. Later stories by other authors than Lee further corroborated the idea that Brian Xavier, an early nuclear physicist at the dawn of the atomic age, was Xavier's father. By that reasoning, and our knowledge (again from the first Juggernaut story) that Xavier served in the Korean War, we deduce he could have been born no earlier than 1930 or so. He seems American, and there is no hint indicating that he is not. Though he met with British, Scottish, and Irish students, none of them commented on a British accent.

John Wainwright was the third of three children by a British doctor and his swedish wife. He had two older siblings, Tom and Anna, mentioned extensively. There is no hint that John was adopted in ODD JOHN, as proposed by some recently---instead, everything indicates (including descriptions of his extremely early infancy) that he is the natural legitimate child of same, including an empathic link between son and mother. (He was constantly contrasted to his siblings...but why would expect him to be like his siblings, if he was not their natural brother?) He was born in 1910, a British citizen. He died (according to Stapledon) in 1928. He had no educational training. He served in no army, and it's hard to imagine him ever passing a physical...

Um.

A little hard to reconcile.

Could Odd John have changed over time to become Professor X?

Well, Adlan, John's elder and superior, still had the distinctive "look" of his kind, despite being over a hundred years old. The same was true of the French female mutant he found, who was much older than she looked. So it would seem odd if Odd John, alone of them, "grew out" of that distinctive large-eyed, large domed, long-fingered look.

One objection was that Xavier could present a "mental image" to look anyway he wanted...and of course, that's true. So to that way of thinking, maybe he looked like Odd John, and presented the more normal-looking "Xavier" as an image...

But of course, you could say that about anyone---that Xavier could have made himself look like John Kennedy, Gorilla Grodd, or Stephen Hawking. What makes it more likely that Odd John is behind the facade, if it is one? Why would Odd John choose a phantom form with its own oddities, like the wheelchair and total baldness?

And what about the times when Xavier lost his concentration and/or his powers? Wouldn't he have turned back into Odd John?

We can only almalgamate the two by sacrificing almost everything we know about one of them, maybe both of them.

It's rather as if one of them had a theory that Batman was really Sherlock Holmes. There are similarities. Holmes was a master of disguise, which could explain the differences between him and Bruce Wayne. They are both the world's greatest detectives. Holmes might have been kept young by royal honey jelly, as proposed by Baring-Gould...

Yet to do so violates almost everything we know about Conan Doyle's character, and Bill Finger and Bob Kane's character.

Similarly, we can only almalgamate the two by ruining everything we know about either one. It's not worth it.

Sometimes it can be done, like H.W. Starr's identification of "The Duke of Greyminister" with the "Lord Greystoke", the (great)uncle of Tarzan. But sometimes it's waaaaay too much of a stretch. This, I submit is such a case.

Well, it's heartening to find out in the same theory that they partially adopted my theory that Professor X and Brain Wave might be related...although I have chronological reservations about the specifics...

I wonder if they realize by including Brain Wave, they are specifically admitting the Justice Society in their continuity, something they had hitherto denied?

(Since Brain Wave originated and only appeared, during the Golden Age, in the stories about the Justice Society...)

One can only hope.