When Stan Lee Admitted Creating X-Men Wasn’t Easy After Fantastic Four’s Success: “I Took The Cowardly Way Out”

The X-Men franchise is undoubtedly one of the most successful superhero franchises ever released. Created by the late legendary comic book writer, Stan Lee, X-Men became an instant hit upon its first release. However, creating X-Men was not an easy task, thanks to the previous successful reception of the Fantastic Four. The creator of the show acknowledged that coming up with a new superhero group story was a tedious task that could potentially keep up with the bars set up by the Fantastic Four.

During one of his past interviews with Rolling Stone, Stan Lee got candid about the incubation period of X-Men. He confessed that the success of Fantastic Four pushed him and his publisher to develop a new superhero group story. But the real struggle for Stan Lee began when he tried to ideate new superpowers for the story because he believed he had already covered quite a lot in the Fantastic Four.

He revealed, “My problem was, what powers would I give them? Because with the Fantastic Four, we already had a guy who could fly, who could burst into flame, we had a woman who was invisible with a force field, we had a guy who could stretch, and we had a big strongest man in the world. So it wasn’t easy.”