To hear Stan Lee tell it, the X-Men came to be precisely because he was tired of making up origin stories. Instead of dreaming up new tales of radioactive spiders and gamma bomb explosions, Lee could just say that new characters were born as mutants, and that was enough.Whatever Lee intended when he and Jack Kirby created the X-Men in 1963, the franchise became anything but simple. Under the stewardship of writer Chris Claremont, who came aboard the series in 1975 and transformed the it into the premier superhero comic by the time his run ended in 1991, the X-Men became known for its winding soap-opera plots.As crazy as things were on the page, they were often just as absurd behind the scenes. Here are some of the most notable backstories behind some of Marvels Merry Mutants.WolverineWolverine is the best at what he does. But what he does is really confuse readers. Easily the most popular member of the X-Men, Wolverine became a fan favorite not just because of his adamantium claws and bad attitude, but because of his secret history.When writer Len Wein, artist Herb Trimpe, and editor Roy Thomas first introduced Wolverine in 1974s Incredible Hulk #180 181, he was just a Canadian operative with a bad attitude and metal claws on his gloves. He didnt get too much more development in the couple of appearances that followed, nor when Wein brought Wolverine onto the X-Men in 1975s Giant-Size X-Men #1, drawn by Dave Cockrum. Wein had imagined Wolverine as a smooth-faced teenager, who wore claws on his gloves to accentuate his heightened mutant senses. But since Wolverine goes unmasked in those issues, he never had a chance to write that description into the script.After Giant-Size X-Men, Chris Claremont took over from Wein as writer of the X-Men, but Cockrum came on and began further developing Wolverine. Cockrum first extended the wings on Wolverines mask, making the small points from Trimpes design more exaggerated. When Wolverine took off his mask for the first time in Uncanny X-Men #98 (1976), he gave Wolvie his distinctive hairdo, with plunging mutton-chops and swoops that matched his mask. In that same issue, a shirtless Wolverine pops his claws, revealing for the first time that the claws are in his skin and not attached to his costume.While the changes came as a surprise to Wein, they shouldnt have shocked anyone following Cockrums work closely. Before coming to Uncanny X-Men, Cockrum redesigned several members of DC Comics Legion of Super-Heroes, including Brin Londo aka Timber Wolf. Cockrum imagined Timber Wolf as a feral, animalistic warrior, and gave him longer sideburns and pointy hair the exact same look he would bring to Wolverine.Around the same time, in 1972, Cockrum started to pitch a Legion spinoff series to DC called the Outsiders, a team of futuristic heroes who battled the Devastators. With the exception of the warlord Tyr, none of the Devastators made it to print. But one is worth noting, a wolf-man type villain with sharp teeth, a bad attitude, with a distinct widows peak and long sideburns. The name of this character? Wolverine.Photo: Marvel Comics.Nightcrawler and StormWolverine was hardly the only connection Cockrum made between the X-Men and the Legion of Super-Heroes. There are, of course, the Shiar Imperial Guard that Cockrum made with Chris Claremont for Uncanny X-Men #107 (1977), which directly copy the Legion (Gladiator = Superboy, Oracle = Saturn Girl, Smasher = Ultra Boy). But the more important contributions involve characters Cockrum never got to realize at DC.Among the Outsiders was a character originally called the Intruder, a demon-like creature who could teleport anywhere he wanted. By the time he appeared in the Outsiders pitch, Cockrum had kept the look, but imagined him as more heroic, giving him the name Nightcrawler. Even with that change, DC editorial deemed Nightcrawler too weird, and rejected the character.The other characters in the Outsiders didnt have the same problem, including Trio, a Black woman who wore a small cape over her black bikini costume. But when Marvel wooed Cockrum over to reboot the X-Men before the Outsiders could enter into production, he brought his characters with him.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!Wein wanted to make the X-Men into an international team, so he and Cockrum looked at Trio as a possibility for the African member. However, Cockrum had since revised the character a bit, transforming her into a shape-shifting American called Black Cat, who had a similar costume. Deeming Black Cats features too feline and Trios too banal for what Wein imagined as a statuesque goddess, Cockrum borrowed elements from a feathered, green-skin character called Quetzal to give her an other-worldly appearance. Finally, he took the weather-controlling powers from an Outsider called Typhoon, put them all together, and ended up with Storm, one of the defining members of the X-Men.Credit: Marvel StudiosMister SinisterWhile Cockrum helped kick-off the revilization of the X-Men, it was truly Chris Claremont who transormed them into A-listers. Claremonts 16-year run was marked by long-form plotting and character development, which sometimes resulted in crazy changes to characters over the course of years. One of the most striking examples is the evil geneticist Mister Sinister.Sinister is hinted at long before he appears on the page, first getting oblique nods when an evil team of mutants called the Marauders murder underground dwellers called the Morlocks in the 1986 crossover Mutant Massacre.When he finally appears in full in 1987s Uncanny X-Men #221, written by Claremont and penciled by Marc Silvestri, he looks a little corny. Hes got sharp teeth, thigh-high boots, and a ridiculous cape. He bellows at his minions and, you know, calls himself Mister Sinister. Such broad characterizations arent completely out-of-bounds for superhero comics. But Claremont spent a lot of time and energy transforming Magneto from a cackling terrorist into a morally grey anti-hero. Why would he introduce a new villain that feels like an 11-year-olds idea of a bad guy?Well, because Mr. Sinister was supposed to be an 11-year-olds idea of a bad guy. Claremont initially tied Sinister to a little boy who befriended Scott Summers in the orphanage where they lived together. This boy would have been a very old mutant psychic who couldnt mature past age 11, which twisted his psyche. To intimidate others and gain respect as a supervillain, the boy came up with the scariest, meanest, coolest looking bad guy that an 11-year-old could imagine: Mister Sinister. Why does Sinister look the way he does? Claremont rhetorically asked in an interview from 2022. Because, while his creator may be a genius, he is also a kid and this is his perception of what a world-class badass looks like.Photo: Marvel Comics.GambitThanks to his romance with Rogue, his appearances in the animated series, and Channing Tatums recent comedic turn in Deadpool & Wolverine, Gambit has become one of the most popular members of the X-Men.But, if you stop and take a look at him, hes kind of like the heroic equivalent to Mister Sinister. His stubble and long hair, his trench coat and thief skills, his Cajun accent that charms all the girls. He kind of seems like an 11-year-olds vision of a super cool guy.Once again, thats because Gambit is an 11-year-olds vision of a super cool guy. The same 11-year-old, in fact. After being defeated by the X-Men a few times as Sinister, the boy tried a new tactic.Instead of direct confrontations, time now to employ subterfuge, Claremont told AIPT; by generating an adult clone of himself and using that agent to infiltrate the X-team to seduce and destroy them from within. And what better way to do that than with the most charming of rogues and thieves? Hence, Gambit the vision of Sinister as the young man hell likely be in perhaps a couple or three centuries.Readers can still see aspects of this mysterious, super-cool version of Gambit in the characters first appearance in 1990s Uncanny X-Men #266, written by Claremont and penciled by Jim Lee. But by the time 1991s X-Men #1 hit and made the team into global superstars, the weird villain origin was long gone.Photo: Marvel Comics.CableCables on the page origin story is already confusing enough. Its almost overkill to describe his genesis behind-the-scenes. The short answer is that Cable is Nathan Christopher Charles Summers, the son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor, who went to the future as a baby and came back as a grizzled warrior. The long answer is way too much to get into right now.Behind the scenes, the Summers baby and Cable were too different people. Baby Nathan first appeared in the classic Uncanny X-Men #201 (1986), written by Claremont and penciled Rick Leonardi. Claremont intended the baby to be the harbinger to move Cyclops out of the X-Men, letting him grow up and retire from the role to raise his family with Madelyne.Those plans got complicated when Marvel editorial decided to bring Jean Grey back from the dead and have Scott leave Madelyne to form a new team called X-Factor. Around the same time, the junior team in the series The New Mutants had lost their second mentor, with Professor X in space and Magneto back on his journey to evil after a few years on the side of the angels. X-Men group editor Bob Harris suggested that writer Louise Simonson and artist Rob Liefeld come up with a new leader, someone very different to the previous two.Harris and Simonson tell a slightly different story about the origin than Liefeld, but the basics boil down to the trio coming up with a military leader based in part on The Terminator, initially dubbed Commander-X. By the time he first appeared in 1990s The New Mutants #87, the character was called Cable, a mysterious warrior from the future.For the first couple years, Marvel stayed coy about Cables true origins, sometimes implying that hes an older version of New Mutants/X-Force member Cannonball and sometimes that hes a version of arch-enemy Stryfe from another part of the timeline.However, over in X-Factor, in which Cyclops and Jean Grey were raising Nathan (Madelyne Pryor is a clone of Jean Grey, who no! We dont have time for that!), Bob Harras, Jim Lee, and the series regular penciler Whilce Portacio decided that baby Nathan would go into the future after being infected by a virus from the villain Apocalypse, and would come back as Cable.Liefeld didnt care for this decision, so he started pushing against it in the pages of X-Force, which he penciled and plotted with writer Fabian Nicieza. In X-Force, it began to appear that Nathan grew up not to be Cable, but the villain Stryfe. Liefeld and Nicieza at the same time suggested that Cable was Stryfes clone gone bad, which means that two different X-books were telling slightly different origins for the character.Turns out, that playfulness worked with readers, so Marvel let Cables true identity linger a bit longer even adding more confusion with the 1992 1993 crossover X-Cutioners Song. Finally, Nicieza and penciler Dwayne Turner set the record straight in Cable # 6 8 (1993 1994), establishing that baby Nathan did indeed grow up to be Cable and that Stryfe is his clone. With the mystery of his background solved, Cable could go on to have more twisty strange adventures, too many to discuss here.