"Criminals, by nature, are a cowardly and superstitious lot. To instill fear into their hearts, I became a bat. A monster in the night. And in doing so, have I become the very thing that all monsters become - alone?"

"Deep down, Clark's essentially a good person... and deep down, I'm not."

"They say that when you kill a man you not only take away what he was, but all he will ever be."

"I have been to too many funerals."

"by Jeph Loeb with art by Jim Lee"

"(to Superman) Everyone looks up to you. They listen to you. If you tell them to fight, they'll fight. But they need to be inspired. And let's face it "Superman"... the last time you really inspired anyone -- was when you were dead."

"(to the Joker) And when you're sitting here alone in the middle of the night, unsleeping in the dark, remember -- every breath you take you owe to me."

"And as the sun, that had been too afraid to show its face in this city, started to turn the black into grey, I smiled. Not out of happiness. But because I knew... that one day, I wouldn't have to do this anymore. One day, I could stop fighting. Because one day... I would win. One day, there will be no pain, no loss, no crime. Because of me, because I fight. For you. One day, I will win."

"Did I finally reach the limits of reason? And find the Devil waiting? And was that fear in his eye?"

"Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Colossus. Children of the atom, students of Charles Xavier. MUTANTS-feared and hated by the world they have sworn to protect. These are the STRANGEST heroes of all! Stan Lee presents: The Uncanny X-Men!"

"The problem is not staying on for 16 or 17 years -- I mean, theoretically anybody could do that. But the thing that made X-Men unique in its day was that the first iteration of the series that Stan and Jack created in 1962 had run its course. It wasn't a success. So when Dave Cockrum and Len Wein worked together to build the new X-Men, we were essentially starting with a clean slate. Aside from Charles Xavier being the mentor and Scott Summers showing up to run the shop, everything was brand new. And the way the industry is structured now, the way that Marvel or DC or Image are structured now, that's unlikely to happen again. You don't have that mainstream series that you can recreate in public before everyone's eyes and come up with something completely new and different. So I don't think that opportunity will come again. I just happened to have the ridiculous good fortune of being in the precisely great place at the precisely great time, and I got to run with it."

"Scott Summers: Hanks articulate as anything, but what people see is mostly ... well, a beast. Emma's a former villain, Logan's a [[thug. And me .. I can lead a team. But I haven't looked anybody in the eye since I was fifteen."

"Remember, the X-Men universe was created in the early '60s in the height of the American Civil Rights movement. So, these ideas of bigotry, tolerance, fear, war ... I think are perpetual ideas. We've had them for thousands of years, ever since man recognized his fellow man and that two people had two different color hair."

"Magneto’s an old terrorist bastard. I got into trouble—the X-Men fans hated me because I made him into a stupid old drug-addicted idiot. He had started out as this sneering, grim terrorist character, so I thought, Well, that’s who he really is. [Writer] Chris Claremont had done a lot of good work over the years to redeem the character: He made him a survivor of the death camps and this noble antihero. And I went in and shat on all of it. It was right after 9/11, and I said there’s nothing f*****g noble about this at all."

"I couldn't have everybody bitten by a radioactive spider or exposed to a gamma ray explosion. And I took the cowardly way out. I said to myself, 'Why don't I just say they're mutants. They were born that way."

"For me, the whole idea was that the number was small enough that they could be expunged if the world got determined about it. You know, that it was something that the Avengers, if they wanted, could deal with. That was what gave Magneto so much of his passion and focus. In terms of defending his people, they really were dancing along the edge of extinction and they really did need someone like him. The difference, and the reason that the school was so intent on remaining clandestine, was that if they were exposed, they could be destroyed."

"This was a period when we were experimenting with the atom bomb. People were wondering what the effects would be. Everybody worried ‘Would we all become mutants? We played around with this ‘mutation thing’ and I came up with the X-Men, who were associated with radiation and its effects on humanity."

"The X-Men, I did the natural thing there. What would you do with mutants who were just plain boys and girls and certainly not dangerous? You school them. You develop their skills. So I gave them a teacher, Professor X. Of course, it was the natural thing to do, instead of disorienting or alienating people who were different from us, I made the X-Men part of the human race, which they were. Possibly, radiation, if it is beneficial, may create mutants that’ll save us instead of doing us harm. I felt that if we train the mutants our way, they’ll help us - and not only help us, but achieve a measure of growth in their own sense. And so, we could all live together."

"I like the very large themes that are in this and the comic books which were originally kind of an allegory for the Malcolm X/Martin Luther King debate."