The original five didn't spend the whole 1960s standing in the same formation. The yellow-and-blue school uniforms give way to individual costumes. Jean goes to college. Scott q…

The original five didn't spend the whole 1960s standing in the same formation. The yellow-and-blue school uniforms give way to individual costumes. Jean goes to college. Scott questions whether he should be leading. The school loses the man everybody believes is Xavier, and the students have to work out what remains of the X-Men without him. This is the stretch between the familiar founding portrait and the much larger reinvention of 1975. Mimic forces his way into the group in X-Men #27, bringing enough borrowed powers to overwhelm almost anybody and very little patience for taking orders. Lorna Dane arrives in #49 without understanding why strangers are suddenly so interested in her. Alex Summers enters in #54 as Scott's younger brother, with a life that is about to become considerably less ordinary. Changeling's place in the story is stranger still. His most important service to the team happens behind another man's face, and the explanation comes after the funeral. Those arrivals happen at different times. Mimic is already gone before Lorna and Alex become part of the expanding cast. Changeling's concealed role belongs to a different interval again. The late original team develops through those interruptions, rather than assembling one neat enlarged class for the entire period. The original five remain the people holding the book together. Their friendships have more history now, which means arguments carry more baggage. They can tease one another over new costumes and still end up separated, frightened or uncertain about the future of the school. By the end of this stretch, being an X-Man has become something a newcomer can attempt, something a veteran can leave, and something the students sometimes have to preserve for themselves. The doors of Xavier's school have started opening in both directions.