Andy Sheets's page

The first one reads like Stan Lee must have read it before launching the X-Men (it came out about 20 years earlier). It deals with a team of mutants that includes a guy with wings, a psychic, a cyclops, and a guy who shoots death rays out of his eyes. Hmmmm. (Grade: B+)

IIRC, Kuttner also wrote the Baldies stories that also come off like a proto-X-Men (IMO, the one true X-Men-before-there-was-X-Men book is Wilmar Shiras's Children of the Atom).

I read a Kuttner novel a few months ago called The Creature From Beyond Infinity (not his best but lots of fun), which featured a concept that struck me as a possible source for Marvel's Galactus. I've read of Jack Kirby that when he was stuck for ideas he'd reach behind his drawing board and snatch sci-fi books and pulps off his shelf and flip through them for inspiration. I can't help thinking that there were probably at least a few Kuttner stories through which he was sifting for ideas ;)