A Not Very Brief Intro Prior to X-Men #1

Before getting to my very first review, I feel it necessary to create a brief introduction for those unfamiliar with the phenomenon known as the X-Men and to provide context for the significance of this landmark issue, other than the number one on the cover. Yes, I am aware that this is a new blog, nobody is reading it, and the whole exercise is made meaningless by the fact that this introductory post will be buried after a couple of weeks, but so be it. For those of you already familiar with the history of the X-Men, or who don’t really give a toss, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs.

Anyhoo, the year was 1963 when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created a group of five white teenagers with superpowers and really ugly costumes, led by their bald, wheelchair bound teacher and leader, Professor X. While this fact is considered completely unremarkable by anybody who reads comic books regularly, I still find myself constantly surprised by people familiar with the X-Men who do not believe that they are actually that old. Anyways, unlike Lee’s other creations such as Spider-man and The Fantastic Four, the X-Men were not a breakout hit and struggled to find readers. This was prior to the adoption of the “persecuted minorities holding back the prejudice that could start a genetic war” theme that would come to define the series, as well as the introduction of any blade wielding Canadians. Plus the team was a group of students based at a school, and everyone knows children hate school. And then there were the costumes. Man, those things were hard to look at; they even made Jean Grey look hideous. As other writers took over the book, slowly the title began to look like what it is today with personalized costumes that were slightly less horrible, stronger social relevance in the storylines, and Cyclops and Jean Grey finally acknowledging their mutual attraction. Then it was cancelled in 1970 with issue #66.

Okay, cancelled is maybe too strong a word, even if it is completely accurate… for the most part. After a break for a couple of months, the X-Men returned with a bimonthly schedule. Except these weren’t new stories, they were old stories repackaged with new covers and back up material. Not the best marketing strategy ever, but whatever works. And so the X-Men remained in continuity limbo until Dave Cockrum and Len Wein brought us Giant-Sized X-Men #1. In it, a bunch of characters who aren’t the X-Men save a bunch of people who are the X-Men, and in doing so become X-Men. And who could forget the X-Men’s greatest nemesis, Krakoa: The Living Island! Well, I’ll tell you who—pretty much everyone who ever worked on the X-Men afterwards. But this was a turning point with the introduction of such iconic characters as Nightcrawler, Colossus, Storm, and of course the most famous X-Man of all: the character that has come to embody the entire series, all of its spinoffs, and the entire Marvel comics line up in general. Yes, of course I’m talking about Sunfire, the hotheaded Japanese mutant with flame powers that just can’t get along with anyone. Wait, he had already appeared in the original series. I’m just messing with you; it was actually Hugh Jackman.

I bring all this up not to bore you or demonstrate how huge of a nerd I am (even though I’ve probably just done both), but to point out that the X-Men were dead in the water, condemned to C-list super hero obscurity until this point in 1975. It was at this point that Chris Claremont took over with Uncanny X-Men #94 and helped build them into the phenomenon that they are today. Without Claremont’s stories, the X-Men would be just another one of the various super hero titles that Marvel endlessly relaunches every couple of years until it inevitably gets cancelled time after time. For 188 issues, Claremont created or redefined just about every character, concept, and idea that the X-Men are even remotely associated with today. He made them so successful that the X-Men were ready for a new challenge in 1991: a second monthly title. With more than one title shipping every month, the X-Men were now in the same league as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Archie. Unfortunately, the opening arc of this new title, cleverly titled X-Men, would be Claremont’s last… for a really long while! Editors Note: Actually it’s probably really fortunate, since when Claremont returned with issue #100, it was absolutely atrocious, but we’ll get to that in about 200 or so posts.

So yes X-Men volume two, number one stands as the end of Chris Claremont’s epic, and nearly unheard of, 17 years straight on the X-Men. That’s significant fact number one. Number two is that this issue sold more copies than any other comic book ever has, before or since. Yes, this issue is the Thriller of comics, the Michael Jordan of funny books, and the Avatar of polly-bagged treasures. Since a record eight million copies were sold, obviously it must be regarded as the greatest comic ever written, drawn, or published. If only there was a better way to denote sarcasm in type, besides the emoticon with its tongue sticking out (:b). At any rate, the reasons for the issues success are three fold:

1. My very least favorite comic book gimmick: the variant cover. X-Men #1 had five of the suckers, which would create a single, complete picture if you put them next to each other. Well four of them would—the fifth had a fold out cover that revealed the whole picture in all of its glory. Personally, I dislike variant covers because they make collecting that much more confusing, and I feel that making a cosmetic change to an already decent product is exploitative, but to each their own. If you are the type of person who likes to spend twenty or thirty bucks buying the same issue repeatedly, who am I to judge?

2. A complete misunderstanding by the public of the back issue market. Around 1990-1991, news organizations around the country were busy reporting stories about Golden and Silver Age back issues that had sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars. At around the same time, a certain well-established and successful franchise started a new series with a #1 on the cover, just like all of those old comics on TV that started out as a quarter and then became equal in value to an Olsen twin. However, in the grand traditions of sensationalism and modern journalism, these stories failed to mention that these prices were due to the rarity of Gold and Silver Age comics in good condition, as well as the fact that most of these issues were sought out because of the creators that worked on them and the demand for the stories more so than the arbitrary issue number on the cover.

Regardless, fans ate it up, and Marvel and DC continued to exploit fans for years by labeling number one issues as collectors items, having shiny cardboard stock covers, including holograms… lots of holograms, and using any other trick in the book until the Speculator Crash of 1996, where people realized Cage #1 was crap no matter how shiny the cover and stopped buying comics in such large quantities—and Marvel had to file for bankruptcy. Whoops! To be fair, the bankruptcy wasn’t completely because of the crash; it also had to do with the investment of millions of dollars in movies that either never got made or were so terrible that they couldn’t be released (i.e. the 1994 Fantastic Four movie). Double Whoops! With 8,000,000 copies sold, X-Men was an undeniable success for Marvel, but today has little to no value as a collectible; you could probably go online right now and buy enough copies to wallpaper your entire room and it would be cheaper than actual wallpaper.

3. Many people were actually interested in the story. Nineteen ninety-one marked a bold new direction for the X-Men—a return to the status quo of the seventies and early eighties! Around this period in X-history, the X-Men had been working out of a base in Australia, Magneto had been an ally and leader of the New Mutants (the next generation of young mutants being trained by the X-Men) for a while, Professor X was walking, and the original X-Men were off hanging out in their own title as a different team called X-Factor. The mission statement for this new X-Men series was simple; undo everything Claremont and other creators had done in the last couple of years.

So the X-Men move back to the Xavier Institute, X-Factor rejoins the X-Men, Professor X gets recrippled, and Magneto becomes a villain again, returning all to the natural, safe order of things. Side note: I wonder why Claremont left after the first three issues? Oh, also there are new costumes designed by Jim Lee that become the default costumes for the majority of the decade. Anyway, things seemed to work out for Marvel pretty well. So well in fact that if you fast forward all the way to 2010, Marvel is getting ready to do the exact same thing with their Avengers franchise, booting out the New Avengers and replacing them with the old Avengers so they can be the new Avengers. Come to think of it, they did the same thing with the Avengers in 1998 with Heroes Return, after all of that Heroes Reborn garbage. I guess that’s why they call Marvel The House of Ideas.

In any case, that’s why X-Men #1 matters. It’s also pretty important for story purposes, at least for the following couple of years. So what have we learned from all of this? I guess I learned that comic publishers will stop at nothing to make a profit, even if it eventually leads to the detriment of the entire comics industry years down the line. If you continue to read my posts in the weeks to come, you’ll learn that long term planning was not the strong suit of the X-office, but luckily the genuine coolness of the characters has managed to keep the X-books afloat for years. Also, if you’re an X-Men fan, make sure you give thanks for Chris Claremont… and Jim Lee… and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of course… and me for telling you all of this… just kidding. Ellipses are fun. Anyways, please come back!