MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY
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"A WILD-RIDE ACCOUNT" —The Hollywood Reporter
"EPIC" —The New York Times
"INDISPENSABLE" —Los Angeles Times
"DEFINITIVE" —The Wall Street Journal
"SCINTILLATING" —Publishers Weekly
“FASCINATING” —GQ
"AUTHORITATIVE" —Kirkus Reviews
"GRIPPING" —Rolling Stone
"PRICELESS" —Booklist
"A MUST FOR ANY SUPERHERO OR POP-CULTURE FAN" —NY Post
"ESSENTIAL" —The Daily Beast
"A SUPERPOWERED MUST-READ" —USA Today
"REVELATORY" —The Miami Herald
"AS FULL OF COLORFUL CHARACTERS, TRAGIC REVERSALS AND UNLIKELY PLOT TWISTS AS ANY BOOK IN THE MARVEL CANON" —Newsday
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Color guide for X-Men Annual #5. Art by Brent Anderson and Bob McLeod. Colors by Glynis Wein. Words by Chris Claremont. Letters by Tom Orzechowski.
Women in Comics: convention program from Delaware Valley Comicart Consortium, 1978. Art by Marie Severin.
By 1977 there was a lot of mail for The X-Men, for the first time in years. Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum had carved out a corner of the Marvel Universe that was perfect for the blockbuster age, filled with plane, boat and rocketship crashes, and gleaming hi-tech space-odysseys that fell into place just as the Star Wars fever started. But The X-Men had something else that played against the spectacle: intimacy. In their two years of collaboration, Claremont and Cockrum had already carefully defined their characters with familiar catchphrases, nicknames, and sound effects that would eventually turn into something like secret passwords for fans: “Mein Gott,” “fastball special,” “bub,” “muties,” “Elf,” Bamf, Snikt! Although the members of the X-Men were hardheaded individualists with diverse backgrounds, many of them flummoxed by American culture, they slowly came together as a surrogate family for one another. If Steve Gerber’s Defenders were, as he’d said, an encounter group, Claremont and Cockrum’s X-Men were the members of a halfway house, where everyone tried to figure out how to live in close quarters without letting their emotional baggage get in the way.
Text from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
1982 X-men jam. Art by George Perez, Paul Smith, Dave Cockrum, Bob Wiacek, Bill Sienkiewicz, and John Byrne.
Editor Roy Thomas, Writer Mike Friedrich, and artist Dave Cockrum went out to lunch at the Autopub, a car-themed restaurant in the bowels of the General Motors building, to brainstorm. Sitting at a table made from car chassis, surrounded by monuments to assembly line production, the trio discussed the idea of replacing the old X-Men members with a multi-ethnic team of mutant heroes. Cockrum, who filled his notebooks with sketches of original costume designs, ideas for hire at the ready, was a one-man character machine. He went home and perused his files, selecting characters he’d kicked around over the years, while in college, while in the army, and while working on DC’s Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes: Typhoon. Black Cat. Mr. Steel. Thunderbird. Nightcrawler. The project went into limbo for months, however, and by the time the title was on the schedule in late 1974, Len Wein had replaced Friedrich; Typhoon and Black Cat were combined into “Storm”; Mr. Steel was “Colossus”; and Nightcrawler had evolved from an actual demon into a mutant German acrobat with a pointed tail.
(Illustration by Dave Cockrum, 1975; Text excerpted from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, 2012)
And here’s what became of the Autopub:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/nyregion/23thennow.html
That’s right: The X-Men were conceived of in the Apple Store.
Nearly everything about 1975’s GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 is a familiar echo of 1961’s FANTASTIC FOUR #1: the Magnificent Seven–like gathering of the team, the dysfunctional bickering, the mysterious island to which they are summoned, even the dramatic escape by plane as the island explodes behind them.
With the final word balloon of the issue—“what are we going to do with thirteen X-Men?” someone in the plane asks—the transition begins. The old X-Men will be put out to pasture; the new X-Men will have a shot at capturing a younger audience.
Marie Severin illustration for Marvel Comics ad in Overstreet Price Guide, 1983.
