As you may recall from our post about Giant-Size X-Men #1 back in April, that landmark comic book concluded with one of the mutant superhero team’s original members, the Angel, posing the query: “What are we going to do with thirteen X-Men?” That question was reflective of the fact that while Marvel Comics had just introduced seven new members to the team (the majority of whom were also brand-new characters), there were still six veteran heroes of the old guard to be dealt with in one way or another. It seemed unlikely that even a giant-sized version of the freshly-revived “X-Men” feature could easily accommodate such a large number of costumed crusaders in every issue — and once Marvel decided to use the existing regular-sized X-Men title (which since 1969 had only presented reprints of old X-stories) as the relaunched series’ primary vehicle instead, that question became even more acute.
Meanwhile, a second question — one just as important to the feature’s near-future prospects, if not more so — had arisen behind the scenes. Who was going to write X-Men? Len Wein, who’d spearheaded the series’ revival and was the co-creator of its new characters, was also serving as the editor of Marvel’s entire color comic-book line at this time; as he related decades later for an interview published in Alter Ego #24 (May, 2003), something on his very busy schedule was going to have to give:
I was editor-in-chief and overseeing 54 books a month. It was an overwhelming, daunting task and I realized very quickly, that I couldn’t write more than one book a month. The other book I was writing was The Hulk, who is my all-time favorite Marvel character. When push came to shove, I stayed with the book I loved.
Wein managed to hang around long enough to contribute the plot for the “All-New, All-Different” X-Men’s second outing; originally planned for the second issue of the Giant-Size X-Men title, the plot was converted from a single extra-length story to a two-parter for the regular-sized title. Stepping in as scripter was Wein’s assistant editor, Chris Claremont, whose writing credits to date included a number of text articles for Marvel’s black-and-white magazine line, as well as some one-off stories for Giant-Size Dracula and Giant-Size Fantastic Four; more recently, he’d become the regular writer of War Is Hell, and, concurrent with his taking on the X-Men gig, he was also coming on board as the new writer of the “Iron Fist” feature in Marvel Premiere. As Claremont recalled in 2003 for his own interview in Alter Ego #24:
I was in the right place at the right time. They needed a body and I needed the work. I was enthusiastic about the work. I loved working with [artist] Dave [Cockrum]. I loved the characters. It was one of those circumstances where it was thought, “Why not give the kid a shot?” It was a low-profile book and no one had any great hopes for it.
Claremont’s script for X-Men #94 would be the first in a remarkably long run as the title’s writer; one that would eventually span sixteen years, and one hundred and eighty-six consecutive issues.
Meanwhile, continuing on in much the same capacity from Giant-Size X-Men #1 was artist Dave Cockrum, who in addition to co-creating most of the new X-characters with Wein had also fully illustrated that issue’s new lead story. For X-Men #94, Cockrum’s contribution began with inking the cover, which was pencilled by Gil Kane. When fans turned to the comic’s opening splash page, however, they found that Cockrum — never the speediest of artists — hadn’t been able to ink his own pencils this time around; instead, the finishes had been supplied by Bob McLeod:
Generally speaking, I’m an admirer of the work of both Cockrum and McLeod, but I’m going to have to come right out and say it: the faces on this page look kind of weird to me. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it feels as though the two artists’ rendering styles, attractive as they are individually, somehow just don’t mesh all that well. Maybe it’s just me? In any event, the effect thankfully becomes less pronounced as we move through the issue.
As noted in our Giant-Size X-Men #1 post, Sunfire’s inclusion in the new series’ premiere storyline was all but inevitable, given the “international super-team” concept that had helped inspire the X-Men’s revival in the first place. Nevertheless, Wein’s handling of the Japanese mutant hero in that issue had done little to modify the generally obnoxious characterization that Shiro Yoshida had been saddled with ever since his introduction in 1969, so I doubt that there were a lot of fans who were sorry to see him go. (My seventeen-year-old self definitely wasn’t.)
Cyclops manages to get in between Wolverine and Iceman before a fight breaks out, but the real issue that’s facing him can’t be dealt with so quickly. As Cyke’s brother Havok puts the question to him directly: “Are you coming with us — or staying?”
And now we readers of 1975 understood how the book’s creative team had decided to answer the question of what to do with thirteen X-Men (although Kane and Cockrum’s cover illustration, which included only one “old” X-Man — Cyclops — among the five heroes pictured, had already given us a pretty solid clue).
Of course, as things would turn out, none of the old guard were heading straight back to comic-book limbo-land — at least not right away. Founding members Angel and Iceman would almost immediately find a new team home in the Champions (whose premiere issue would be coming out in just one month). Meanwhile, Havok and Lorna Dane — relatively late arrivals to the original X-Men lineup — would be reappearing in a guest-star capacity as early as issue #97.
As for Marvel Girl, aka Jean Grey — despite the seeming finality of her and Scott (Cyclops) Summers’ goodbye kiss (and would you believe that this was evidently the first time the couple had ever kissed, at least on-panel?), her departure was never intended to be permanent. In 2003, Len Wein explained why he wanted Jean out of the book, even if only for a time:
For variety’s sake and to open new possibilities. But I had planned to bring her back eventually… We wanted to find a way to make her interesting. It also opened romantic possibilities for Scott, since she wouldn’t be around. It was worth our time not to have her there.
Fans of the old X-Men series could guess what Cyclops had in mind with his last comment above — though new readers might have been as befuddled as the new X-Men themselves are when Cyke leads them to what Storm quite reasonably identifies as an “empty room“, and tells them their job is to walk through it and exit the door on the other side…
The breaking up of the story into separately-titled chapters is, I imagine, a vestige of it having been originally planned to appear in Giant-Size X-Men #2; regular-sized Marvel comics of this era occasionally featured chapter breaks, but it had been more or leas standard procedure across the whole short-lived Giant-Size line.
On another topic, the notion that the Colorado mountain that housed NORAD during the Cold War was named “Valhalla” seems to have been a fancy of either Wein or Claremont; in the real world, it appears to have always been known as Cheyenne Mountain. (Though I suppose it’s at least possible that those that knew the place best called it “Death“. I mean, who’s to say?)
Cover to Daredevil #39 (Apr., 1968). Art by Gene Colan and Frank Giacoia.
Cover to Marvel Team-Up #25 (Sep., 1974). Art by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia.
Back in 1975, my younger self was intrigued to see three familiar figures among the five animalistic types shown busting into NORAD in the panel above. Ape-Man, Bird-Man, and Cat-Man — then going by the group moniker “the Unholy Three” — had been the baddies in one of the first Marvel comics I ever bought, Daredevil #39 (Apr., 1968). They hadn’t made that great an impression on me at the time, either in that issue or in the second or third parts of the trilogy it initiated — nor had they been any more memorable in the more recent Marvel Team-Up #25 (Sep., 1974), where they’d gone up against not only Daredevil (who’d already beaten them twice on his own, counting their debut way back in 1965’s DD #10-11) but Spider-Man, to boot. Though to be honest, why should I (or anyone else) have ever been impressed by the Unholy Three? After all, they were basically just three ordinary guys wearing really elaborate animal costumes. Still, it was at least a surprise to see them showing up here in X-Men (where they looked to be seriously overmatched by the book’s stars, at least on first glance). and I was interested in learning more about their unfamiliar (to me) froggy and insectoid compatriots, as well.
The next page finds the five invaders swarmed by military police, but the former quickly subdue the latter… hmm, maybe they’re not such third-stringers after all…
Like the Unholy Three, Count Nefaria was an old-school Marvel supervillain, having first appeared Avengers #13 (Feb., 1965); unlike them, however, my younger self had never encountered the Maggia leader in a story prior to this one, though it’s likely I had at least a vague idea who he was. But honestly, the guy himself was prepared to tell you pretty much everything you needed to know to understand his actions in this story, as we’ll see on the very next page:
Believe it or not, that last panel — plus Nefaria’s earlier remark to his “allies” about how they’d better toe the line if they ever want to be human again — is all the explanation we’ll be given in this storyline as to how the Unholy Three Plus Two — or, as we’ll be calling them henceforth, the Ani-Men — got involved in Nefaria’s schemes in the first place. Claremont’s script never offers his readers any indication that any of these characters have appeared before, meaning that it was probably years before I learned that Frog-Man had in fact debuted in the same 1965 Daredevil storyline as his three male teammates (at which time the foursome was called “the Organization”), or that the one female in the bunch, Dragonfly, was appearing here for the very first time. I can remember how, back in 1975, I kept waiting for an acknowledgement that these characters (some of them, anyway) had a history in the Marvel Universe — a footnote, if nothing else — but, in the end, my waiting proved to be in vain. A minor thing, I know, but irritating, all the same.
Meanwhile, back in Westchester, Cyclops is sitting alone and brooding, as is his wont, when he’s approached by Kurt (Nightcrawler) Wagner…
This is obviously the first time that Hank (Beast) McCoy has heard anything about the major changes that have recently gone down with his old team — which, if it’s actually been several weeks (as the earlier Danger Room training montage scene implied), would seem to be a regrettable oversight on the part of Professor Charles Xavier, not to mention Cyclops. Aren’t they all still friends? I realize everyone’s been pretty busy, but even so…
The X-Men proceed to head out west — though not before resolving a bit of interpersonal conflict, which arises when Cyclops wants to leave the injured John (Thunderbird) Proudstar behind, and the latter angrily protests. Professor X ultimately pulls rank, saying there’s no time to argue, and clears Thunderbird to go.
On board their supersonic jet, an exchange occurs between Wolverine and Banshee that offers us a taste of character beats to come:
Wolverine is almost certainly not “joshin’” — at least, not entirely — in making this kind of comment.. though it’s a fair question as to whether Wein, Claremont, and Cockrum themselves knew for sure at the time whether their scrappy new hero was being serious here or not. (On the other hand, it’s virtually certain that none of them intended what in retrospect seems the heavy irony of Banshee addressing Wolverine — who would of course eventually be revealed to be much older than Sean Cassidy, but at this point was seen by Wein, at least, as being still in his late teens — as “lad”.)
Once they’ve reached the skies of Colorado, the X-Men establish contact with the military commander in charge of operations on the ground, who turns out to be an old acquaintance of Cyclops’…
The cliffhanger that concludes X-Men #94 was evidently necessitated by the relatively late decision to split the story that had originally been intended for Giant-Size X-Men #2 into two individual issues of X-Men. Given that GSXM #1’s “Second Genesis” had run 36 pages, while the stories for both X-Men #94 and #95 would top out at 18 pages east, this seems to have been more a matter of serving the story’s structure than of a need to adjust for length. As Chris Claremont later recalled for Alter Ego #24:
We had to find a place to split the book so that issue #94 had an exciting conclusion, which we did by having The X-Men blown out of the sky. Then we redesigned the second half of the story so it was a coherent stand-alone issue that led to a final conclusion.
In respect of the fact that the storyline was originally designed to be read as a whole — and, OK, because we already have at least two more comics we want to blog about than we have Saturdays next month — we’re going to skip on ahead into July, 1975 and discuss X-Men #95, which, despite the series’ supposed bi-monthly schedule, came out just 42 days after #94 (per Mike’s Amazing World).
Fronted by another fine cover by Kane and Cockrum, the credits for “Warhunt!” signaled a couple of changes that had gone down since the previous issue. One was the arrival of inker Sam Grainger, whose slick, clean style seemed better suited to Cockrum’s pencils than Bob McLeod’s had (to my eye, anyway). Another was that while Len Wein retained his credit as plotter, he was no longer listed as the book’s editor; that role had passed to Marv Wolfman, who’d succeeded his longtime friend and sometime writing collaborator as the editor of Marvel’s complete color comics line. Of course, that meant that the editorial workload that had originally led Wein to choose writing Hulk over X-Men was no longer a factor; going forward, he’d be writing Amazing Spider-Man and Thor in addition to Hulk, picking up the former titles from Gerry Conway, who was jumping ship from Marvel to DC Comics. Could Wein have taken X-Men back from Chris Claremont if he’d wanted to? Perhaps — though it’s easy to see how, in 1975, Amazing Spider-Man (and maybe even Thor) would have seemed the better gig.
Asked in 2003 whether he’d ever regretted leaving X-Men when he did, Wein responded:
All things considered: tremendously! I didn’t really regret it until the day Chris bought a plane with X-Men money, back in the heyday of big sales. That was the day I said, “That was a big mistake on my part.”
Of course, this sentiment presupposes that X-Men would have still become the sales juggernaut that it ultimately did, regardless of whether Wein or Claremont had been its writer. And maybe it would have; there’s no way we can ever know.
But we’ll set such musings aside for now, so as to return to our narrative… “Warhunt!” begins with the X-Men still in free-fall (naturally), then offers a brief recap of the past issue’s events before moving ahead with the new stuff…
Cyclops proceeds to remind the team of their mission’s parameters; the goal is de-activate the Doomsmith system within the next hour, before it launches every ICBM in the U.S. strategic arsenal and brings on nuclear Armageddon. Their first task, obviously, is to break into Valhalla Base…
Once inside the base, Nightcrawler quickly runs afoul of Frog-Man (aka “Croaker”)…
The X-Men move quickly into the base, but after they’ve only proceeded a short way, the corridor they’re in begins to flood with gas. Following Cyclops’ order, the team smashes through a metal wall, allowing them to escape — although perhaps only for the moment:
Regardless of how “fresh” they might or might not be, I’m not sure the original guys-in-costumes version of the Ani-Men could ever have been a credible match for the X-Men — remember, Daredevil was able to take out four of these guys all by himself, so the two groups being “numerically equal” really doesn’t count for much (or shouldn’t, at any rate). But knowing that the bestial baddies have been modified into newer, more powerful forms by Count Nefaria’s scientists allows us readers to believe that maybe these souped-up models have what it takes to defeat our heroes — at least for as long as this fight scene lasts.
The X-Men’s readiness to come to each other’s aid, as demonstrated by Colossus’ helping out of Wolverine, above, ultimately allows them to turn things around. Cyclops assists Nightcrawler against Frog-Man, then Nightcrawler returns the favor against Bird-Man. Next, Ape-Man (aka Gort) charges Cyke, Kurt, and Wolverine, only to have Storm send him reeling with an electrical shock — though it’s the fists of Wolverine and Nightcrawler that finally put him down for the count. In the end, the mysterious Dragonfly is the only Ani-Man left standing, er, flying…
Wait, so, every time Cyclops’ eyes open wide — even involuntarily — his visor opens to unleash his destructive eye-beams? That seems kike it would be… highly impractical. Not to mention very, very dangerous. I’m thinking that our storytellers may not have gotten that business quite right, here.
Leaving the still-unconscious Banshee and Thunderbird where they lie, the other X-Men race on in search of their goal. But the Valhalla Base contains “three cubic miles of corridors and cubicles”, and by the time our heroes finally reach the control center for the Doomsmith system, it’s “too late“:
So the X-Men have actually achieved their primary goal, after all… completely by accident! How very convenient (narratively speaking).
I can recall being legitimately surprised by John Proudstar’s death when I first read this story fifty years ago — though not especially moved. After all, I (along with all my fellow readers) hardly knew the man. Still, regardless of how short our acquaintance with the character had been, there were fans who were already invested in him — as was indicated several months later, when the letters column of X-Men #97 included the following missive:
The anonymous Bullpenner responsible for answering fans’ letters to the “Mutant Mail-Box” (the Grand Comics Database credits Chris Claremont) began their response with a general statement about how Marvel’s desire “to put a semblance of reality” into the company’s comics necessitated that, sometimes, deaths occurred within them. After citing such earlier examples as the respective passings of Amazing Spider-Man‘s Captain George Stacy, Avengers‘ Swordsman, and Sgt. Fury‘s Junior Juniper, the response went on to say:
This sort of editorial response to fans’ complaints about a character’s demise — one that argues that the creative personnel responsible had virtually no other choice than to do what they did — seems to me to have occurred with relative frequency, back in the day. Certainly, the particular response given above is reminiscent of the ones made in the letters pages of Amazing Spider-Man a couple of years before, which justified the death of Gwen Stacy on the grounds that the relationship between Gwen and the book’s titular star, Peter Parker, had nowhere else to go; it was either marriage, or death. (As an aside, it’s interesting to note that while X-Men #97’s letter-answerer included Gwen’s dad on their list of deceased Marvel characters, they didn’t include Gwen herself — though I think we can safely chalk that up to the “clone” storyline that was going on in ASM at this time.) Unfortunately, however well-meant they may be, such “mercy killing” arguments ultimately can’t help but come off as self-serving, as they seek to claim the high ground by expressing concern for a fictional character’s “honor” (as though they were a real human being) while side-stepping the question of how the character got into such a no-other-way-out jam in the first place; after all, if John Proudstar was now and could never be anything more than a “not-as-interesting copy of Hawkeye”, whose fault was that?
Interviewed over half a decade later for The X-Men Companion: I (Fantagraphics, 1981), Dave Cockrum recalled that the decision to kill off Thunderbird was made “kind of at the last minute”:
The way this all came about was that when we were first planning out that first issue, we decided what we were going to do was have it be an aptitude test or an entrance exam or something like that. They would be sent off to rescue the original X-Men, but the original X-Men would not actually be in any danger. We figured if it’s an entrance exam, theoretically, there are people who are going to flunk as well as people who pass, and so we had Banshee and Sunfire, and we were going to flunk ’em. Then we thought, well, that doesn’t seem fair, we ought to have a new guy to flunk too, a new guy who’s unsuitable. So that was what Thunderbird was for, to be a flunker. He was unsuitable because he was anti-social. Hah! As if Wolverine’s not anti-social. But at the last minute — well, I liked Banshee and we all liked Thunderbird, so we figured to hell with it. It turned out not to be a test anyway. So we had Sunfire, who nobody much liked, go off in a huff, and we kept Banshee and we kept Thunderbird. But then we didn’t know what to do with Thunderbird because we never thought him out. It was easier to kill him off than to think him out…
Almost everybody in the group did something he did, and he seemed kind of superfluous. He was fast, he was strong. I mean, he was fast enough and strong enough to run down a buffalo and pull it down, and faster than Colossus, but not as strong. The whole thing seemed pointless so we did him in.
Also interviewed in 1981 for The X-Men Companion: I, Len Wein offered a slightly different version of events, one that didn’t mention the early “flunking out” concept — though, obviously, the end result was the same:
Thunderbird was meant to die from the very beginning, just to show to the reader, “Well, this is a real group!” Every time a new group is formed, they all live forever, they all go on and on. So maybe this character has outlived his usefulness and should die. These were kids in training. When I created them they were all teen-agers… and the fact that they were teen-agers meant that they were learning the job — unlike the FF, who had been doing it for years — and they die. You don’t win all the time. …Thunderbird was put in there as a throwaway, meant to surprise you. He died in the second issue [#95]. No intention of bringing him back.
For his part, Chris Claremont noted in his own interview for the same publication that he hadn’t been part of the decision-making process that resulted in Thunderbird’s demise
If I had had my druthers, if I’d known what I was going to do on the book, if I’d had time, I would have not killed Thunderbird… If he’d not worked in The X-Men, I would have written him out of the book — broken his leg in fifteen places or something. You could understand why Len made the decision to do it because as he understood it he was writing a giant-size, 34-page quarterly book. There was no way that you could maintain the issue to issue continuity and suspense of a monthly. And there was no real way he could take the time to build up a character. It would just take too long. A twenty issue story which would take me twenty months would take him five years, which was unacceptable. So he decided rather than take the time to build up this character and have the reader feel an emotional connection and have a stake in the character’s existence, he would go for shock value and just his first mission, Boom! [claps hands] the guy dies.
The insights shared by Cockrum, Wein, and Claremont regarding how Thunderbird came to die are all interesting, and, up to a point, reasonable. Nevertheless, there’s one aspect of that decision that doesn’t seem to have caused a great deal of concern for any of those gentlemen at the time, but which really stands out to a modern readership, half a century on — and it’s the same one that mattered so much to Tom Runningmouth, writing his letter back in the summer of ’75. It comes down to this: John Proudstar, Thunderbird, was a Native American superhero at a time when there were precious few of those; and eliminating him from the X-Men’s ranks, just one issue after the group’s only Asian character, Sunfire, had also been written out (albeit less fatally), left the team with only one character — Storm — who couldn’t be racially coded as white. Considering how the theme of “anti-mutant prejudice” had previously been utilized by earlier X-Men writers as a metaphorical means for addressing racial discrimination as well as other forms of bigotry, this development made for a bad look for the newly-revived series, to say the least.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20. Mistakes made in the past can’t be reversed — but they can be learned from. Going forward from July, 1975, the future of the X-Men — as individual characters and as metaphors — would largely be in the hands of Chris Claremont. How that project would progress in the months and years to come will, naturally, be a topic for discussion in future posts.
It was Wolverine that brought me into comics; started with his serious and started buying back issues and then I learnt he was in the X-Men…so i asked my comic dealer to get me a copy of X-Men #94 to find he wasn’t even on the cover! Barely got a line of dialogue in there as well…I hunted issues #95 through to #101 and just saw my favorite character being ignored…so I gave up on those early issues!
Later in my life I revisited them and sought out every Cockrum and then Byrne issue I could – I still just love the way Cockrum does a montage page, draws an aircraft or pencils Storm’s cape; I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or artist merit but I very much enjoy this era.
Great overview & commentary of the first All New All Different X-Men story in the regular series, Alan! I got these issues new off the racks and enjoyed them, although just based on these two issues I couldn’t have guessed how huge a success the X-Men would become. Within a few months we’d also see the debuts of the Champions and the Inhumans, and the Invaders were another new team book. Within less than 4 years, the new X-Men would be the last one standing and growing ever more popular. I could think of a variety of factors as to why the other three ultimately failed but the revived X-Men thrived, including Byrne coming onboard and helping to make Wolverine the break-out character of the early ’80s, but also Claremont really coming into his own on this series and making us care about these characters. Hard to say if Wein could have done the same if he’d stayed on, but given that it was highly unlikely he’d have stayed on the title even three years, never mind 16, I don’t think he would have ridden it to the heights of success as Claremont did. But then again, several years later, his pal Wolfman, teamed up with George Perez, would revitalize the Teen Titans to similar great success, although clearly taking at least some inspiration from what Claremont with Cockrum and Byrne had already done.
Of course, the most dramatic aspect of this story was the death of Thunderbird, in a pretty much suicidal rampage. And, yeah, why’d it have to be the Native American dude??? I have a hunch that Wein didn’t give that aspect of it much deep thought although he really should have, but it does seem he did create him solely to have him killed off, which would explain why he wasn’t given more distinct powers and a more likeable personality. In 1975, to my recall, there weren’t any regularly recurring Native American characters in any U.S. comics and aside from Englehart’s short-lived Coyote series in the early ’80s, that wasn’t about to change any time soon
As to Count Nefaria and the Ani-Men, I’d gotten the MTA reprint of Nefaria’s debut in Avengers #13, and that issue of MTU with the “Unholy Trio” variant. I vaguely recall indications that Claremont initially had some other plans for Dragonfly that just fell by the wayside as things went. I know the Unholy Three showed up at least once more, in the concluding episodes of the long-running Death Stalker plot in Daredevil, apparently meeting their demise in Frank Miller’s first issue on the title (which I missed!), but if Dragonfly ever showed up again, I missed that too.
Dragonfly finally reappeared in an issue of Quasar as one of the characters the Stranger had kidnapped to his world. I don’t know if she’s ever appeared since.
Wyatt Wingfoot in FANTASTIC FOUR and Hawk in WAR OF THE WORLD/KILLRAVEN are the only other Native American characters I can think of at Marvel at this time – and Wyatt hadn’t been used all that much, as I recall.
Rereading the old FFs, my impression is that Lee and Kirby intended to do more with Johnny in college. There’s the start of a subplot where the school’s football coach is desperate to force Wyatt to play for him by any means necessary … and it comes to nothing.
My guess is they realized Johnny away from the team wouldn’t be as interesting as Peter in college so they dropped all that. Which left Wyatt largely sidelined.
Roy Thomas in the early Bronze Age has the coach run into Reed and mention how his obsession with Wyatt was ridiculous so he got over it (IIRC).
I remember John Proudfoot’s brother would appear to exact revenge on X-Men, thinking they had killed his brother.
100 issues on from this one! It was issue #193 double sized celebration of the All-New All-Different X-men
a letter writer named “Tom Runningmouth”? Seriously? Wonder if this wasn’t a letter written by another bullpenner…
Yeah. That seems phony to me too. Almost too convenient a way to lead into the bullpen discussion. Also I know Dave Cockrum was a big Legion of Super Heroes fan (as well as their former artist obviously) and I wonder if part of the genesis for the way John Proudfoot died wasn’t at least influenced by Cockrum’s stated admiration for the Ferro Lad sacrifice story in Legion. Very similar. Almost new character, dies heroically, bonding experience for the remaining members.
Like the letter from the minister praising the “Sise-Neg Genesis” story which ran in *Doctor Strange*?
Could be, could be.
Just out of curiosity, I did a google search on the name Tom Runningmouth, and lo and behold the first item that came up was a site with a discussion by Sequential Scholars on the death of Thunderbird and that very letter. Various other things came up but nothing on any individual named Tom Runningmouth, which certainly doesn’t prove that there never was or currently isn’t anyone by that name but it lends some credence to the possibility that the letter was a fake, possibly meant as a stand in for actual letters received on Thunderbird’s demise. Perusing that first site, the discussion didn’t bring up the question as to whether or not that was an actual letter by a Native American named Tom Runningmouth, but seemed to assume it was legitimate, but whether it was or wasn’t was rather irrelevant to the discussion itself about the depiction of Native Americans in U.S. comics.
I’d forgotten the extent that Claremont introduced several other Native American characters over the course of his run on both the X-Men and in The New Mutants and other related mags, including Moonstar, Sunspot, Forge, Shaman and Warpath.
While it’s entirely possible that “Tom Runningmouth” was a made-up name/persona, I’m doubtful that the letter was planted by someone in the Marvel offices, if only because (as Don has pointed out elsewhere in this comments section), the answer didn’t address the writer’s concern about prejudice against Native Americans at all.
I’d also think that by now someone would have long since confessed to it, as Englehart did regarding his famed phony letter in Dr. Strange/Marvel Premiere.
“Play it, Sam, play ‘As Time Goes By,'” as Ilsa says in “Casablanca.”
Everyone looks to “Beware the Juggernaut, My Son” in *X-Men* #32 as the point where Scott and Jean recognized that they were in love with one another: Claremont does it in #138 and Jubilee sees it in reading Jean’s diary in the *Wedding Album* special over a decade later.
Maybe so, but I couldn’t buy it. The crying-thought-balloons business Scott and Jean indulged in since #8 (parodied in *Not Brand Echh* where Marble Girl realizes that it’s Cyclomps’s turn to indulge in them this month, not hers) may have let up, but it’s not until #60 when Scott says that they wasted a lot of time because of his hang-up over his optic blasts that I felt confident that they were a couple.
(And off they go in the Angel’s new car, reminding me that after two consecutive appearances in *The X-Men* {#31 and #32} we wouldn’t see Warren Worthington’s romantic interest Candy Southern again until *Ka-Zar* #2 over three years later!)
Exactly how it had happened I felt I’d missed, leaving me to dream of an “Untold Tale of the X-Men” in which we saw Scott tell Jean how he felt. (Later, after the emphasis on Jean’s “fiery redhead temper” I began to wonder why she hadn’t done it herself. Nice girls created in 1963 didn’t do that sort of thing, I suppose, which was why Lesley Gore sometimes wished she was a boy.)
By the way, while a hug isn’t a kiss, Jean does hug Scott in #52 when she realizes that he managed to pull off his masquerade as Erik the Red and successfully infiltrated Magneto’s (and Mesmero’s!) headquarters.
“You played it for her, you can play it for me,” as Rick says later in “Casablanca.”
Wolverine’s healing factor hadn’t been conceived of yet in the mid-70s, so there was no discussion of letting him just plummet to the ground when the plane was disintegrated, as of course the fall would be fatal. In the 80s, after the healing factor had shown up, letting him plummet still wouldn’t have been an option, since it just allowed him to heal from injuries but wouldn’t have prevented him from being killed. Eventually, in the 90s the discussion would become “He’ll survive, but it will take him too long to heal and we need him now, so one of you flyers catch him!” Finally, by the 2000s it would be “Wolvie will be smashed into goo, but is so badass he’ll pull himself back together by the time the rest of the team figures out how to get inside the mountain, so let him fall.”
Did the X-Men ever face off against Nefaria again after this? It seems like being responsible for one of the team’s death back when fatalities weren’t a dime a dozen would’ve made the Count one of the major rogues in the X-Mens’ gallery, but I don’t recall him ever plaguing them again, though he definitely turned up alive and well elsewhere after getting blown up in this story.
Shooter & Byrne brought Nefaria back in the Avengers a couple of years later and gave him near Superman level powers so he could personally take on Thor in a genuine fight whereas previously Thor could have just gently tapped Nefaria’s noggin with Mjolnir to send the baddie off to not so sweet dreams for a few hours. But I’m not aware of the X-Men facing off against Nefaria at least up through 1985 or so when I stopped collecting.
spot on! I had multiple people recommend the Byrne 3 issue arc of #164-166 with the Nefaria battle and his death…it was decent if memory serves but not anything mind blowing!
I may have got the death wrong – I have that as Iron Man #116 in my spreadsheet!
Beast attacked Nefaria saying that if he had known that Nefaria was alive, he, and every other X-Man, would have hunted him down.
Nefaria said he had little use for mutant scum, so I guess he had no interest in the X-Men, though why the X-Men never went after him is a bit odd.
I wonder if the Beast felt responsible for Thunderbird’s death since he was the one who got the X-Men involved.
Let’s face it, in 1975, diversity, or more accurately “equal rights” didn’t really extend beyond the inclusion of blacks and women, if it included anyone at all. As such, I’m fairly certain John Proudfoot’s Native American status wasn’t considered at all when they made the decision to end the character. It just wasn’t something we’d been trained to think about yet. Which is the one thing that makes me believe that the “Tom Runningmouth” letter might have been real. That letter definitely called the creative team out for it’s treatment of it’s only Native American character and in response, the Bullpen team (Claremont or whoever) made all sorts of excuses for killing Thunderbird, but none of them had anything to do with his ethnicity, which makes me believe they still didn’t consider it an issue. Unless Mr. Runningmouth comes forward, we’ll never know, since I believe everyone who originally worked on the book other than Claremont, has now passed, and Chris seems to have said everything he wants to about the matter.
As to the book itself, this new incarnation of the XMen is the first Marvel book I really got excited about. Not the first one I read on the regular, but the first one I really looked forward to. Cockrum was always a penciller I enjoyed, ever since he days on the Legion, and Claremont really seemed to have a good grasp on the characters of the new XMen, right from the first issue. The only thing I call foul on is that god-awful cowboy hat thing Jean has on her head when she kissed Scott good-bye. What was Cockrum thinking? That was one fugly hat, folks. Truly.
As to the death of Proudstar (and you’d almost think that should have been his hero name, shouldn’t it?), at least he died doing something worthy, and wasn’t just thrown away for no reason. I guess you can make the opposite argument by pointing out that if he weren’t so stubborn, he could have let Banshee do the sonic blast thing and not have had to die in the first place, but that’s part of what makes his death so tragic. Thunderbird didn’t have to die, but chose to in the end. As written, and thinking about what we know about psychology, it’s easy to imagine that John always felt like and outsider and a freak who demanded validation, even when he perhaps already had it or perhaps hadn’t had a chance to earn it yet. To paraphrase a comment I once made about a former wife of mine, (He) held everyone up to such a high standard so that they would let him down long before he inevitably did the same to them.” Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in which he proved no one would ever give him a chance because he never let them try.
Regardless, even though it would have been nice to see this story have more room as an Annual as opposed to the shorter two-issue size it got, I enjoyed it, and of course, the best was yet to come. Thanks, Alan!
Great analysis of John Proudstar’s self-sacrifice, Don. It did come off a sort of suicide. It was also yet another example of the sort of “death scene” of the baddie who would show up later none the worse for wear with little or no rational explanation as to how he survived. A proud trope of card-carrying comicbook supervillains guaranteeing fictional immortality since the Joker showed up again after his apparent death in Batman #1 – at least I’m assuming the Joker did it first in U.S. comics. Carried over to Marvel Comics when the Moleman survived the explosion at the end of Fantastic Four #1, although it would be nearly two years before he showed up again and in the meantime Dr Doom had already come back from “certain death” a few times already.
I regretted the death of Thunderbird at the time and as any other obsessed comic fan would, I even came up with a way to revive him years before Krakoa. In retrospect, I would have offed Wolverine especially knowing now that Byrne would elevate him to the detriment of Nightcrawler and Colossus, even though the latter never has appealed to me. If they’d offed Logan, we would have also been spared the years of Wolverine dominating the whole line!
I agree that Grainger was a much better inker for Cockrum. McLeod never inhibited my enjoyment of a comic but I would never prefer his inking on anyone. His brief forays into lead art were even less appealing to me. His co-creation of the New Mutants was okay but with Sal Buscema as his successor it’s easier to look back and not care for it as much as I did on first reading.
Best single panel of the issue had to be Storm summoning her powers to wash away the hypnotized soldiers. Cockrum could do things with a cape very few other artists could even dream of!
I liked McLeod’s inks better.
I did not see #93 when it came out (but was able to pick it up in July ’76 from a back-issue bin, for USD 00.25).
Sam Grainger was a solid inker (he had inked the last new X-Man issue of the first series (#66) over Sal Buscema’s pencils back in 1970.
His work was professional but seemed (to me) to miss nuances in Cockrum’s art that McLeod, Dan Green and Bob Layton captured, in my opinion.
Cockrum (like Ditko or Murphy Anderson) was best when he inked his own work.
On John (Thunderbird) Proudstar, I thought the character was sort of a “throwaway” character but had potential, Wolverine (then a cypher or tabla rasa) got Thunderbird’s loner/proud warrior traits.
If you had played with Proudstar’s Apache heritage, he could have been really interesting.
Make him someone (as Wolverine became) who routinely defeats larger, stronger opponents but make his advantage (not ferocity, as with Wolverine) but with an ability to be where the opponent’s main strength isn’t.
Give him an ability (mutant or not) to see where foes are divided or where you can slip through a weak point and hit something vulnerable with great force. (This in particular was something the Apache were known for in fighting more powerful enemies, the Comanche, the Spanish/Mexican Federales and the US Cavalry , often several of these at once.)
You could also have made him someone who knew how to survive anywhere he lands. (Make him a guy who reads a lot about survival skills in odd places. Make him a course but essentially decent autodidact, Make him a man lacking in formal education but with intense curiosity about anything that will give him an advantage.
A lot of this would wind up in Wolverine . . . but probably didn’t have to.
Hmmm, I actually thought that Bob McLeod was a better inker for Dave Cockrum than Sam Grainger! But that’s just my opinion, and I don’t dislike Grainger’s work, for that matter. Regardless, I do think it was a shame that Cockrum never did get a regular inker on his first X-Men run, in the way that Terry Austin was the regular inker for John Byrne (only missing one issue, I believe) and I think either McLeod or Grainger would have been fine to fill the role.
Regarding Thunderbird, as I believe I’ve said before, Cockrum was an incredible character designer, and that includes his designs for John Proudstar. Aside from the issues that you raise, Alan, it’s also a shame that Thunderbird died because he’s just so visually interesting. It’s not at all surprising that just a decade later the character’s brother would adopt the Thunderbird costume, or that a few decades after that Thunderbird himself would be resurrected, because I think he’s just to visually distinctive to be consigned to limbo.
Thanks for another excellent review Alan. A few more historical notes of interest: X-Men 94 was the first X-Men issue lettered by Tom Orzechowski. He would of course become the longstanding regular letterer of the X-Men but not for several years. He would return several times, especially in 1978 but it would not be until 1979 that he would be the regular X-Men letterer. It was Dave Cockrum who mentioned in an interview over 20 years ago that he had definite plans for Dragonfly as part of an all female team, but unfortunately those plans were never realized. I always learn interesting things from your reviews Alan. I remembered the general story of X-Men 94-95 from when I bought it 50 years ago. But I did not remember that Nefaria said that he mutated the Ani-Men, and I would have to guess that Dragonfly was created by Wein and/or Cockrum for this story since she had never been seen before. Interestingly enough the “Ani-Men” (excluding Dragonfly) were killed off twice a few years later, first in Iron Man 116 and then in DD 158 ( a second new group). Also it’s interesting that Cat-Man tells Wolverine that his claws are real unlike Wolverine’s and Wolverine provides no response, it seems clear Chris and Dave are working off Len’s plot. At this time Len had considered the claws (of Wolverine) were in his gloves. Of course Chris revealed in XM 99 that indeed Wolverine’s claws are part of him also. Presumably Chris and Dave worked that out later.
As to Nefaria’s comments calling the X-Men “his greatest foes”…hmmmm…maybe and maybe not. I had read Nefaria’s previous appearances against the Avengers and Iron Man and the reprint of XM 22-23 in X-Men Annual 2. It didn’t seem like Nefaria thought much of the X-Men then, although they did defeat him and his (as other referred to them) “moldy supervillain group.” Still it is true that as far as I can recall at least during Chris’ lengthy tenure as writer Nefaria never showed up against the X-Men shifting over to the Avengers and Iron Man.
A few other points. I remember reading an interview where Len suggested his original intent that Wolverine was a teenager. That might have been possible given his rather wild behavior and dialogue in Hulk 181. However when he is reintroduced in Giant Size X-Men 1, which was written by Len, He is at a military base, and looks and talks like an adult. Not sure what Len was thinking, but by the time I read that interview it seemed hard to believe that Len had intended to portray Wolverine as a teenager.
Regarding this time period in 1975, as others have noted there would suddenly be several new team books including the X-Men from Marvel: Invaders, Inhumans, Champions, Super-Villain Team-Up and at the end of the year Guardians of the Galaxy. By the end of 1977 many of those books would be gone. Surprisingly the first of those books to go monthly in June 1976 would be..the Invaders! It would take 3 years, until 1978 for the X-Men to go monthly and that was partly because at that time Cockrum could barely meet a bi-monthly deadline and it was a John Byrne who could comfortably handle a monthly book.
By the way, I distinctly recall buying X-Men 94 in May 1975. I checked the Grand Comics Database and it quoted an on sale date at the end of April 1975, so I guess I am close enough. I do recall buying X-Men 95 in July 1975.
Regarding Jean Gray, Chris has said in interviews that he really liked her and brought her back as soon as he could, in X-Men 97 and she quickly became an important member of the cast of the book.
Thanks again Alan.
Regarding the freefall scene from X-men #95:
First of all, we go from 50 seconds to impact at the beginning of the scene to 63 seconds on the following page. Whoops! (I suspect the letterer–Karen Mantlo, if memory serves–misread the first number. 80 seconds is more probable).
Secondly, that’s a whole lot of dialogue for slightly over a minute of freefall! I guess speed talking is an unacknowledged mutant ability.
Not to mention being able to hear one another at all which to my understanding is rather difficult when freefalling from a great height. Fortunately, I don’t know from personal experience. Of course, Stan Lee himself had long since established the capacity for characters to emit massive mouthfuls of words in seconds during just about any activity, such as by Thor while brawling with Hercules in The Mighty Thor #126 (the same issue wherein the mag was retitled for him). Not to mention all the verbiage Thomas came up with for the original gang to speak during his tenures on the X-Men. All much easier to do in comics than in live-action movies — or even animation!
Yes, the whole free-fall sequence was a bit much. Besides all the talking, you have the convenient reveal that Banshee can’t carry two people and that Kurt didn’t simply teleport higher up to give Storm or Banshee more time, or Storm creating an updraft to slow down their fall.
Also, I had always thought it was Banshee’s scream that was keeping him aloft – he somehow manages badinage with Cyclops without losing altitude…and given the way he snatches Cyke at the last second without ill effect, you wish he was at the George Washington Bridge back in Spider-Man #121….things might have ended slightly differently!
Is this the one where Cyclops slows his fall by firing optic blasts at the ground, or was that later? A silly idea in any case — it’s an energy blast so it’s not going to work according to Newton’s equal-and-opposite forces.
I’m fairly certain that was a later issue, but I don’t recall which. I can search my supply of X-men omnibuses to find out. Does anyone else recall, offhand?
This issue confirmed the X-Men were going to be good though no hint how good they’d get. Parts that stuck out for me were Banshee feeling he was too old, Wolverine’s threat to cut the attackers into pieces and Thunderbird’s tragic death. It was indeed an effective finish. And the letter seemed to justify it perfectly.
Now? Not so much. For one thing it paints it purely as “he was a lousy character so we killed him off” and avoids Wein’s created-to-die view (which would really have pissed off Mr. Runningmouth) and Cockrum’s someone-had-to-die. And, as you say, avoids the obvious implication that Wein did a crap job creating him.
Plus the assumption that he couldn’t possibly ever be any good is ridiculous. Two issues, limited exposure — who knows what other aspects he could have shown (and that’s not even considering Claremont’s skill at developing character). Maybe he’s an obsessive nerd about Apache history or American-Indian folklore or his father’s in prison for working with the American Indian Movement. I’ve no idea what their issues was with Hawkeye but even if he was bouncing from the Avengers to solo adventures to the Defenders then back to the Assemblers, he was working steadily.
And of course, you could as easily justify killing Wolverine (“Vicious little tough guy. He’d never be anything more complex.”), nor had Storm shown any great depth.
No one was going to admit right at the time that Thunderbird was purposely created with little depth and undistinguished powers for the sole purpose of being killed off early on. Just as they weren’t going to admit that the main purposes of killing off Gwen Stacy was for the intense drama and shake-up of the mag and Conway simply not liking her character and wanting to set up Pete with Mary Jane. It’s easier to fess up to such things long after the furor has died down.
True. Doesn’t make it any more palatable.
I know a number of people who think this is where the Bronze Age starts — waaaay too late in my opinion, but the idea is out there.
I think each of the ages should be divided into sections, like maybe Early, Middle and Late and X-Men #94 initiating the Middle Bronze Age. But this is the sort of thing fans could argue about for, ahem, ages.
“… this is the sort of thing fans could argue about for, ahem, ages.”
That’s why the internet was invented.
“Your hair’s about a gray as mine.” Hey – remember when Chris Claremont had a sense of humor?
I forget why I decided to stick with this title. At the time, I was a bit of a Marvel zombie, but I wasn’t the biggest X-Men fan. I knew Claremont mainly as a guy who wrote decent (but not necessarily striking) scripts over other people’s plots. I guess Cockrum was part of it – although, as Alan pointed out being inked by Bob McLeod wasn’t the greatest choice. Looking back, I think of Cockrum sorta the same way I think of Mike Grell. He was a fine designer, and a wonderful finisher/inker. But as a penciller, his storytelling was only OK, and his figures could be a bit stiff and his expressions weren’t the subtlest. But for mid-1970s Marvel, he was something different.
I think I knew it was either issue #96 or 97 that cemented my decision to following this title. It was apparent that Claremont had some long-term plans, and I appreciated what he was trying to do in terms of characterization.
Speaking of which, the decision to kill Proudstar was more for shock effect (“Anything can happen! No one is safe!”), and a poor one at that. I never really bought the “skill set” argument. After all, Superman and Martian Manhunter were pretty identical in that regard. The question is what you do with the character, and I think having a Native American in the mix would have been interesting, as long as they didn’t fall into the “noble savage” trope. I believe that other than Wyatt Wingfoot, the only other Native American character at Marvel was Hawk in AMAZING ADVENTURES/WAR OF THE WORLDS/KILLRAVEN – and he didn’t last too much longer, either. (Sadly, you weren’t into Don McGregor, Alan, so we won’t be revisiting that series or JUNGLE ACTION/BLACK PANHER. Sigh…
It’s interesting to revisit the dawn of a series that, within a relatively short time, would take the comic book world by storm. I think you can see some of the seeds of potential, but could anyone have predicted that it would almost define an era?
Marvel also introduced Red Wolf, a Native American (tribe unspecified) superhero, in 1970. Then gave one of his ancestors a series set in the Old West, then returned to the present for the last three issues (which were so “off” on the character, including his name, that version has now been retconned as another earlier incarnation).
Thank you! I had forgotten Red Wolf!
Red Wolf had a Lakota/ Sioux background in the Old West and the earlier short-lived 1960s DC superhero Super Chief was (set in the [very Old] West in about 1500 and was Mohawk..
Both were written by Gardner Fox, who had at least some interest in “America and its peoples.” (As well as nearly everything else on the planet, he was a lawyer who was fascinated by a broad variety of historical and scientific details.)
I think Thunderbird’s Apache background could have been a major springboard for events and characterization,
In GS X-Men #1, we see Thunderbird run down and catch an American Buffalo. However, most Apache’s did not live on the great plains and did not have a “Buffalo Culture.” Most were farmers and hunter-gatherers.
I attended the Military Intelligence Advanced Course at FT Huachuca, Arizona in 1990. Part of the course was on Low Intensity Conflict/Small Wars. This was taught by looking at the Apache Wars and doing a “Staff Ride” to a few associated sites.
The Apache still live there. It was the worst poverty I have ever seen in the US and perhaps the worst I saw anywhere. (I spent years in the Middle East and Africa, by way of contest.)
Yet, the people had great pride: their ancestors had stood off the Comanche; the Spaniards; the Mexican Federales and the US Cavalry (sometimes several of these at once) for centuries.
Now, that is a background for a character . . . .
Gardner Fox also wrote “Man, Thy Name Is Brother!” in Justice League of America #57 (Nov., 1967), featuring an Apache boy who tells Green Arrow about the prejudice he faces not only from white people, but from other, non-Apache native Americans as well. I wrote about it here eight years ago: https://50yearoldcomics.com/2017/09/17/justice-league-of-america-57-november-1967/
That was perceptive on Fox’s part. since inter-ethnic prejudice was not on most people’s radar in the Fall of ;’67 (and may not be now).
Since Fox was an Irish-American who was married to an Italian-American (both from affluent families) it may have been something he was familiar with, It was not unknown in NYC when Fox (born in 1911) was young..
I’m not so sure about that. Plenty of Italian and Irish-Americans embraced racism as a way to show they were on the “white” side of any racial divides. But Fox generally seems to have been a good-hearted man.
This reminds me of the John wayne movie Fort Apache, in which new cavalry commander Henry Fonda is PO’d because he’s not standing against cool foes like the Comanche. Wayne sets him straight.
There’s a bad tendency writing about Native Americans to blend them into a fantasy culture where they’re all hunting buffalo, living in Teepees, smoking the peace pipe around the totem pole and ignoring different tribes lived very differently.
Great post.
In retrospect, now knowing how big a deal the mag would become, generating multiple spin-offs and becoming the basis for several highly successful movies, the revival of the X-Men was the big comics event of 1975, just as the debut of Spider-Man was that for 1962.
I think a lot of fans were really looking forward to this. In part, this was because of what fan-favorites the Thomas/Adams (and, maybe a bit, the Drake/Steranko/Smith) X-Men had been.
I remember people saying about X-Men # 100, that “Cockrum was as good as Adams.”
I also think Englehart using the X-Men in the “Secret Empire” story in CA&F built interest.
Yep, that was about the only sustained use of the X-Men as a team in a multi-issue story (albeit with only Cyclops, Marvel Girl and Professor X) in the period between the cancellation and the revival. Of course, the Beast had his short-lived series, and Ice Man guest-starred in Amazing Spider-Man and the team showed up in an early MTU story, but otherwise they were mostly missing in action. A point Englehart made interesting use of in the Secret Empire story.
In 1970 we also got a three-part Angel solo tale by Jerry Siegel and George Tuska. It showed up in two issues of a three-issue Ka-Zar reprint book that year and then Part Three was in Marvel Tales. None of which announced it on the cover. I stumbled across it on the Marvel app (which annoyingly does not have part three, though I looked it up) this week.
I’m guessing this was a one-shot planned for a tryout book that didn’t get its slot so they had to use it up somewhere. The villain is named the Dazzler, though he doesn’t do anything to justify the name.
Going off at a tangent to the above discussion, was Storm Marvel’s first superpowered heroine?
Not even the first mutant heroine, since Wanda and Jean preceded her. If you meant black, I can’t think of an earlier one.
Yes, that’s what I did mean.
Thanks for clarifying that, Brian. Like fraser, I can’t think of any Black Marvel superheroines that predate Storm. At least one villainess (Nekra, over in Daredevil), but no heroines.
Nightshade, Queen of the Werewolves, first appeared in Cap/Falc # 164 (Aug. 1973).
Misty Knight in Marvel Premiere no. 21, March 1975:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Ffzl50aylr3p91.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D67c786c4769885be9a41d4878e653592ed855dd4
Oooh, good one! Of course, I’m sure that there are people who’ll disagree, given that Misty doesn’t have a codename or costume (or at least didn’t at the beginning). Hmm, what was that fred and fraser were saying about “the sort of thing fans could argue about for ages”?
“So the X-Men have actually achieved their primary goal, after all… completely by accident! How very convenient (narratively speaking).” Oddly enough, this odd plot point was explained/resolved just four days ago, in Weapon X-Men 5 that was released on June 18, 2025 (where it was explained that a time-traveling Deadpool shut off the doomsday device). How’s that for addressing continuity — 50 years later!
I had no idea! Thanks for sharing, Dan.
Deadpool: he’s Marvel Jesus!
He is Sise-Neg-Deadpool — and he is God!
A trivia note I almost forgot: Len Wein said his original concept was that Kurt was too far from the ground to teleport but Claremont reworked it as hitting the ground with all the acceleration.
Claremont’s comic book science makes sense to me, though that’s a long-winded explanation to embark upon when you’re in freefall.
At least they were high enough in the sky that they didn’t go splat before Kurt finished explaining why he couldn’t teleport under those circumstances.
drhaydn: “Claremont’s comic book science … that’s a long-winded explanation to embark upon when you’re in freefall.”
That didn’t stop Claremont in similar situations. You’d think that generation of writers were paid by the word, à la Dickens!
This is enough of a comics convention it doesn’t bother me. Much like characters shrugging off several hundred concussions without suffering any brain damage.
I agree on the faces. They look weird on that splash. Early in McLeod’s career; while, although he’d done Legion, etc, Cockrum didn’t have hundreds of comic issues under his belt. Couple of dozen?
To me, Cockrum’s faces were his weakest point anyway.
The New X-Men looked special and felt special.
These were not two of the best issues, but the above still held true.
Splash to #94 looks like more McLeod than Cockrum, as if he was trying to fix something but made it even worse. My vote is for the Cockrum-Grainger art team, with Grainger providing lush brush strokes whichbcompliment Cockrum’s pencils nicely.
For those so inclines, Alter Ego #78 shows an unused page from X-Men 94/95 featuring some prime Cockrum pencils.
Regarding the death of John Proudstar, killing off the sole Native American does sound (to this Bisexual White boy) like the “Kill Your Gays” trope we would hear about in later years. This is actually the first time I read this story although I knew what was going to happen. Still an amazing story, where the X-Men start to act like a team.
Yes the “POC dies first” and “the bad girl dies to reaffirm girls should be good” tropes have a long history too.