Per its entry at the Mike’s Amazing World of Comics web site, the comic we’re discussing today originally reached America’s spinner racks on January 20, 1976. But even though one can’t tell it from artist Dave Cockrum’s very fine cover, once we turn to the opening splash page we find that, three weeks into the new year, the All-New, All-Different X-Men were somehow still celebrating the December, 1975 Christmas season: Read More
Re-reading the early issues of the revived, “All-New, All-Different” X-Men title for the first time in decades, your humble blogger has found himself struck not only by how quickly writer Chris Claremont — still a relative neophyte in 1975 — made the book his own, but also by how enduring many of the concepts and characters he introduced in the first half-dozen or so of the stories he wrote on his lonesome (the first two issues under his byline, #94 and #95, had of course been plotted by his predecessor, Len Wein) have ultimately proven to be. Half a century on, it’s hard to imagine what the X-books — or maybe even the Marvel Universe, period — would look like, had neither Moira MacTaggert nor the Shi’ar (to name two of the most prominent examples), ever existed. Read More
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. Read More
Cover layout by Gil Kane, featuring only the new X-Men team lineup.
The completed original art for the cover, with the new team pencilled by Kane and the old team pencilled by Dave Cockrum; all inks by Cockrum.
Half a century after its original release, there’s little doubt that the subject of today’s post was the most historically significant mainstream American comic book released in 1975; indeed, it’s arguably in the very top tier for the entire decade of the Seventies. But in April, 1975, it arrived with very little fanfare — at least in the relatively isolated comics-reading world of your humble blogger, who at age seventeen still wasn’t tuned in to what little fan press there was at the time. I don’t recall seeing any house ads for Giant-Size X-Men #1 ahead of its release, and the only promotion of the book I’ve been able to locate in any Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page published around then is a brief mention in the column that ran in the company’s March-shipping issues, reporting how artist Dave Cockrum’s being chosen to illustrate the project represented the realization of the “fan dream of a lifetime”. That may well have been the only heads-up I had that this book was coming out at all, prior to seeing its soon-to-be-iconic cover by Cockrum and Gil Kane staring out at me from the spinner rack. Read More
Marvel Comics’ original summer tradition of publishing “King-Size Special!” annual issues featuring (mostly) new material had a relatively brief heyday in the Sixties — just six years, really. I’ve known that for decades, but before digging into my collection to do the research or this blog, I hadn’t realized how very few of those annuals I actually bought new off the stands. While I’d bought my first Marvel comic book in the summer of 1967, I didn’t pick up any annuals until the summer of 1968 — and that was the last year that the specials featured all-new material, at least for a while. As it turns out, I just managed to catch the very tail end of this golden era of Marvel annuals. And I’d end up buying all of two off the spinner rack Read More