FSC: X-MEN MARVEL ILLUSTRATED Paperback

By 1982, Marvel had been making inroads into establishing itself as a children’s book publisher as much as a periodical comic book publisher. This was apparently Marvel president Jim Galton’s plan for where the future of the organization should lie. He had no idea how the emerging Direct Sales marketplace was going to explode, nor how improved editorial content would result in a strong upturn in Marvel’s comic book sales on the newsstand. So he spent a bunch of effort in this area, creating an assortment of coloring and activity books featuring Marvel characters as well as assorted collections in both the Trade Paperback and Paperback-sized formats. I wasn’t really a big fan of the latter, as unlike the earlier Paperbacks released through Tempo which maintained the structure of the original pages, these new books chopped the panels apart so as to make them larger and easier to read on the smaller pages. I’d always hated that approach, and so for the most part I avoided this line. But the one exception I made was this X-MEN MARVEL ILLUSTRATED Paperback. And the reason was that it reprinted GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1, the first appearance of the All-New, All-Different X-Men.

By 1982, GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 was already commanding some pretty extraordinary prices for the time, as much as $25.00 on the back issue market. Obviously, that doesn’t sound like all that much in retrospect, but at the time it was an absolute fortune for me to contemplate spending on any one comic book. At the same time, I was hungry to read the first All-New X-Men story as I had become a huge fan of the series. As had pretty much everybody else, especially in the wake of the Dark Phoenix Saga which had melted minds and broken hearts. X-MEN was already the book that every fan paid attention to, a position it would hold throughout the 1980s and beyond.

Behind a new painted cover by original artist Dave Cockrum, that first X-Men revival story was edited down to put only a panel or two on a page. By itself, it filled about 2/3 of the book. And it really wasn’t the best way to experience this story for the first time. (About 18 months or so later, Marvel would release X-MEN SPECIAL EDITION #1 in the Direct Sales market which would reprint this GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 story in its original format, so I and others could consume it in a much more aesthetically-pleasing format.) But that was still to come at the point where I dropped my buck-twenty-five for this slim volume.

Especially considering its somewhat convoluted birthing process, the story is pretty good, introducing the world to Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Thunderbird while bringing back Wolverine, Banshee and Sunfire, all of whom had appeared in other stories before this. According to wrier Len Wein in his interview in the first X-MEN CHRONICLES volume, the original idea for this story was that the entire mission was going to be revealed at the end to be a test, a kind of entrance exam. And the original notion was that the new characters would all pass and the older guys would wash out. But that all seemed very contrived, so not only did Wein and Cockrum eventually discard the test conceit, but they also opted to keep most of the players they’d drafted into the tale in order to fail as members of the ongoing crew. Only Sunfire chose to take his leave once the events of this story reached their conclusion.

Also of note: Thunderbird, the short-lived Native American X-Man, was created to fail as well. Realizing that it didn’t make much sense for only the old timers to not make the grade, Wein and Cockrum decided to include one newbie who didn’t measure up as well. And once the conceit of the test fell by the wayside, they found themselves laden with a character that they hadn’t really cooked anything much up for apart from a cool costume. Rather than investing the effort into trying to turn Thunderbird into something, the team instead chose to have him perish in the group’s next mission, a shock value demise that was intended to raise the stakes for the series. It certainly did so for the relatively scant number of readers who were following the book at that point.

As things turned out, Wein followed Thunderbird out the door, handing the reins of the new title to newcomer Chris Claremont, who had been buzzing about and offering suggestions all the while. Chris wound up dialoguing the two-parter in which Thunderbird met his end, then began plotting the series from that point forward. Together with Cockrum, who was one of the most exciting character designers of the period, the two created a series that flew underneath the radar while pushing the drama and the emotion for their new cast of characters. It was easily the most progressive mainstream Marvel comic of its era, and it only got better and better as time went on.

The back third of this book featured a reprint of UNCANNY X-MEN #117 by Claremont and Cockrum’s successor as artist John Byrne. It was a good little one-off focusing on an event from earlier in Professor X’s lifetime, his first encounter with a malevolent mutant out in the world. But as I’d bought and read UNCANNY X-MEN #117 when it first saw print, it was little more than empty calories to me (though the artwork by Byrne and expert inker Terry Austin did look great in black and white, despite the hatchet job.)