TOM BREVOORT: The open secret about X-Men in the 1960s
is that it was a failure.
It was one of the last original creations
of that original blossoming period of the 1960s.
They were intended to be like another Fantastic Four.
You have to put it in context.
The X-Men was never an A category series, anymore
than Iron Man was.
Stan and Jack did the opening few issues,
and then handed it off to other writers, other creators.
TOM BREVOORT: For most of the '60s, it
was the lousiest-selling Marvel title--
or close to it.
In 1969, it was canceled.
The last bunch of issues of X-Men,
which were done by Roy Thomas and Neal Adams,
got a little attention, and there
was a little uptick in sales.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: The irony was that Roy Thomas
and Neal Adams' run on the X-Men was
groundbreaking in its own way.
It's just that the tracking network
was so primitive that Marvel didn't realize they had
a hit on their hands until eight months
after the first issue came out.
And by then, Neal had gone back to DC, so too little, too late.
So the decision was made.
Let's bring X-Men back as a reprint.
We'll just reprint the old stories, and if it sells,
that's good enough.
So that's what X-Men was for about five or six
years between 1970 and 1975.
The characters still existed in and around the Marvel universe,
and the series certainly had its fans.
Fans of the day would ask Roy or Stan--
or whomever-- about when are you going to bring back the X-Men?
It wasn't like there was a huge wellspring,
but there was a dedicated following.
Marvel's president, moving into the mid-'70s, was a fellow
by the name of Al Landau.
And Al Landau got into the business
by being the person who had licensed
Marvel comics to be sold in international properties.
One of the things that occurred to him
is if we had a book that had characters in it
from all of these different places around the globe,
maybe that one would sell really well
and it would make a lot more money.
There was a meeting, and I believe it was Roy who said,
well, maybe we do that and we can do that with the X-Men.
I could take one or two of the original X-Men,
and we can have all these other X-Men from around the world,
and that'll be the thing.
And so that was the starting point for what
became Giant-Size X-Men 1.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: Stan didn't pitch.
I mean, he was the boss.
So for him to pitch something is when should we do it?
Now.
How do we do it?
The best you can.
And he and Roy talked about it, then Roy, I think,
turned to Len.
TOM BREVOORT: Len Wein was a very famous comic book writer
and editor and worked both at Marvel and other companies
throughout the late 1960s, all the way up through the 2000s.
And Len has the distinction of being
the creator of that time period who
came up with the most stuff.
For Marvel, the big ones, obviously,
are Wolverine and the All New, All Different X-Men.
But up to about the mid-2000s, he
had about the best batting average of anybody
in terms of coming up with stuff in comics
that would then be translated into film and television.
Dave Cockrum was one of the preeminent young artists
of the 1970s.
He was, in the '70s, the cutting-edge of superhero
and costume design.
Of all the people that would design new superheroes
or redesign old superheroes, he was at the forefront of that.
And his looked the most modern.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: With Dave, you had reams and reams of paper.
I mean, he did, I think, 35 or 40 design pieces for Phoenix--
different costume designs, different costume colors.
Taking the cape off one design, putting it on another,
combining them in different ways.
He would juggle the figure until he found the visual iconography
that worked.
When you have access to an artist as creatively gifted
as Dave Cockrum, you want to utilize that palette
to the best extent.
Roy tasked Len and Dave with creating the X-Men.
He and Len sat down and went over all this stuff,
and he just had, like, books full of designs and characters
and stuff he'd come up with.
And they pooled together the characters that became the All
New, All Different X-Men.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: He was the best there is at what he did--
which was tell stories, create characters, create universes.
Without Dave, the visual concept of the X-Men
would be non-existent.
The premise was how do we introduce the new team?
The one rubric that Stan established for the team was he
wanted it to be international.
The idea was to bring as much diversity in form and reality
as possible.
Out of that discussion, you have an indigenous
American, a Russian, a German--
who doesn't look human at all.
TOM BREVOORT: Nightcrawler went through a couple of iterations.
Dave came up with him one night while he was in the service.
They were out somewhere, and there was some
shelling going on or something.
It was a dangerous night, and he sat in this foxhole or wherever
and came up with a superhero character.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: Storm was originally
two different characters, which Dave folded
together and created Ororo.
Then you had Colossus.
TOM BREVOORT: Here's a superhero who's
a good guy, a hero on the team, and a Russian citizen.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: Utilizing Colossus as a member
of the team in 1974--
how would we play it in terms of the United States' relation
to the Soviet Union?
TOM BREVOORT: It's a much wider array
of backgrounds and personality types
than you tended to have in any comics.
Now these guys are the X-Men, not the guys that you know.
There was no warning, really, whatsoever.
It's not like there was an issue before that that could say--
next issue, the new X-Men!
And they hated it.
They hated it!
And you can actually see it even in the letters
that they printed.
There was a real hardcore bunch of X-Men fans
that wanted X-Men back.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: We got letters upon letters from readers.
Why have you taken the previous team away?
How could you turn the X-Men into this cheap advertising?
TOM BREVOORT: And pretty much, they
were told, you're going to get the X-Men back,
except all the guys that you love are gone now,
and it's all these new weirdos.
In the office, we were all looking at it and saying,
this is bloody brilliant.
TOM BREVOORT: And it took a while
for that sentiment to shift, and for the new team
to catch on with the older fans.
It always had a popularity with the readers
that came to it in the '70s.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: The audience reaction
pre-publication is entirely different from the reaction
post-publication.
But we knew from, certainly, the reader reaction-- from
the mail that we would get--
that we had a hit.
The question was, how could we exploit it to the best
and most positive extent?
TOM BREVOORT: In those days, Chris had come on staff
as an assistant editor.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: I was working on a college internship.
Marvel was nothing like it is today.
TOM BREVOORT: Chris was just hanging around
in the offices at whatever point where Len and Dave
Cockrum were coming up with the plot
for Giant-Size X-Men number 1.
And as it's told, Chris is the one
who suggested to them how they get rid of the menace in that--
Krakoa-- this huge island that turns out to be
a singular entity that's alive.
Len kept trying to shut the door in my face,
and I kept slipping in anyway.
And Len, at the same time, decided it was time to move on.
And for the chance to work with Dave Cockrum,
I basically threw him to the floor and said, I want it.
And Len said yes.
It really wasn't until Chris started writing the book
regularly and started to dig into it
that the underlying metaphors started
to really come to the fore.
The actual mutant experience as metaphor for human experience--
that really became the stock and trade of the X-Men,
and the real strength of what Chris
and his various collaborators did
didn't really develop fully and become
an integrated core part of that series
until they were working on it regularly.
CHRIS CLAREMONT: Len planted the first seeds.
The key element here was that I got a hold of it
from that very first issue.
Even though X-Men 94 was substantially Len's plot,
95 was mine.
96, for better or worse, was a necessary fill-in.
By the time Dave and I got our story underway--
which was sort of 97, but definitely 98 to 100--
we pretty much knew what we wanted to do
and the direction we wanted to go,
and that was where I think we all started dancing down
the road to what the X-Men evolved
into over the next 16 years.
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