In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head to April 1975 for the debut of the All-New, All-Different X-Men in Giant-Sized X-Men #1!
It’s weird. Obviously, I had to feature this issue for the «50 years ago» entry in this month’s Look Back, but, man, it’s kind of weird, right? What more could I possibly tell you about Giant-Size X-Men #1 that you don’t already know? I guess we could sort of lean into that, maybe? So for this Look Back look at April 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men #1 (by Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, and Sam Grainger), I’ll go through my Comic Book Legends Revealed columns, and find each of the various legends that I did on the topic!
Suffice it to say, though, that this is is one of the most historic comic books of all-time, and it ultimately took the X-Men from the point of not even having an active comic book series (their book was reprint-only) to becoming THE MOST POPULAR comic book series in the whole country for well over a decade! Basically from 1983 through, like, 2001 or so.
Was Thunderbird invented to die?
From Comic Book Legends Revealed #20, I debunked a longstanding rumor that Thunderbird was always intended to die. He WASN’T intended to die, but it IS true that he was never meant to last as a member of the X-Men!
Peter Sanderson, in his iconic X-Men Companion book, asked Cockrum about the original plans for Thunderbird:
SANDERSON: «Now was it originally intended that Thunderbird would really be a member of the team? When was it decided to kill him off?»
COCKRUM: «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.»
Was Colossus intended to be Ferro Lad's brother?
As you might know already, a number of the X-Men were based on old designs Dave Cockrum was hoping to work into the Legion of Super-Heroes. One legend is that Colossus was intended to be Ferro Lad’s brother.
As I noted in Comic Book Legends Revealed #51, that wasn’t the case. In Glen Cadigan’s excellent The Legion Companion, he answered the question simply enough…
Q. True or False: your design of Colossus was originally intended to be used as Ferro lad’s brother.
Dave Cockrum: False.
Was Nightcrawler nearly a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes?
In Comic Book Legends Revealed #60, I explained that while Dave Cockrum developed a number of these ideas for what became the X-Men while working on Legion of Super-Heroes, what’s interesting is that, while Nightcrawler may have originally meant to be a Legion of Superheroes member, right before Cockrum left DC, that was not going to be where Cockrum was going to use him. Instead, Cockrum had bigger plans for Nightcrawler, as a member of a brand-new team set in the Legion universe called the Outsiders.
Was Storm an amalgamation of MULTIPLE characters?
In Comic Book Legends Revealed #75 (as an aside, the column was originally Comic Book URBAN Legends Revealed, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. When I did my book based on the column, my editor at Penguin said that she thought Comic Book Legends Revealed sounded better, and I agreed, so I dropped «Urban»), I wrote about the origins of Storm.
When Dave Cockrum sat down with Len Wein to develop the characters who would be members of the new X-Men, Cockrum used a number of characters he had already designed. When it came to Storm, the character who became Storm was originally a number of Cockrum character designs. First, there was Trio and Quetzal, who Cockrum took their looks and gave it to a character named Black Cat, who could shape-shift. Then there was a character named Typhoon, who controlled the weather. Cockrum and writer Len Wein decided to merge the two, and suddenly «Black Cat» had the weather powers that Typhoon had. A slight change in the costume, a cape and a new white hairdo, and thus, Storm was born!!
Why does Wolverine have a cowl?
As I noted in Comic Book Legends Revealed #303, people might have noticed that Wolverine’s costume changed in Giant-Size X-Men #1. As I noted in the column, over the years, perhaps since he was such a great costume designer in his own right, Dave Cockrum has been given credit for doing the re-design on Wolverine’s outfit. However, the truth is a lot odder than that.
You see, when the comic was penciled by Cockrum, he drew Wolverine the same way he appeared originally. Gil Kane, though, who was drawing the cover, accidentally messed the outfit up (or perhaps drew it differently willfully, I dunno) and drew Wolverine with the distinctive cowl he has had ever since. Rather than fix Kane’s mistake, though, Cockrum decided that Kane’s version looked so good that he decided to adopt it himself! Cockrum then went back through the comic that he had penciled and while inking the book, he inked Wolverine so that his cowl would match Kane’s design.
Who were the THREE X-Men who weren't intended to stay on the X-Men past this first story?
As I noted in this Comic Book Legends Revealed (long after I stopped numbering them)
One of the problems with the original story for the debut of the All-New, All-Different X-Men in Giant-Size X-Men #1 is the fact that Len Wein and Dave Cockrum worked on the story for a long time. It went through a lot of variations. Work lasted so long on Giant-Size X-Men #1 and what was going to be Giant-Size X-Men #2 (but instead became X-Men #94 and 95) that Len Wein ultimately had to give up the title (due to his increased duties upon becoming the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics while working on the story and thus having to choose between dropping the Hulk or dropping the X-Men) before the stories even all saw publication!
Because of that, there has been some confusion over the years between what Cockrum recalls and what Wein recalls, most notably when it comes to Thunderbird, as Wein is pretty sure that they were always intending on having Thunderbird die off, while Cockrum is unsure.
What it sounds like is that Thunderbird’s death might not have been ALWAYS in the cards, but just decided very early on. It sounds like the original plan was never to include all of the new X-Men in the series going forward, but the debate is whether that non-inclusion was always meant to be due to death or not.
In speaking to the X-Men Companion‘s Peter Sanderson back in 1981, Cockrum recalled it being more of a matter where early on, they were going to have a few character «flunk» the original test for the new X-Men and they decided that Thunderbird should be one of them. The other two, though, were going to be Sunfire and…Banshee!
However, they then decided against the «flunking» X-Men idea, so now they had to come up with another way to get rid of Sunfire, who they didn’t want on the team at all. So he just left in a huff. And then they decided on the whole «let’s just shock everyone and kill Thunderbird off» idea. But Banshee somehow made it through! Of course, for Banshee to remain, they decided that they had to revamp the character’s look, as the original take on Banshee was far too…bizarre-looking. So Cockrum re-designed him to look like a normal guy (also de-aging him slightly, as Wein and Cockrum both agreed that it didn’t make sense to have him look like a PEER of Charles Xavier)…
How did Chris Claremont have a secret assist on the first story of the All-New, All-Different X-Men?
In this old Comic Book Legends Revealed, I wrote about how Chris Clarmeont had a secret role in Giant-Size X-Men #1
Giant Size X-Men #1’s creative team was Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, however, that was also the LAST issue that the two worked on together just by themselves, as Chris Claremont was brought on board to script the second issue of the series (which went from being a Giant-Size X-Men #2 to being a two-parter in X-Men #94 and #95). Then Claremont took over the series by himself and he became the writer of the book for the next sixteen plus years, defining the characters and netting a spot in my book as the most important person or thing that you need to know about the X-Men.
However, did you know that Claremont was actually kind of sort of there right from the beginning?
As you may or may not know, the All-New, All-Different X-Men were introduced when a powerful mutant captured the original X-Men and then Professor X put together a new team to save them on the island where the powerful mutant had the original X-Men captive. As it turned out, though, in a major twist, the island itself WAS the powerful mutant, Krakoa!
So they fought against the entire island until they defeated it. HOW they defeated it, however, was thought up by Chris Claremont!
Claremont described the situation to Peter Sanderson in The X-Men Companion…
Len and Dave Cockrum were evolving the new X-Men concept. And they’d be sitting in Len’s office… plotting it. I would be sitting there just outside proofreading. I’d wander in and say, ‘Can I listen?’ and they’d say ‘Sure.’ They’d evolved the whole first issue of Giant-Size except the ending. They needed a way to get rid of Krakoa utilizing the powers of the X-Men. I was thinking about it and I thought, well, we’ve got Lorna Dane, who has since become Polaris, here, and her power is magnetism, so why don’t you just have her slice across the magnetic lines of force, the gravimetric lines of force? And then the speed of the Earth’s rotation on its axis would just squirt it up and away it would go. In a sense Krakoa would stay in place while the Earth just rotated around its axis and revolved around the sun away from it. And off he goes into the wild blue yonder. It would be like taking a bar of soap and watching it go Pfffttt! right the air. . Len thought it was a great idea and Dave came up with the visuals and that was that.»
And so that was the ending…
Happy 50th anniversary, All-New, All-Different X-Men!
If you folks have any suggestions for May (or any other later months) 2015, 2000, 1975 and 1950 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
