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1968: Marvel Comics is doing well, with most of its superhero titles seeing rising sales. Alas, there is an exception: the X-Men. This team of superpowered teenagers has a devoted cult following, but the majority of comics readers seem to find them rather blah.

In part this is because the concept -- WASP teenage superheroes at a private school -- is sort of dopey. Mostly, though, it's because of remarkably uneven writing and art. In two years the X-men have three writers and five artists. And the main writer -- Roy Thomas -- somehow can't seem to find the right "voice" for the team.

In an effort to boost sales, Marvel moves exciting new talent Neal Adams onto the book. Working with Adams perks Thomas up; the two men have already been working together on Marvel's Avengers title, and they like and respect each other. In 1969, they produce half a dozen or so good-to-excellent issues (X-Men 57-63 IMS).

Alas, it's too late. Sales stop falling but don't rise, and in early 1970 Marvel cancels the X-Men.

This will turn out to be a well-disguised blessing. In 1975 Marvel will reboot the X-Men with a new writer (Len Wein, quickly followed by Chris Claremont) and a new team of characters... Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and such. And the rest is history.

So, POD: Marvel moves Neal Adams' to the original X-Men a bit earlier -- six months, say. And this is enough to move the series from "marginal failure" to "marginal success. The original X-Men are not cancelled.They continue rolling along through the '70s -- perhaps with a new member or two and some new costumes, but otherwise as the same old teenage misfits.

No New X-Men, ever. The Wolverine character may still appear, but will never get the Claremont makeover, and will almost certainly remain a rather minor character. (1)

The ripple effects are... significant. The NXM were pretty hugely influential, at least within superhero comics.

To give some specific examples, Claremont and Byrne did the first "dystopian future interacting with our present" storyline ("Days of Future Past", New X-Men 141-142, 1981). That trope -- and its dopey kid brother, the dystopian alternate timeline -- became first an industry standard, then so overdone that nobody could stand it anymore. Even Alan Moore wrote one.

Characters with complicated pasts and /so much angst/. Evil parents and siblings. Soap-opera interactions. Plots that were revealed oh-so-slowly, months and years at a time. (Do you know, it took Claremont nearly 50 issues to reveal his complete version of Wolverine -- fast-healing, adamantium skeleton, and all? And at that point he'd just barely started to hint about the character's past.) Riffs on homophobia and racism. None of these were wholly new, but NXM made them wildly successful, and for a while everyone was copying them.

N.B., Claremont's NXM was in some respects a negative influence. IMO more good than bad, but it certainly had an awful impact on the writing of dialogue for a while. And there were a lot of comics with captions and dialogue crowding off the page. We won't even mention the run of "let's make this character female" female characters.

Meanwhile in this TL the Plain Old X-Men have a brief revival under Thomas and Neil Adams, and then get handed over to... ohhh... Steve Englehart. For a while. Then one or two other forgettable creators, then a really long run under Bill Mantlo. They find a niche as an OK second-string superhero team, sort of like the Defenders or the Doom Patrol. Are cancelled at least once, but come back, not so much from popular demand as from inertia.

I'm not sure what happens to Chris Claremont. OTL he was writing just one rather minor title -- Iron Fist, with equally noob John Byrne -- when he was given New X-Men. The fact that editor Len Wein gave the book to such a young and inexperienced writer suggests what a low priority it was. (2) But anyhow... if he doesn't get something, he may not last; while he and Byrne did some good work on Iron Fist, the title faded and died anyway. Absent New X-Men, Claremont might have left comics altogether.

By 1980 or so, the lack of New X-Men is going to be making a difference in the comics world. The title was hugely popular, and was the locomotive that pulled Marvel out of its 1978 financial crisis. I don't think Marvel dies without New X-Men, but it's certainly a lot shakier. So this TL sees a weaker Marvel, which means in turn a somewhat slower growth of the retail specialty comic shop. The end result (almost all comics sales through shops) is the same, but it takes a bit longer to get there.

By the mid '80s, we'll also be missing all the New X-Men spinoffs (New Mutants, etc. etc.) and copycats (Teen Titans).

The development of the graphic novel is also set back. OTL the first graphic novel was Will Eisner's _A Contract With God_, but this was not a great commercial success, and nobody hurried to copy it. The big breakout for the GN was _God Loves, Man Kills_ in 1982. It was just an X-Men annual on steroids, but it sold like nobody's business, and the GN format was up and running.

What else?

Doug M.


(1) Wolverine was first proposed in 1973 because Marvel had just ramped up its distribution in Canada, and thought it would be a good idea to have an explicitly Canadian super-character.

It's easy to forget how dumb the original Wolverine was. He didn't have fast healing, and his adamantium claws weren't part of his skeleton. And his original secret origin was not that he was a mutant. Rather, it was -- it's almost physically painful to write this -- it was that he was an actual wolverine, raised to human form and sentience by the High Evolutionary and then turned loose. Really. It was Len Wein's idea. Claremont spiked it and came up with the berserker short guy. We owe Claremont that, people. We owe him that.

(2) Claremont was just 24. It's oddly difficult to find much information on his life before he started writing comics.

(3) At this point a bunch of people will be getting ready to yell about all the graphic novels that came before "God Loves, Man Kills": A Contract With God, Blackmark, the Lee Silver Surfer hardcover, the giant DC vs. Marvel issues, Buck Godot... GLMK itself was "Marvel Comics Graphic Novel #5". (And a no-prize to anyone who can name #s 1 through 4.)

Well, yeah sure... but there was nothing about any of those to make a publisher sink some serious money into marketing and distribution. The graphic novel medium did not have a major commercial success until GLMK

GLMK sold nearly /half a million copies/. That was probably more than any six other "graphic novels" combined had, up to then. And it made a buttload of money. It was to graphic novels what Ford's Model T was to cars. It opened up the possibility of GNs being their own medium, spun off from comics but significantly different in form, content, marketing, and distribution. So, no GLMK, things are different.
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