|
This was Neal Adams' first cover for X-Men, done at a time
when it was viewed in the office as an endangered book, teetering on the
precipice of cancellation. Some would later say that it was selling
decently but that the returned copies — the ones unsold by wholesalers and
returned for credit — were being tallied incorrectly, and returns on other
Marvel titles were being tallied for X-Men.
In any case, the
important thing to know is that the goal at that point was the shake up the
X-Men title and try to make it different. To that end, Adams designed
a cover with the title characters strapped to their logo...a cover that was
quickly vetoed by Publisher Martin Goodman, who said it made the title of the
book too difficult to read. One wonders if that might not have been a good
thing, considering the fact that he believed readers already weren't rushing to buy a book called
X-Men.
Adams, trying to get something special on the cover, had to settle
for the issue's villain just holding the logo. At one point at DC, this
kind of thing was forbidden and not because it made the title of the publication
hard to read. It made it difficult for foreign publishers to reprint the
cover if they had to figure out how to work their local logos into an existing
drawing.
|