By the way I found this in an old comic book, who knew that Professor X once moonlighted as a Marvel huckster?

While Dave was drawing the book, as most of you know, sales kept inching up, but he could not handle a monthly grind, and Archie Goodwin, then EiC, knew the book needed to go monthly to turn the corner and get the sales engine really chugging along. That was where I came in, along with Terry Austin.

Sales did not explode with our arrival, but they kept climbing steadily, in small increments, and that continued after I left. The real supernova effect kicked in when Paul Smith arrived -- tho, in all honesty, that might have been just a coincidence. Full credit to Smitty, where credit is due, but this was also the same time the speculators started "noticing" the X-MEN.

I kind of got lucky in a way in that when I started reading all the Byrne back issues were too expensive for me to buy so I never read them until  years later and all I had to compare the current issues (@230) to were the back issues I could afford (@150-200) so the current stuff to me seemed really awesome by comparison. I think by then it was even going bi-weekly for short periods.

It was definitly the 'Death of Phoenix' that cemented the X-Men in my mind. I had been loving and reading the reprints in Rampage and it had been my favourite comic for a number of years at that point. However, once Rampage had got to Dark Phoenix, that was it, I decided to start buying the American versions.

This led to a fun period of hunt the issues down (At that point the issue on the stands was Kitty's fairy tale - 153) and I managed to get all the issues between 137 and 153 over a period of a few months. This was helped by what appeared to be a glut of back issues coming on to the newstands for some unknown reason. A poxy little, local newsagent chain seemed to have bought a load of Marvel back issues and was stocking them. I spent a few days going around every store buyinig up whole swathes of Marvel comics. Got the originals for Dark Phoenix, Days of Future Past part 1 (Had to get 142 and 142 through mail order) and a lot of Cockrum's second run up to 153.

Ah, those were good days.

edit to add - all those issues were at cover price - 35p for issue 137 16 months after it was published.

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I'll have to send Shooter a note asking him to forward to me the checks he must have withheld, then, since that figure in no way tallies with my bank account. Does he owe me interest, do you think?

(Anyone who wants to test Shooter's math can do so fairly easily. The Statement of Ownership in the books was usually accurate. The royalty payments were 4% of the cover price, divided among the creative team as 1.5% to the writer, 1.5% to the penciler, and 1% to the inker. An additional 1% was paid to the creators of books, such as on ALPHA FLIGHT. This was paid only after the first 100,000 units sold, so a book that sold, say, 150,000 would pay royalties on 50,000. Royalties started to kick in some time in 1983, as I recall. So, figure out which issues I worked on during the time Shooter was EiC after the royalties arrived, calculate the payments based on the sales, cover price, and jobs I did, and see how close you come to $10,000,000.)

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The reference would be to the Wolfman lawsuit, in 1999, since that was the only time Shooter and I were ever in a courtroom at the same time. Shooter is perhaps forgetting that "The Comics Journal" printed the transcript of that trial, so it is easy enough to check what was actually said.

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Shooter likes to promote the myth that it was he, and he alone who brought in royalties -- or "incentives" as they were called at Marvel -- to the comicbook industry. This overlooks two important details: the royalties arrived first at DC, and Mike Hobson, as Shooter's BOSS, was the one who signed off on the policy at Marvel.

Nathan Greno: "...at least "too cute" for me. "Bamf doll"? Nightcrawler has a hot, flight attendant girlfriend? Feels like the concept of the book is lost imho."

I dunno, I think one of the things that made the book popular was the playing against type.  The strongman being an artist, the "demon" who would rather play at being Errol Flynn than focus on his appearance, etc. 

It does make me wonder how the book did in the alternate reality where Len Wein never left.  From Giant-Size #1, I suspect he would have gone for a less offbeat approach.