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My idea there was that X was not fully recovered from his mental battle with the Xnoxx. He was sliding around in time in his own head, so sometimes he was in the present, sometimes in the past. Note his comment when he encounters Jean in a variant of her original school uniform.

This was my way of setting up an in context explanation for the X-Men sometimes appearing in their old uniforms while their book was in reprint limbo. They had adopted the old suits as a way to ease X back into his proper state of mind.

(The real world reason was that the X-Men were in their school uniforms in the reprints, and Marvel editorial felt it would be confusing to readers if the characters also turned up in other costumes in other titles. Not an altogether invalid concern, since many readers demonstrated that they did not understand titles like X-MEN, MARVEL TALES and MARVEL'S GREATEST COMICS were reprints.)

I pointed out that the reprint titles were selling just as well as the regular books and, as noted, many readers did not even realize those books were reprints. Since Marvel had literally decades worth of reprint material to draw on (no pun!) strikes did not seem like a very good idea.

The idea died away swiftly enough, anyway.

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* Around this same time, one writer declared his intention to produce deliberately inferior work, until Marvel started paying him what he thought he was worth. "The fans will support me!" he said.

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Yup. And the black areas are filled in with the clone tool.

The actual page is practically blank!

"Thus, a few different facts were revealed in subsequent issues during Larry Hama's run on Wolverine. Hama famously doesn't plot that much of his stories out ahead of time, so someone must have just told him about this issue before he started writing Wolverine. Rather than coating the skeleton with adamantium, the adamantium was revealed to have bonded with the bones to form a new sort of substance that was different than just metal-covered bone. Secondly, this new substance was revealed to be a new form of adamantium, known as beta adamantium. Beta adamantium allowed for bones to breathe like they would in nature while still having the other properties of adamantium, such as the practically indestructible nature of the metal. Pretty neat fix, huh?..."

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Reads like Shooter on acid.

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We actually received one letter* from a fan who wanted us to do a book about the ANAD X-Men in the style of CLASSIC X-MEN. The writer did not realize CXM was a reprint book.

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* In those days Shooter maintained that each letter "represented" 16,000 readers who had the same ideas but didn't write in.