An added bonus is the alternative cover for # 56, a selection of black and white original pages and Neal Adams’ colour schemes for some of the pages.

These tales have been reprinted in a UK annual and a couple times in the USA long before the latest giant reprint I have in my hands. The end of the Pharaoh as he turned into the gigantic Living Monolith, the return of the Sentinels, Karl Lykos turning into the tragic Sauron and a second visit to the Savage Land and the return of Magneto was a magnificent pace, topped only by a logical return of Professor X. However, my jaw continued to drop with the pace of these stories. The apparent feud where you stayed local only to one of the Big Two was a contributing factor and poor distribution in the early 70s meant I never saw Neal Adams later work on Batman and Green Lantern until much later because comicshops, let alone UK fandom, didn’t exist at the time. I was always an X-Men fan and the opening splash of X-Men # 56 with Angel flying wings spread over a vehicle containing the rest of the team and a captured Living Pharaoh towards an Egyptian temple was jaw-dropping. Eventually, the title got resurrected with new material and…well, the rest is history. Later evidence showed that sales had jumped up and so it came back reprinting the early issues to keep it on the shelves.

The X-Men was then put in his lap with writer Roy Thomas scripting and they did 9 issues, missing out only on 2 before the title ended on # 66.Ĭirculation figures were a bit nebulous and often late back then and ‘X-Men’ was cancelled before they came in on their run showing a significant improvement. Comicbook artist Neal Adams wanting to come over to Marvel Comics from DC Comics did not want to take on a best-selling title but one that wasn’t. Long before the X-Men became ‘All-New, All-Different’, back in the 1960s, ‘The Uncanny X-Men’ were on the verge of cancellation through lack of sales.

Roy thomas neal adams