Why Marvel Comics canceled the flagship X-Men title in 1970, and made plans to breakup the franchise

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Today, the X-Men are one of the cornerstones of the Marvel Universe. Roughly one-third of all the new comics Marvel publishes these days is X-Men or X-Men related. So it’s hard to imagine a time when Marvel wasn’t publishing countless X-titles, but that’s just what happened in 1970-1975.

If you go back to the late ’60s and early 70s, the original X-Men title – launched in 1963 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – was never one of the company’s top-selling titles. It was consistently outsold by flagship titles such as the Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, and even titles such as Sgt. Fury, Strange Tales, and Tales to Astonish. By 1970, its relatively mid readership was dropping even further, and its creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, had already left years prior. Roy Thomas, who had taken over writing duties, felt the series was floundering.

“It had always been the weaker of Marvel’s titles. It was the last one to go from bi-monthly to monthly. I don’t think I brought anything particularly new to it. It sold okay. It really wasn’t going anywhere,” Thomas said during an interview with The Epic Marvel Podcast. 

Neal Adams joined Thomas on these issues as penciler, and while he boosted sales, it wasn’t enough to save the title.

“It had actually been selling well right around the time that Neal [Adams] and I had finished up doing our last few issues. Two or three issues around that time sold rather well, and the others didn’t sell that badly, just not quite well enough for the book to survive,” Roy Thomas said in Fantagraphics’ The X-Men Companion #1.

In 1970, Marvel cancelled the title with X-Men #66. According to Thomas, a delay in sales reporting made then-publisher Martin Goodman realize that the numbers were going up. Realizing that X-Men could still make money but not wanting to spend money on creating new stories, Goodman resumed X-Men as a reprint title, instead reprinting old stories but with new issue numbers.

From 1970 to 1975, Marvel didn’t publish any new X-Men stories. The team would make guest appearances in other titles, such as Marvel Team-Up #4, but the group no longer had its own title. Not only was their book cancelled, but the team seemed to be breaking up. Incredible Hulk #150 reveals that Havok and Polaris had left the team. Beast left the X-Men in Amazing Adventures #11 and joined the Avengers in Avengers #137.

Marvel Comics was essentially stripping the X-Men for parts and using the different pieces for other teams and titles. All that would change with the publication of Giant-Size X-Men #1, but that’s a story for another time.

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