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Giant-Size X-Men #1 might be one of the most important comics Marvel has ever published. It's been 50 years since it was published, and its impact can still be felt.

In April 2025 Marvel published 76 new comics, excluding reprints and trade paperback collections. Of these 76 new comics, 25 of them were X-Men (or X-Men adjacent) titles. This means that the X-Men represent a third of Marvel’s entire publishing line. This isn’t an anomaly. Marvel’s X-Books have been consistently popular for almost 50 years, so the publisher keeps producing more. The X-Men titles are such a big part of Marvel’s publishing line that it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. However, there was a time when Marvel wasn’t publishing any X-Men comics. The title had flatlined, and the team had no place in the Marvel Universe. Until Giant-Size X-Men came along.

By all accounts, it’s amazing that Marvel was able to pull it off. The book was an attempt to revive a title that had failed, and it was done partially using rejected Legion of Super-Heroes characters. The book was published during an editorial transition, and a miscommunication led to the original writer being replaced. Despite all this, Giant-Size X-Men was a hit, and it’s arguably responsible for the current state of the Marvel Universe.

Marvel's X-Men and the fall of the mutants

To fully appreciate the impact of Giant-Size X-Men #1, you have to understand the X-Men’s place in the Marvel Universe before 1975. X-Men was launched in 1963, with Stan Lee on story and Jack Kirby on art. When it came to Marvel Comics, it didn’t get more a-list than that. The team of Lee/Kirby was responsible for Fantastic Four, the comic that had revolutionized superhero comics, changing the course of Marvel history. Additionally, the team of Lee/Kirby also created Thor, the Hulk, Ant-Man, and the Avengers

However, the X-Men failed to make the same splash their contemporaries did. The book wasn’t a failure, but according to postal statements, X-Men was being outsold by Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales, Sgt. Fury, Avengers, Thor, Fantastic Four, and Amazing Spider-Man.

Reading those original X-Men comics, there was nothing truly spectacular about them. The team was melodramatic, much like the rest of the Marvel Universe. Magneto, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and Juggernaut were there, but most of the other adversaries were forgettable at best.

Jack Kirby left after 11 issues, and Stan Lee stopped writing after 19 issues. X-Men was one of the first superhero titles Lee stepped down from, while remaining on other books like Fantastic Four, Thor, and Spider-Man. It appears Lee was losing interest, and so were the readers.

Roy Thomas took over writing duties, but the book still struggled.

“It had never been a top-seller under Stan and Jack either,” Roy Thomas said during an interview with The Epic Marvel Podcast. “I think the high point was the Sentinel story just a couple of months before he gave it to me. But the fact remains, 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.”

When Neal Adams, a superstar artist at DC Comics, came over to Marvel, he asked editor Stan Lee to put him on the lowest-selling book. And thus, Adams became the new artist on X-Men. Adams’ style gave the book a boost, but it wasn’t enough to save it from cancellation. During an interview with Fantagraphics’ The X-Men Companion #1, Thomas recalled his run with Adams.

“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.”

The title was cancelled with X-Men #66 in 1970. Thomas believes that had he and Adams been allowed to continue their run, the team would’ve reached new heights. Due to a delay in sales numbers being reported, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman didn’t realize that X-Men sales were going up until after the series had been cancelled.

“Martin Goodman, the publisher at that time, was on an economy kick. He wanted to bring the book back but didn’t want to spend the money [laughter] so he just did reprints for a while,” Thomas recalled.

Months after its cancellation, Marvel resumed publishing X-Men, but only as a reprint title - reprinting old stories but with new issue numbers. The X-Men began to fall into obscurity. The Beast was given his own feature in the title Amazing Adventures before being added to the Avengers. Not only were new X-Men stories cancelled, but the team seemed to be breaking up. Essentially, Marvel was stripping the X-Men for parts, using their assets for other titles.

Thomas, who was now an editor at Marvel, had brainstormed ideas to bring the book back, but had never gotten around to it.

“It sort of gestated for a number of years as a reprint book, with my plan to bring them back as plainclothes heroes and various things. I always liked the X-Men, so there I was trying to revitalize them by putting them in plainclothes and making them more realistic, revitalize them and make them an original group,” Thomas said during a Fantagraphics interview.

From 1970 through 1975 Marvel didn’t publish any new X-Men stories. The characters would appear in other titles, but they no longer headlined their own adventures. Looking at the current state of the Marvel Universe, it’s unthinkable to imagine five years without a new X-Men story, but this was the reality of 1970-1975. Hard as it may be to believe, there was no place for the X-Men in the Marvel Universe.

Building the X-Men revamp creative team

Some of you may know the story of how Len Wein and Dave Cockrum revived the X-Men with Giant-Size X-Men #1. What you might not know is how the book was originally envisioned as an entirely different concept with a different writer. The original plan for the book would’ve had Mike Friedrich as the writer and would’ve involved the X-Men traveling the globe and teaming up with mutants from different nations.

The X-Men as we know them would not exist if Marvel hadn’t been looking to expand their overseas market. At the time, Marvel was owned by a conglomerate called Cadence Industries, and their president was looking for new ways to grow their international sales. This led to a meeting between then-Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, publisher Stan Lee, and Cadence president Al Landau. It’s not hyperbolic to say that this meeting changed the course of Marvel’s future in immeasurable ways.

Speaking to Fantagraphics, Roy Thomas recalled the meeting. “Al Landau, Jim Galton’s predecessor, was the president of Cadence back in that ’73, ’74 period right before I left. There was a meeting that he and Stan [Lee] and I were at – I suspect probably also John Verpoorten, maybe one or two other people – in which Landau mentioned that it would be a good idea to have an intentional team of some sort.”

“You see, he had his own company called Transworld, which at the time was reselling Marvel’s work overseas by the page. And he knew that if we, for example, had big markets in three or four countries and we had a team that had three or four characters in it, one from each country, we’d have a terrific hit on our hands overseas. So, the new X-Men was actually born to tap our foreign market.”

Thomas began developing an idea, which involved a few members of the original X-Men traveling the world recruiting new members.

“My original idea – I don’t think they used it, I never read enough issues closely to know – was that a couple of the members like Cyclops and Marvel Girl (with the others guest-starring occasionally) would have this giant ship, sort of Noah’s Ark thing, that would fly around with a portable cloud around it, and would hover over various countries in search of different X-Men that would get them into adventures.”

Another unused pitch would’ve had the group operating from one of Magneto’s old island bases.

“I think they would be based on the island that Magneto used to have that was invisible to tracking devices and radar which you couldn’t see,” artist Dave Cockrum recalled during a Fantagraphics interview. “I told Roy I’d be interested in doing something like that and so he said, ‘All right, I’ll consider you.’ Then he couldn’t write it himself, so he first asked Mike Friedrich."

Mike Friedrich recalled the sequence of events differently, believing it was he who brought artist Dave Cockrum on board. Speaking to Alter Ego magazine in 2003, Friedrich recalled his brief involvement with the X-Men revamp.

“I knew Dave Cockrum with whom I was distantly acquainted, had been showing an idea over at DC to revive the Blackhawks with a number of new characters, and I thought maybe he’d be interested instead in creating these characters for Marvel as X-Men. I know my intentions, which Roy and I clearly discussed at the time, were that I would work with Dave as the writer of the new series, if Marvel liked Dave’s characters.”

Unfortunately, development stalled, and during that time Mike Friedrich moved to California. What happened next is a bit more unclear. Cockrum believes that Thomas assigned Len Wein to be the writer of the book, but Thomas recalls that Wein didn’t become the writer until after he stepped down from his position as editor-in-chief. Various interviews point to Roy Thomas working alongside Len Wein to build the concept before he left Marvel, which lines up with Cockrum’s version of the events.

However it went down, Friedrich was out, and Wein was in.

“Roy couldn’t devote any attention to it and the whole thing kind of got shelved, but I had drawn up a whole bunch of characters. Time passed and Roy decided that now was the time to do something with this. He approached me again, Mike Friedrich was no longer available so Roy asked Len [Wein] if he wanted to handle it,” Cockrum recalled.

This came as a surprise to Friedrich, who was still expecting to write the book.

“The next thing I heard, but I don’t remember how, was that the new X-Men was going forward and Len was now writing it. At the time, I was pretty pissed off that I’d been cut out of a writing assignment that I had helped create. In recent years, my longtime friend Len has told me that he was unaware that I had been involved at the beginning, and I’m more than happy to believe him,” Friedrich said.

Some of this was due to chaos going on behind the scenes. Roy Thomas stepped down as editor-in-chief, and Len Wein was promoted in his place. The X-Men revamp, which had been Roy’s project, was now being handled by Wein. Speaking to The Epic Marvel Podcast, Roy Thomas recalled how the corporate musical chairs led to the book losing its original writer and how the original international concept was transformed.

“One of my relatively last acts as editor-in-chief in ’74 was to give that over to writer Mike Friedrich and artist Dave Cockrum and have them start working on it. It got stalled for a few months and then when Len Wein, when he was the editor-in-chief, he took over, and I don’t know if he really even knew that Mike Friedrich was the assigned writer, but if he did, he forgot it.”

“[Len] took over as the writer, although Dave was still the artist, and they brought the book back a little bit later, pretty much as we had designed it, except they lost that roadmap of using characters from countries where we wanted to sell more comic books. They had the Soviet Union and Kenya. These were not places we were going to sell a lot of comic books.”

Marvel had built their new creative team, and now it was time for the X-Men to build their new roster.

Marvel's The New Mutants

In many ways, you could thank DC Comics for the success of the X-Men. Many of the new X-Men characters had initially been developed by Dave Cockrum as possible additions to the Legion of Super-Heroes. However, DC wasn’t interested, paving the way for Marvel to get some of their most iconic characters.

When Len Wein and Dave Cockrum began putting together their new X-Men roster, they agreed that it would be mostly new characters.

“Everybody felt the original team didn’t sell well enough to support a new book. That may actually not be true,” Cockrum said.

“It had been cancelled with the old cast initially, and it wasn’t selling very well even when it was being done by Roy [Thomas] and Neal Adams and Tom Palmer,” Wein said. “If that group of talent couldn’t make that group of characters sell…Roy’s idea was that if we revived them we’d be doing them a la Blackhawks, with an international cast of characters.”

Wein and Cockrum knew they needed a legacy character to serve as continuity for the title. They decided it would be Cyclops, but not for the reasons you might expect.

“Dave had this new visor in mind he wanted to use, and I really liked it, and that was almost why we kept him: the new visor, because it looked so good,” Wein said.

For the new team members, Wein and Cockrum turned to a sketchbook of rejected Legion characters.

 “Nightcrawler’s costume when we first presented it was a lot more complex. We simplified the costume. There were more sections to it in terms of colors and things. Nightcrawler was just a visual presented to me by Dave. For years now, Dave has created characters in this book that he keeps in a big bound volume. What we essentially did was we sat down with this book and went through looking for visuals for the new members for the group,” Wein said.

Cockrum and his wife had come up with the idea for Nightcrawler after staying up all night during a typhoon. The storm and the darkness had created some scary visuals, setting Cockrum’s imagination on fire.

“Wouldn’t it be fun if he was a demon and he could teleport and run up walls and he howled like an animal…and all kinds of weird stuff,” Cockrum said.

In Cockrum’s original pitch, Nightcrawler was an actual demon, but he decided to move away from the concept after Jack Kirby created Etrigan the Demon in 1972.

“I proposed four new Legionnaires, and Nightcrawler was one of them. But Murray Boltinoff’s response was that he was too weird looking,” Cockrum said.

Storm was originally going to have an entirely different name and powerset.

“Storm was first conceived as a character called the Black Cat, with an entirely different set of powers. Roy, I think nixed the Black Cat – she’d have a little black cat cut out of her costume, entirely different costume – since he had come up with another cat of some sort – I don’t remember, maybe Hellcat – and not wanting duplications of her powers,” Wein said.  

“When I did up the original X-Men designs, one of the characters was called the Black Cat,” Cockrum recalled. “Take a look at Storm without the white hair and without the cape, and that’s essentially the Black Cat. She had dark hair which was sort of like Wolverine’s, tufted on top with the ear effect. And she could transform into a cat – I preferred the idea of a house-cat and I think we were talking about both a house-cat and a panther- and she could also half-transform into a humanoid cat.”

To solve the problem, Black Cat was combined with another member of the group, who had the power to control the weather.

“I had another character in the group, a male called either Tempest or Typhoon – I think Typhoon was his name – who was going to be a member of the group, and we decided that rather than have all these members, we would simply combine the essential visual of the Black Cat – because the face was essentially the same, with that kind of cat’s eyes – with the powers of Typhoon, and we created Storm,” Wein recalled.

According to Wein, the name Storm came from Roy Thomas before he stepped down as editor-in-chief.

“She was called Typhoon originally, and none of us liked it. It didn’t sound feminine enough, it sounded like something you spat rather than said, and we talked to Roy about it as he was going out the door.: ‘Well, she’s a mistress of the storm, she’s got all these powers, what do we call her?’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you simply call her Storm?” And we all went, “Jesus, Johnny Storm…” and he went, “So what?” and we just said, “Okay, you’re the boss,” and we called her Storm.”

Colossus wasn’t originally conceived as a Russian character, but his design looked Russian, so Wein and Cockrum decided to explore that idea.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Everybody was into the détente, and it was supposed to be an international group and the way I drew it, he looked like a Russian, so why the hell not,” Cockrum said.

“The initial conception of the character was done as a character for the Legion of Super-Heroes, when Dave was doing that book. He never had a chance to use him. We were at a party at Marv Wolfman’s house years ago and we were standing out on the balcony talking about characters, and he had wanted to make some changes in the Legion while he was drawing it, and he came up with the idea of doing a Russian character,” Wein said.

According to Cockrum, Len Wein originally saw Colossus as the lead character for the new team.  

“[Len] always felt the strong guy, the strong man, was the best character to be the lead character. And that was Len’s intent, and I suppose would’ve happened if Len had stayed on,” Cockrum recalled.

Wolverine was Wein’s contribution. Wein had co-created the character in the pages of The Incredible Hulk. At the time, he knew an X-Men revival was on the table, so he had written Wolverine to be a mutant.

“I decided to make him a teenage mutant, to be one of the new X-Men if it came to pass,” Wein said.

However, the original version of Wolverine was far different than the character we know today.

“He had no adamantium skeleton, he had nothing. He was a mutant only in terms of his ferocity and his animal senses. He was a hunter and a tracker and incredibly resilient. He was able to get the stuff kicked out of him by the Hulk and still be able to get back on his feet,” Wein recalled.

Wein also noted that he envisioned Wolverine and the other members to be teenagers, but other creators aged them up.  “[Wolverine] was 19 when I created him. Storm was 17,” Wein said.

Wolverine also had an entirely different origin, but it was rejected by publisher Stan Lee. Wein and Cockrum were building off the idea that Wolverine had once been a real wolverine that had mutated into a humanoid. The idea was deemed too gross for Marvel. “Stan didn’t like the idea of Wolverine being a mutated wolverine, either. Apparently, he tried it with Spider-Woman and thought it was so gross that he wouldn’t let us do it with Wolverine,” Cockrum said during a 2003 interview with Alter Ego.

Wein and Cockrum also developed a Native American character called Thunderbird. They also used Sunfire, a Japanese mutant introduced during Roy Thomas’ run. This rounded out the new team. Now it was time to send them on their first mission.
 

Along came prolific X-Men writer Chris Claremont

Now that Wein and Cockrum had a new X-Men team, it was time to write their first adventure. It’s interesting to note that Chris Claremont, the writer who would succeed Wein and write the team for over 17 years, was part of the original planning process.

“We originally came up with a different plot than what was used in Giant-Size X-Men #1,” Cockrum recalled. “There were several guys sitting with Len and me. I’m pretty sure Scott Edelman and Chris Claremont were there, and maybe a couple other guys. I was getting a little uncomfortable as the session went along, and finally said, ‘I’m not sure I like this plot very much.’ Len said, ‘God, I’m glad somebody finally said that!’ So, we tossed it out and started over.”

“Chris [Claremont] was my assistant, and since I was editor-in-chief, his desk was about 15 feet from my desk. He sort of basically heard what we were discussing, but he wasn’t really sitting in on the meetings,” Wein said.

A new plot was developed, wherein the original X-Men had disappeared on an island called Krakoa, with Cyclops being the sole member to escape. Cyclops and Charles Xavier then put together a new team, consisting of Colossus, Storm, Wolverine, Thunderbird, Sunfire, Nightcrawler, and Banshee.

The new team heads to Krakoa to rescue the original X-Men. Upon arriving, they discover that Krakoa is a living island that was feeding off of the captured X-Men. While plotting the story, Wein and Cockrum weren’t sure how to end it. That’s where Claremont came in.

“I think it was Chris Claremont who suggested the idea of sort of squirting the island out into space,” Wein said.

As longtime Marvel fans know, this wouldn’t be the last time Chris Claremont would brainstorm an X-Men ending.

The X-Men's Deadly Genesis 

Giant-Size X-Men #1 was published on April 1, 1975 with a cover date of May 1975. At the time, Marvel was experimenting with publishing larger books. The idea was that those titles would come out quarterly rather than monthly. This was a leftover from Roy Thomas’ tenure as editor-in-chief, which slowly went away after Len Wein took over.

The cover to Giant-Size X-Men #1 was penciled by Gil Kane, with Cockrum inking. Cockrum also penciled and inked the ghostly image of the original team in the background.

When Wolverine had appeared in The Incredible Hulk, the black ears on his mask were shorter. However, Kane got the proportions wrong on his cover sketch. This error would change the course of the character’s history. “Gil Kane drew [Wolverine’s mask] wrong at some point and we thought, ‘Gee, he looks sort of like Batman. That’s kind of neat.’ So, we kept that look,” Cockrum said.

Reader reactions were enthusiastic. Marvel received letters from fans praising the new characters, and sales weren’t bad either. Giant-Size X-Men was a hit, and that enthusiasm carried over to the main X-Men title.

X-Men, which had been a reprint title since issue 67, began printing new stories with issue 94. Those stories were initially written for future issues of Giant-Size X-Men, but Wein decided it was better to revive the original title. Although the title was bi-monthly at the time, it was too much for Wein, who was struggling with a full workload as editor-in-chief. Wein stepped away from the title, handing the writing reins over to Chris Claremont, who would remain with the book for over 17 years.

“There are very few strips that I regret giving up in my career and that’s one of them,” Wein said. “I’m really sorry I didn’t stick with it. I don’t know if it would have become the success it became if I had done it; it may not have been. I was editor-in-chief of Marvel and I was putting in 25-hour days. I will personally testify to the fact that the last 12 pages of the first Giant-Size were written at my desk in my office as an all-nighter, and that’s crazy. I couldn’t put in those kind of hours. My brain was falling out.”

Mutant Mayhem

The new X-Men was did well, but it was not an overnight success. The book remained bi-monthly for two years before sales figures justified making it monthly. The book had a dedicated following, and the audience grew. Cockrum left the title and was replaced by John Byrne in X-Men #108. For the next few years, Claremont and Byrne would produce some of the most iconic X-Men stories ever published, including ‘The Dark Phoenix Saga’ and ‘Days of Future Past.’

During the ‘80s, Uncanny X-Men (as the title had been renamed) had grown in readership, and was now regularly topping Marvel’s sales charts. It had gone from being one of Marvel’s worst-selling titles to being the crown jewel of the comic industry. Spin-off titles soon followed, paving the way for a successful animated series, and a film series which has grossed over $6 billion. The 1991 comic X-Men #1 holds the record for best-selling American single-issue comic book of all time in its first printing.

X-Men continues to be a big earner for Marvel, which is why so much of their publishing line consists of X-Men books.

While most of the credit goes to the readership built over Claremont’s 17-year run, none of that would have happened if Len Wein and Dave Cockrum hadn’t resurrected the franchise with Giant-Size X-Men #1. To use a metaphor, X-Men had flatlined, and Wein/Cockrum had resuscitated the patient, while Claremont, Byrne, Terry Austin, and their other collaborators nursed it back to full health.

Giant-Size X-Men changed everything. It introduced us to Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler. It placed Wolverine in the X-Men for the first time, and redesigned his mask, creating his signature look. Without Giant-Size X-Men, there never would have been a 1992 X-Men animated series. Without Giant-Size X-Men, Deadpool & Wolverine wouldn’t have been the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

Consider what the Marvel Universe would be like today if the X-Men had faded into obscurity in 1970. Then consider just how big the X-Men’s footprint is now, not just in the Marvel Universe, but for the comic book industry as a whole.

Next to Fantastic Four #1, it’s probably the most important comic Marvel has ever published. It’s a true nexus point in Marvel history.

Join Popverse in our own little X-Mansion as we cover just about everything you need to know about the X-Men. Learn how Marvel's mighty mutants are classified by power, or why the Krakoan Age of comics is coming to an end. And once you're done with those, keep up with the characters' big screen outings via Popverse's X-men movie watch order.