Popverse's top stories

• Five Nights at Freddy's creator Scott Cawthon almost made Foxy an animatronic beaver. A previous flop made him change his mind
• MEMBERS ONLY: Marvel Studios is quietly learning, mistakes and all, how to replace their heroes with Fantastic Four: First Steps, Ironheart, Captain America 4, and Daredevil: Born Again [Marvel Matters]
• WATCH: How Marvel's Ironheart is related to Iron Man: The Riri Williams/Tony Stark connection, explained [Lore Corner]

---

It might surprise you to learn that one of Marvel’s most iconic teams has a lot of DC Comics in their DNA. When Marvel revamped the X-Men in 1975, they looked to two DC teams for inspiration. In fact, some of the X-Men’s most iconic members are rejected DC Comics characters.

The idea began when Marvel’s parent company, Cadence Industries, was looking to expand its overseas market. Roy Thomas, who was Marvel’s editor-in-chief at the time, recalls a faithful meeting where the idea was born.

“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,” Thomas recalls during an interview for Fantagraphics’ The X-Men Companion.

“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.”

When Thomas recruited Len Wein and Dave Cockrum to pencil the project, he compared them to the Blackhawks, DC’s team of World War II-era pilots with an international roster. Len Wein recalls how Thomas initially made the pitch.

“Roy’s idea was that if we revived them, we’d be doing them a la Blackhawks, with an international cast of characters,” Wein said during an interview for Fantagraphics’ The X-Men Companion.

“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,” Thomas said.

According to Mike Friedrich, who was the original writer before being replaced by Wein, some of Cockrum’s character designs had originally been conceived for a rejected Blackhawks pitch.

“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,” Friedrich said during a 2003 Alter Ego magazine interview.

You might notice that some of the heroes introduced in Giant-Size X-Men #1 came from different countries, such as Kenya (Storm), Russia (Colossus), and Germany (Nightcrawler).

However, the Blackhawks weren’t the only DC team the new X-Men borrowed from. Colossus, for example, was originally conceived as a Legion of Super-Heroes character. “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.

The X-Men slowly moved away from the Blackhawks-inspired pitch, losing the traveling-the-globe angle. However, the team’s diverse cast remained, and helped Giant-Size X-Men #1 become a big hit.

Just think, if DC hadn’t rejected these characters, the Marvel Universe would be a different place today.

---

Want to know what's coming up next in pop culture? Check out Popverse's guides to:

• Upcoming movies
• Upcoming TV shows
• Upcoming comics
• Upcoming games
• Upcoming fiction books
• Upcoming comic conventions