X-MEN: The "Hot Artists".
By Pindaros.

The popularity of The X-Men can be attributed to a number of factors: the writing of Chris Claremont, which emphasized character development and interpersonal relationships; the vivid characters themselves; the range of settings for stories, from The Savage Land to other galaxies; the social drama of the mutants, reflecting in various ways adolescent alienation, prejudice and the importance of duty. And of course, for most of its history, the art in the X-Men books has been of a very high quality.

It's certainly not unusual that extremely popular comics should have excellent art. After all, it has been in Marvel's interest to do everything possible to keep the books popular, and certainly an artist interested in a wide audience would hardly refuse to illustrate an X-book. What is surprising, given the importance of the writing for the franchise, is the way in which the X-books became such a significant battlefield in the struggle of a number of artists to take control of the superhero industry.

In a number of ways, X-MEN and its spin-off titles have been the birthplace of the "hot artist," the comic artist whose work is so popular with fans that his name alone assures good sales of a book. The institution of royalty payments in the comic industry, and the formation of Image Comics have made the "hot artist" more than a compliment; for better or worse, artists such as Michael Turner and J. Scott Campbell have become central elements of the mainstream comics industry.

As the last of the heroes developed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the X-Men perhaps ought to have been set up on a firm ground of exceptional art. Yet it took some time for the original book to find itself visually, since in X-MEN, Kirby never displayed the extravagance characteristic of his art in THOR and THE FANTASTIC FOUR.

>The writing developed some of its trademark themes of romance and alienation in these early years, but the book truly came into its own in 1969, when it was put in the hands of Roy Thomas and Neal Adams. In this run, the last before the title was turned over to reprints of earlier issues, Thomas wrote emotion-wracked dramas worthy of his mentor Stan Lee, which Adams infused with a burning energy that all but leapt off the page. In many ways this run was a preview of the X-MEN to come, a melodramatic soap opera that was also an incredible visual treat.

In many respects, Neal Adams and the artists of his generation, including Jim Steranko, Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor-Smith, were the original "hot artists." That they did not enjoy the power and wealth that their successors do had more to do with the nature of the comic business in those years than with the popularity of their art. Two factors prevented their financial success from equaling their prestige amongst fans. First, the nearly total dominance of the industry by Marvel and DC encouraged the companies to emphasize characters and titles rather than artists. Second, the comic book distribution practices at the time were at best wildly inefficient, and at worst systematically corrupt.

While the problems caused by the former circumstance have been widely recognized, the latter situation, although long decried by Adams and others, is only now being fully documented. In particular, an article by Robert L. Beerbohm in the Fall 1999 issue of COMIC BOOK ARTIST sheds a great deal of light on the problem.

The difficulties largely resulted from the fact that comic book distribution was a two-tiered system. On the national level, DC owned a distribution network, which Marvel also used, which sent the comics to local distributors, and reported sales and returns to the comic companies. The local level was a different story. Because the newsstands sold large quantities of time-sensitive materials at very low prices, distributors destroyed rather than directly returned what wasn't sold. The accompanying difficulties in documenting actual sales itself created problems for publishers. It also made newsstand distribution very appealing to businessmen with sources of income they didn't want reported to authorities, since those profits could be attributed to newsstand sales. The effect of such practices, known as "money-laundering," on popular entertainment has been well-documented for the recording industry by Fredric Dannen in his book HIT MEN.

Since the national distributors refunded the local distributors for reported returns rather than actual returns, there was a certain appeal for these businessmen in overreporting returns. Even better for them was if they had another buyer for the comics other than the newsstands. In this case, the entire transaction was off the books, and there was no one to say whether the comics had been sold or destroyed, as there was if they were actually delivered to a newsstand. The rise of comic fandom in the late sixties provided just such a black market. Enterprising fans who had previously only been able to get small numbers of issues of popular comics, and these often irregularly, discovered that the distributors were more than happy to sell them whole shipments of these titles. Suddenly finding themselves in possession of the only copies of these books in an entire geographical region, these fans could sell them at a significant profit.

It's hard to get any sense of the damage that this situation did to the American comic industry, but it may have been nearly as great as that brought on by the imposition of the Comics Code. The comics of the late sixties, especially those from Marvel, were a pop culture phenomenon, as important to certain portions of the counterculture as rock music and drugs. While most comic book histories blame an aging audience and deteriorating quality, corrupt distribution practices may have been more to blame. At the exact moment when ambitious new creators were taking the field and maturing fans were looking for new visual and narrative feasts, distribution became a particularly weak link in the chain between them. Because books by star artists were so much in demand by this new audience, they were that much more likely to be sold under the table by distributors, and thus to be cancelled by comic companies looking at high "return" rates.

As a book published by Marvel and drawn by a star artist, X-MEN was particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, and this may well have been the reason for the lackluster sales of the book. Fortunately, the notion of the title as a site of revolutionary change in superhero comics seems to have been established in the minds of those who got to follow that run. When Len Wein brought the title back in 1975 with a new cast, the memory of the Thomas-Adams run hovered over the book: the writer, Chris Claremont, had worked with Thomas, even earning a writing credit on the book in 1969, and artist Dave Cockrum was one of a number of artists, including Mike Grell and Jim Aparo, whose work would be unimaginable without Adams' example.

Nevertheless, in the early years Claremont's contribution was decisive in the success of the new series, at least inasmuch as it's impossible to conceive of another writer showing as strong a dramatic sense. Cockrum was crucial initially for his creativity in designing new characters, but with the new team established, his contribution to individual issues seemed less striking. Nevertheless, the pair established the title on a sound footing, and it was Cockrum's misfortune to leave it just as Marvel instituted royalty payments for artists.

John Byrne, who drew the series from 1977 to 1981, is a quite different case, since for many readers he was the preeminent X-Men artist. While he did not employ a radically different style from Cockrum, his attention to detail and willingness to experiment brought an engrossing depth to such classic stories as "The Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past."

By this time, the fan sales of the late sixties and early seventies had developed into a new distribution system, the direct market, in which there were no returns. Because of this, Byrne's popularity with fans was recognized, to the artist's advantage. Although some artist-oriented independent companies were being founded at this point, none of them had had enough success to persuade Byrne to abandon Marvel. Instead he satisfied his ambitions by taking over THE FANTASTIC FOUR, as writer as well as artist. Byrne's success created the best of all possible worlds for Marvel: the increased popularity his art brought X-MEN remained after his departure, and he brought many of these fans to his new work on FF.

A remarkable feature of the X-titles in the eighties is the way that Claremont and his editor and fellow writer Louise (Jones) Simonson were able to maintain a consistent vision of the world of the mutants while finding themes that could inspire a number of excellent, but idiosyncratic, artists. One imagines a number of conversations of the sort Claremont describes in his prologue to the Frank Miller-drawn WOLVERINE limited series collection: although Miller initially expressed a distaste for the character of Wolverine, Claremont's conception of him included so many facets that had as yet been unexplored in X-MEN that the two of them soon found the outlines of a plot that Miller was interested in.

At any rate, as X-World grew to include such further titles as THE NEW MUTANTS and X-FACTOR, a recognizable pattern emerged. Most often, the ongoing mutant soap opera was depicted by artists who were strong craftsmen with a firm grasp of contemporary styles. On the original title, Cockrum returned for a couple years, to be followed for one year by Paul Smith, whose style managed to accent the charm and fun of the characters while remaining significantly close to Byrne's precedent. John Romita Jr., who would go on to draw stories written by Miller for DAREDEVIL, did art in the middle years of the decade that reflected the harder edge that Miller popularized in DAREDEVIL, WOLVERINE, and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The final years of the decade had Marc Silvestri developing a style for the book that reflected his earlier work on CONAN THE KING, and which reflected an interest in fantasy artists such as Barry Winsor-Smith and Frank Frazetta.

On the other hand, from time to time a more experimental artist such as Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz or Walt Simonson would draw a title after a notable success elsewhere, encouraging Claremont and Louise Simonson to develop the X-mythos in directions that made the best use of their talents. For Miller, Claremont developed a Wolverine torn between his love for the discipline of Japanese culture and martial arts and a savage nature at home in the Canadian wilderness. Sienkiewicz used increasingly radical inking techniques to depict extreme states of psychological turmoil in THE NEW MUTANTS, bringing to life the multiple personalities of Xavier's son Legion. Louise Simonson took advantage of her husband's myth-making talents in X-FACTOR by penning classic science fiction stories in the neo-Darwinian epic of Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen. In every case, exceptional artist was stimulus to the imagination of the writer, rather than suggesting any limitations to the writer's vision.

The event that seems to have thrown this equilibrium significantly out of balance was Marvel's recruitment of Rob Liefeld to draw THE NEW MUTANTS. While Louise Simonson wrote the stories, it is no coincidence that they are currently published in a TPB titled after a creation of Liefeld, the one-man-army Cable. In some ways, Cable's impact on the young mutant team seems a symbol for what Liefeld was doing both to the title and to the world of superhero comics in general: saying that they were too soft, too weak and too caught up in little emotional dramas to be able to deal with the world as it really was.

Despite the hostility of many readers, Liefeld's impact on both THE NEW MUTANTS and other superhero artists was immediate. In less than a year, THE NEW MUTANTS became X-FORCE, a book about a militaristic team written as well as drawn by Liefeld. In other books, most notably Jim Lee's work in X-MEN, the heroes began to reflect Liefeld's aesthetic. Lee's work in ALPHA FLIGHT reflected the post-Byrne standard: cleanly drawn, slim and clean-cut adolescent figures in a world of STAR WARS technology. By the time the second X-MEN series was launched, in 1991, the X-Men had become a group of battle-scarred hulks and posing babes. The books raced out of the comic stores.

Liefeld was also at the bottom of the other transformation of the comics industry that assured that the nineties would be the decade of the artist, the formation of Image Comics. The eighties had seen a number of significant developments in the abilities of independent comic companies to compete against Marvel and DC. Some of these had been influential by offering artists and writers greater creative control, others had caused the odd commercial sensation, as did TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. But in no case had an independent company managed to beat the majors at their own game, selling large numbers of superhero comics produced by the most popular writers and artists of the moment. Ultimately, Image would not only match the majors in popularity, but would outdo them in the actual quality of paper and coloring, forcing changes in the basic appearance of mainstream comic books.

Young, single and flush with royalty payments, Liefeld had a freedom that Neal Adams and the young artists in the seventies had never had, and so was willing to see how successful he could be without DC and Marvel. Somewhat surprisingly, fellow artists Todd McFarlane, Eric Larsen, Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portacio and even the far more conservative Jim Lee were willing to join him. When first issues of SPAWN, YOUNGBLOOD and WILDC.A.T.S began breaking sales records, there was no way to deny that a popular artist could, through his reputation alone, make a popular book. The era of the "hot artist," with its pin-ups and multiple covers and trading cards, had arrived.

In this new era, an established book such as X-MEN took on a quite different role, of offering artists a position from which they could become widely known before developing new titles that they owned themselves. While X-MEN is not the only book that serves this function, it has done so regularly, because its popularity assures that it can choose from the best artists and that these artists will have a wide audience for their work. Sam Kieth, Jae Lee, Andy and Adam Kubert and Greg Capullo can all point to the X-books as part of their rise to fame.

Two artists in this most recent generation deserve mention for their success in using the X-books as a tool to achieve total creative control, even abandoning superheroes altogether. Chris Bachalo had had significant success at Vertigo on two DEATH mini-series' and SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN, but it seems likely that it was the larger audience he was exposed to while drawing GENERATION X in the mid-90's that made it attractive for him to produce the idiosyncratic vision on display in STEAMPUNK.

When Joe Madureira had his first significant assignment drawing DEADPOOL in 1993, a major attraction of his work was its similarity to Todd McFarlane's work on SPIDERMAN. While derivative, it was successful enough to justify putting him on UNCANNY X-MEN in the mid-90's. This tenure offered him the opportunity both to develop his own style and to become popular enough with fans to make his creator-owned fantasy BATTLE CHASERS a popular title with fans and speculators. Given Madureira's incredibly erratic release schedule, it's hard to see how the book would have any popularity without Madureira previously having become a fan favorite on UNCANNY.

While the X-books will undoubtedly continue to nurse the careers of "hot artists" in the future (WOLVERINE artist Francis Leinil Yu currently seems bound for mainstream "godhood"), the recent "Revolution" reboot on many of these titles suggests that the domination of the franchise by artists is ending. The revamped titles boast strong artists, including the return of Image artist Whilce Portacio to an X-book, but by turning over both the X-Men books to Chris Claremont and having Warren Ellis supervise the development of a "Counter-X" line from X-MAN, GENERATION X, and X-FORCE, Marvel seems to be more concerned about the contribution that writers make. Whether this marks the ascendancy of the "hot writer" over the "hot artist" remains to be seen.

Pindaros is a person of mystery. Pindaros is a Staff Writer for PopImage.

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