Love, love, love this piece!

I have my opinion about a few things - i like Wolverine with or without mask modification...with i would prefer because lets face it he's a team player but he still wants / needs to be an individual.

Masks are there for a reason to protect the identity of the person wearing it....to this end, does Nightcrawler really need a mask?  Its not like with the mask his identity is anymore protected than if he was not wearing one.  I can see Masks on all of the others but less so for Nightcrawler imho.  On the other hand, from a team perspective, by removing his mask do you single him as the odd one out...if thats possible in a team of mutants? and therefore demotivate him from the get-go...

Altho he started out as SCARY, in GIANT-SIZED X-MEN 1, it did not take long for him to, ah, mutate into a happy-go-lucky character, much as the Thing did in FANTASTIC FOUR. This is a classic example of "standing too close". Writers, artists, fans, tend to forget that no matter how familiar we become with these characters, to someone living in that world coming face to face with Ben or Kurt would still be a shocker.

So, by wearing a mask, Nightcrawler would be sending a subliminal message to people he met -- people he would most likely be trying to help! -- in effect saying "it's okay, I'm not really a demon!"

Or an "elf".

shudder. . .

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Jim Shooter once said of "untold tales", "If they're so great, why weren't they told before?"

This rather misses the point, but it does underscore the "danger" of "untold tales". Sometimes they can degenerate into pure fan-wank, filling "gaps" that don't really exist (as when Marvel decided there were "missing" issues between AMAZING FANTASY 15 and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 1) or unnecessarily clutter a character's backstory (as when DC decided it had actually taken Kal-El 100 years to reach Earth).

But sometimes -- rarely -- there really is a "gap" in the history, as with the X-Men. The team's appearances in other parts of the Marvel Universe, while their own book was in reprint limbo, told readers that there were other adventures going on. HIDDEN YEARS showed us some of those adventures.

The All New, All Different X-Men don't have any "gaps" like that -- not unless we resort to shoe-horning in tales between issues, and/or between panels.

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One of the things I love about that cover is the unabashed hyperbole. That lower right blurb, declaring the X-Men to have "taken America by storm!" Back in those days, it took as much as a year to gather all the sales figures (which is why it so often took eleven issues for a book to get canceled), so as of the third issue, five months into the run, Marvel wouldn't really have any sort of fix yet on how the book was selling.

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Which hardcore X-fans embraced without hesitation -- while at the same time (well, a few years later, actually) blasting me for having the original X-Men meet Ororo because "that has never been mentioned, so it didn't happen!"

Typically, retcons are allowed only when they are allowed!

Of all Chris' sins as Chief Shaper of the X-Men, the way he mucked about with Magneto will, to me, always stand as the worst. It so clearly and distinctly contradicted Stan and Jack's version of the character.

Part of the problem -- if it is a problem, since X-Fans seemed to love it -- lies in his not have read the early issues until late in his "formative years" as X-Scribe. Close to when I left the book, in fact. This was why Roger Stern (as editor) and I (as co-conspirator) would be constantly having to tell him he could not do thus-and-such a thing he wanted to. Which usually meant he'd find a way to do it in a book over which neither Rog nor I had any control. His complete revision of Jean Gray's backstory, for instance -- which, of course, became canon, as reflected in the X-Movies.

Speaking of the movies, people keep telling me FIRST CLASS is really good and really the best X-Men movie yet -- but there's no way I could ever watch it. Just from the trailers I can tell there's WAY to much Christory in it!