There is no way to prove this, but I was reading the X-Men religiously during your/Chris/Terry's run and I don't think there is any way in the world the sales would have jumped without said run.  The Dark Pheonix arc is the 400lb gorilla but look at the arcs that came in rapid succession, and I'm going from memory--Weapon Alpha (GUARDIAN INTRO)--Moses Magnum (MARIKO INTRO)--Mesmero--Magneto--Alpha Flight--Mutant X (PROTEUS)--Hellfire Club--Dark Pheonix--Wendigo--Days of Future Passed. With the Hellfire Club/Dark Pheonix mega arcs flowing under all these smaller arcs.  Looking back, it is incredible;  the quality of the stories one after another.  And how can you not mention...THE ART!!!  To me, this is the greatest run in comic history.  Or at least equals the best of Lee/Kirby/Ditko.  I will say this run had a profound impact on me that lasts to this day.

I liked Paul Smith's work.  It wasn't JB but I liked his stuff.  The stories however were not the same.  Chris was unfettered and I didn't like a lot of the Chrisisms.  I hated the punk Storm and other things.

As far as sales, I think The Dark Pheonix Saga made such a splash that it turned a lot of people on to the title, they started reading back issues and everyone was waiting for it to happen again.  It was like having Seinfeld as a lead in for Suddenly Susan.  Is Suddenly Susan as good as Seinfeld? No, but it's still a hit. 

When I was assigned to X-MEN, the first thing I told Chris I wanted to do was a Sentinel story, but he said "Sentinels are lame!" Of course, it was my opinion that Sentinels were REALLY COOL and Chris just WROTE them lame, so eventually, as I found myself taking on more and more of the plotting, I basically said "I'm going to plot a Sentinel story!"

The result was "Days of Future Past".

As the story evolved in my head, one of the most important elements became, for me, that this would be an instance where the X-Men would have a clean win. There would be no doubt that they had succeeded completely in what they had set out to do. No chance for Chris to come back later and say "really, they failed, and. . . "

Central to this was the idea that Kate Pryde, sent back into her younger self thru Rachel's mental manipulations, would simply DISAPPEAR when the X-Men changed her history. At the exact moment the X-Men altered the actions, the future from which Kate came would cease to exist. (It was important, too, that the future X-Men understood this.)

That's why the "action" in the panel as it appears in the published comic takes place entirely in the captions. I did not draw anything remotely like what Chris wrote, because what Chris wrote SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. What I drew is what was supposed to happen: Kate simply blinks out of existence, and Kitty is back.

But, instead, Chris wrote what came to be called, around the office, "the incestuous lesbian kiss", the X-Men's victory was taken from them, and an "alternate reality" was created -- and then mined relentlessly for years thereafter.

(Another important element of my plotting was lost because of this story. When Nightcrawler was first introduced, he was a fearsome monster, but over a very short span he became a happy-go-lucky "elf". He became the Beast with a German accent, basically. One of the things I was interested in exploring was that the X-Men might have gotten used to what Kurt looked like, but basically he was still a fearsome monster. So I wanted Kitty to be very uneasy around him. Creeped out, in fact. But Kate, from the future, was long past her problems with Kurt. That was the point of the hug scene, when Kate first sees Kurt alive again. Unfortunately, there was a recurrent problem I had with Chris: we'd plot something, I'd draw it, and then he'd script it as something else. Somehow, just having worked out the plot part meant the scene was "done" in Chris' mind, so he actually scripted the scene "as I felt when I wrote it." I grew very, very tired of hearing him say that, as many important scenes were lost. In this case, once all was restored and Kitty was back in her own head, Chris forgot all about her being uneasy around Kurt. Kate had not been, so Kitty was not. All better!)

The X-Men in space really didn't bother me because I was young at the time and any new issue of the X-Men was something wonderful. I recently re-evaluated my Uncanny X-Men collection. I had a pretty good run dating back to the 60's. I had gotten out of comics around the time that Colossus (my favorite) turned on the X-Men and joined Magneto's Acolytes. I returned years later with a steady income and picked up alot of what I missed and continued buying the X-Men. 

Then one day I realized that I didn't like what Marvel had been doing with them so I purged the Chuck Austen run and quit during the Fraction run. I always thought that I'd return after a few months but when that didn't happen I got rid of pretty much everything that Chris Claremont didn't write. Last month, I started to realize that I HATED Inferno and Fall of The Mutants (not at the time when I was buying them but I NEVER went back and re-read any of those issues). I made the point to get rid of the issues that I felt that the X-Men went wrong so I got rid of everything after 200. My X-Men collection was tied into my sense of nostalgia, I could tell you where and when I bought almost every issue that I owned up to the point that I quit the first time but when I think of the issues that involve Cyclops getting beat by an de-powered Storm, the Beyonder, the Mutant Massacre, Inferno, The Australian Outback, Genosha, Ninja Psylocke, and Banshee's team of X-Men featuring Moira MacTaggart as a member of the X-Men....let's just say that cutting loose those issues wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

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Thanks, but. . .   no. Not unless you are being REALLY restrictive in defining my "peers".

After all, even if we limit to my "generation", I was out there with Michael Golden, Walt Simonson, George Perez, Jim Starlin, John Romita Jr, Keith Pollard, Frank Miller and a host of others.

Michael Golden, Walt Simonson, George Perez, Jim Starlin, John Romita Jr, Keith Pollard, Frank Miller and a host of others.

Wow! What do the Big Two have that compare to just that handful? A couple of "superstars" that are only able to do a few issues a year and a bunch of studio clones that do layouts and need multiple inkers? Don't get me wrong there are still some guys that can get the job done (Mark Bagley comes to mind of course) but while your list was doing their thing we were STILL getting comics from Kirby, Ditko, and others. I just don't see the Big Two putting an emphasis on the artist anymore.

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Yup. And those others included Joe Kubert, Gil Kane, Curt Swan, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, John Buscema, John Romita Jr., Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Berni Wrightson, Carmine Infantino. . .

Ay-Mazing!!!