A couple of things:

1. The X-Men by Byrne/Claremont/Austin is my all-time favorite run of any comic book ever. That's kind of my rep at my LCS, I'm the "Byrne Guy" who will talk your ear off about that run. There are two other customers who I talk with all the time about the run to the point that the guys at the store wanted us to contribute a discussion to the store's "What I Love About Comics" series on YouTube.

2. Claremont's stuff is not bulletproof for me. The introduction of Rachel to the timeline changed the book making it a little bit darker. We'd have Storm losing her powers, Secret Wars II (which got dark), The Mutant Massacre, the removal of Colossus, Kitty, and Nightcrawler, Inferno, and the Fall of the Mutants etc... The X-Men who I grew to know were gone by the time they got to Australia.

Around this time last year. I was curious about "what happened" to the sales of the X-Men, so I plotted all of the sales figures I could find, for all the books, in an Excel document and plotted that data on a line graph.

I learned a few things from doing this. The most important one was "sales doesn't equal readers". The next most important thing was that I finally understand what JB has been saying when he talks about the Direct Market and speculators.

One cannot compare sales figures from 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010.  They represent different scales of economy.

But you CAN compare different books during the same year, i.e. Daredevil and Uncanny X-Men both in 1980.

Or Avengers vs. X-Men in 1990.  

But spreading the years around, I believe the 1950s are going to kill everything.

I bought X-Men 1 and 2 and never picked up another issue.

Mark, at that time there was an established sense of paneling at Marvel. 

Stories tended to describe the action in a well-recognised way. What happened when the later-to-be Image folks burst on to the scene was that pin-ups and 'cool' poses were used to describe essentially nothing. So the once climactic shot of a pissed of Wolverine getting his second wind, used to bridge the end of one book and the start of another, suddenly appeared while he was making coffee or calling a cab. Almost all conversations took place through scowls and gritted teeth.

I met Jim Lee before he landed a penciling job at Marvel. I had no clue who he was or that he had done some inking jobs at Marvel previously.

Jim was pleasant and in awe of all things Marvel. He described himself as an inker and had some X-men try-out samples on him, that he had penciled. I was a wannabee penciler who was trying to learn to ink better. 

So we sat down and swapped notes.

What I saw both horrified and impressed me. Some brilliant pin-up/splash-page worthy drawings but no 'story'. The pencils looked already inked...no room for an inkers style.

I had been used to 'reading' stories with my eyes. I had heard the advice, "I should be able to tell the story, even if there are no words to tell you what is going on". So what I was saying was sweet but no substance.

My advice to him was to stick to inking (he had samples of those and I thought they were really slick). 

I imagine if he had listened to my advice he'd be a lot poorer for it! 

I get stuck on this, like the Chicken & the Egg. The industry switched over to the Direct Sales Market, was it a coincidence that the splash'n'no-substance artists found their way into professional gigs? Was it by Design? Surely we can't credit them for massive sales purely for being in attendance at the time?

Finishing observation: Chris (Claremont) wrote whatever he wanted over John, regardless of the art. Were these newcomers the perfect artists for his writing style?

__________

I think the opposite was true. Chris Claremont was the perfect writer to make Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio's art seem like it had substance.

When Sienkiewicz was on New Mutants, Claremont got very good at writing a story over top of whatever it was Bill was drawing. A lot of times it read more like a prose story with impressionistic illustrations, but it worked and that's one of the more highly regarded eras of New Mutants for a lot of fans.

When Lee, Portacio and Silvestri were working on the books with him, they could draw flashy cool weird stuff too, but their storytelling wasn't very strong. They were not on Sienkiewicz's level, but to me, it seems like he was doing the same thing: taking the art as it was, flashy and eye catching and crazy, and then "writing a prose story over top of it", covering for the lack of continuity or clarity in the art with a ton of narrative captions. If they didn't draw what he asked for in the plot, it didn't matter, he would just write whatever he wanted over top of it in the narration.

In those books, there's no synthesis between the words and the pictures. But it ultimately didn't matter, because people who were actually reading those books maybe only counted for a third (or less? pure speculation on my part) of the total copies sold. Marvel was selling these comics to retailers, who figured they could easily sell a flashy book with a lot of words in it on hype alone.

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If you take a look at the 3 issues of X-MEN that Claremont did with Jim Lee, you'll see that he was constantly scripting against what Lee drew, particularly regarding Magneto. Lee wanted Magneto to be a villain again, and Claremont clearly did not. There'd be a scenes of Magneto pummeling the X-Men in various ways, as he says something like "It pains me to do this, but...."

Having a Magneto who is visually fighting them tooth and nail, be conflicted about it, makes it seem like there's more levels to this story, when really, it's just the writer asserting his will over the plot of the story.

There's also all kinds of weird stuff in there with Cortez and what he's doing that just isn't in the art, and the "on and off" mind control... but I don't wanna derail the thread. 

What I was trying to get at was that there was something in that last push with Lee on art that fans responded to on some level by being interested. Then the hype around the book just went nuts when it wasn't really any better than it had been in recent years.