Great commission. I always loved JB's Havok!

QUOTE: both were eventually mucked up -- Angel almost immediately.

You mean by changing the color?

Next time the costume shows up, Angel is not even wearing it! In AVENGERS 110 we learn that Magneto was up to no good (duh!) when he put Angel into the new suit, and now is wearing it himself for various arcane reasons. Here the costume begins the seemingly inevitable downward spiral of black-with-blue-highlights costumes, as the blacks are left off, and the costume is purely blue and white. His black leather boots have also turned to white cloth.

A while later, Angel is pegged as a member of the new Champions team, but the Powers that Were at Marvel decide there are too many characters wearing black in the group (the others were the Black Widow and Ghost Rider, both of whom had somehow managed to avoid turning blue, despite the highlights on their outfits), so Angel's suit becomes red, with yellow gloves and boots. (Tho not immediately. First he had to revert to a version of the red and yellow costume he'd worn in his Avenging Angel days.) For unknown reasons the boots become leather again, but with yellow highlights, giving us another of those colors-not-found-in-nature so common in comics. It was around this time I became artist on the book, so at least I was able to draw Neal's version of the costume, and since I was working in black and white the color scheme didn't concern me.

The blacks start dropping off this version of the costume pretty fast, tho, once I'm gone, and once the book is canceled, and pretty soon it's pure red. The boots stop being leather again, too.

Typically, hardly any of these changes are deliberate choices. Really, only the switch from black/blue to red qualifies there. The rest are a string of typical goofs that become cannon, as each artist or colorist in line refers only to the most recent previous appearance, right or wrong.

One of the joys of HIDDEN YEARS, of course, was getting to draw the real suit, with the right colors!

Truth to tell, I hesitated over calling Havok "old", since, to me, he really is still one of the new guys. I "met" the character shortly after I returned to reading comics in the early Seventies, after a hiatus of about six years. A whole lot was "new" to me, then. The first issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN I bought trumpeted upon its cover the death of a character. It turned out to be Gwen Stacy, who I'd not seen before! The Green Goblin was new to me, too. The issue in which he'd made his debut had been one of the many I missed, due to the bad distribution in my part of Western Canada.

In a very short span of time, then, I met a lot of "new" characters, Havok among them, who became more or less permanently locked in my brain as "new" -- in much the same way I remained eternally eight years old to all my relatives who had last seen my at that age when my family left England.

If the series is of 7 commissions, I think the 7 classic X-Men are Cyclops, Iceman, Beast, Angel, Marvel Girl, Havok and Polaris. The 7 newer X-Men should be: Nightcrawler, Colossus, Wolverine, Storm, Sprite, Banshee and ? Who's the 7th: Sunfire? Thunderbird? Phoenix? Eh! Professor-X is left out! He could have been paired with Thunderbird walking him in his wheelchair.