Dedicated to the definitive superhero non-team.


Saturday, May 26, 2012

Like the Original X-Men?

When I first saw this ad more than 30 years ago, I knew little about the new X-Men who featured in the series at the time and had never read about the original team pictured on the left.

Even in their original uniforms, though, I could identify Angel and Cyclops because of the wings and visor. Yet I had no idea that Marvel Girl of the original team had any connection to Phoenix of the new X-Men.

Familiar only with Beast from the Avengers, I did not recognize the early version of the character rendered in the ad without the blue fur.

But the most puzzling character to me at the time was the "snowman" (a callback to X-Men #1, when Iceman dressed up like a snowman in a gag sequence).

A few years later, with more knowledge of comic book history under my belt—and after Angel, Beast, and Iceman regrouped—I thought Marvel could have reworked this ad to say:

Like the Original X-Men? Then You'll Love the New Defenders!

2 comments:

~P~ said...

I loved that old ad.

There was another similar one with the X-Men on one side and the MAN-THING on the other (both were bi-monthly titles at the time, I believe).

As for your "ad campaign" idea... LOVE IT!
That would have been fab!

pblfsda said...

The ad was for Man-Thing Volume 2, which was indeed bimonthly, but X-men had been upgraded to monthly the year before. The reason they were sharing an ad was because they were both written by Chris Claremont.