Jim Lee joins the team and makes them sexy again.
The very first American Uncanny X-Men issue I ever bought and also the debut of Jim Lee as the penciler. If only I had been more careful with this issue I could’ve sold it and retired on the profits… I had started reading superhero comics in 1987 and had been buying the Juniorpress version of the X-Men, roughly a year behind the original, since 1988. And then in the summer of ’89 my local comics shop started experimenting with selling new American comics so I started buying those. Frustratingly, they did stop doing so for a few months which meant I missed a few key issues from that time…
This issue came at the tail end of the whole “X-Men Down Under” arc, when the team was already falling apart again. In a few issues they would all be gone and the next year or so would be spent in yet another “rebuilding the X-Men” project. ironic, considering sending them to Australia had been intended as a fresh start as well. I’ve said it before that Claremont at this late stage was stuck in a rut, never letting his characters catch a break. The ‘mistake’ I made there of course was reading a year’s worth of stories in one go: then this is a tedious slog. Read as intended though, issue by issue as it came out it kept me on the edge of the seat. With Claremont you never knew what would come next, just that it would rarely be something good to our heroes…
But still, Claremont was running out of gas. Australia hadn’t quite worked out, something new was needed. In the past Claremont was always at his best when he had a good artist to bounce off of: John Byrne, David Cockrum, Paul Smith each in turn had revitalised the series. Jim Lee could do that too.
But it took some time. Issue 248 was only a fill-in; Silvestri was back the next issue and would remain until #256, when Lee would return for a three issue stint. He would only take over as the regular artist with #268, twenty issues after his debut. Starting from that point on, the series did have a new energy to it, though ironically it would ultimately lead to Claremont’s departure. But that was still in the future at this point.
Even as ‘just’ a fill-in that debut had a real imapct, at least on fifteen year old me. I liked Marc Silvestri well enough and his slightly cartoony, scratchy drawing style, but Lee brought something he lacked: the horny. Just look at Havok’s chiseled abs and Dazzler’s casual sexiness there. That was a lot for a nerdy teenager like yours truly. It’s no wonder Lee got so popular, so quickly. It’s also no wonder he even got Marc Silvestri to change his style; just look at his work on Cyberforce later…
As a story, uncanny X-Men #248 is just another day of misery for the X-Men, but artwise then it was a revelation. A turning point in the series history, even if it wasn’t obvious at the time.
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