A Comic A Day: X-Men The Hidden Years #1

Published by Marvel
Writing and Art by John Byrne

With Giant-Size X-Men #1, Len Wein & Dave Cockrum revived the dormant X-Men property at the behest of Marvel's then Editor-In-Chief, Roy Thomas. After over two years of existing merely as a reprint title, Thomas urged them to use the book as a way to expand Marvel's international audience. Aside from Cyclops and his lover Jean Grey, the core cast was swept aside to make room for characters such as the wind goddess Storm and everyone's favortie overexposed canucklehead, Wolverine. Mere issues later the torch was passed yet again.

Chris Claremont and John Byrne wrote the book on how to do super-hero teams well on a monthly basis. Their formula for action, drama, and dangling plot threads is still utilized to this day. Their run is easy enough to find thanks to Marvel's Essentials and various other reprint volumes that have been released over the years. Byrne would only be on the title a scant few years compared to Claremont, who wrote the book until the early 90's.

Years after that, John Byrne still had a steady and loyal audience at Marvel, and was still producing a lot of work. While Marvel: The Lost Generation was interesting enough and Spider-Man: Chapter One was a flop, in my opinion his most interesting effort during that time was X-Men: The Hidden Years. You may ask yourself why in the world Marvel felt they needed yet another X-book, but Byrne came at the title with an interesting gimmick.

Remember the "dormant" thing about the early 70's X-Men title I mentioned before. Between the sort-of cancellation of the book and the revival thanks to Giant Size #1, there were twenty-seven issues of reprint and filler material. Byrne looked to rectify this by setting his new series during that gap in time when the X-Men were nowhere to be seen, aside from a few guest spots here and there. He even hid the "actual" issue number somewhere in the cover art for each issue, although the logos and cover blurbs put on in post-production often obscured them.

This first issue begins immediately after prologue sequence that could be found in the backmatter of the X-Men books during that time, reintroducing us to the classic cast of Xavier's first class. It isn't long after a recap of the previous issues (which were by Roy Thomas and Neal Adams) that the strangest teens of all find themselves on an adventure in the Savage Land. If you're a Byrne fan who was turned off by his late 90's work on projects like Spider-Man: Chapter One, don't be so quick to trash this series. It's actually a pretty fun romp and Byrne even manages to incorperate many other Marvel heroes like the Fantastic Four into the mix.

This series is handily collected in two trade paaperback volumes or could probably be found for dirt cheap in a back issue bin somewhere. For the Uncanny completist, it's fun to plug in these two volumes between the Classic and Uncanny Essentials.