Thursday, February 10, 2011

1980 - Whatever happened to the X-Men and Legion of Superheroes crossover?


In 1980, as reported by Comics Feature #4, there was a X-Men and Legion of Superheroes one-shot in plan by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum.



However, Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter was not pleased that DC wanted the fourth company crossover to include the New Teen Titans, DC's best-selling title at the time, as he wanted the crossover to be the X-Men and the Legion of Super-Heroes. This friction led to Shooter's decision to stall and cancel the JLA/Avengers project.

With the Teen Titans being a huge hit, it was decided to turn it into a Titans/X-Men crossover instead. Dave Cockrum decided to drop out of the project.



From Dave Cockrum's interview in The Legion Companion book:

"But there also originally was going to be a Legion/X-Men crossover, and I was to draw it.  Then they decided ‘No, we'll make it a Teen Titans/X-Men crossover,’ and that's the one that Walt Simonson drew.  They figured that the Teen Titans were more commercial." 

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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 11, 2011 at 2:35 PM

    i remember reading about this in the legion letter page circa that time period too. such a shame, i loved cockrum on both legion and x-men. having him do them together would have been fantastic.

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  2. pblfsdaFebruary 13, 2011 at 8:52 PM

    He nearly did have them meet in Uncanny X-Men #107, in 1977. There had been a multi-part story (104-108)where the X-Men wind up on the Shi'ar homeworld to halt a cataclysm. They meet the Shi'ar Royal Guard in a fantastic two-page spread that's clearly a tribute to the LSH. It's so obvious that whenever future writers and artists added new members to the Guard, they made them counterparts to LSH members not parodied in the 1977 story.

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  3. IcecypherFebruary 24, 2011 at 5:30 PM

    Yup. We'll have to be content with the Imperial Guard, which is the closest we got to an X-Men/ Legion crossover (and actually, is pretty close, LOL).

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  4. AnonymousJanuary 3, 2012 at 7:03 PM

    The Titan/X-Men crossover is decentl, but the Legion/X-Men crossover would have been magical at that time -- especially with Cockrum as penciller.

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  5. Doc SavageFebruary 8, 2015 at 11:22 AM

    Shooter didn't "stall and cancel" Avengers/JLA. Stop spreading the lie.

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  6. Jason ShayerFebruary 8, 2015 at 11:48 AM

    I disagree. http://marvel1980s.blogspot.ca/2011/06/1983-jlaavengers-crossover-also-known.html

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