Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and ninety-eighth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.
As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for part one of this installment's legends. Click here for part two of this installment's legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
Chris Claremont told Dave Cockrum to pull Starjammers from the X-Men.
True
I think it is fair to say that Dave Cockrum was one of the most imaginative comic book creators of the 20th Century. The X-Men legend just KEPT creating awesome characters ALL of the time. Not only did he create new characters, but he was also famous for being a wonderful costume designer. When he became the regular artist on the Legion of the Super-Heroes at the start of the 1970s, he redesigned pretty much the entire cast. During this time, Cockrum's creativity led to him coming up with a variety of new characters who could populate the world of the Legion. However, after he quit DC over a dispute over a piece of original art (Cockrum had put a lot of effort into a big wedding scene in an issue and he specifically asked his editor if he could have the original art of that page and he told him yes, but then DC's top editor overrruled the decision, afraid it would create a bad precedent), Cockrum brought those character ideas with him to Marvel Comics and soon enough, a bunch of those ideas were re-worked by Cockrum and Len Wein into most of the All-New, All-Different X-Men (specifically Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus and Thunderbird).
However, during that period, another concept Cockrum had was a space pirates idea called the Starjammers...
One of the things that was so cool about Cockrum is just HOW MUCH he got into his creations. When he was pumped about an idea, he was SO excited about it. For instance, Corsair and Ch'od of the Starjammers appeared on the final page of X-Men #104 by Chris Claremont and Cockrum...
On the opposite side of that page, Cockrum just drew an awesome full-page drawing of Corsair (amusingly, the front page had to be altered and so the back image of Corsair is slightly askew). That's just how excited he was about his new ideas (I've written in the past about how another drawing that Cockrum did for fun turned into Mystique. Cockrum just really loved to draw and create new characters).
So the plan was for Starjammers to show up soon in X-Men #107, part of the Phoenix Saga by Cockrum and Claremont. The problem, though, was that Cockrum was having trouble holding to deadlines on X-Men and so he was soon replaced on the series by John Byrne as artist. This meant that the Starjammers would be debuting right before Cockrum was no longer going to be on the book!!
In an interview with Margaret O'Connell in The Comics Journal #50, Claremont discussed how thought that that didn't seem particularly fair, so he noted, "When I knew that Dave would not be pencilling #108, I suggested that we just drop the Starjammers from the plot altogether, we could make do without them, simply because I thought they were a great idea and I didn't want him giving it away. At least if they hadn't appeared in X-Men he'd have a bargaining point with Marvel, he could sell it as a series and perhaps get a percentage. This way, they've appeared, they're Marvel characters, Dave has no claim on them any more. But he wanted to do them. So I said, 'Fine.'"
And so the Starjammers made their triumphant debut...
At the time, Claremont believed that if there was ever a Starjammers series, that it was only right that Cockrum draw it, and sure enough, when the Starjammers finally got their own miniseries, over a decade later, it WAS drawn by Dave Cockrum (and not written by Claremont, interestingly, as I guess Claremont was pretty busy at the time on Uncanny X-Men and Excalibur. So Terry Kavanagh wrote it).
How cool was it of Claremont to try to help Cockrum out like that? Of course, years later, during his second stint on the X-Men, Cockrum actually DID pull back a character from the X-Men for a creator-owned series (as I detailed in this old Comic Book Legends Revealed).
Thanks to my pal, Nathan, for suggesting that I do a bit about Claremont's Comics Journal #50 interview (I'll get to the aspect of the interview that he suggested in the future! I was just taken by how cool of a move this was by Claremont, so this moved to the top of the line).
In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Learn about the unsung nurse who inspired one of the most heartbreaking Charlie Brown animated specials.
OK, that's it for this installment!
Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!
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The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...
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