The concept is that Magneto has found a group of followers known, appropriately enough, as the Acolytes, led by Fabian Cortez, who appears to be increasing Magneto's powers. RELATED: How Superman Secretly Wrote Shakespeare’s Macbeth Claremont had one final arc on the series as the co-plotter/scripter, it was from X-Men #1-3. Well, the conflicts continued (all cordial enough, just one guy wanting X and another guy wanting Y and the editor, Bob Harras, had to decided who what would happen, X or Y and ultimately, Harras sided with Lee, the superstar artist who was probably THE most popular artist in the entire comic book industry at that moment) and Lee and Whilce Portacio were given control of the X-Men titles, with them plotting both books and Lee drawing a new X-Men series while Portacio drew Uncanny X-Men.

It's really amazing looking back on that story and thinking of Magneto as a replacement character, as Claremont wrote him so well in that arc. We worked out sound compromises and some really good stories came out of it.' It was a case of Chris, who'd been on X-Men for some years, wanting to take the characters in very different directions, and me, a die-hard X-Men fan, just wanting to do the classic stuff. Now to me, Loki wasn't an X-Men villain and it didn't feel right, so we compromised and came back to Magneto. Originally the villain was supposed to be Loki, I guess because Chris hadn't written many Loki stories. One of the very first issues I did featured Rogue and Magneto, and she gets stranded on his island or something like that. That's where the editor steps in, and you talk, and hopefully you compromise.

So there was a difference of opinion from the outset on what the stories should be. A lot of the stuff I wanted to do was to rehash or update stuff I had really liked as a kid, but Chris had done that maybe two or three times already. Lee later recalled, 'When I came onto Uncanny X-Men I had a very strong sense of what X-Men stories should be. Lee, though, wanted the character to be revealed as Magneto, because he really wanted to do a Magneto story. That came to an early head when there was a conflict when Claremont wanted a mystery villain to be revealed as Loki, who Claremont had written during the famous Asgard Wars storyline in the X-Books, and wanted to follow up on the loose edges of that story. Today, as part of this month's fifth week, we go back to October 1991 for X-Men #3 (by Chris Claremont, Jim Lee and Scott Williams), the final issue of Claremont's original X-Men run.Īs I discussed in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed, one of the central conflicts between Jim Lee and Chris Claremont on their run together on Uncanny X-Men was that Lee wanted to revisit the classic characters in X-Men history and Claremont, you know, DIDN'T want to do that.

X-Men (1991-2001) #1 by Chris Claremont