X-Men: The Hidden Years
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X-Men: The Hidden Years was a comic book series set in the Marvel Comics universe, which starred the company's popular superhero team, the X-Men. It was written by John Byrne, with illustrations by Byrne and Tom Palmer.
The series attempted to fill in the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the original X-Men comic was publishing only reprints of earlier issues. It features the cast of the original X-Men and their villains, with a few appearances by characters who had not otherwise appeared at that point in time, such as Storm.
The series was originally conceived to run 27 issues, one issue for every reprint issue of the original series (#67-93), but the decision to cancel it was made after only 17 issues had been published. It completed its run with #22, though Byrne claimed he had ideas that might have extended the series.
Marvel's editor-in-chief at the time, Joe Quesada, considered the series one of the more extraneous X-Men spinoffs and cancelled it, along with several other X-Men franchise titles, in an effort to streamline Marvel's output. It is believed that part of the reason for the cancellation was because Marvel wanted to also simplify the continuity of the X-Men, and did not want a series around that added to the complexity by dealing with the "hidden" time of issues that were published in the 1970s. Perhaps more relevant was that Hidden Years was one of the lowest selling X-Men titles at the time of its publishing, ranking far below other titles such as the franchise flagship Uncanny X-Men and even some of the more tertiary spin-offs.
Byrne maintained that the comic was still profitable and believed the cancellation to be unexplained. This disagreement was a precipitating factor for him to decide to no longer work for Marvel Comics.
Bibliography
- X-Men: The Hidden Years #1-22 (December, 1999 – September, 2001)