When an FBI Agent Disbanded the X-Men

CBR

By Brian Cronin

Published Jul 25, 2018

In their latest look at abandoned comic book plots, CSBG examines how the X-Men reformed after one of the odder breakups that the team ever had.

In every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without actively retconnng away the previous story. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today, based on a suggestion by reader Steve M. (well, he asked something tangentially related to this, at least), we look at one of the stranger X-Men break-ups.

At the end of the X-Men's fourth year of existence, the comic book series was in serious trouble. It just was not selling all that well. It was not necessarily at cancellation stages just yet, especially since that year, 1968, would see Marvel expand their comic book line, so there was a bit less pressure on X-Men to be "taking the spot" of another title. Roy Thomas (possibly working with Stan Lee, but certainly with Lee's permission), killed off Professor X in 1967's X-Men #42...

Then, the next issue, Thomas cleverly has Marvel Girl gain telepathy to make up for the missing Professor X.

Okay, so around this time, Stan Lee came up with this big idea. He thought that a way to make the X-Men stand out would be to have the book be the only book on the market where the title changed every issue. So the way that they did this was to make each issue "star" a different member of the team. They had already been doing back-up stories featuring the origins of the team members, so this was an attempt to make the books sort of a series of solo books. A main story spotlighting a member of the X-Men and then an origin backup spotlighting a different member of the team.

The weird thing about this era is just how MESSY it was, as these solo books were happening while the X-Men were still a team, so excuses had to be made to give the characters solo stories in the middle of team stories. It was kind of crazy. Plus the book then crossed over with Avengers in the middle of it all, as well! No wonder Roy Thomas passed the book down to Gary Friedrich!

In Friedrich's final issue of his super short run, he embraced the "solo heroes" aspect of the book by having the team break-up...

However, HOW they broke up is beyond weird.

FBI Agent Duncan comes to visit them while they're dealing with Xavier's will...

Then the Juggernaut attacks! They ward him off, but once it is finished, Duncan then lets them know that he's decided that the school being open without Xavier is too dangerous and the X-Men have to disband! He also has letters to tell them what to do next with their lives. This is bonkers, right?

Beast even points out how insane it is, but Cyclops is all, like, "Well, I guess we still have to agree with this insane scenario" and so the team broke up...

The idea was that we would get Angel solo stories plus team-ups of Cyclops and Marvel Girl and Beast and Iceman (all written by new writer Arnold Drake)...

However, sales did not pick up, so Marvel dropped this idea and the planned Beast and Iceman story for X-Men #49 was dropped. How did they get back together?

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As it turned out, Angel just happened to be stopping by the Mansion when he saw Cerebro going haywire over the discovery of a new mutant and that was enough for the team to get back together...