Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and seventy-fifth week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

As always, there will be three different posts for each legend this week!

NOTE: I noticed that the the CSBG Twitter page was nearing 10,000 followers. If we hit 10,050 followers on the the CSBG Twitter page then I'll do a BONUS edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed during the week that we hit 10,050. So three more legends! Sounds like a great deal, right?

In honor of the release of my new book, 100 Things X-Men Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, on April 15th, every legend until that point will be about the X-Men!

COMIC LEGEND:

Chris Claremont had an uncredited plot assist for Giant-Size X-Men #1.

STATUS:

True

Giant Size X-Men #1 was a historic issue, as it was the first appearance of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, which were created by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, the creative team on the issue...

However, that was also the LAST issue that the two worked on together by themselves, as Chris Claremont was brought on board to script the second issue of the series (which went from being a Giant-Size X-Men #2 to being a two-parter in X-Men #94 and #95).

Then Claremont took over the series by himself and he became the writer of the book for the next sixteen plus years, defining the characters and netting a spot in my book as the most important person or thing that you need to know about the X-Men.

However, did you know that Claremont was actually kind of sort of there right from the beginning?

As you may or may not know, the All-New, All-Different X-Men were introduced when a powerful mutant captured the original X-Men and then Professor X put together a new team to save them on the island where the powerful mutant had the original X-Men captive. As it turned out, though, in a major twist, the island itself WAS the powerful mutant, Krakoa!

So they fought against the entire island until they defeated it. HOW they defeated it, however, was thought up by Chris Claremont!

Claremont described the situation to Peter Sanderson in The X-Men Companion...

Len and Dave Cockrum were evolving the new X-Men concept. And they'd be sitting in Len's office... plotting it. I would be sitting there just outside proofreading. I'd wander in and say, 'Can I listen?' and they'd say 'Sure.' They'd evolved the whole first issue of Giant-Size except the ending. They needed a way to get rid of Krakoa utilizing the powers of the X-Men. I was thinking about it and I thought, well, we've got Lorna Dane, who has since become Polaris, here, and her power is magnetism, so why don't you just have her slice across the magnetic lines of force, the gravimetric lines of force? And then the speed of the Earth's rotation on its axis would just squirt it up and away it would go. In a sense Krakoa would stay in place while the Earth just rotated around its axis and revolved around the sun away from it. And off he goes into the wild blue yonder. It would be like taking a bar of soap and watching it go Pfffttt! right the air. . Len thought it was a great idea and Dave came up with the visuals and that was that."

And so that was the ending...

Awesome! So now we can say that Chris Claremont was right there from the beginning (do note, by the way, that Claremont also gave Roy Thomas a similar plot idea way back in the Thomas/Adams X-Men run)!

Thanks to Chris Claremont and Peter Sanderson for the information!


Check out some legends from Legends Revealed:

Did ABBA Really Turn Down a Billion Dollar Concert Offer?

Was Jonathan Rollins on L.A. Law Based on Barack Obama?

How the French Navy Saved the Eiffel Tower From Destruction

Did Frank Capra Accidentally Try to Accept an Oscar He Didn’t Win?


Check back Saturday for part 2 of this week's legends!

And remember, if you have a legend that you're curious about, drop me a line at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com!