Fan outrage when Claremont took over?

[teapartyofthedead]

Roy, Chris, Dave, John, Len...

Ah, thank you, Mr. Busiek. I can’t imagine what it’s like to write a letter you probably forgot about as soon as you put in the mail surface decades later on a social platform that hadn’t been invented yet. That’s got be wild.

[sunofdarkchild]

It is ultimately the job of the editors to balance to balance fan expectations and the needs of the story. And the editors were the ones who failed to do that. My father liked to tell of how at a convention in the 70s he suggested to Stan Lee that characters like Mr. Fantastic should age in real time since Marvel was trying to be more realistic than DC and Stan immediately dismissed the idea and told him that Marvel time worked differently. My father wasn't resentful. He was just glad to meet Stan Lee.

When it comes to nostalgia I'm in a weird place because the comics I find to be the best were all written before I was born. I grew up reading my father's collection of old Marvel comics from the 80s, not just X-Men but Iron Man, Avengers, Spider-Man, Fantastic 4, ect. And even as a little kid in the early 2000s I couldn't but wonder at how these old comics were so much better than anything Marvel seemed to be putting out for any of those franchises at the time. It's why I stopped getting comics at all in my teens. Why spend money on an inferior product when I could just read better books for free?

I often hear about nostalgia for the way things were when you were a kid, but I'd actually hate to have the Marvel of my childhood back. My 'nostalgia' is for a period before I was born. But no golden age can last forever. I do find it fascinating to try to examine what worked then and how the decline occurred. There was a ton of behind the scenes BS that was outside the writers' control.

[Electricmastro]

Roy, Chris, Dave, John, Len...

I'm sure Roy was one of the earliest cases...

[Zelena]

Neither did Busiek.

I was fairly young when I wrote that letter, and it's kind of embarrassing today, but I'm baffled as to how people keep reading it and assuming that I hated the new X-Men, when the letter itself says I thought the book was excellently written and drawn, and that it wasn't until #113 that I started getting soured on it, and it wasn't until #138 that I stopped buying it.

That's not fan outrage when Chris took over. That's fan (well, one fan's) disappointment years after Chris took over.

I liked the old book. I liked the new book...for a while. Eventually, I didn't any more. It happens.

But it wasn't because Len and Dave replaced most of the membership. That was cool, and it was my favorite book for quite a while.

kdb

Point taken, Mr Busiek.

[Shadowcat]

There wasn't a sign of it returning the book was canned. Until it was ressurected. What happens today is there is almost hope of a relaunch and revamp. It's not the same thing. It was an unusual thing back then

Cancelled in 1970 and relaunched in 1975

Actually that’s not entirely true. I think Steve Englehart was priming up to do a possible relaunch of the book. He was planting the seeds in his Captain America, Amazing Adventures, and Avengers runs.