STORY: "Friends and Enemies" (22 pages)  The Fantastic Four defeat Magneto thanks to a tip-off from Professor X; the Promise disband; and the X-Men escape the Mole Man.

What you need to know about the cancellation:
We'll come to the actual story shortly, but obviously the most important thing about this issue is that the book gets cancelled.  This was a matter of some controversy at the time, as well as a clear indication of where comics were going.

The first point to make is that Hidden Years wasn't cancelled simply because of low sales.  The final issue reached number 80 on the sales charts, with estimated pre-orders of 25,463 - and that's several months after Marvel had announced the cancellation, which always drives down orders.  It outsold titles like Birds of Prey and Spider-Girl which both survived for over five years to come.  By all accounts, Hidden Years was still turning a profit, and many of the book's fans were baffled by the decision to cancel it.

However, two points have to be taken into account.  Firstly, Marvel can only publish a certain number of comics (without either exceeding their budget or deluging the market).  So it makes sense to cancel a marginally profitable title if you think you can replace it with a much more profitable one.

Second, there's the wider brand to consider.  In 2001, editor-in-chief Joe Quesada and publisher Bill Jemas had recently arrived on the scene and were in the course of remaking Marvel in their image.  The company had recently emerged from a lengthy and bruising stint in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the new team had an unusual degree of leeway to experiment.  They embarked on a rolling plan to revamp and refocus almost all of Marvel's core characters.

In part, that meant getting rid of superfluous X-Men books that weren't really adding anything to the line.  Titles like X-Man and Generation X were quietly put to sleep.  Hidden Years fell into the same category - it was another X-Men title that the line didn't really need.  Around the same time, Marvel launched rather more focussed new titles such as Brotherhood and Exiles.  (Not always good ones - Brotherhood was dire - but at least they had a clear identity of their own.)

But on top of this, Quesada and Jemas were quite deliberately moving away from Marvel's old house style and reliance on continuity with the past.  Whereas in the past Marvel had promoted exciting new plot developments, now they were promoting exciting new types of comic.  It's around this time that writers like Grant Morrison come on and completely change the style of flagship titles.  The image was of a new, innovative company making a break from the past and striding forward.  Quesada's Marvel Knights imprint, which had been doing this sort of thing on the margins for several years, now became the template for the whole line.

X-Men: The Hidden Years was exactly the sort of thing the new regime were trying to get away from.  Not only was it mired in past continuity but (despite Byrne's editorial in issue #1) it had a decidedly retro style to it.  It was the precise opposite of everything New Marvel stood for.  It had to go.  Not only did it not fit in, but the cancellation of books like this sent a clear message that Marvel was serious about its new direction.

Naturally, this cut no ice with John Byrne and his fans, who were essentially being told rather forcefully that, after relying on their support for years, Marvel was no longer interested in catering for them.  This was a calculated risk on Marvel's part and, objectively, one that paid off in terms of increased sales.  Nonetheless, it was a new marketplace that Byrne wasn't prepared (or willing) to adjust to.  Byrne has a rather orthodox view of what superhero comics should be and generally appears singularly unwilling to contemplate alternatives.  Relations with the new regime at Marvel broke down quite spectacularly, leading to some unedifying public squabbling.

The following years have not been especially kind to Byrne's reputation.  He's produced a string of flops for DC, such as Labrats and a disastrously-received Doom Patrol relaunch.  Meanwhile, his continued public grumblings about the state of comics - generally to the effect that he's still big, it's just the comics that have gotten small - combined with a surreally worshipful message board, have given him a reputation as a grumpy old man who's slightly out of touch with reality.  While there's some justification for that view, it's unfortunate that it's come to overshadow the previous 20 years of his work.  Still, having seen what he did after Hidden Years got cancelled, Marvel can't be losing too much sleep at letting Byrne get away.

This issue is, in many respects, the end of an era - the point where Marvel symbolically put a stop to looking backwards for inspiration.  Whether that's a good thing is ultimately a decision for the reader.

Ironically, attitudes at Marvel have changed significantly over the last five years - not least because Bill Jemas has been replaced and a much more conservative philosophy has taken root.  As I write this, Marvel have just announced X-Men: First Class, an eight-issue miniseries featuring untold tales of the Silver Age X-Men - precisely the sort of pitch that Jemas would have shot out of the window with a cannon.

Now then...

What you need to know about the issue:
Professor X tips off the Fantastic Four that Magneto is using a harness to tap into the Earth's electromagnetic field.  And that's the X-Men's whole contribution to the story that's been appearing over three issues.  Havok, who raced off to help last issue, never even gets there in time.

Iceman belatedly remembers that he's supposed to be bitter about Professor X.  He decides that Xavier's a nice guy after all because he didn't mean to fake his death - after all, he didn't know the Changeling was going to get killed while impersonating him.  (Although really, wasn't the impostor scheme bad enough?)

The Promise are all released from their suspended animation tubes, and despite the fact that they're all loyal to Messenger, none of them complains.  Messenger dies when his suspended animation tube fails, and the group decide that he was wrong after all.  And.  That's.  It.

Lucy Robinson is clearly set up as a character who will go on to manipulate others in future.

Xavier breezily tells Teri Martin that there's no place in his life for romance until his dream has been fulfilled, and then heads home.  And yes, that's the whole pay-off to the storyline that started back in issue #9.

Avia is quietly taken back to the Savage Land behind the scenes.

The Beast celebrates his twentieth birthday party, symbolically ending the X-Men's sixties run as "the world's strangest teens."

The final hidden cover number is #88, so the series falls five issues short of bridging the gap.  It's on the round between the words "FADE" and "TO".

Comments:
It'd be nice to say the book went out on a high, but frankly, it doesn't.  We have a massive amount of space devoted to repeating scenes from a Fantastic Four story that doesn't even feature the lead characters, and which they barely even affect on the margins.  We have the Promise meekly packing up and going home, with no real pay-off.  We have a third consecutive issue of the title characters running around in caves having generic fights with the Mole Man.

And worst of all, there's Teri Martin and her never-ending non-plot.  Considering that John Byrne went on to bitterly criticise the slow pace of the "decompressed" storytelling style that dominated the early 2000s, it's worth remembering that the Martin family storyline takes a massive fourteen issues to go absolutely nowhere.  Even knowing that there was nothing at the end of the road, on re-reading this series, I was floored by just how pointless it all is.  Normally one might make excuses on the grounds that Byrne had to tie up his storylines quickly, but remember, they announced the cancellation six months earlier.

The appeal of this series lies in the style and the old-school, retro superhero storytelling, which was already drifting out of fashion by this time.  The first half of the run more or less delivers on that; the closing issues, unfortunately, go badly off the rails.  Some of these long-running subplots are barely even stories.  The X-Men stand on the margins of a Fantastic Four plot.  The Mole Man captures the X-Men, but they escape.  Ashley Martin is attracted to Professor X, but nothing happens.  At its best, Hidden Years did entertain a section of the audience that yearned for a simpler time; but even they would have to concede that these closing issues provided plenty of ammunition for the book's detractors.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (next in Avengers vol 1 #88)
Cyclops, the Beast and Marvel Girl I (all next in flashback in Amazing Adventures vol 2 #11)
Lorna Dane, Havok and Iceman (all next in Incredible Hulk vol 2 #150)
The Angel (next in flashback in Amazing Adventures vol 2 #11)

GUEST STARS
The Fantastic Four: Mr Fantastic, the Human Torch, the Invisible Girl, the Thing and Crystal (all concurrent with Fantastic Four #104; Mr Fantastic also appears on pages 3 and 8 in original panels interweaving with pages 16-17 of Fantastic Four #104; all five appear on page 20 panel 5 following Fantastic Four #104; the Torch appears next in Marvel Team-Up vol 1 #1, Mr Fantastic appears next in Avengers #88, the Thing appears next in Sub-Mariner #31, and the others appear next in Fantastic Four #105)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Teri Martin and Ashley Martin (no further appearances for either)
Candy Southern (last behind the scenes in issue #18; next in Hulk Annual #7)
Avia (behind the scenes; last in issue #17; no further appearances)

VILLAINS
Magneto (concurrent with Fantastic Four #104)
The Mole Man and his Moloids (next in Incredible Hulk vol 2 #127)
The Promise: Tobias Messenger (dies), Tad Carter, Craig, Gene, Gracie and Simon (the group dissolves; no further appearances for all)

GUEST APPEARANCES
Namor the Sub-Mariner and Dorma (both concurrent with Fantastic Four #104)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Lucy Robinson (no further appearances)

Written: 3 June 2006

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