Oh, wait.

I know.

Xavier was a Nazi officer (secretly a Jew who had managed to hide his heritage) who abused Magneto, his brother (although neither knew that they were brothers at that time), at Auschwitz. After WWII, Xavier, a war criminal, started his school and founded the X-Men in an attempt to bury his past.

That'll "tilt the mirror" on all those crappy old stories, right? And there can be 17 variant covers, to boot.

Jean in her green and gold outfit, as depicted above by JB, always got my heart pumping...Neal did a great version of her as well.

Thanks, Mark.  That's exactly right.  I'm not sure why I thought it was a Classic X-Men issue.  Perhaps it's because Alpha Flight #17 reprints some of X-Men #109 and came out in roughly the same time frame as the Classic series.

More to the point, I remember seeing JB's amazing art on the cover of Alpha Flight #17 and then later seeing X-Men #109 with Cockrum's cover and JB's interior art and wondering why on earth JB didn't do the original cover.

I like Cockrum's art as much as the next X-Men fan, but in my opinion, JB's art is in a completely different tier.  In any case, it's been really great to see JB's renderings of some of these other X-Men covers as end pages for these bound volumes.