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You've been reading too many Claremont stories! I like the characters to have a clean win, occasionally!

Well, if you didn't intend that, then there was an unintended bonus point. :0)

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Not so much "intent", perhaps, as instinct, honed by mumbly-mumble years on the job!

First, a distinction. There are team books, and there are group books. People tend to use the words interchangeably, or with their meanings exchanged, but as I use them here (and as I generally use them) a team is something that starts out that way -- the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Challengers of the Unknown, etc -- while a group is several characters who have established their own credentials before coming together -- the JLA, the Avengers, the Defenders, etc.

Traditionally, in superhero comics, it has been easy to spot the teams, as distinct from the groups, by the uniforms. Literally, the characters wear the same (or variations on the same) outfits. The X-Men, in fact, may be the first to have broken this mold, when they got their "graduation" costumes (no longer uniforms) and each took on a distinctive look. (It's important to note, mind you, that this was a SALES PLOY. The title was floundering, and Marvel wanted to do something to call attention to it. Individualizing the characters, even to the point of putting their names, one by one, on the cover as logos, was the chosen route. And not a particularly successful one.)

This is a concept that has been all but abandoned in the past few decades. The All New, All Different X-Men were as different from each other as they were from the previous team. There were no unifying elements, as there were none in the relaunched Doom Patrol that followed not long after. The result was subtle but profound. In the kinds of wallpaper shots that were increasingly becoming common, as lots and lots of costumed characters found themselves bunching together (in books like SECRET WARS and CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS) it was becoming harder and harder to pick out the characters who belonged to teams. The Fantastic Four still stood out via their uniforms (tho there had even been a short-lived effort to give the Human Torch his own "look"), but if all the Marvel characters who appeared in the books published around the same time as GIANT-SIZED X-MEN 1 had been gathered together, there would have been nothing at all to cue an unfamiliar reader to who the X-Men were in that gathering. Not even something as simple as Xs on their belt buckles.

In a curious way, I think this points to the unfortunate direction comics were already beginning to turn -- to the clubbishness that has come to dominate fandom. The notion that readers are assumed to ALREADY KNOW what is needed to be known. So, OF COURSE the X-Men could be picked out of a clutch of costumed characters. After all, EVERYBODY KNOWS who the X-Men are, right?

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That was all Chris. He'd got it into his head, somewhere before I arrived on the book, that having the team struggling to "mesh" would play up their individual strengths, and also provide a bit of internal conflict. One of the things I did was to try to show how the team WAS learning to function AS a team -- only be be frustrated as Chris wrote it the other way no matter what I drew!!

This is one very large problem with the "Marvel Method" of plot-pencils-script. If the scripter decides to go off in a different direction from what was plotted, often the penciler doesn't know anything about it until the book sees print (especially if the penciler is on the other side of the continent!). Many was the time I would pick up the latest issue, and end up calling Chris to ask why some important moment we -- and, later on, / -- had worked out at the plotting stage, was not there in the script. "That was how I felt when I wrote it" was the most often heard reply.

As to Trevor's -- Sure, when the writer and artist are "bouncing off each other" it can create some terrific energy. Only real problem, as noted, is when the writer, who basically has it last, alters the original intent. There were many instances of this when Chris and I were on UNCANNY, and, to my mind at least, a lot of good scenes and character "bits" got lost as a result.