In 2010, the Guinness Book of World Records awarded Claremont a trophy for the best-selling comic of all-time in honour of X-Men #1, which sold somewhere between 3 and 8 million copies. #xmen 1/5

Due to the direct market system, the actual number of copies sold is impossible to track, but the pre-order figures came in at around 8.1 million copies, more than enough to take the title. 2/5

Famously, the issue capitalized on hype, Jim Lee’s emergence as an artist, a speculator market approaching its tipping point, and the gimmick of using multiple covers to force collectors to buy extra copies of the same issue. It worked. 3/5

The record stands to this day, in part because of industry collapse in the mid 1990s, a collapse that has, ironically, been linked to both sales gimmicks, and to the loss of talent at Marvel and DC, spurred by the Image comics revolution (with Lee a part of that). 4/5

In this sense, X-Men #1, the beginning of Claremont’s swan-song on his franchise-defining run, is a strangely pivotal object lesson in comics history, representing both the highs and lows of the industry at the exact same time. 5/5