I've had enough Jim Lee X-Men merch

There I was, minding my own business, eating the Trader Joe’s salad I’d packed for lunch, when I saw the following D23 promotion for X-Men ‘97 on my Twitter feed:

And, as I looked at the “animation-style” artwork done in homage to Jim Lee’s classic 1992 Impel X-Men cards, complete with a binder and trading card sleeves, each individually damaged to indicate the dedicated love of its owner from so much usage … I got kinda riled up.

It wasn’t the new show. And it wasn’t just the ad. It was what the ad was symptomatic of, a relentless barrage of a single-minded form of promotion that has gotten so tired and played out that I have reached my absolute limit. I’m talking, of course, about the neverending force-feeding of Jim Lee’s X-Men as the quintessential nexus point of all X-Men nostalgia per Marvel’s very own marketing and licensing. Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about, so allow me to provide some examples. Just in the last week I have been served up ads for the following:

A “Youtooz” style Cyclops sculpture in the style of … Jim Lee’s X-Men #1:

A wraparound jacket from CultureKings using interior art from… X-Men #2

CultureKings X-Men wraparound jacket front

CultureKings X-Men wraparound jacket Back

A Disney branded T-shirt using Mickey and Friends as the X-Men on … X-Men #1

You might be looking at these items saying, “Cool! Where do I get those? What’s your problem, dork-butt?” Well, the problem is that by locking us solely into Jim Lee’s artwork of 1991-92, we are being paralyzed into an eternal stasis of X-Men nostalgia from which we cannot escape and deserve to be free from. As an X-Men fan and consumer, I am part of the problem. I own multiple T-shirts with Jim Lee X-Men artwork. One of them, featuring the black and white linework from X-Men #11, is still a regular find at your local Target. Two years ago, Austin Gorton and I wrote about the Jim Lee Impel Trading Cards coffee table book published by Abrams – and you know I have a copy. Heck, I even looked to the design features of those same cards when doing the Kickstarter rewards for my fan comic Bish & Jubez.

Part of my hostility is just boredom. I’m sick of seeing the same images printed and spit out on every conceivable product for decades. And it feels even worse now because since Disney acquired the rights to X-Men, there’s been an increased field day on licensing this imagery ad nauseam. We’ve seen clothing lines like BAIT doing wraparound shirts of Lee’s trading card art, then last year it was KITH’s blind-bag Asics paired with exclusive holo-foil/graded trading cards of – you guessed it – the 1992 trading card art. The online Marvel SNAP! game features an entire collection of variant cards of the artwork that was repurposed and recolored for Jim Lee Marvel Variant covers in 2017.

I am simply sick and tired of looking at the same artwork I was looking at when I was 11 years old. And I want to be very clear: I am a huge fan of Lee’s X-run. His early ’90s work set the template for what the entire decade would try (and fail miserably) to look like, and it meant a great deal to me when I was a kid. I have the floppies, I have the omnibi, the Epic Collections, the first printing TPBs. I am one of the few humans on this planet who has a copy of Speakeasy Magazine #119, for goodness sake.

But we need to recognize that Lee represents an artistic archetype of a bygone time. What seems exciting and new to any generation inevitably weathers with age through repetition and time. Just like hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a classic rock station in 2024 isn’t as thrilling as it was hearing it on a Top 40 station in 1991, thinking that Lee’s work still inspires the same emotional response simply isn’t true after it’s been copied, bastardized and sold to death. The emotional response we get when we see Lee’s work is the memory of that excitement, instead of the excitement itself. It’s the happiness of the familiar. It’s the literal allure of nostalgia.

Enjoying X-Men is about more than just Jim Lee. The line has a rich history of incredible artists who have worked on the books, and depending on your age or entry point, you might prefer the classic Dave Cockrum or Paul Smith, or you might be more of a Marc Silvestri, Andy Kubert or Joe Madureira person; maybe you love the work of Frank Quitely, or if you’re just joining the era, you might really be into RB Silva. Every person has their own favorite eras and characters, and there is a joy in having those favorites and sharing your love for them.

But if all Marvel is going to do is solely license Jim Lee artwork from the short window of the early ’90s, it suggests there is only one artist whose X-Men are the X-Men. That there was only one era of X-Men worth putting out there to the rest of the world who shop at retail stores instead of local comic book stores. And that artist is Jim Lee, a man who hasn’t worked for Marvel in decades and currently leads their main competitor, DC Comics. He’s a legend in his own right who deserves to be honored instead of treated like a ceaseless commodity cash cow.

So there’s that, but I’m also mad because despite Marvel marketing dwelling in this timestuck hell, life has gone on, X-Men has gone on, and there are so, so, so many more artists whose work I would like to see used not only to sell merchandise, but also see appropriate royalties for it. Where is our Chris Bachalo merch, or our Stuart Immonen stuff, and where for the love of the Nazarene mutant is our Pepe Larraz and RB Silva gear?!

I’ll give you one quick example of what would be an easy, knockout collectible right now. For the last two years, Russell Dauterman and others have been illustrating outstanding, “trading card” variants for the most recent volume of X-Men. They are, every single one, absolutely beautiful. Do they use the ‘92 Impel trade dress? Absolutely. But they are not Jim Lee. They are gorgeous drawings of the X-Men characters as they are in the present, even if there are occasional nods to the past. Why not issue them as a physical card set? Why not put this readymade artwork onto shirts and jackets and assorted stuff (Plus it would be a nice way to make up for that pandemic-quashed X of Swords Tarot Card set we didn’t get!).

I’m going to try to be optimistic here. Years ago, the talented Shelby Wolf and I wrote a piece for AIPT about the X-Men characters who most needed the Funko treatment, and lo and behold, more than half of our suggestions have gone into production since. So let’s make this dream a reality. It is time to finally give the tired, well-trod work of Jim Lee a rest, and allow the generations of artists who have followed their time to shine. Give us some freaking variety, so that when I see inevitable new lines of X-merch as we trod slowly toward the eventual MCU X-movie push, I can see exciting, new, fresh material instead of the ancient, the played out and the exhausted.