X-Men #60, Sauron, and the Neal Adams rescue
X-Men #60, cover dated September 1969, contains the first appearance of Sauron, created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Neal Adams. It falls in the middle of Adams's short run on the title, which ended with the book being canceled as an ongoing series in 1970.
Karl Lykos is a doctor with a condition. When he touches a patient he drains something out of them, and the more he drains the harder it is to stop, and eventually he stops being a man at all and becomes a green pterodactyl with a hypnotic stare. That is the premise Roy Thomas and Neal Adams put into X-Men #60, cover dated September 1969, and it is one of the stranger character concepts to come out of Marvel in that decade.
A dying book gets the best artist in comics
To understand why X-Men #60 looks the way it does, you have to know what the book was in 1969, which is to say: a problem. The X-Men had launched in 1963 alongside the rest of the Marvel line and had failed to catch in the way Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four did. The title bounced between writers and artists, spent stretches on a bimonthly schedule, and by the late sixties was the book that people at the company mentioned when they wanted an example of something that was not working.
Then Neal Adams asked for it.
Adams was the most in-demand artist in the industry and he could have drawn anything. He took the X-Men specifically because it was failing, on the reasoning that nobody would interfere with him on a book nobody cared about. He drew issues #56 through #63, skipped one, and came back for #65. Nine issues total. The book was canceled as an ongoing five issues after he left.
Those nine issues are the reason there is an X-Men franchise. That is a strong claim and it holds up. Adams brought a photographic, anatomically serious style to a book that had been drawn in the house manner, redesigned Havok’s costume into the black-and-white concentric design people still copy, and gave the team a visual identity that fans remembered for the five years the title spent publishing nothing but reprints. When Marvel went back to the well in 1975 with Giant-Size X-Men #1, it was going back to a property that had stayed alive in the memory of people who had seen those Adams pages.
Naming a villain after Tolkien
Sauron’s name is a deliberate Tolkien reference and the comic does not hide it. Lykos picks the name himself, in the story, because he has read The Lord of the Rings and recognizes what he has become. Roy Thomas was a heavy reader of the kind of fantasy that had not yet colonized American popular culture, and in 1969 a mainstream Marvel comic quoting Tolkien was a genuinely odd move. The paperback boom that put Middle-earth in every dorm room was only a few years old.
It is also the rare comics name that survived the lawyers. Marvel has periodically had to run “with apologies to the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien” style acknowledgments, and the character has occasionally been credited in a way that nods at the borrowing. He kept the name.
Mechanically, Sauron is an energy vampire, which is a much better idea than a pterodactyl man. He feeds on life force, the feeding makes him stronger and less human, and the cure is abstinence from the thing he needs most. Thomas wrote him as a tragedy with a monster attached, and the hypnotic-eyes power gave Adams something genuinely fun to draw. The character became a Savage Land fixture, which is where Chris Claremont and John Byrne picked him up in the late seventies, and he has cycled back through X-Men stories and animated series ever since.
Why this issue and not the next one
First appearances land where the schedule puts them, and this one is a clean case. Sauron shows up fully formed in #60, gets his transformation, and the story runs straight into #61. There is no ambiguity about cameos or partial appearances, which is a mercy. The same era produced several X-Men keys that collectors still argue about.
Where #60 sits matters more than its number. It is in the middle of the Adams run, at the point where he and Thomas had settled into each other and were producing the best work the title had seen. The issue before it and the issue after are both strong. This is the one with the debut, so this is the one with the price attached, and that is more or less an accident of which script needed a villain that month.
The distribution reality of a 1969 flop
Late-sixties X-Men issues are hard to find in high grade for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone hoarding them.
- Everything sold on newsstands. There was no direct market in 1969 and no comic shops to speak of. Unsold copies did not come back as unsold copies. Distributors stripped the covers, returned those for credit, and pulped the rest.
- A low-selling title means a low print run and a high return rate, so a larger fraction of the run was destroyed than for a hit book.
- Nobody bagged anything. Comics went in a stack, in a closet, under a bed, and got read repeatedly by children with no interest in spine stress.
- The paper was cheap and it yellows. Half of what separates a 9.4 from a 9.8 on a Silver Age book is page color, which you cannot fix.
For scale on what the franchise’s keys do when they surface clean: Heritage Auctions sold a CGC 9.4 copy of X-Men #1 from 1963 for $807,300 in 2012. X-Men #60 is a tier below that in every sense, but it comes from the same distribution reality, and high-grade unrestored copies are genuinely scarce rather than scarce as a figure of speech. If the grading vocabulary is not second nature yet, our guide to the language collectors use for condition is the shortest route to reading an auction listing properly.
What a licensed digital edition is
VeVe publishes officially licensed Marvel comics and art as numbered digital editions, and the X-Men catalog is one of the deeper corners of it. The thing worth understanding is what one of those editions actually consists of, because the mechanics are more specific than most people assume.
The publisher authorizes a run of a fixed size. Each piece in that run carries its own edition number, recorded on a public ledger, and that number travels with the piece if it changes hands. You read the comic full-screen in the app, page by page, and for art pieces you can stand a figure on a table through your camera. What you are buying is the licensed edition and its number, not a file you are hoping stays on a server somewhere. The first-appearance logic that drives the paper market applies here in a rearranged form: the object is official, it is finite, and the numbering is public.
That is a different proposition from a stapled 1969 newsstand copy and there is no point pretending otherwise. It is also the only way most people will ever hold a numbered edition of anything from this era of the book.
The run that mattered more than the debut
Sauron is a good villain who has had a long career, and X-Men #60 is a legitimate key. But the reason to care about this issue is the nine-issue stretch it sits inside.
Adams took a canceled-in-all-but-name title because nobody would bother him on it, drew the best-looking superhero comics of 1969 and 1970, and then the book died anyway. Five years of reprints followed. The relaunch, when it came, worked partly because those Adams pages had given a generation of readers a reason to remember mutants at all, and Claremont’s long run afterward turned that into the stories people still argue about fifty years later.
Failure is usually just failure. Once in a while it is a book that was too good for its sales figures, sitting in a drawer waiting for the audience to catch up.