Did you know sometimes covers for comic books get rejected by editorial and a new one has to be made? I’m sure you did, and of course that has happened to plenty of famous titles over the years, including Marvel’s X-Men. Over at Comic Book Resources, Brian Cronin, with help from the Unpublished X-Men blog, has collected a bunch of these unused X-Men covers to compare and contrast them with their published counterparts. For example, take this cover for X-Men #10 by Jack Kirby.

Since no explanation is given as to why Marvel rejected the original cover, one can only speculate. There is a good chance they felt the original was too busy, with the dinosaurs and Zabu in on the fight as well. While both covers offer Ka-Zar as a clearly formidable opponent, the published one at least makes it look like the X-Men have the situation under control, instead of being terribly overrun and beaten down. That last part could be true, but that obviously wasn’t a problem with a lot of future covers.

The cover can be nearly as important for the issue as the story itself. The cover is the first thing people see, it has to be able to quickly and succinctly convey the story so far in a single image. Sometimes there are words sprinkled in, and many times it has to be the selling point to convince someone to pick the book up in the first place. Therefore it may be the most scrutinized part of the issue all together. It’s no wonder that there seems to be a goodly amount of unused ones in the lengthy history of the X-Men series.

Check out a few more examples in the gallery below, but be sure to head over to Comic Book Resources to see the full assortment that Cronin put together. Let us know what your favorite X-Men cover of all time is in the comments below or over on Twitter with me, @MattDelhauer.

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HT: CBR

Featured image provided courtesy of deviantArt // artist: DAVID-OCAMPO