9 Best Selling Comic Series Of All Time
4. X-Men
270 Million Comics Sold
The X-Men emerged during a seminal moment in Marvel's history, and that is of course its bullpen era. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and countless others together fashioned a new mythology in the Marvel Universe, giving birth to one of the most popular fictional worlds in entertainment history.
At the forefront of this new world were the X-Men, a powerful allegory for the oppressed that shaped Marvel's mantra of "reflecting the world outside our window." It would be decades until the team became a staple of the publisher's books however, with Giant-Size X-Men #1 - written by the late Len Wein and drawn by Dave Cockrum - birthing the group's definitive incarnation.
A memorable run led by Chris Claremont would soon follow, and with the nineties the X-Men reached whole new heights of popularity. Egged on in part by the speculator boom (and later that iconic animated TV show), Jim Lee's redesign of Marvel's Mutants propelled them into a whole other level in October 1991.