Summary

• Jean Grey briefly worked as a bikini model due to X-Men's breakup in issue #45.
• Cyclops took on the surprising role of a radio correspondent during the X-Men team split.
• Marvel comics leaned on romance comics for inspiration in the late 1960s, leading to sexier superhero content.

This is "Working for a While," a feature that spotlights the lesser-known jobs that our favorite superheroes have had over the years (mostly in their secret identities, but sometimes I'll feature examples of jobs superheroes have had in their costumed identities, as well). Today, we look at Jean Grey's short-lived stint as a bikini model (as well as Cyclops' similarly brief time as a radio correspondent).

A while back, I wrote about how Marvel's comic books got decidedly "sexier" in the late 1960s, and a lot of it was the influence of the romance comic book genre upon Marvel's superhero comics. You see, as I noted in that piece, in the 1950s, Marvel Comics went into a major sales slump and then, due to a problem with their distributor, nearly went out of business later in the decade. Almost all of their artists had to go find other work, with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko being the main artists at the revamped, lean Marvel.

Some of Marvel's artists found work at DC Comics, which had a very prominent selection of romance comics during the 1950s and 1960s. Romance comics, naturally, tended to be a bit more on the steamy side of things than your standard superhero comic book. All Comics Code approved, of course, but someone like John Romita certainly could do "sexier" things with these comics than he ever could with superhero work. As I noted after Romita's passing, it was his romance comics that turned Romita into a superstar artist. That was mostly due to all of the storytelling skills he learned, but it's fair to note that, yes, he also brought a lot of "sexy" with him when he came back to Marvel from DC in the mid-1960s.

Check out this iconic page from Amazing Spider-Man #47...

Once Romita was doing this in the pages of Marvel's most popular title and things went okay, then suddenly this sort of thing began to pop up more and more in Marvel Comics throughout 1968. One of those places was in 1968's X-Men #48, where writer Arnold Drake, and artists Don Heck and Werner Roth (both veteran romance comic book artists, although Heck had actually only RECENTLY gotten into it at the time) had Jean Grey become a bikini model! Find out why she was even IN that situation, and see what Cyclops' job was while Jean was modeling skimpy bathing outfits.

Why did Jean Grey have to get a job?

As I noted in an old Abandoned Love, after the death of Professor X in X-Men #42 (by Roy Thomas, Don Heck and George Tuska), Stan Lee had the idea that a way to make X-Men stand out would be to have the book be the only book on the market where the title changed every issue. So the way that they did this was to make each issue "star" a different member of the team. They had already been doing back-up stories featuring the origins of the team members, so this was an attempt to make the books sort of a series of solo books. A main story spotlighting a member of the X-Men and then an origin backup spotlighting a different member of the team.

Gary Friedrich had the team break up in X-Men #45, as FBI Agent Fred Duncan actually FORCED them to break up, and even gave them letters detailing their new lives!!!

It was absolutely preposterous, and yet the X-Men went along with it, and split up, with the idea that the series would now become team-ups of Beast and Iceman, team-ups of Cyclops and Marvel Girl, and solo stories featuring the Angel. With the team disbanded, Jean Grey now had to come up with a reason to tell her family why she wasn't just moving back home, and her idea was to say that she was now a bikini model!

What was Cyclops doing while Jean was modeling bikinis?

In X-Men #48 (by Arnold Drake, who succeeded Friedrich on the title after the team broke up, and Heck and Roth), we see that Jean Grey is not only a bikini model, but she's apparently a really good bikini model, as well!

However, after the photographer for the session tries to hit on Jean, suddenly her boyfriend, Scott Summers, shows up, and he makes a big ol' scene. As he and Jean leaves, he acknowledges that he played it up a bit, as they are sort of playing a role now that they are out on their own, but, at the same time, he had a blast picking on the guy flirting with Jean (and trying to take advantage of his position of power).

Okay, so if Jean is now a fashion model, which sets up HER plot outside of the school, but what about Cyclops? As you might have expected, due to his super-serious nature all of the time, the best avenue for Cyclops was...RADIO CORRESPONDENT!

Yes, radio correspondent. How weird is that? Was that even a job that you could just walk up as a 19-year-old and get hired as off the street back then? Then again, I guess Scott was briefly the headmaster of Xavier's, so maybe his resume sounds pretty impressive? Whatever the case, as I noted in that aforementioned Abandoned Love, the whole "split the team up" idea was abandoned after just three solo issues, so they were back together in the next issue, and Scott and Jean's jobs were dropped (I assume Jean maybe did some modeling when she left the team briefly after Giant-Size X-Men #1, but I don't know for sure).

Okay, folks, I'm sure you all have plenty of suggestions for this feature, so let me have 'em at brianc@cbr.com!