If I were him, I’d like to go out this way too.
Anyone who was a child in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s that was into comics knew Dave Cockrum and Len Wein’s work. To me, seeing characters like Mystique and Storm made me completely fall in love with comic books in general, X-Men specifically. While the boys had Spiderman and Captain America, all we really had was Jean Grey (pre-Phoenix, she was pretty weak, in my opinion) for the girls until these characters came along. I’m sure there were other females in the Marvel world at that point, but none of them stood out for me like those two did. Storm was the one that always held my eternal admiration, because she could kick ass and still be a “girly” girl, what with her on-again off-again thing with Forge, along with making the X-Men a little less WASP-y.
So thanks, Dave, for all that you gave a shy little girl who got to imagine that she was something else for a while because of you.