Wolverine Gothic

Artist Paolo Rivera tells the story behind this unused Wolverine cover:

When I was first given the premise of Wolverine Art Appreciation Month,

this was one of the first images to pop into my head. Yes, it's totally cliche, but that's sort of the point. I quickly found an image of American Gothic on-line and proceeded to digitally paint on top of it. I received approval from my editor rather quickly, but it couldn't survive the legal department... and so we moved on.

http://paolorivera.blogspot.com/2009/04/wolverine-gothic.html

All of the Wolverine Art Appreciation Month covers can be seen on Comicbookresources.com

Brandon Peterson Phoenix

This Brandon Peterson convention sketch is one of the many goodies that can be found on the artist's blog:

http://www.brandonpeterson.com/blog/

Dolmen - Alan Davis

This Alan Davis cover for the Spanish magazine Dolmen was created from the drawing below.

The original art was auctioned by Heritage Auctions:

http://comics.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=812&lotIdNo=40017

Allies For Peace

According to toonzone.net:

"The X-Men's introduction to animation was inauspicious. They didn't even refer to themselves as the X-Men. Instead they opted for Allies for Peace!

The original X-Men line-up appeared in an episode of the 1966 Sub-Mariner show from The Marvel Super Heroes, the first part of which was called "Dr. Doom's Day". The story was essentially an adaptation of a Fantastic Four story, but since Grantray-Lawrenece didn't have the rights to the FF characters, they substituted the X-Men.

Oddly, the X-Men are never referred to by that name, instead known only as the Allies for Peace! The characters kept their original looks and individual names from the comics though."

The Allies for Peace can be seen after 1:30 in this clip from the episode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1bso2ZJv-U

Begorrah!

This image of Banshee was part of a Heritage Comics auction, and is credited to Dave Cockrum and Josef Rubinstein.

http://comics.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=809&lotIdNo=70013

Eighth Line-Up Blue Team

The X-Men Blue Team appears to be drawn by Steven Butler and Josef Rubinstein.  You can find more team Line-Ups from The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Master Edition here:

http://unpublishedxmen.blogspot.com/search/label/Line-up

Origins

As far as I can determine, this cover art for Wolverine Origins #3 by Mike Deodato was never published.

Hope

Here's a sketch cover for Uncanny X-Men #1 (2011) featuring Hope Summers by Carlos Pacheco.

Operation: Zero Tolerance

All apologies for the image quality, but this is the best version I could find of the Operation: Zero Tolerance promo by Carlos Pacheco. I don't think Cecilia Reyes ever wore this face mask in the comics.

Carlos Pacheco Week

This Carlos Pacheco cover for X-Men 63 featuring Sebastian Shaw and Jean Grey was never published.

Graduates

Let's make it a Steve Rude week, with this image featuring the first graduating class of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.  This image comes from Steve Rude's comicartfans.com gallery.

School Days

After a little research, I have determined that this is most likely the final piece produced by Steve Rude for Wizard. This image was published in Wizard's X-Men special for 2002. The unpublished prelim was featured in the previous post.

Steve Rude Preliminary Sketch

According to Chris Klamer at comicartfans.com: "Wizard had asked Steve to do a piece for their X-Men special book and he thought they meant a cover and this is what he came up with. Then they came back and said it was going to be an insert along with a biography of him so he had to change the whole thing."