So You Want To Get Into… X-Men Comics

There’s still a lot of "being inside" to go this year so you’ve got plenty of time to get into more stuff. Assuming you’ve worked your way through all eighty years of Batman comics, let’s go for another heady mix of soap opera and extreme violence this time round. As ever, it’s another one with a daunting amount of content so knowing where to even start can be daunting. That is why your friendly neighbourhood* Baldy Fella is here to give you a gentle nudge in a couple of directions.

Start At The One Of The Beginnings
Hang on, one of the beginnings? Yup, in a sense, X-Men is a comic with two jumping on points. You can, of course, go all the way back to Uncanny X-Men 1 when the original team of Cyclops, Marvel Girl (Jean Grey), Beast, Iceman and Angel is introduced along with mentor Professor X. However, due to falling sales, the title was effectively cancelled after issue 66, becoming a reprint title up until the second jumping on point - Giant Size X-Men 1 in 1975. This introduced a new team including such iconic characters as Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and a short guy with pointy nails called Wolverine (not sure what happened to him)**. It’s a contained enough reboot that you can start here without having to go all the way back.

Key Storylines
There are a few key storylines that you could jump into if you don’t want to invest in the whole run; the most obvious being The Dark Phoenix Saga which has been adapted (pretty poorly) twice now for the big screen (X-Men: The Last Stand and, obviously, Dark Phoenix) and is justifiably held up as one of the classic X-Men storylines. In terms of other storylines, I’ve got a soft spot for Fatal Attractions as that was the first one I read way back in the day and Mutant Massacre and Inferno are other solid old-school crossovers.

Runs By Creator
The classic run by Chris Claremont begins with Giant Size X-Men so is covered by starting with that one. There are two other creator-led runs on the title that I think are really worth it as both take the franchise in a different direction. The first is Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men back in 2001 which, as with a lot of Morrison’s work, is bursting with ideas and strange characters, many of which are still going strong today. He was determined to really shake up the status quo- sadly, this being comic books, some of the more radical ideas he introduced were undone almost immediately.
The other run is the one that is currently impacting the X-Men line by Johnatahn Hickman. Like Morrison, Hickman is an ideas man and the scope and scale of the story he’s telling is genuinely intriguing. Sadly, this has been disrupted somewhat by the current state of global affairs but you can at least get hold the initial 12 issues run of two interlinked mini series, House Of X/Powers Of X, which kick the whole thing off.

There you go - a couple of hints to get you started on the world of beleaguered mutants, hated and feared by a world which misunderstands them...


* Oh hang on, that’s the other guy.
** Alright, technically he’d already been introduced in Incredible Hulk the year before but this is when he really comes to prominence.