I'm going through the X-Men before Disney/MCU fucks it up by integrating mutants into the franchise and I decided to start with Immortal X-Men. It's a good fun, but I keep getting derailed by allusions to events that've happened in other comic series.
Thank god I can access these for free, but how tedious is it to find cohesive stories. I know I'm seeking that in comics, but still.
I really like the X-Men as a series too. From the origins to the way they interact with other 'heroic' characters in Marvel.
Fun bit of trivia on the X-Men - when making action figures, human-shaped dolls fell (and mighs till fall) under a different tax bracket than, say, non-human creatures or monsters. To save money on that taxation, Marvel argued that mutants were not human and so shouldn't have the tax applied to them. It's a fact that capitalism dehumanizes people, but rarely do you such a hilariously bleak example of it.
Also, who's your favorite on the X-Men roster?
Mine's Rogue.
Comics that have been running since the Silver Age can definitely get hard to follow, but X-Men in particular gets REALLY hard. Mutants became prevalent in Marvel comics because you don't need to write an origin story for them. They just have a secret set of powers that awaken in a time of intense trauma.
This made it really easy to create new characters who could just show up and didn't really need an explanation, so writers did it a lot. The X-Men roster expanded beyond reason, but Marvel wasn't about to give up on selling collectibles, so they made new teams for brand-new series. Eventually it got to the point where mutants outnumbered non-mutants in the Marvel universe, and then House of M put a big pause on creating new X-Men for a good couple of years.
All that being said, Chris Claremont's titanic 16-year run on Uncanny X-Men is among the best things to ever happen in comics.
My favorite X-Men character is Nightcrawler.
The Krakoa era started with so much promise but after Inferno it all just devolved into a mess. Jonathan Hickman was really the key to keeping it interesting and coherent. X-Men are always fun until timeline and space hijinks complicate the story.
As far as favorites go, Kate Pryde is my girl.
Tangential, but I've been re-watching the old 90s X-Men show and it's been mostly good. There have been little spots of obnoxious 90s neolib parts (the Omega Red episode in season 2 where they pull the "USSR was just an extension of Russian Empire" shit, among other expected anti-communist horseshit, or Beast reading fucking Animal Farm to show how intellectual he is lol) but it's been enjoyable overall.
Favorite X-Men are probably Ice-Man and (when he's actually booked correctly, i.e., as an underdog) Wolverine.
Yes lmao. I remember trying to read the Sonic comics back in the day, and if you didn't also read every single miniseries and special release you would very quickly get lost - and that universe was relatively well contained compared to the sprawling mediascape that is Marvel.
The best way to read comics is collected editions. Paperbacks will usually have everything you need to follow one story arc from beginning to end.
Comics in the 90s is when the companies realized they could go to town and sell a LOT of junk. Before that, they were just recreations for boys, but in the 90s they went pro.
Yeah, the MCU has stepped into that problem recently, too.
It wasn't always like this. You can read classic 60s era Spider-Man or Fantastic Four and it's remarkably easy to follow. Every now and then there's a stray annual or crossover, but they were pretty good at saying "it happened here! go read it!" and moving on without being too confusing. It started getting brutal in the 90s when Spider-Man was carrying three or four different series at the same time and they all overlapped. Then in the 2000s they got big on the annual crossover events and ever since it's like you have a small, grounded story where Kamala Khan is thinking about boys and fighting street-level crime then all of a sudden universe ending event and she's in space fighting gods. Say goodbye to whatever storyline she had going on before that, because then they're just renumbering the series next week. And they can't afford to do anything interesting because they have to stop what they're doing and focus on the big event that's right around the corner.
Now the MCU is at the point where they make a movie about the nature of gods and they can't really address the nature of gods because there are now like five pantheons of gods in the MCU and to make any sort of change in their hierarchy affects 12 other stories that are being written, so instead they just get a bunch of dumb jokes. Sure, they could dial it back to like, 3 movies a year and nothing else, but that would mean less money.
Unfortunately you need one of those dumb CBR-adjacent websites to give you a reading order any time you want to read through some Marvel Comics from the past 20 years. Marvel Unlimited just isn't designed to accommodate that problem.
