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.