A few years ago, while working on the now defunct VeXed-Men website, I did a series of The X-Men in ten seasons, where I did some exhaustive reading, some skimming, some Wikipedia-ing, and some trips to the used book store that carries comics, and put together an exhaustive timeline of how to read the X-Men using pretty much all of the trade paperbacks that were then available. Don't do that to yourself. In the last few months, I've read nearly 150 X-Men and X-Men adjacent books including spin-off titles such as Cable, X-Factor, X-Force, X-Man, Generation X, Rogue, Wolverine, Wolverine & Gambit...if it has been collected into trade in the last fifteen years or so, I've read it and reviewed it on Goodreads, and it made me question why I ever even liked the X-Men. For this project, I'm just going to condense it down to the books I enjoyed reading. There are going to be ten "episodes" per season, and it's going to lean heavily and more modern stories/collections because they're easier to access, and some of the writing techniques of the 60s, 70s, and 80s haven't aged well. Season one took us from the original stories all the way through the Claremont run and beyond. This season is once again, mostly spinoffs, as the main titles at the time were beimng written by Chuck Austen, Peter Milligan, and Chris Claremont, three of the Worst Writers to ever work on the X-Books. I know, Claremont was also one of the best, but his 21st century X-books are akin to Jimi Hendrix coming back from the dead and swatting randomly at a keytar, and having record executives try and convince you he was still a genius. Except it's much worse than that. Don't punish yourself by picking up X-Treme X-Men, Uncanny X-Men The New Age, New Excalibur, or his runs on The Exiles. You don't deserve it. Season 3: |
October 2024
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