Welcome!

[sheliak]

Welcome to X-Men Classic!

This is a community dedicated to the classic Claremont-era X-Men! Related titles very much included. If you want to talk about New Mutants, X-Factor, Excalibur, the Magik miniseries, the Fallen Angels or anything else X-related from this time period—go right ahead! We hope you’ll have fun here.

To get the discussion rolling, tell us about the comic or arc that got you hooked on the era, or X-Men comics in general!

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the issue that got me hooked was the one where Psylocke, still not a team member yet and with broken ribs from an earlier fight, is left in the mansion alone except for non-powered doctors and severely wounded team members in the infirmary, and Sabertooth attacks! She has to buy time in a physical fight with a man with super-strength who wildly overpowers her - and she does. And then Wolverine arrives and buys time for her to mind-read Sabertooth. And then she's welcomed to the team.

I read that without much background - it was one of a pile of unrelated comics - and absolutely loved this woman in her pink princess outfit who manages to stand her ground against overwhelming odds, fights hard and cleverly and too the utmost of her abilities, and triumphs. I loved that her broken ribs keep coming back into play, the glimpses of the courage of the doctors (I think it's Moira and someone else?) in their locked room who are also hugely outgunned but not leaving, and the neat parallel of her fighting to buy them time and then Wolverine fighting to buy her time.

I think that was Alan Davis's first issue drawn in a regular run - he might have done an annual first. I loved how he drew Betsy and her telepathic butterfly eyes. She has such a lovely, radiant smile at the end. And her hair and ribbons always look great.

[sheliak]

When I was fourteen, my family went on a long vacation. I checked out some books from the local library to take with me, and one of the ones I picked was Essential X-Men vol. 2. We were away for about two weeks, and I read that comic over and over and over. I think it's still engraved on my brain.

I was already vaguely familiar with the characters—I'm not sure if I had seen the movies, but I'd definitely read Chris Claremont's novelizations, and the couple of other X-Men books I'd been able to find. (In retrospect, the Legacy Quest Trilogy was an excellent primer to the villains active in the 90s, if nothing else!) But I had a bit of trouble reading color comics in those days, so a black-and-white edition was a perfect place for me to start—and I still think the lineart looks great on its own!

There were about twenty issues in that collection—Proteus, the Dark Phoenix Saga, Days of Future Past, Kitty fighting demons and Wolverine mending fences with his old friends in Canada. There was even a helpful summary of the X-Men's entire history, courtesy of a bereaved Cyclops! It was a great primer to what made the team and the era so great, the characters and relationships and lovely art, and a good taste of how many different places the book could go.

I think it was the Proteus saga that really hooked me—I loved the combination of quiet moments (cocoa after a fight!) with high-stakes superhero battles, and the surreal and terrifying nature of Proteus's powers. And I imprinted hard on Moira. I loved her brilliance and ruthlessness, that she was the top scientist in this 'verse and that the most prominent human supporting character was a middle-aged woman (not that the artists often drew her that way, but still).

My other favorite arc was Days of Future Past. I loved Mystique and Destiny—their devotion to their cause and to each other, the tragedy of them creating the future they meant to avert (especially given Destiny's powers). And I immediately liked Pyro for his loyalty to Mystique and the creative, if sometimes nasty ways he used his powers. And meanwhile we had Kitty's badass future self, and Storm as a brand-new leader in a crisis, pulling through and doing splendidly. It was great.

I adore the characters in that era, and their relationships. I loved that Jean and Ororo were the strongest members of the team, their friendship, and Storm beginning to be a mentor for Kitty. I had an immediate crush on Nightcrawler, too.

And so much glorious weirdness. Canadian wendigo law! I loved how strange and out-there the X-Men's world was, how anything was possible, from space opera shenanigans to high fantasy interludes.

From there, I went through the rest of the library's X-Men collection. Ultimate X-Men wasn't my thing (though I liked the art in the Magnetic North storyline), but I loved the enthusiasm and tragedy of Age of Apocalypse (despite being confused all the while by all the skipping between titles and storylines in the collections I read). And I dipped my toes into then-modern X-Men—I loved the Academy X kids, still do—before being scared off by Decimation. But the Claremont era has always been the core of the X-Men for me—there's stuff later on that I love, but this era is what I always come back to.

[sholio]

For me I'm pretty sure it was the punk!Storm arc where she's depowered. I got into Marvel comics when I was pretty young, about 8 or 9, I think. I already loved comics (we had a bunch of my mom's old comics from the 50s and 60s from when she was a kid, mostly stuff like Superboy, Legion of Superheroes, and Classics Illustrated) and for Christmas I was given a "grab bag" gift set of Marvel comics that included an issue of all their currently running titles. I know this was what hooked me on X-Men, but while I remember specific issues of some of the other comics because they were first of all so memorable (the Thor issue where he turns into a frog was one of them, and an Iron Man one in which he got shrunk to microscopic size and attacked by computer viruses that looked like alien fighter planes) and second because they were the only issue of most of those titles that I had for most of my childhood, with X-Men I got into it enough to start collecting it, so I'm not sure of the specific issue. But it was definitely in that arc because I absolutely loved depowered Storm so much that it's the defining arc for her character for me, and I was disappointed when she got her powers back.

... NO WAIT, I just remembered the issue #, it was 202 - this one. (Thank you brain for storing useless trivia like that. Where are you when I need useful information like people's names or remembering appointments?)

I haphazardly collected X-Men and a couple other titles (Power Man & Iron Fist and Alpha Flight were the other ones I was mainly into) but it wasn't until I started getting the collected volumes in the late 90s that I ever had a clear idea of what happened when, because the comics I bought were so completely out of order - it was a combination of buying whatever was cheap in back issue bins and occasionally picking up the latest issue when I could get my folks to take me to the comic store, which was in a big city not very close to the small town we lived in, and therefore was a once or twice a year thing).

What I was really into, though, was the team stuff overall (especially those parts of it involving various combinations of Storm, Rogue, Wolverine, Kitty, and Nightcrawler), and especially the times when the team would just hang around together in their civilian clothes and do normal-person things, which was something I loved and could never get enough of. I also got into Rogue/Gambit later on, but he wasn't around yet in the time period when I first got into them.

[delight]

Once upon a time I saw X-2 and thought Kurt was amazing! Yeah, that's an embarrassing intro to a series when you have a comic geek parent, but it is the truth.

So I wanted to learn more about the source material - my father was a huge Jack Kirby fan (they shared a birthday, as a bonus) - and my first opportunity was at summer camp. What my camp-mates had brought along in terms of X-Men was all Claremont; I got introduced to the swasbuckling priest Kurt Wagner and fell in love with both him and everything around him, his team, his friends, everything.

ETA: The arc with Alex Summers and Annie Ghazikanian was the first I actually read in full! It was so far away in my weird foggy memory and then came back all at once.

My second summer at said camp, the Emma Frost miniseries origin story came out, and now Emma and Kurt are tied for first comic book characters of all time in my heart. Yes, both have had arcs that make me go D: and want to ignore them, but that's comics for you. I recently learned the Emma series has a complete set you can buy on Kindle for $25, and I intend to do this as soon as I have the funds because I haven't got the faintest clue where the actual books are anymore!

[lilacsigil]

So! I was about 10 and my mother brought home a random box of books from a garage sale. In it was the X-Men: Heroes for Hope comic. It was a one-off special by various big-name creators (including Stephen King!) with a framing story by Claremont, where each of the X-Men of the time have a scary experience where they learn about despair and then go to famine-hit Ethiopia and literally beat up despair in the form of a monster. It sounds terrible but the individual stories are really good, and they're clear that this doesn't solve famine. I was super impressed by Storm, Magneto and Rogue, who are still three of my favourites.

[teshumai]

So my classic x-men story is a bit round about. I didn't start reading comics and x-men until the 90s after the Claremont era had ended and I kept reading them for a long time. But I never really went backwards, until recently when I got marvel unlimited and decided i was going to read the entire 500 something run of Uncanny X-men starting in 1963. The move from Thomas to Claremont is sort of staggering in just how much better Claremont is. His voice is so distinctive and really gripping.

I have made it to 1985, and just met Madelyn Pryor last issue and i think it is time for me to decide if I'm just going give my life to the x-men and start reading new mutants and x-factor as well or stick to uncanny.

[julian]

I didn't read comics when I was a kid, but I read character summaries in the Marvel game descriptions in Dragon Magazine (really), and was captured by some of the storylines, so I was kind of vaguely interested in starting. But I didn't know quite how.

And then I discovered, in 1992, that my college had a small comics library inside its larger actual library. (OK, it was my co-college, me being at Bryn Mawr and the library being at Haverford.)

As far as I *remember*, they had most of the Claremont X-Men run. I'm pretty sure they were light on the early Claremont/Cockrum productions, and I don't imagine they could have had Giant Size X-Men #1, it being even then pretty rare & expensive, but I know I've read that stuff at other times.

Anyway. Love! Drama! Claremontisms! The focused totality of her psychic powers! Self-sacrifice! Punk Storm being badass, and Kitty Pryde figuring things out and being one of the more stubborn people in the universe. Mentorship of many different kinds. Mutantkind as one big ol' queer metaphor. Stuff like that.

I guess the arc I liked best was, yes, punk Storm, or more accurately, Storm trying to figure herself out, re-discovering that core of strength and steel, and how the network of relationships within the X-Men changed and grew, all during it.

(But I also loved Rachel Summers flailing in confusion and pain, and Piotr and Kitty's Big Romance (which makes me wince now), and Kurt being Kurt, and just everything.)

Anyway, I think they had like 3 issues of Excalibur and a couple of New Mutants. I later went on to collect as much of Excalibur as I could, and all of New Mutants until Claremont left, but not so much X-Men because I'd already read it and Claremont's writing tics by that time annoyed me. (I also collected some post-Claremont NM, but Simonson just really didn't... jell with the book, and Liefield is to be avoided at all times.)

[laceblade]

Hi! This community has fortuitous timing because I'm actually reading the X-Men comics for the very first time. A couple of years ago, I started with the Dark Phoenix saga because this article suggested it was a good place to start.

Right now, I'm in 1988/1989, smack in the middle of the Inferno arc - like I literally read the "Part 1" collected book and am waiting for "Part 2" to come in through the outerlibrary loan program :D The X-Men are all "dead" in Australia, except for their grieving counterparts who are meanly not told that it's all a fakeout!!?!

I've read some of the associated limited runs - Wolverine & Kitty Pryde mini-series, Illyana in Limbo mini-series, Fallen Angels, etc. The ones I'm reading right now include X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants, X-Terminators (I think I just read the last one?), Power Pack, and Excalibur. I am sad that the fourth/final edition of Power Pack never got published! But now I have something to hunt for in used bookstores.

Illyana/Magik is probably my favorite character. This whole "having a darkness inside of you and being afraid of it" thing is way too on the nose for me, a person who loves metaphors for depression in fiction.

I've also strongly clamped on to Kitty Pryde, probably because 1) she has brown curly hair like mine, and 2) she joined the X-Men team essentially right during/after the Dark Phoenix saga, or where I started, so it feels like we've been going through this thing together.

The Bill Sienkiewicz art was mind-blowing while it lasted. I recently grabbed basically his entire run for $1 per issue at a sale, :D

I am aware of a few vague spoilers (e.g., Illyana), but am excited to continue through this run of "canon," and to continue through the 1990s and 2000s, both good and bad. The hardest part right now is figuring out where/how to continue the storylines. I might need to get a digital subscription to Marvel Unlimited at some point so that I can continue with New Mutants, Power Pack, and whatever other random things were never collected (e.g., Cloak & Dagger).

[nyctanthes]

(Using one of sheliak's fabulous X-Men icons...)

Very excited to participate in this comm.

I came to X-Men in a roundabout way. I watched the cartoon back in the '90s (and hence became quite the Rogue-Gambit 'shipper), saw the first two X-Men movies, then read a few of the later runs (Whedon, Morrison). At some point I drifted away from X-Men fannishness. I came back into the fold a few years ago, when I started listening to the Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast.

I recently got a Marvel Unlimited subscription, in part so I can read the classics as well as keep up with some of the current storylines. I have a good friend who's going to lend me his Excalibur back issues, which I'm excited about.

In terms of older material, I might start with New Mutants because of the Bill Sienkiewicz art and I love Ilyana. But I enjoy almost all the original characters, as well as the new ones who have been introduced over the years. What makes me happiest is when there's a good story arc with lots of team interaction.