As an X-Men fan for officially 20 years this year, it's time to add my few cents.

I first discovered the team while watching "Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends" reruns on the Marvel Afternoon in the late '80s. A few weeks later they showed the "Pryde of the X-Men" pilot and I was hooked. I began looking for the comics, and X-Men were among my first ever comic book purchases: a second print of The Uncanny X-Men No. 211 and Classic X-Men No. 36, reprinting The X-Men No. 130, the second chapter of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Anyone who has read that issue knows that the second page gives out a lot of extensive detail on Scott Summers and Jean Grey. Needless to say, I was hooked on both the exploits of the new team and now had a hunger for knowledge of the old.

My first real encounters of the original team was the Classic reprint of the Jean Grey funeral issue, when Cyclops recounts the history of the team. Now, this was of course written by Claremont and Byrne and illustrated by Byrne, so it was far more eloquent than those original issues by Lee, Thomas and Drake were. Claremont even made the mundane mid 20s issues seem exciting, even though he breezed through most of it. So from that point on, I was basically obsessed with both the old and new X-Men.

Years later, I did finally read the majority of issues of The X-Men Nos. 1-60 (still haven't read the last few yet). And while the issues of the first Thomas run don't live up to what Claremont made them sound like in the the flashback issue, I still appreciate them for what they are. I think The X-Men was the first title Stan gave up writing and I think for his first big break, Thomas wanted to write The Avengers, hence the more generic-y villains as opposed to mutant ones. But he got better on his second run, and even the Factor Three storyline from his first run, in issues 28-39, isn't terrible, and even thouhg it is Masterworked across volumes 3 and 4 I still think it's worth the classic trade or classic hardcover treatment. It's not as ground breaking as Thomas' Kree-Skrull War or anything else that later scribes would do, but it's still the team's first long story arc and aside from some hokey dialogue (and the Mekano issue) not too bad for the era.

As for X-Factor, the first time I ever had any frame of reference for them was in the aforementioned issue 211, when the X-Men were rescuing Madelynne Pryor from the Maurauders and Wolverine asks Havok why his brother left his wife and took their kid; Havok of course doesn't believe Wolverine. So it's funny, the first X-Men story I ever read had Maddie, not Jean. I've now read some of the early X-Factors, and the Simonsons do improve that title greatly over the first several issues. And I actually do enjoy the way they brought Jean Grey back in Fantastic Four and The Avengers, because they made it a mystery, and I don't feel like it detracts from the original Dark Phoenix story.

Incidentally, I've never much cared for the whole separation that some fans do between the first and second generation of teams. I like it even less when some people refer to the originals as the X-Men and the newer ones as the "Uncanny" X-Men. To me, they're all still the X-Men. The team has one shared history not two separate ones. In fact, if Marvel ever wanted to rerelease the Uncanny Masterworks 1-6 as X-Men Masterworks 9-14, I'd probably squeal with delight. It's probably the same reason I'm always whining in other threads about how all the Spider-Mans should be MW'd together instead of separate Amazing/Spectacular/Web when the time comes -- for the diehard fans, it's the WHOLE history of the characters that counts most, not just one era is better than another.

But that's just my view

Why can't they just let her have her imaginary babies and her robot husband? Look what happens when she doesn't!

Last Edited By: icemanjeff79 Oct 22 09 12:43 PM. Edited 1 times.