I like the original X-Men run and think it's very charming, but it was clearly a second-tier book compared to what was going on with most of the other Marvel books.

I think the characters are great fun, a very likable bunch with good chemistry. Beast and Iceman often have funny dialogue, especially when Stan was scripting the book. Prof. X I'm not so crazy about, because I think mentor characters should generally go away once they've imparted their lessons to their students. By keeping Xavier around on an ongoing basis, it made the X-Men look childish and weak, especially compared to a guy like Spider-Man, who was the same age but somehow had to scrape through despite not having "adult supervision". Oh, and the Scott and Jean "romance" was ridiculously drawn out.

The plots in the early going are okay and I think they hold up fine but it seems to me that when Lee and Kirby really started cranking things up in series like FF and Thor, X-Men never benefitted from a similar shift. The FF started going up against Galactus, the Inhumans (I sometimes feel like the Inhumans were Kirby's vision of what the X-Men should have been, a more exotic and grandiose redrafting of the concept but anyway...), Black Panther, Thor got increasingly cosmic and epic, but for X-Men Stan handed the book to Roy, who then proceeded to get the team involved in really loopy plots against third-string chumps like the Plant-Man, Locust, Porcupine, etc., inadvertently making the heroes look even more pathetic. It wasn't until Steranko and especially Adams came on that things started turning around and by then it was too late. On top of that, Werner Roth was a nice artist but he couldn't elevate the series beyond whatever silliness Roy was inflicting on it. Daredevil wasn't an especially well-written series either but at least it had Gene Colan's art to balance out a lot of its faults.