“Classic X-Men” is one of my favorite things, and I feel like there is a lot of misinformation about it on teh internets.

I hope you’ll indulge me if I scratch an itch and post about this series here, on IMWAN, and fill it only with 100% factually true statements about the series.

WHAT IS CLASSIC X-MEN?
This series began in 1986. At around the same time that Chris Claremont, in the Uncanny X-Men series, dismantled the X-Team that was so beloved by its fans, Marvel began to run a reprint series that would feature adventures of that selfsame beloved iteration of the team, the one that began in Giant-Sized X-Men 1. So at the same time that Claremont was writing Nightcrawler and Colossus out of Uncanny, you could see when they first joined the team in the first place – along with their fellow Cockrum creations Storm and Thunderbird, and Roy Thomas creation Wolverine -- via “Classic X-Men,” which would reprint old issues of “Uncanny.”

HOW LONG DID THE SERIES RUN?
I think it ran until 1995.

RIGHT BUT LIKE HOW MANY ISSUES?
“Classic X-Men” ran for 110 issues.

It was called “Classic X-Men” for issues 1 through 45.

For issues 46-110, it was called “X-Men Classic” presumably so that it started with “X” and not a “C” and would get batched in the proper place by comic book stores. Ironically, this was right around the time it was reprinting the end of the John Byrne era, which is when the original comic being reprinted switched from being called “X-Men” to being called “Uncanny X-Men,” i.e. changing its starting letter from an “X” to a “U.” Wild stuff, man.

WHICH ISSUES WERE REPRINTED?
The first issue of Classic X-Men is a partial reprint of Giant Sized X-Men #1. Why only partial? More on that later.

After that, Uncanny issues 94-206 were reprinted, although four issues were left out. Marvel left out issues 106 and 110 because they were fill-ins, not drawn by Dave Cockrum, nor by John Byrne.

A few years later, Marvel decided to put out a squarebound 48-page one-shot comic reprinting the two-part “Days of Future Past.” Because this was happening at right around the same time that Classic X-Men was about to get to that two-parter, they decided there was no reason to ALSO reprint them in Classic X-Men. So issues 141 and 142 are skipped.

So it goes like this:

Classic X-Men 1 = Giant Sized X-Men 1

Classic X-Men 2-13 = X-Men 94-105 (During this era, you can use [x = c + 92] as your equation to derive which X-Men issue is in which Classic issue.

Classic X-Men 14-16 = X-Men 107-109 (For this brief period, the equation becomes [x = c + 93]

Classic X-Men 17-46 = X-Men 111-140 (During this era, the equation is [ x = c + 94]

Classic X-Men 47-110 = X-Men 143-206 (And finally, [x = c + 96 ] )

EXTRA STORIES, “CLASSIC” ISSUES 1-34
Uncanny X-Men 94 through 138 were published during that era when a typical Marvel comic was 32 pages, but a full 15 of those were ads, and/or in-house stuff (like Bullpen Bulletins or letters pages). Only 17 pages of story content! Starting with issue 139 in 1981, that went up to 22 pages.

I believe it was Chris Claremont himself, who wrote all of the material being reprinted in “Classic” and was STILL writing Uncanny when “Classic” became a thing … who said, “Hey, what if Classic X-Men is a 32-page comic, but with NO ads? So we’ll have 17 pages of reprint, and then 15 pages of NEW X-Men content?” Claremont was all about giving readers value for the money. The fact that Claremont was also stealth-pitching a new monthly gig for himself and thus an added monthly royalty … well, that was inconsequential. Claremont was above greed. He was a GOD WHO WALKED AMONGST US, YOU GUYS

This led to each issue of Classic X-Men having a new, second story. This bonus story would always be original to “Classic X-Men,” but it would be set during the era being reprinted. In many cases, the new story would tie in DIRECTLY to the issue being reprinted. (See, for example, issue 6 of Classic X-Men, reprinting (Uncanny) X-Men 98. The backup story serves as a direct prequel to X-Men 98. A DIRECT one, you guys.

For the initial couple years of “Classic,” these backup tales had a very consistent creative team:
Chris Claremont, writer
John Bolton, artist
Tom Orzechowski, lettereist
Glynis Oliver, colorist

At this time, Ann Nocenti was the editor of the X-line, so she was editor on these backup tales.

The stories were always consistently 12 pages long also, as I recall.

This marvelous consistency lasted for the first 17 issues of “Classic X-Men,” but after that you’d get some occasional fill-ins. Jo Duffy, Ann Nocenti and Tom Orzechowski sometimes came in and wrote some issues, and Bolton took a month off for Classic #29, as I recall.

That said, the quality was still very consistent for another 17 issues.

In fact, the Classic X-Men backups that appear in issues 1-34 of the series are some my favorite X-Men stories ever. Just some great, great stuff. GOD damn, I love that material.

EXTRA STORIES, “CLASSIC” 35-44
The last ten backup tales are a more ragtag affair. Bolton left after issue 35. Claremont only wrote three more, which are in issues 41-43 and have … less than satisfactory artwork. The incredibly unappealing Fabian Nicieza wrote a couple of the backups (gah), and there are a couple other kind of dismal ones in there. But there are also some that I really like, their common element being: Ann Nocenti. She wrote one that was illustrated by Jim Lee (possibly Jim Lee’s first X-Men story!), which I quite liked. She did one about Dazzler, illustrated by the amazingly awesome Kyle Baker (this is back when he was good, before he switched to his goofy computer-ish style that sucks). And she had one drawn by Keiron Dwyer, the man who kicked butt on Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America run. (That was not Keiron’s only connection to Classic X-Men, but more on that in a bit.)

EXTRA STORIES, “CLASSIC” 45
Ann Nocenti wrote a script to be used as the back-up for Classic #45. It was in fact a continuation of the one she wrote for Classic 44, the Keiron Dwyer one. Her script was drawn, colored, and lettered … and then, it seems, someone was putting together Classic 45 and said, ummmm … this story doesn’t fit. And then someone else said, sure it does, the reprint material only takes up 17 pages, that leaves plenty of room for a backup. Then the first guy said, ummm, no, the reprint is of Uncanny X-Men 139, which is 22 pages long, not 17.

Alas, the reprints finally caught up to modern times when it came to page-count. So someone said, well, screw the bonus content then, let’s just start running the same 10 pages of non-story content that we put in ALL of our 32-page monthlies. And yay, we can stop paying creators to produce bonus content for “Classic X-Men”! And perhaps while scrutinizing all of these elements of “Classic,” that is when someone realized it made more sense for branding to put the word “X-Men” first, because in issue 46 they changed the name to “X-Men Classic.”

So starting with “Classic” 45, no more bonus stories. (That Nocenti piece that was created before they realized they didn’t need it, that story DID eventually see print in Marvel Fanfare 60 -- the last issue of Fanfare incidentally.)

And starting with issue 46, it became “X-Men Classic.” The golden age of this series had well and truly ended. For the rest of the series, it was just a straight-up reprint series.

THE “CLASSIC” CONTROVERSY
But let’s go back to when it all started. For you see, the idea of adding bonus stories drawn by the exquisite John Bolton, that was a cool idea that I don’t think anyone could have argued with.

But Claremont had another idea, one which is a bit more controversial. He wanted to go back to those original 17 page stories, and ADD stuff to them. After all, they were Claremont’s stories originally, and Claremont was still producing new X-Men content. He had full custody of the franchise, and his editor was Ann Nocenti, who gave him a lot of room to experiment.

As I’ve talked about in the Daredevil thread, Nocenti didn’t grow up with Marvel comics. And although she came to love them while working for Marvel as a young adult, she didn’t have the reverence that comes with growing up with this stuff. So when Claremont said, “Hey, what I’d like to do is, I want to change the dialogue in these old comics, and also write new pages, that will be inserted in between the original pages …” Nocenti didn’t balk and yell, “What? You want to take the beloved X-Men comics of Dave Cockrum and John Byrne and FUCK with them?”

She just shrugged and said “A’ight.”

THE NEW CONTENT, “CLASSIC” #1
The most effed with of all the comics was Giant-Sized X-Men #1. The original Giant-Sized X-Men had 36 story pages to its main feature (not counting backups and reprints in the back). The first 12 of those story pages are the recruitment sequence, with Xavier going around the world and recruiting Banshee, Wolverine, Sunfire, Nightcrawler, Thunderbird, Storm, and Colossus. Then after that, the remaining 24 pages involve those new X-Men being led by Cyclops on a mission to rescue the Silver Age X-Men: Jean, Lorna, Iceman, Havok, Angel and Iceman. They succeed, and then Angel says, “What are we going to do with fourteen X-Men??” And that leads into Uncanny X-Men 94, where the old Silver Age members quit, etc etc.

“Classic X-Men” is only 32 pages, not 36, so it couldn’t fit the entire story in one issue anyway, unless they expanded the page count for issue 1. Or reprinted the story over 2 issues, I suppose.

Instead, Claremont lifted the 12-page recruitment sequence, but he and John Bolton created 20 pages of original content to fill out the comic. Four of these pages are placed before the recruitment. The latter 16 pages come afterward. Six of those pages are just summary of what happened in Giant-Sized. Angel’s rhetorical question that ends Giant-Sized comes at the end of Page 18 of Classic X-Men #1!

So what happens in the last 14 pages?

SOAP OPERA!

Wolverine coming on to Jean Grey; Angel trying to flirt with Storm; Alex and Lorna deciding they want to go back to school to finish their degrees; Iceman being an asshole to the new team members …

It is GREAT.

{Anecdootal: When I was a child collecting comics with my one fellow comic-book fan friend, Mike, we both were keen to acquire reprints of Giant Sized 1. I found a standard reprint of it, while Mike bought Classic X-Men #1. We each read each others, and I think we both were wistful and envious. As a guy who loves his superhero soap-opera, I was SO jealous that Mike’s version had 14 pages of angsty soap opera, while Mike – more of an action fan – seemed to envy me for having a version of the story with a good 20-plus pages of the X-Men fighting Krakoa. If only it had occurred to us to simply trade …)

THE NEW CONTENT, “CLASSIC” 2 THROUGH 27.

Now we get to the really controversial stuff, with Claremont just inserting pages directly INTO the pre-existing comic. With issue 1, you could say, well, it wasn’t REALLY a reprint … it just reprinted 12 old pages, unaltered, in their entirety, and placed them in a new context. I think that since it was Len Wein who wrote those pages, Claremont maybe didn’t feel comfortable going in and making alterations.

But starting with issue 2, ostensibly a reprint of (Uncanny) X-Men 94, things get more … CONTROVERSIAL.

Because now Claremont is looking at his own stuff, and he wants to EFF with it, baby. Note that this was in 1986, more than a decade before Lucas effed with his Star Wars movies. Claremont INVENTED the hated ‘90s incarnation of George Lucas, and he never gets credit for that!

So, “CLASSIC” 2 through 27, which are reprints of X-Men 94 through 121, we see Claremont writing new pages, which are then drawn by a variety of artists and inserted right into the old comics. In some cases, though it was rare, Claremont also REMOVED some of the original artwork and replaced it with the new stuff he was writing. He also would go into certain pages and – while leaving the artwork unaltered – he would rewrite what was in certain word balloons. And sometimes original artwork got redrawn, like when they decided to dial back the whole “Nightcrawler becomes invisible in the shadows” and retcon it to “Nightcrawler becomes kinda-sorta hard to see when he’s in the shadows.” Lots of newly-drawn Nightcrawler silhouettes inserted into Cockrum’s art, for that example.)

Generally speaking this was done so that Claremont could bring things more into line with later retcons. (The “Holocaust survivor” Magneto retcon is not a thing until Uncanny #150, but via interpolated pages, Claremont could plant seeds for that in these earlier reprints. Same goes for retcons regarding Wolverine – his age, his life experience, even the nature of his powers. And tons of other examples.)

Generally speaking, Claremont would add roughly three pages of material to each old story. This worked out nicely, so that each lead feature could be 20 pages, and each Bolton backup could be 12.

The Classic X-Men Omnibus – one of the few Omniboo that I own – has a very complete list of alterations that were made by Claremont and Nocenti and their artists, and they helpfully will show original panels and pages alongside the altered “Classic” versions.

It should be noted that in many cases, Claremont tried to get the original artists back to do the new pages. Dave Cockrum drew several of the new pages for the ‘Classic” issues reprinting his run. They also got some of Cockrum’s original inkers to ink the new pages. Tom Orzechowski lettered the new pages for issues where he was the original letterer. Etc.

In a somewhat cheeky move, since of course they couldn’t get Byrne back to draw new pages for his stuff (can you imagine a world where he says “Yes” to drawing new Claremont-scripted pages to be inserted into his old X-Mens?) – Claremont and Nocenti drafted Byrne’s son in law, Keiron Dwyer, to draw some stuff for those issues. Hilarious!

(Maybe not “hilarious,” but … kinda funny.)

Note: There are also times when dialogue in the original stories is changed because of changed Comics Code standards. The words “Damn” and “Hell” appear in some of those old X-Men issues, and while the integrity of that original dialogue is maintained in the reprints in, say, Marvel Masterworks … they didn’t keep that stuff in for the monthly “Classic” series that was going to be in supermarkets and Waldenbooks racks and whatever else. So “damn you” becomes “curse you” and “hell” becomes “heck,” etc.

Also perhaps worth noting, sometimes Claremont would add new pages to the old comics that served no purpose but to provide a little tee-up to the accompanying Bolton-illustrated backups.

ALTERATIONS TO OLD COMICS, IN “CLASSIC” 28-110
Right around the start of Year Three of “Classic X-Men”’s run, Ann Nocenti was replaced as X-Editor by Bob Harras. Harras was NOT about having his precious Claremont-Byrne X-Men memories defaced by modern-day Claremont. Harras – whom time has proven to be a friend to the comic-book industry, and not at all a sleazy fuckface – only took a few months to put the kibosh on the alterations to the original stories in Classic X-Men.

So starting, with Classic issue 28 (or X-Men issue 122), no more alterations to the original material. Perhaps some stuff got recolored or whatever, but the lined artwork itself wasn’t touched, nor was the dialogue.

THAT SAID
At some point, Kelly Corvese became the reprint editor on “Classic.” I can’t remember if maybe, by this point, Harras was no longer the X-line editor? But here’s what I do know: Corvese decided that he would show his diligence as an editor by scouring the original Uncanny issues for typos, and if he found one, he would have the word re-lettered. This would sometimes, however, be hard to do in context of the words around it, so maybe an entire line of text would be re-lettered, or even the entire word balloon. All to fix ONE error. (Classic 84 is one I remember very distinctly, because it has the word “souce” in it, when the word should be “source.” Corvese fixed the typo, but he or his letterer had to fuck with the entire line of text on the word balloon, and looks like such shit. The Corvese era of “Classic” is littered with examples of Tom Orzechowski’s immaculate lettering being trashed, because Corvese decided that someone’s dialogue balloon needed an extra comma in it. I’m not even exaggerating. I’M NOT, YOU GUYS)

So “Classic” the ends with a reprint of issue 206 of Uncanny. I don’t know why they didn’t just go for three more months to go up to 209. “Classic” issue 1 came out contemporaneously with Uncanny 209, so it would have been a perfectly full-circle choice. Issue 209 is also the last issue of the classic team before the “Mutant Massacre” starts in Uncanny 210, and rips the team apart. Issue 209 is a great jumping-off point for fans of the classic team. WHY didn’t they just do three more issues? WHY???

COVER ART
One last thing of note: The new covers created for the 110 issues of Classic X-Men are, in many cases, really, really REALLY good. Here’s a rough breakdown of who was the cover artist during “Classic” run. (This part is an estimate, because there were fill-in cover artists at times.)

1-23 – Art Adams
24-29 – Keiron Dwyer
30-56 – Steve Lightle (awesome)
57-70 – Mike Mignola
71-79 – Adam Hughes (beautiful)

After that, the cover work becomes less consistent, but there are still some gorgeous ones in there. Gary Frank does a couple really nice ones, as does Paul Smith, Romita Jr. …

But those first 80 issues, damn, there’s no other run of cover art of that length, that I consider to be as consistently great.

When they had the extra story in the back, they would also forego a back-cover ad, in favor of a piece of art drawn by the same guy who drew the back-up tale. This means that for the first 35 issues (barring one fill-in), John Bolton drew a back cover, and those were consistently great.

There were also frontispieces on the inside front cover. That lasted all the way up through issue 44, I believe, and usually those contained art by the same person who drew the front cover. Some of those pieces were also gorgeous. Steve Lightle's in particular were gorgeous. His Colossus that he drew for the frontispiece of "Classic" #30 is seared into my brain. Seared!

TL;DNR
Shorter version:

It’s “Classic X-Men” for issues 1-45
It’s “X-Men Classic” for issues 46-110

Issues 1-44
…. have an added “bonus” story in the back. The story that was created for Classic #45 was printed in Marvel Fanfare 60.

Issues 1-27
… reprint issues of X-Men (specifically 94 through 121), but they are not “pure” reprints. There are tons of examples of: interpolated pages; rewritten dialogue, thought bubbles and captions; altered art; excised panels.

Issues 28 through 110
… straight-up reprints of Uncanny 122-206, but sometimes someone went in and re-lettered a dialogue balloon to correct a typo, and the new hand-lettering looks like shit compared to the original letters by Orz. (So he misspelled “source” as “souce,” SO WHAT? We’ve all done it once or twice, sure it’s nothing to be proud of, but it happens. What, is it a CRIME?)

Wow. This flood of posts presumably accumulated during the recent IMWAN downtime evokes nothing less than George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album.

Classic X-Men came at the perfect time, about a year after I started buying X-Men with issue 199. It was a great and cheap way to catch up.

I loved John Bolton's art in the backup stories. I imagined the subdued approach infuriated action junkies like John Byrne, but I thought it was a refreshing and even elegant contrast to the blunter fight fight fight that dominated the non-Claremont superhero alternatives.

I was a little annoyed to subsequently learn that some of the issues didn't just have extra art pages, they omitted and altered panels to conform to the current state of continuity. A lot of stuff was deleted around the leprechaun issues, including Nightcrawler's power to disappear in shadows, and the awesome reveal of Wolverine's name.

BACKUP STORY STATISTICS
The young kids like to talk about how they’re “obsessed” with this or that, or they’ll post memes where they say “I can’t stop thinking about” such and such. Or such and such “lives rent-free in my head.”

Anyway, those young people are a bunch of crazy goofballs. That said, I am obsessed with the backup stories in “Classic X-Men.” I can’t stop thinking about them and they live in my head, rent-free.

Let’s break down the stats for these 44 wonderful X-Men tales. (Well, most of them are wonderful. A few crummy ones got through in the end.)

WRITER BREAKDOWN
Claremont wrote 26
(1-17, 19, 21-24, 29, 41-43)
Nocenti wrote 11
(25, 27-28, 30-34, 38-39, 44)
Jo Duffy wrote 2
(18, 20)
Tom Orzechowski wrote 2
(26, 40)
Then there are three that I don’t really consider part of Doot canon, so who knows)
(35-37)

ARTIST BREAKDOWN
John Bolton drew 34
(1-28, 30-35)
Kyle Baker drew one
(38)
Jim Lee drew one
(39)
Keiron Dwyer drew one
(44)
Other artists drew the other ones
(29, 36-37, 50-43)

THE BEST OF THE BEST
Claremont/Bolton, obvs, and there are 22 of these
(1-17, 19, 21-24)
Nocenti/Bolton was also great. We got far too few of these, only eight
(25, 27-28, 30-34)
Then an honorable mention to the back to back issues featuring Nocenti/Baker and Nocenti/Lee collabs, respectively
(38-39)

JOHN BOLTON
This guy freakin’ rules. He was the best of all of Claremont’s artistic collaborators.

It’s true, John Byrne was not the best John. B to ever work with Claremont. But don’t feel bad, Byrne, a bronze medal is still a medal! (The silver goes to John Buscema, of course.)

For more of Claremont/Bolton, check out their “The Black Dragon” and “Marada the She-Wolf.” Fantastic stuff! (Bolton also provided a cover and some interior illustrations for Claremont’s novella “Dragon Moon,” which is a kind-of sequel to “The Black Dragon.”)

Meanwhile, after their collaboration on “Classic X-Men,” Nocenti and Bolton went on to work together on an original graphic novel titled “Someplace Strange.” (Actually, come to think of it, though this was published after their “Classic” collabos, I’m guessing that work started on “Someplace Strange” BEFORE Nocenti and Bolton did any of the backups. I’d guess that the order went something like: Nocenti was editing the Claremont/Bolton backups in her role as the X-editor, and was like, hey, this Bolton guy is great, I want to do something with him! And that led to the two working on the “Somplace Strange” GN. Then Claremont stopped doing backups for “Classic,” so Ann stepped in, and suddenly the two were working together on those backups too. And in the midst of those backups coming out, “Someplace Strange” was also released.

In the interest of full disclosure, however, I must report that “Someplace Strange” SUCKS. Sorry, Ann. Sorry, John. I don’t know what happened with this one. Given the creative team (which also included Tom Orzechowski on letters), this should have been gangbusters. And Claremont himself is an avowed fan of “Someplace Strange.” (He called it “dead brilliant.”) But … it’s a swing and a miss, as far as the Doot is concerned.

Sorry to end on a downer. I wanted to like it! There was an ad for it in the back of "Classic X-Men" 28. Fantastic placement, as it directly follows a particularly weird and wonderful Nocenti/Bolton backup about the X-Men at a Halloween costume party, encountering a homicidal, knife-wielding maniac in a clown costume. I love that story! And then boom, turn the page, and there's the ad: "Ann Nocenti and John Bolton take you ... SOMEPLACE STRANGE." That ad fascinated me for years and years before I finally tracked down the GN.

But enough dwelling on the negative.

"Classic X-Men" was awesome!

This is a timely comparison. I was on a George Harrison kick a couple weeks ago, after I learned that "I've Got My Mind Set on You" is actually a cover of an old 'Sixties song. WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?


I discovered the X-Men via the broadcast of the old animated series pilot from 1987. (It aired in 1988 ... I don't know if that the first time it was aired, but it was my first time seeing it!). I went to the store looking for comics with the team from that cartoon (which was the Claremont/Byrne team, not that those names would have meant anything to me yet). But on the racks, all the modern X-Men comics said "Inferno" on them and there didn't seem to be any X-Men on the covers, just a hot babe in a skimpy outfit called "the Goblin Queen." (And why would anyone name a skimpy outfit "Goblin Queen"?) But Classic X-Men, those covers HAD the team from the cartoon! So I had to buy an issue. LIFE-CHANGING


I think I found the backups kind of surreal and strange, at first. But what was nice is that they were generally self-contained stories, so you didn't feel like you had missed something by not reading the previous ones or later ones. It was nice that at least the latter half of those comics were done-in-one.


Hmmm, you're right about the Nightcrawler thing, of course, but ... You're talking about when the leprechaun calls Wolverine "Mr. Logan"? I don't think that's deleted. In fact, I'm positive that it's in there.

Granted, what's changed about it is that it is no longer a "reveal" even for a hypothetical someone who was only reading "Classic X-Men" at the time. 'Cause I'm pretty sure the narration calls Wolverine "Logan" in the backup story in "Classic" #3. So retroactively if someone was experiencing early X-Men in that way, and weren't following the modern issues, they'd "first" learn Wolverine's real name via narration, rather than via leprechaun. So in that sense, yeah, that bit is changed.

But I'm sure the scene between Wolverine and the leprechaun is not cut. No way!

I just fact-checked and you are correct. It's unsettling to learn my memories of reading comics 37 years ago are so shockingly unreliable.

I read this for a number of years. I stopped collecting it before the series ended but I had a lot of them. It was the only affordable way I could read old X-Men comics, as the back issues were incredibly pricey (by my standards, anyway).

I enjoyed the new stories, especially the one where Wolverine convinced Nightcrawler not to use the image inducer so much and they went to a bar...and was it 'Tag, you're it' (?) in which Wolverine is stalked by Sabretooth before Sabretooth was first mentioned as being a character Wolverine knew in (the established) continuity?

The backup material also seemed odd to me at first, but eventually became one of my favourite aspects of the series. I felt like it was a better deal than buying back issues, because I was always a reader first and foremost. I didn't want t to own every issue of everything, but I did want to read everything I possibly could. These were the earliest days of stuff like the Marvel Masterworks books which were way out of my price range anyway, so being able to get old stories combined with new ones in a comic I could afford to get seemed like a great idea to me.

Classic X-Mean corresponds almost precisely to the time I bailed out for good on comics. I was reading them well into 1984, sampling in 1985. But then weird stuff like Classic X-Men and Secret Wars 2 and married Spider-man just seemed like it was time to say goodbye.

Edited to add: I think the last subscription I had, the one that ran out at the latest month, was Fantastic Four with #286 (Hitler saluting on the cover). So that fits -- mid-1986 began the black out period, with only minor monitoring of things in stores. I started visiting the comic book store again in about 2004-2005

I think I got about two of these back in the day. One was the reprint of the death of Jean Grey, with a backup that showed her meeting what was evidently an incarnation of Death. These were the only X-issues I think I ever got. Never been an X-fan.

I was still reading Superman until 1998. I think I was buying it out of habit. Once the Electric Superman storyline ended (which was DC's equivalent of the Clone Saga) I stopped reading comics entirely.

I've tried to get back into comics since arriving at IMWAN but, as the song says, my heart won't buy it.

I got out in 1980, dipped back in c.1987 or so (whenever it was that Byrne was doing Supes) and c.1991 (when untitled X Men came out) but saw nothing to interest me, and forgot about them until finding the JBF in 2004.

Two classic "Classic" classics! The second one was technically called "Tag, Sucker!" but I think you were close enough to avoid a "fake fan" label. That story is also notable for having "Marada the She Wolf" on a movie marquee in the background, plugging Claremont and Bolton's earlier collaboration.


Hell yes. It's my favorite X-stuff ever now.

Sure, sure, I'm following so far.


Hmmm, this started in spring of 1986.


This was 1985.


This was in 1987.


A perfect fit with the three things you mentioned earlier that happened in three different years! Also Fantastic Four #286 was released in 1985 (dated January of '86, which means it came out around October of '85).

But that's okay, because Hitler isn't saluting on the cover of that one. You meant FF #292.

Still, despite the factual errors, the underlying gist of your post holds true, which is that Classic X-Men marked the start of a new funnybook renaissance -- a golden age that you missed out on because of your short-sighted adolescent mistakes.