If you read comics (or want to), at some point you’re going to wonder how to get in to a particular series or character. It can be daunting– if you wanted to read, say, Batman, where would you start? Do you need to go back to his first appearance from 1939 in Detective Comics #27 and go from there? (If you did, you’d find a Batman who’s a little more…extreme…than you’d expect). That’s a lot of issues to read to get caught up.

I’m no Batman or DC expert, but I can help you with Marvel Comics. Since Marvel (unlike DC) has never restarted their continuity, it can make finding a good place to start a little difficult. Trying to jump into X-Men continuity in particular can give you an aneurysm, and that doesn’t do anybody any good, so Super Doctor Astronaut is here to help.

So Many X-Men

There is a lot of X-Men out there, from the original five in their first appearance in X-Men #1 (Sep 1963)– it wasn’t called Uncanny X-Men until later – to the other mutant X teams like X-Force or X-Factor. There are literally hundreds of characters in intersecting storylines that go back decades, and so just picking up an issue at random might leave you confused.

Do you have to go back to the beginning to get caught up? Nah. While the Silver Age X-Men were written by Stan Lee and Drawn by Jack Kirby, they’re not really essential to understanding what’s going on with the crew. As long as you know the basic premise of “Children of the atom, students of Charles Xavier. MUTANTS-feared and hated by the world they have sworn to protect,” you’re pretty good to go. You might even know who a lot of the characters are already as they’re somewhat prevalent in pop culture.

If you do decide to start from the beginning, you may be delighted by the enthusiastic prose of Stan the Man or wowed by the inventive prowess of Jack the King, but as far as really digging into the mutant as metaphor, you need to start later.

Here are a few suggested starting points:

Giant Size X-Men #1 (May 1975)

It’s not that Giant Sized X-Men #1 (the size refers to the number of pages, not the stature of the heroes…it can be confusing, especially with titles out there like Giant Size Man Thing) is a particularly amazing piece of writing. Its story (written by Len Wein) is almost a Silver Age type story, where the X-Men have to fight a living island (I’m trying not to spoil this 44 year old comic, but I think that’ll be impossible). The dialog isn’t particularly clever and the story is kinda weak, but it is a landmark issue in comics because it revamps the X-Men lineup that had been stagnant since the beginning (the series had been essentially canceled by this point and had been reprinting back issues as new ones for a while).

This is where you first get Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Thunderbird for the first time. Wolverine had already appeared in a couple of Incredible Hulks at this point (also written by Len Wein, who liked the character enough to include him) and Banshee and Sunfire were a Silver Age X-Men characters. The idea was to bring in characters from other countries to hopefully expand readership overseas, so you had characters from Kenya, Russia, Germany, Canada, Japan, Ireland and one from the US. Whether this idea bore fruit I can’t say, but the characters almost all endured to this day, with most of them still fan favorites.

X-Men: First Class (September 2006)

Marvel understood that jumping randomly into the series can be very daunting. Giant Size X-Men was published back in the 70s, which might alienate new readers, so they commissioned Jeff Parker (who would later create the fantastic Agents of Atlas) to write…not really a retcon, but the story from a fresh perspective. The big details are all the same, with the original five (Cyclops, Marvel Girl/Jean Grey, Iceman, Beast and Angel) attending the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters in Salem Center, New York, just upstate from NYC.

Technically it exists in the 616, but it tells stories that are, shall we say, adjacent to the Silver Age X-Men stories. It’s a good place to start if you know just a little but want to see if X-Men is right for you.

X-Men #1 (1963)

Before it was called Uncanny it was just plain old X-Men. Back in that insane burst of creativity between Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (among others) that gave us the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor, Hulk, and basically every character in Avengers: Endgame we got the tale of five mutants that were hated and feared by a world they were sworn to protect.

Stan has said that he couldn’t think of a good origin for powers for his new characters when he had a flash of inspiration: What if they were just born with them? That’s right, basically lazy storytelling gave us probably the most compelling world of characters in comics.

Is it worth reading from the very beginning? Sorta? The entire mutant metaphor didn’t really develop until much later, and there are a lot of monster of the week type stories and terrible Silver Age villains. On the other hand, we get the Coffee-a-Go-Go (bring it back, Marvel!) and the beatniks who hang out there, the introduction of a lot of classic characters, from Magneto (who isn’t remotely interesting at the time) to the Juggernaut to Havok and Polaris.

I made a point of reading all of the Silver Age issues on Marvel Unlimited, and while I’d say you should read the very first one for perspective, you can probably skip the rest unless you find this stuff charming, in which case you’ll have a good time.

X-Men #1 (1991)

And then there is where the 90s really began, the best selling comic in the history of the medium. Marvel released multiple variant version of this Chris Claremont/Jim Lee book and somehow convinced people that they would all be worth money, which led everybody to buy multiple copies of everything. It was the 90s. Go figure.

The art in the issue is spectacular. Most of that “90’s style” involving pouches, big guns and blades are certainly here, but Jim Lee was also the only artist who could sell it– while Rob Liefeld is responsible for it, Lee legitimized it for better or worse (it depends on your perspective, I suppose).

While written by the great Chris Claremont, it was just about the end of his time working on the mutants for many years and he was very unhappy how the artists were messing up his books. It’s almost like he wanted to get every last word, which for Claremont is a clear and present danger, because there is a lot of dialogue in this honestly pretty boring and confusing issue, which also gets negative points for turning Magneto back into a straight up villain.

The art almost saves it. There are multiple images from it that are now iconic, and it is directly the source for the excellent cartoon. Some characters are still wearing the same costume from this revamp decades later.

In Summation

Where you want to start depends on you. You might not want to even bother with a #1 and just jump right in. That’s what I did. I think my first X-Men was Uncanny X-Men #280 (September 1991) which was right before the relaunch (by like one issue). I understood very little of what was going on– this was before the cartoon, the movies, any of that, so I was coming in cold. The fact that there was all of this story that I had to figure out was actually a good thing for me. It spurred me to find out more. If you’re the type that likes to uncover things, just go ahead and jump right in. Hope you survive the experience!