My summer reading project is to reread the X-Men starting with the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby books straight through the Vol. 5 Omnibus edition. These omnibus collections are the best most of this work has ever looked making them a joy to go through. I’d call it light reading, but these books are real wrist breakers. Personally, I found a little reading stand called a Mind Reader which sits on your lap and allows you to read the volumes hands free. Best twenty bucks I ever spent. Concurrently, I’m also reading the Fall of X books to take in the other end of this amazing-decades-spanning story arc.
Couple of takeaways… Stan and Jack’s early work on the series is much better than I remembered it being. Right out of the blocks, they built the foundation, and beautifully established the tropes on which the entirety of the run right up until today rests. And it’s fun to see today’s writers and artists paying homage today to those elements that were put down decades ago. At one point Iron Man says he first became aware of Magneto when Magneto attacked an air force base… and, BAMFF, there you are right back at X-Men #1.
At first I thought that Fall of X would be one of those excruciating cross-over events that these days seem to roll right into the next this-will-change-everything cross-over event, but I was surprised to find some work of real substance. The rise of Orchis which is spread across the books is a perfect allegory for how fascism insinuates itself into a society and divides it as it advances towards the levers of power. It’s nice to see comic books doing what they have always done so well (and what Stan Lee did so well) in calling out the bad guys. Gutsy stuff.