When I was a kid, I was all about the Uncanny X-Men. This series had me enthralled with its perfect mix of complex characters and universe-spanning adventures, and just looking at these covers brings back fond memories of reading them and dissecting the stories with my friends. I may have had a half dozen long boxes filled with bagged and boarded comics, but the X-Men comics were the ones I would have grabbed if the house ever caught fire.
These comic books are the ones I collected back in the late 80’s, and are pretty much the only comics I kept out of the great purge of 1990, where I stupidly sold off my collection to my local comic shop, receiving mere pennies for boxes and boxes of gold.
I remember being very proud of my X-Men run, having found almost every issue from #95 and up. There were a few issues that eluded me — I’ll have to track them down one of these days — issue #94 was always the holiest of grails, and I would still love to get a copy, because no X-Men collection is complete without it. I always loved issue #109 because it featured Alpha Flight, and of course the whole Jean Grey/Phoenix storyline was so great. My X-Men comics are not in mint condition, because I read and re-read each and every one of them, but I don’t think I would ever feel the need to trade up to nicer copies. It sounds pretty lofty, but these comics really were a big part of my formative years, and being one of the very few items I held onto all this time, I value them way higher than Overstreet ever would.
The Blogging from A to Z Challenge continues! Check back soon to see what I come up with for “V.”
Man, I love 80s/90s X-Men. I would read the God Loves, Man Kills TPB again and again back then…..back before the whole blue team/gold team started…..
I think I know what I’m going to read tonight. It’s been awhile! 😉
YES! I started collecting Uncanny X-Men at issue #163 – the Brood war in space. Spent the next 6 years collecting (stopped in college). During that time, also backtracked to issue 100. Loved the Proteus storyline and Dark Phoenix. The artwork was fantastic. The Brood/Sleazoid storylines were great. Wolverine in Japan. The Morlocks! Fantastic. About 7 years ago, I pulled out about 30 issues from that timeline and had a blast reading through them.
I’ve tried to restart collecting X-Men several times over the last few years, but got frustrated with them restarting with issue 1 every other year, and also it’s the same story over and over again.
But the 80s ROCKED. May be doing some reading this weekend.
I’ll be reading as well. I opened up a few of these last night and started to leaf through the pages and got sucked in once again. There’s nothing better than the Claremont and Byrne X-Men issues.
I’m totally with you here. I have bunch of Uncanny X-Men issues from the 80’s and they are fantastic. I love the diversity of the team. I actually got #204 (awesome Wolverine cover) signed by Chris Claremont a couple years ago.