I just finished Secret Wars so I'm going to take a couple of blog posts and try to get everyone caught up. This is going to have to happen over the course of a number of blog posts. Be patient, bear with me. Here we go.

• Uncanny X-Men 1-93: Completely f-ing useless. Introduction to a lot of characters, both good and bad, but you could almost skip this stuff entirely and come crashing into Second Genesis without any problems at all. This stuff was so generic and boring that X-Men nearly ended before it even took off.
• Second Genesis: The start of the modern era of X-Men, although I'd venture to say that some readers might disagree. This is the introduction to some of the biggest names in X-Men lore like Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler. Here's what happens, Original X-Men (including Havok and Polaris) are captured by a living island and Cyclops is released in order to bring more people back for the island to feed on. Xavier gathers an international crew of mutants to go save them. After Giant Size X-Men, the bulk of the original crew leaves the team and Uncanny picks up where it left off. Claremont shows how much of a bad mambajamba he is by killing off one of his new characters, Thunderbird (older brother to Warpath). Eric the Red is introduced (although Cyke used that persona during the old school run), and then it pretty quickly jumps into...
• Phoenix Rising: A few of the X-Men are abducted by Sentinels and taken to a space station controlled by Stephen Lang. Pretty sure that name comes back during the Phalanx Covenant, but I'm not sure. The rest of the X-Men somehow manage to get into space and help with the rescue/escape. In the process of coming home Jean Grey is forced to pilot a space shuttle with a punctured hole through a solar flare. She attempts to use her telekenetic powers to block the radiation from harming her, and although she was able to safely fly and land the shuttle she didn't survive, kind of. She died and was resurrected pretty much immediately by/with the Phoenix force. A few issues later the X-Men run into Magneto and although he was turned into a baby he has now been converted back into a adult again by Eric the Red. Turns out this wasn't ever something I really needed to be knowledgeable about because it was so heavily glossed over in the time between the Original X-Men run and when Claremont came in years later. These issues run together pretty good picking up almost right where the previous issue left off. It makes for some clunky transitions (like being worried about Jean Grey's recovery from a f-ing space shuttle crash landing to a being in Ireland, for vacation, a couple of pages later), but its generally more appealing than the one shot issues from the old team.
• The Phoenix Saga: Lilandra makes her first appearance but is almost immediately abducted by Eric the Red. The X-Men follow and $h!7 gets real when they have to go toe-to-toe with the Imperial Guard and Lilandra's brother D'Ken. I really like how Tony Daniel copied some of the shots in these issues for his Age of Apocalypse run on Gambit & the X-ternals when they too are teleported into space and have to fight the Imperial Guard. Anyway, D'Ken has taken over the Shi'ar Empire and is in the process of using the M'Kraan Crystal to obtain ultimate power. But it's damaged and the Phoenix force is the only thing that can fix it. Jean saves the day and the X-Men come home and the Sh'iar empire will likely fall back to Lilandra but there are legal things to take care of before she can so she comes back to Earth to spend time with Xavier.
  
  Shortly after this the X-Men are abducted, twice. Once by Mesmero and then again by Magneto. Beast is with them for the second abduction, but somewhere between here and Second Genesis he turned himself blue and furry. Not a ton of explanation on that point just yet. Their battle with Magneto leads to Jean and Beast surviving an explosion out into the antarctic and the rest of the crew surviving through a tunnel that takes them to the Savage Land. Both sets believe the others to be dead and the trek through the Savage Land leads the X-Men on a long adventure by way of Japan and Canada. By the time they get home Jean has gone on a trip to Muir Island and Xavier is into space with Lilandra.

That's all for now. I know I could definitely stand to go more in-depth with all of this stuff but I'm trying not to get too bogged down with the details. I'll save that for when I'm not trying to cover 100 issues worth of material to get you caught up with me.

Edit: foul language. Sorry mods and readers.

When I was a kid I read comics constantly. For a while I was completely stuck on Darkhawk, although I can't figure out why. After that I was into the New Warriors and Ghost Rider (the Dan Ketch version) and Venom (once he started being a good guy). I wasn't really a collector at that point, those were just the comics I bought when I had the moneys for it. Eventually I came to X-Men. It's not like I didn't know about them. I had all the comic cards so I knew of them, I just didn't exhaustively follow them.

What did it for me was Bishop. I don't know why but I thought the guy was so cool and Whilce Portacio's art was so awesome and Jim Lee was working on the Blue team and all of a sudden I was in love with the X-Men. Now I still didn't have a lot of money so I was constantly struggling to to keep up with current issues, which meant back issues were a pipedream. I learned a lot from context clues, but there was a ton I didn't know or understand. Everything about Madelyne Pryor and Jean Grey dying (the first time) and obtaining her Phoenix powers was a little confusing. Mister Sinister and Genosha and a secret base in Australia and Gambit joining the team and Storm being a young girl and various bits about Magneto (like getting turned into a baby??) were all parts I missed and had trouble picking up on. Back then there was no Wikipedia or ComicVine so I was left to figure it out on my own, needless to say I didn't figure out much.

Eventually I grew up a little bit and got tired of comics. I remember the Joe Mad era in Uncanny, but backed off right after Onslaught. I had some friends that still collected so whenever I saw them I could dive back in and see what's happening now, but I was never getting a very comprehensive picture. For years that was enough for me but I recently realized I wanted to get back into comics, X-Men specifically, and I decided that if I did I would do it right and start from the beginning. No more secrets. No more confusion. No more wondering what event or past relationship so-and-so character was referring to. I'd get everything cleared up simply by starting from the beginning.

So I got on my favorite bittorrent site and downloaded X-Men chronology packs that come with all the issues in order, sorted by story*. Now this isn't strictly an X-Men chronology, it's an X-books chronology so it's got all the other X-teams and related comics that feature X-Men in them.

*I didn't really steal all those old comics like I just said I did. That's illegal and I would never do that. Dear Marvel, you guys should totally put your back catalog online for free. Obviously new issues shouldn't be in there, but I would think anything over five years old isn't selling so good anymore. Just a thought. Maybe even charge an extremely discounted subscription to all of it and make some dough off of it instead of forcing people (not me, though) to torrent it.

What I didn't realize is that there's a lot of books to make it up to what I last remembered, but even more to bring up to 2012. What I'm saying is that this is going to be a ridiculously long project and why not have some fun with it and blog a little while I'm at it.

Now to be perfectly honest with you, I've already started. In fact, I'm about 180 issues into Uncanny already. No big deal though because my next blog post is going to recap as much of what's already happened as I can remember.

Stay tuned.

Also, I'd love to encourage comments from you guys but be careful about posting spoilers please. I don't know how the moderation system works on here. I want to participate in conversations and there's a lot I already know about what's coming ahead, but I don't want story lines ruined for me or anyone else who decides to join me in starting from scratch.

Edit: foul language. Sorry mods and readers.