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.
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