Wolverine is one of my all-time favorite comic book characters. I collected his solo series and read it religiously.
I wanted to read X-Men too, so I could get the bigger picture of his adventures, but X-Men had decades and decades of convoluted history and it was so daunting. Not to mention EXPENSIVE. When I was reading in the early 90s, those old X-Men books were hot back issues, and there were simply NO collections of reprints at the time.
I got into the books from the Jim Lee/Liefeld/Portacio days going forward, but all those classic Claremont/Byrne issues remained elusive to me. The one exception was "Dark Phoenix Saga" which was always in print as a paperback.
I distinctly remember reading it the night I got back from band camp my freshman year of high school. God, I'm a dork. It finally came in to the library and I was SOOO excited to see what the hype was all about. I remember enjoying it.
Well, that was the summer of 1992, almost exactly 30 years ago.
Now that every comic book known to man is pretty much free to read on the internet (if you have no scruples about such things, and I don't) I've decided to FINALLY read all those X-Men issues I never had a chance to, starting with Dark Phoenix Saga.
It's....not as good as I remembered. Man, Claremont is so verbose. He just blabs on and on, and repeats himself so much. I think this is one of those stories you had to be there for. It might have blown minds 40 years ago, but it's boring as hell nowadays.
Anyway, I'm gonna keep reading. Really looking forward to the John Romita Jr issues, and then the Outback era, and Marc Silvestri's run, and all the stuff in-between. I've always been aware of what happens in all these issues but it's gonna be cool to finally read them for myself. Hooray for free comic books! (Not like Disney needs any more money anyway....and I doubt they'd share any of it with the creators...)