I'm a X-Men fan and want to start reading the comic books which one should I start with???

Current Events:

Each of these story arcs are collected in Trade Paperbacks,

House Of M

Messiah Complex

Second Coming

Schism

Regenesis

Then read the ongoing Avengers Vs X-Men event.

Good old stories : Dark Phoenix Saga, Days of futur past, God loves Man kills and Age Of Apocalypse.

More recent good stories: House of M + Decimation, Messiah CompleX + Messiah War + Second Coming (Some can argue that it suck, but i loved it)

For Schism and Regenesis, please stay away from them it is REALLY bad. Check a summary of the event only to understand what happen. Then you can check the current story of Avengers vs X-Men.

So many trades....

If you want a quick start at trying X-Men comics buy X-Men "not Uncanny" from 30 to current. Its been good and has NO AvX tie ins. If you really want to get into the X-Men then most of the trades above are must.

Utopia (happening between Mesiah Complex and Second Coming) is another good event to help understanding how they end up on an isle between both events. Probably even Manifest Destiny to explain how they end up in San Francisco after Mesiah Complex.

It must be heavenly to be a new reader nowadays.

@Yamata:

my favorite X-men story is Dark Phoenix from 1980, expect to be surprised by it's greatness. It has all the best X-men all in classic costumes, its a gem of a story.

Thanks guys appreciate the help! :)

@Yamata: believe it or not the "X-men: Proteus" is an excellent story too, taking place before dark phoenix, I bought it for 9.99 randomly and it got me hooked on the older comics. It's like 18.99 reg price, slick premiere hardcover, it looks awesome on the shelf too.

I'd also recommend Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men. My favorite X-Men run.

X-Treme X-men started out really good, anf you don't need much to hop on - just several issues of Astonishing X-meng

Hey guys, never read any X-Men (read other marvel and dc titles) and interested reading some. where you would be a good jumping on point so that I have a pretty decent understanding of major plot/character points?

I've heard morrisons new x-men followed astonishing is a pretty decent jumping on point for new readers. So my question is would I be lost if I jumped on at this point? and would I miss major character development and plot points? Also where would be then next step to get myself to a point where i can read some of the current X-men titles (Wolverine and the X-men etc)?

If it were you with experience and hindsight where would you start?

Cheers - any help would be much appreciated

@AirKing: All-New X-Men launches in November by Bendis. It's supposed to be a jump on point for new readers. It's becoming the new flagship X-Men title so that would be what I would get if I was in your position.

I wouldn't go start reading X-Men right this second because it's all AvX tie ins. I might be easier to just wait till AvX finishes and start from there. If you want a really good X-Men story, you should get the trades for Uncanny X-Force. It deals with Apocalypse stuff, which is always cool. It's all self contained too, so you would only need to get one series. I haven't read Wolverine and the X-Men since I didn't like the art, it's kinda funky in my opinion so I don't know a good jump on point for that. Uncanny X-Men is also ending so, you should just ignore that or you'll have to get trades.

Start with the Wolverine and the X men series

Wolverine and the x-men 1, thats a good place to start on current events without having to know a lot about past continuity.

.....Anything without Wolverine.

u can start reading new x-men vol.1 & vol.2 ,i really enjoyed reading them. u can also read second coming & u must read Messiah Complex. if u have time, go back & read the phoenix sage ,the dark phoenix sage & days of the future past. and don't forget to read house of m. after that u can read the ongoing avengers vs x-men.

if u want to know more about the charecters ,u can gather informations from her or other wikis. i also recomand u to buy as much uncanny x-men comics as u can & if u want to know about the origins of the team u can read x-men season one (cuz reading the old x-men 60s comics isn't entertaning).

I've recently started with X-men - I read from House of M onwards.

But I want to read

Dark Phoenix

Age of Apocalpyse

Days of Future Past

God Loves Man Kills

Do I need to read anything to understand these titles? Or can I just jump straight in to all four and enjoy / understand them without tie-ins?

@danongorf: Dark Phoenix is the only want that isn't explicitly a standalone story, that being said you should have no trouble picking up the trade paperback and reading through it.

AoA is the only one of those that might be confusing, the rest really speak for themselves.

DoFP happens almost right after DPS in the original series, so you can really start with them. GLMK was a stand-alone story that came out a few years after those first two, but it doesn't really need any extra context.

AoA was a big, sprawling, line-wide crossover event from the 90's. The premise is simple enough, but it has a lot of side stories and it's kind of hard to even tell which if any of them constitute the "main story"; on the whole, it spends as much time showing what every character in the world would be doing if Xavier never formed the X-men as it does progressing any particular plots. Oh, and most of the art's not very good. It's alright, but certainly not essential.

@oldnightcrawler: Reading Vol 2, 3, and 4 of the old trades seems to be the best way to read AoA IMO. I tried reading one first a long time ago, had no idea what the fuck was going on...and then someone recommended to me to read 2, 3, and 4 first and it was a much better experience.

@danongorf: honestly you should be fine, the stories are pretty simple enough as long as you dont stress yourself if you dont understand every tiny detail, or recognize every face.

Btw am i the only one that realizes this is like a 3 year old topic?

welcome to the (90's) X-men; hope you survive the experience B|

Lol that moment when you realize AoA is an allegory for an entire period in X-Men history, and things have never been clearer.

@koays: i really love the architecture of the 90's, Two Teams running out of the mansion (blue/gold) X Force the renegade X team, X factor working for the government, Excalibur the European group, and Gen X the school for mutants. None of them shared characters (except the two teams from the mansion but it made some sense) and there was plenty of room for B and C listers to develop. IT was confusing and some bad writing but I wish we could get that set up with some Good writes in the X verse

@mcklayn: Yea, I'm actually more for the post 90's/mid 00's build myself. It takes all those ideas and sort of amplifies them, 3 teams and a student class at the mansion, a private X-Factor group and X-Force being completely in the dark. Keeping all the cast indepent with maybe a background cameo for the students or one of the 3 teams operating around the mansion....but otherwise it sort of raised everyones profile to be a named character instead of a a random "fodder" student/mutant as part of the scenery

@oldnightcrawler: @oldnightcrawler: Well thanks! That really does help! But Apocalypse is one I really want to read. I played an X-Men game where Apocalypse was the villain and loved it as a kid. So I've always wanted to get into his big story arc.. So what I'm asking is can you give me a somewhat simplified read-through of Age of Apocalypse? What to read / buy, I mean. Would be greatly appreciated. But thank you so much. Really clarified a lot for me. ^^

pas de probleme, yo.

The main thing that makes AoA so daunting as a story is that the gimmick was that, since Xavier had never started the X-men, the reality all of the X-books no longer existed, so the 8 ongoing X-titles of the time (X-men, Uncanny X-men, X-force, X-factor, Excaliber, Generation X, Cable, and Wolverine) all got cancelled and replaced with books set in the new reality, which means the story ended up being in all of them. So you've got a 4 month event (not counting the two months of Legion Quest that lead up to it) and more than 34 issues worth of material to navigate.

Because all of the characters now had different histories, none of the factions were the same; Magneto had formed the X-men, but characters like Beast, Cyclops, and Havok had in this reality all been recruited by Sinister, so lots of the main X-men characters weren't on the X-men. If you wanted to follow Cyclops' alternate life, you'd read Factor X, if you wanted to read why Jean Grey wasn't on the X-men, you'd read Weapon X, and so forth.

Most of the different books featured teams going on missions to help fix reality in some way or another, but in retrospect, I feel like you can basically get the main story from reading

• X-Men Alpha (single issue that introduced the main story),
• Astonishing X-Men (4 issue mini that replaced Uncanny' about Rogue's team's mission),
• Amazing X-Men (4 issue mini that replaced X-men about Storm and Quicksilver's team's mission), and
• X-Men Omega (single issue that concluded the main story)

and that would basically give you the meat and potatoes of the story, though 'Omega would bring all the books' elements together so you'd still be missing a few pieces at the end. If I were going to recommend any of the books besides those, Generation Next was actually by far the best series of the event, andX-Men Chronicles #1, which features an early flashback story to the original X-men of the AoA world, and is actually one of the cooler stories.

Even there, you'd be cutting it down to 10-15 issue out of 34+ to make it more manageable. And you could always go back and read the other series too, if you found you were interested.

@oldnightcrawler: Thanks alot. Looks like I have a lot of reading to do. ^^ Are there any other Apocalypse stories worth reading? Cos I can only seem to find him in Age of Apocalypse. :L

You were a huge help!

mon plaisir, yo.

AoA might actually be Pocy's best story as the main villain. Some people would probably recommend The Twelve story-line from '00, or The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix 4-issue mini from '94, or maybe his introduction in the first few volumes of X-factor ('86); I'm not a super-fan of any of those stories, so I might be the wrong one to ask..

..but the The Rise of Apocalypse 4-issue mini is probably worth checking out if you're a fan of the character, it's basically like his origin story.. and he's basically the central villain in Uncanny X-Force (2010), sort of, especially the The Dark Angel Saga (2011), and that whole series is pretty decent.

Would you say that Giant-Size X-Men is a good place to start with them? I bought the 40th Anniversary edition of it, read it and loved it and seemed to give me a pretty good understanding.. But I'm not 100% this is the best possible place for me to start, since it's like 70's (right?), are there better places to start?