I am pretty unfamiliar with the X-Men world outside of the two movies. I don’t think i’ve ever actually read a comic (although i think i may be just nerdy enough to enjoy it)…but i picked up the first “Astonishing X-Men” like a good little Joss Whedon fan, and i’ve yet to read it. What i’m wondering is if this would be a good place to start, would i be able to follow the story succesfully without much background info?
Well, you could buy the Marvel Masterworks collection of the first X-men comics so you get a brief history of the characters. You could also visit a fansite containing lengthy bios which would probably catch you up on everything minus the fast few years (if they tend not to update often). One warning about the Marvel Masterworks collection, though. Growing up, I watched the X-men cartoon on Fox, read various comics (I couldn’t afford to buy them in order, so I bought random comics where a storyline never finished), and got most of my info about them by discussing them with my friends (I think we established that it would be coolest to be either Nightcrawler or Wolverine). So after all this, my uncle started giving me these collections for my birthdays. Frankly, I was bored with reading them as the action is nowhere near as exciting as it was in the cartoon, and Wolverine hadn’t joined until the 2nd or 3rd volume. Wolverine was also pretty boring in the beginning. So yeah, maybe since you’re new to X-men, you’ll have fun with the collection, but I just wanted to warn you about that. I feel like I just babbled a lot. Blah.
You might like to try the Ultimate X-Men series. Purists may scoff at it, but it’s perfect for people trying to get into the storylines. It’s set in a completely separate universe (so far as we know) from the ‘main’ X-Men comics and can be read without worrying about crossovers, other Marvel titles, or who did what to whom 30 issues ago.
Also, check out http://www.uncannyxmen.net/. I was in the same situation a few months ago, but I managed to catchup thanks to all their info.
You probably won’t have too much trouble if you start reading now. The past couple of months has been the X-books “reboot” wherein they changed everything…again.
I used to be an X-Men fan back in the late '80s where it was possible to read an entire year’s worth of comics and still have no idea what was going on. I think the situation when Morrison was writing was much the same and part of the idea for the reboot was to try to rein in the divergent plots.
I haven’t picked up any of the new ones, but I was waiting for EXCALIBUR but the couple I did flip through looked fairly awful.
I liked Astonishing, but as Chairman Pow alluded, don’t get too attached to anything. Every ooh, maybe 8-10 months, they change the X-men around and there’s no hope of getting a coherent or long-lasting storyline going on and all the previous sub-plots will be dumped without ceremony (the Morrison run lasted…what 2 years? That seems like a HUGE run by comparison.) They also have a tendency to start a ton of X-Books in a batch which tend to overload/flood the market and only one or two will survive. It’s a stoopid tactic that gets them short-term gains at the expense of long-term customer goodwill and trust and hurts them in the long-run.
In other words–I’d say back issues, Masterworks and Essentials are the way to go.
Sure, I think you could start there, although you may want to pick up one or two of the other main books to learn more about some of the other characters. I’m not sure who is in Astonishing. It seems that this month they’ve decided to add two flagship titles. (What is it–Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, New X-Men, and Astonishing X-Men? Yeesh . . . )
I’ve been reading X-Men (Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, and sometimes various spin-offs like Excalibur) pretty much constantly for the past twelve or so years. I started reading young so I didn’t really understand much of what was going on when I delved into it, but eventually that didn’t matter because the story arc finished and another one began. Still, it took me several years to fully understand the origins of some of the characters. The past four years or so I haven’t been as thrilled with the storylines, although I truly think they are picking up again, and I believe it wouldn’t hurt for you to try a few! (I mean, two comics a month is only about six dollars. . . so even when the storyline was blah I didn’t mine picking them up, so I wouldn’t have to fill in any blanks later when the story got good again.)
If you enjoyed the movies, especially their semi-realistic take on superhero powers, you’re probably going to be very disappointed with the actual comics. I’ve read far more X-titles, from the 70’s through about 2002, than I care to admit, and none of them were even a fraction as good as the movies. Oh, there were little gems here and there, but on the whole, they’re just not that great. As others have mentioned, Ultimate X-men is relatively new (a normal person could catch up with it without going bankrupt) and designed to be free of the decades of continuity that affect the other titles, but c’mon, it has giant pink and purple flying robots in the first issue, not to mention female characters who dress like streetwalkers.
The comics medium has so much to offer it’s amazing, but the X-titles are far from the cream of the crop.
Wolverine’s comic line is pretty good on its own.