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dantastic's review against another edition
4.0
Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Vol. 1: The Strangest Super-Heroes of All collects X-Men #1-10.
I've been buying these new Masterworks with the Michael Cho covers so my wife bought this for me for my birthday or Father's day or some such occasion.
Nobody mentions X-Men #1-10 when great Silver Age Marvel books are brought up so I was surprised at how good this was. Lee and Kirby worked the bugs out of the Marvel Method and the bickering family-style team by this point so this stuff is pretty slick.
A lot of formative stuff appears here: first X-Men, first Professor X, first Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, first Ka-Zar, well, that last one isn't all that important.
Stan Lee does the words while Jack Kirby does the pencils with Paul Reinman and Chic Stone on inks. The usual put upon S. Rosen and A. Simek do the lettering. Speaking of, I noticed a couple instances of characters being called by the wrong name and a 'from' instead of a 'form.' I wonder if Sam Rosen or Artie Simek was tired of Stan Lee's crap that day and let those pass.
The stories hold up pretty well, full of action and the bickering team dynamic. I'd say this reads better than the first year of Avengers or Fantastic Four. Four out of five stars.
I've been buying these new Masterworks with the Michael Cho covers so my wife bought this for me for my birthday or Father's day or some such occasion.
Nobody mentions X-Men #1-10 when great Silver Age Marvel books are brought up so I was surprised at how good this was. Lee and Kirby worked the bugs out of the Marvel Method and the bickering family-style team by this point so this stuff is pretty slick.
A lot of formative stuff appears here: first X-Men, first Professor X, first Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, first Ka-Zar, well, that last one isn't all that important.
Stan Lee does the words while Jack Kirby does the pencils with Paul Reinman and Chic Stone on inks. The usual put upon S. Rosen and A. Simek do the lettering. Speaking of, I noticed a couple instances of characters being called by the wrong name and a 'from' instead of a 'form.' I wonder if Sam Rosen or Artie Simek was tired of Stan Lee's crap that day and let those pass.
The stories hold up pretty well, full of action and the bickering team dynamic. I'd say this reads better than the first year of Avengers or Fantastic Four. Four out of five stars.
sqeeker's review against another edition
5.0
- I'm so thrilled that Marvel has released these comics at an affordable price! Getting old school comics is SUPER expensive, but now everyone can have them in these Marvel Masterworks!
- I was geekin' out through the whole book!
- I love the letter at the beginning from Stan Lee. I'm glad you decided to go with the name X-Men too!
- I can't believe the first issues of The X-Men were 12 cents!!!! I wish they were that cheap now! I'd buy a truck load!
- The art and dialogue remind me of the old 60's Batman with Adam West.
- I feel like Stan Lee was still figuring out The X-Men while writing the first issues. Their powers are being defined, and Iceman slowly develops his design. At first, Iceman is just a big man shape snowball, and then he develops a face, and later he starts getting more definition.
- The X-Men and Avengers issue was EPIC!!! SO AWESOME!!
- Jean and Scott's thoughts about how they are in love are getting annoying! JUST HOOK UP ALREADY!
- I tried to make this last as long as possible, but alas, I finished, and now I'll probably have to wait forever before buying the next volume :'(
- I was geekin' out through the whole book!
- I love the letter at the beginning from Stan Lee. I'm glad you decided to go with the name X-Men too!
- I can't believe the first issues of The X-Men were 12 cents!!!! I wish they were that cheap now! I'd buy a truck load!
- The art and dialogue remind me of the old 60's Batman with Adam West.
- I feel like Stan Lee was still figuring out The X-Men while writing the first issues. Their powers are being defined, and Iceman slowly develops his design. At first, Iceman is just a big man shape snowball, and then he develops a face, and later he starts getting more definition.
- The X-Men and Avengers issue was EPIC!!! SO AWESOME!!
- Jean and Scott's thoughts about how they are in love are getting annoying! JUST HOOK UP ALREADY!
- I tried to make this last as long as possible, but alas, I finished, and now I'll probably have to wait forever before buying the next volume :'(
shane_tiernan's review against another edition
4.0
So I was a little worried about this being just too corny to put up with but it ended up being a lot of fun. There was some ccol stuff that I never knew about the x-men - prof x was in love with Jean Grey (Marvel Girl/Phoenix), a villian named Lucifer was responsible for prof x being in a wheelchair. But probably even better than that was all the cover blurbs. They are just hilarious. Boasting about how great the comic is, how "strange" the x-men are.
Definitely recommended for any fans of the x-men.
Definitely recommended for any fans of the x-men.
clarkness's review against another edition
2.0
These stories were tough to get through. I've been a casual fan of the X-men since I was a kid, but I wanted to go back and read some of the classic originals. Tough to see the original team as a true work in progress. It takes a while before they approach anything like a fully fleshed out set of characters that can be discriminated from one another. Moreover, these early stories are mostly pretty boring. Roughly half of each issue seems to be the X-men training in the Danger Room, which is obviously as entertaining as watching anyone get ready to do something interesting.
kellylynnthomas's review against another edition
3.0
Kind of fun to go through old comics, but also kind of torturous, because the prose is so over-wrought, they all start out in the danger room with bizarre training contraptions and end with a super villain/mutant attack, and Scott and Jean just pine endlessly over each other (except for that one weird issue where Professor X grossly professes his desire for Jean to the reader, and then never mentions it again). I appreciate this book much more as an historical document than as literature, but it is still fun to read an issue at lunch time every now and then.
The Masterworks volume is fairly nice, though whoever decided using Times New Roman for the font for the page numbers at the bottom of the page should be shot. That's not really a font that should be used in professional book production, people. Stan Lee's introduction on this first one volume pretty good. Typical Stan Lee stuff, but fun to read. A nice retrospective on the beginning of the X-Men. (The later intros aren't so great.)
The Masterworks volume is fairly nice, though whoever decided using Times New Roman for the font for the page numbers at the bottom of the page should be shot. That's not really a font that should be used in professional book production, people. Stan Lee's introduction on this first one volume pretty good. Typical Stan Lee stuff, but fun to read. A nice retrospective on the beginning of the X-Men. (The later intros aren't so great.)
suspiciouspinecone's review against another edition
2.0
Ok, first of all, I love the X-Men, they're my favourite Marvel team. But this is not my X-Men and these aren't my favourite characters, I'm much more interested in the All-New X-Men, with Nightcrawler, Storm and Colossus. This was not that.
This is an early superhero comic. As such, it was sort of stupid and funny on accident, and either Jean Grey is the single most beautiful, most fascinating person to ever walk the Earth, or the entirety 0f the X-Men, including Professor X, are completely love-starved.
CW: Violence, weird romantic nonsense, ableism
This is an early superhero comic. As such, it was sort of stupid and funny on accident, and either Jean Grey is the single most beautiful, most fascinating person to ever walk the Earth, or the entirety 0f the X-Men, including Professor X, are completely love-starved.
CW: Violence, weird romantic nonsense, ableism