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A review by caractacus
Essential X-Men, Vol. 6 by Barry Windsor-Smith, Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, Chris Claremont
5.0
A thing very specifically about my age as a comics reader is that I started reading the X-Men during what I now realize was a very brief window between the death of Jean Grey and her resurrection - and because I was so young, of course that handful of years felt like forever, of course I accepted Jean's death as permanent and irrevocable, since it was probably the biggest part of recent Marvel history that I was familiar with.
I think that because Jean's death was so significant during that time, I soaked up this idea that the Jean Grey era of the X-Men - if nothing else, the Jean Grey era of Claremont's X-Men - was some kind of Golden Age. But reading the whole Claremont era now, start to finish instead of piecemeal like when you're a kid raiding quarter bins, the biggest revelation for me has been realizing that Claremont really hit his stride, really turned the book into The Claremont Era Of X-Men[tm], only after Jean died. This is probably very obvious to people a little older than me who were reading them all as they came out, or people a little younger than me whose first encounter with the X-Men wasn't in that interregnum.
(This comment isn't limited to this particular volume, but this happens to be the point where I've caught up to the first X-Men comics that I read when they were new.)
I think that because Jean's death was so significant during that time, I soaked up this idea that the Jean Grey era of the X-Men - if nothing else, the Jean Grey era of Claremont's X-Men - was some kind of Golden Age. But reading the whole Claremont era now, start to finish instead of piecemeal like when you're a kid raiding quarter bins, the biggest revelation for me has been realizing that Claremont really hit his stride, really turned the book into The Claremont Era Of X-Men[tm], only after Jean died. This is probably very obvious to people a little older than me who were reading them all as they came out, or people a little younger than me whose first encounter with the X-Men wasn't in that interregnum.
(This comment isn't limited to this particular volume, but this happens to be the point where I've caught up to the first X-Men comics that I read when they were new.)