This is blasphemy
Literally now eyeing either the Claremont Omni #1 or the Morrison New Xmen Omni and confused by the last few posts. It's like staring into the abyss on which direction to go...
dont listen to the anti Claremont brigade and go for it. Chris has been total shit only when they dragged his arse back from retirement to write these godawf Wolverine stories in the early 2000s
Claremont... it's the definitive run. They still mine it for the movies 30 years later
Let me be
super clear. The Claremont X-Men is the
only X-men as far as I'm concerned. The John Byrne, Scott Lobdell, Chuck Austin, two Joes, Morrison, all the new writers since (except Ed Brubaker, that was the ONLY time i thought the books had a worthy writer)...they were all terrible and just mined the old Claremont mythos to various shitty degrees.
The editorial teams during the Claremont run were excellent. By Claremont X-Men, I mean everything including the New Mutants, Wolverine, X-Factor, and even Power Pack. Those years feel so completely alien from what's currently being passed off as X-Men (or has been for the past decade) that I wouldn't even recommend they read the old stuff. The fans are different, the characters are different, the philosophies and storytelling techniques are different...it's just not good. But if you're going to continue to read the new stuff, then you might as well jump in at a point where the consistency begins.
And before some of you think I'm just old man ranting, I wouldn't say the same about most other Marvel books. They've changed but they've improved and maintained the essence of the book. Even Spider-man, which I really never liked under Dan Slott, still retained the core of the character. He just changed it for a different audience. I can respect that and bowed out.
But what happened with X-men? There's just no way that book could survive the amount of editorial upheaval and writers who either never got it, or wanted to put their own stamp on the book to the extent that it changed it dramatically, or creators who simply outright didn't like CC's years and wanted to disrupt crap for the sake of it. CC was no saint. His comeback writing STUNK.
But like i said earlier, had Ed Brubaker stayed on the book, tonally it was affectionate of the CC era, but had new ideas and style that Brubaker offered. None of the other writers had that, or, like Whedon, were so slavish to an older era but who's ideas just didn't work for me.
So yeah, I'm saying skip everything Claremont did because it's not relevant and muddies the waters. Just skip it, or TOTALLY embrace it but don't expect the recent stuff to make a lick of sense nor have the intimacy of the old books.
As far as I'm concerned, for CC fans of that era, other than the movies and TV, the X-Men are DEAD.