Product Description: Buckle down your mortarboards, students of Marvels merry mutants, cause weve got a summer crash course in X-Men classics coming your way!Lesson #1: It aint easy being an X-Man. No sooner has their mentor, Professor X, died than who shows up but Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants! Only a study in teamwork with Earths Mightiest Heroes can help our grieving heroes make the grade!Lesson #2: Think twice before inviting family over. A friendly house call from the Juggernaut or Polaris, the daughter of Magneto himself, isnt the summertime bliss the brochure may have described!Lesson #3: Battling a bevy of baddies including Mesmero, Blastaar, the Red Raven, Warlock and Computo may causecramps. Be sure to stretch before jumping into this pool!And for extra credit you can pull an all-nighter with the origins of Iceman and Beast, along with a rare solo story featuring the Angel!Consult guest instructors Jim Steranko, Barry Smith and John Buscema this July or risk failure at the end of the term. Dismissed! Collecting X-MEN (Vol. 1) #43-53, AVENGERS (Vol. 1) #53 and selections from KA-ZAR #2, 3 and MARVEL TALES #30.
Turning the tide ^ The original X-Men run was a case of Promise mostly unfulfilled. The first dozen issues were interesting but then creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby left and their successors (and sales) floundered. Even the death of a major character in the previous volume MARVEL MASTERWORKS X-MEN HC VOL 4 doesn't stem the tide.
This volume opens with Roy Thomas' swan song -- a 3 part battle against archfoe Magneto featuring the Avengers, drawn by George Tuska and the magnificent John Buscema. The unfortunate decision to break up the X-Men afterwards, though, worsens the book, causing it to lose what focus it had. But all is not lost. The legendary Jim Steranko pipes aboard for two issues and three covers. This is the shot in the arm the book needed. The interior work is not Steranko's best -- he is ill-served by inker John Tartaglione, nor does he mesh with writer Arnold Drake, going from a text-heavy opening page of his first issue to a double-page spread of a futuristic secret base. However, Steranko's covers and innovative layouts allow you to read more into the issues than is evident. The "Magneto's Daughter" storyline concludes with art by Don Heck at the top of his game and a surprise I don't believe ANYONE ever saw coming. The last story features early artwork by Barry Smith in his pre-Conan, heavily Kirbyesque style.
Despite the mushy middle, either of the two major storylines -- the X-Men / Magneto / Avengers battle or "Magneto's Daughter" is reason enough to purchase this volume.
A few moments of brilliance ^ When I was a kid, I was always puzzled why the X-Men was cancelled. I thought these stories were great when I originally read them, but four decades later most of them don't hold up. The two Jim Steranko stories stand out, of course, as does the Barry Smith story. I remember thinking the Smith artwork was shockingly bad, and in fact it was greeted with howls of protest from readers... Smith sketched it on a park bench in NYC waiting for his interview at Marvel. Today, it looks much better than the rest of the issues contained in this volume.
For me, it's a worthwhile purchase, as there are three Steranko covers along with the two stories he illustrated. I wasn't able to buy every issue in those days and missed many, so it was a pleasure to be able to finally, at last, read them all in order. But I would have enjoyed it a lot more 42 years ago.
Things pick up dramatically in the next volume, with the entry of Neal Adams, but it wasn't in time to save the title. True, the X-Men were revived in 1975 but they were "all-new, all-different", and I always felt a certain nostalgia for the X-Men of my childhood.
Not as good as I remember... ^ This here's an interesting collection of the original X-men stories, that's not quite as good as I remember from my youth. Almost gave it a 3 star. This volume collects a few issues with Steranko art and Barry (Windsor) Smith's first rough one off for Marvel. Smith's work improve greatly after this in Daredevil and Conan. This volume see the first appearance of Lorna Dane, but this era doesn't really pick up steam until Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Vol. 6 (Hardcover) when Roy Thomas picks up the writing chores and Neil Adams take over for the artwork. I'd recommend picking up Vol. 6 over this one.
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