What was your introduction to the X-men...?

[charliehustle415]

The trading cards in the early 90's were my introduction to Marvel in general, but I fell in love with the X-Men based solely on the character designs. I had no context to who they were at all, but when I discovered the animated series I was hooked. Then from then on out I started picking up the collected editions in the library, Barnes & Nobles or Walden Books.

I also learned a lot more about the characters with the DK Encyclopedias.

[Master of Sound]

Mine was Uncanny X-men # 4 I think it was. The one with Logan and Kurt versus Wendigo. Alpha Flight also came by. Then I got hooked even though I was very young then.

[Mormel]

Mine was Uncanny X-men # 4 I think it was. The one with Logan and Kurt versus Wendigo. Alpha Flight also came by. Then I got hooked even though I was very young then.

That would have been #139-140.

[BobbysWorld]

Uncanny X-Men #319, purchased off a Toys-R-Us spinner rack with Christmas money when I was ten years old and comics were still sold in major stores like Toys-R-Us which at the time was a store that still existed, way back in the Jurassic period, before half of the words in this sentence went extinct.

It was the infamous 'Bobby and Rogue yell at Bobby's dad as a stop on their road trip, and Bobby makes a giant ice palace that has zero subtext whatsoever, absolutely none, nada, kaput' issue.

I often wonder if Bobby would still be my favorite character if a different issue had been my first exposure to the X-Men, or even a different Bobby-centric issue. I'm sure it has a ton to do with that. But at the same time, I also wonder if any other issue would have grabbed me as much as that one did and lead me to seek out more issues. It probably was an instance of happening to read the right issue to draw me at just the right time for me to be drawn in by it. Perfect storm kinda confluence of variables.

[Su_Whisterfield]

Marvel UK started doing B&W reprints of Uncanny from issue 94 onwards in the very early 80s. I picked one up when looking for Captain Britain by Moore and Davis. Then I hunted down the rest and US copies of the originals. I still have them, some of the US copies are quite ropy, if the comic shop had issue 100 for £3 or for £5 for a better copy, I bought the cheaper one, I wasn’t collecting, I just wanted to read the story.
So the ANAD team will always be my team.
I stopped reading in the early 90s when Chris Claremont left and started reading again in 2019 accidentally at the start of Krakoa.

[Rift]

The X-Men arcade game inspired me to go to a comic shop for the first time and this was my first issue.



Been hooked ever since.

Was it because the story was good? Or was it because Colossus was in a speedo?

[marhawkman]

The 90's cartoon was my first contact with the franchise. But I started to read the comics back during the Academy X run before House of M.

Same here. Loved the idea of the X-Men teaching the next generation.

[JB]

Was it because the story was good? Or was it because Colossus was in a speedo?

Yes. They both left quite an impression.

[Factor]

X-men TAS. But it was on re-runs when I was a kid and I was rarely able to catch it.
One day I saw a Ultimate Spider-Man comic guest-starring the X-men on a newstand and that was my intro to the comics.

[Hakka84]

Memory is fuzzy but I guess through TAS.
While TAS was running (or rerunning) one day in the newstand I notice an X-Men cover and I buy it. It was the Italian X-Men that collected Uncanny X-Men #333 (I remember the cover) and... I think X-Men #53 (given both came out in the same month).
Not sure if I was confused by the story or what, but I didn't buy the next month.

Skip to 1999. X-Men featuring Uncanny X-Men #362 (and I guess X-Men #82). I was in vacation at sea (my first time) and I saw this in the newstand and went "why not". And I was ruined.


I don't know if my "first time" influences my preferences in any way. But I have to admit that the art style of both my "first times" still influences me. I tend to compare any comic art (both pencils and coloring) to those two.
I'm not sure that the fact my fave is Warren (and my fave pair Warren/Betsy) is related to the fact they were in the first issue I ever bought. Because when I actually started to collect X-Men, Warren and Betsy weren't in the team and they wouldn't show up until The Twelve an year later.

If you ask me "tell me the first page that comes to your mind if you think X-Men" it's the glorious two-pages from UXM #333 with Warren pondering on his damaged wings and Betsy about to pounce on him like a playful cat in a mood for play-fighting. So yeah, perhaps I have been influenced by my "first X-Men time".

[Jackraow21]

This was mine, to Wolverine at least...



I was a kid and had been a Captain America and Spider-man fan until then. Jumped all over Wolverine and never looked back. That brought me to buy Claremont and Jim Lee's X-men #1, and then I met the X-men 6-player side-scrolling arcade game which I dumped tons of quarters into, the original X-men Animated Series, the Toy Biz toys... let's just say it's been a lifelong love affair ever since.

[Thundershot]

I remember the X-men being on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends… but for comics.ll

New Mutants #100

There was a little newspaper I got in the mail that was like a catalog and it must have come because I ordered some Transformers back issues from a comic ad… They were hyping New Mutants 100 in preparation of X-Force. I ordered the books and eventually got hooked into X-men number one, UXM 281, X-Factor 71, etc., so I had the mutant genesis issues that led into that. I was already reading FF at the time, so it became a rabbit hole I fell deep into.

[OBrianTallent]

Dang I guess I'm the old man in the room...I saw this cover on the spinner rack in my local drug store...the only place we had with comics in my small town. I was completely hooked with who I would soon learn was Pheonix as well as Storm.

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[j9ac9k]

When I was a kid, my mom would let me buy one or two comics at the store, so I used to pick up whatever. But the first title I "collected" (made sure to get every month) was ROM and that's where I first saw the X-Men:

And yeah, I immediately thought Wolverine was the coolest.

Rom also ran across the Brotherhood of Evil mutants where Rogue tried to take his powers and - if my memory serves - she was touched by his nobility and at the end seemed unsure about her path of "evil." In my head canon that was the first step to her becoming a hero because I think she joined the X-Men not too long after.
[edit] I decided to look it up! Here are two relevant panels:

[whitecrown]

X2: X-Men United. I think I'm the only one so far who's posted about being introduced to the franchise via the movies. X-Men: The Last Stand had already come out but X2 was showing on TV and my aunt, who is a big X-Men fan, pointed out Jean to me during the opening museum scene and told me she was going to turn evil. I was already a Fantastic Four fan from the movie, and had started reading the Lee/Kirby FF run, so it wasn't hard to slide on over to the X-Men and very soon I had bought the trilogy DVD set from becoming such a fan. Before this, my only exposure to the X-Men was from seeing bits of the 90s show on TV but I didn't like it then. I thought all the characters seemed really freaky but the two who left the most lasting impressions on me were Storm and Beast. Storm seemed like some divine alien goddess with her glowing eyes, white mane, and regal speech patterns. Beast seemed like such an oxymoron with his freakish appearance but being so well-read and constantly quoting literature while wearing eyeglasses.

After watching the X-Men trilogy, then I got into the comics by picking up the essential volumes for the O5 run. But my first X-Men comic purchase was The Dark Phoenix Saga TPB which I devoured and is in brutal condition today because of how much I read it. Jean easily became my favorite character, supplanting Sue who previously held that position. At the half-price bookshop, it would be easy to pick up the 90s comics for half-off so I got into that run. I used to constantly look at the UXM covers online because the covers from the 60s-90s were so demonstrative of the actual stories that just looking at the covers was like looking at an X-Men timeline and following the stories that way. The Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire OHC was the first contemporary X-Men comic I bought. I picked it specifically because it felt the closest in tone to The Dark Phoenix Saga.


In terms of other media, X-Men Evolution was still showing on TV so that became the main X-Men show I watched since it seemed more contemporary than TAS. And video games like Marvel Ultimate Alliance helped expose me the rest of the Marvel universe that wasn't focused on Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, or the X-Men.