Having recently spunked away fourteen months of my life reading X-Men comics, I've inevitably ended up writing about it. It would have been twelve months but I miscalculated how long it would take to work my way through 1,654 comic books. I started with X-Men #1 from 1963 and kept going until I reached September, 1991, the point at which it all went down the toilet so far as I'm concerned and coinciding with the end of the Chris Claremont era. As older readers may have discerned from the numbers, this wasn't just X-Men #1 through to #280, but also the associated books - New Mutants, X-Factor, Excalibur, all the solo titles, issues of Defenders and Avengers featuring the Beast, Champions, Dazzler and anything else to feature an X-person even if it's just Cyclops stood in the background of one panel whining about something. The book is, in part, an analysis of all that went wrong, but also of what made X-Men great in the first place. It was written mainly for fun, specifically my fun, and therefore should not be mistaken for a droning treatise on post-gender tropes in the Spongebob Squarepants movie or collector bullshit about which issues you "need" with lists of who appeared where. I'm sure there's enough of that shite already out there and nobody could possibly need another one. It therefore has very little in common with, off the top of my head, The New Mutants (2016) in which Ramzi Fawaz explains how the Hulk is an important non-binary character because Bruce Banner often has a bit of a cry when he's finished rampaging through the latest city, because crying is something that ladies do and is therefore counter-patriarchal or summink*.
If you're familiar with my Pamphlets of Destiny blog or the associated books, then you'll probably have some idea of what to expect. However, because this one is over 241,000 words and should therefore be considered a magnum opus (at least in quantitative terms) I'm going to post a series of twenty-nine daily trailers here on this blog, one write-up taken from each year covered in the book leading up to the launch, as we publishing bigwigs call it. The excerpts should give you some idea as to whether you'll want to read the thing which, being unofficial and full of swearing, isn't going to get any promotion beyond this.
See you tomorrow, possibly.
*: God how I wish I were making this up.
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