Chris Claremont’s X-Men is the superhero comic for me. I have read ones drawn by John Byrne and John Romita jr when I was younger. It concentrated on characters more than other superhero comics. You could have issue where there was no fighting. Villains had more dimensions than regular supervillains. I have never read beginning of Chris Claremont’s run. X-Men was released in Finland from when Byrne was drawing it. Birth of Phoenix was in some special. From Byrne’s time Finnish X-Men jumped some time forward. When Uncanny X-Men Masterworks were in sale I decided to get them and read the whole thing. Current Masterworks don’t include end of Claremont’s run but I get quite far into what I have already read. Including the jump Finnish X-Men had.
First volume starts with Giant-Size X-Men which introduces new X-Men and end on last issue before born of Phoenix. Giant-Size X-Men wasn’t written by Claremont. It shows how new X-Men could have turned out to be quite different. Team had infighting and members not wanting to be in team. X-Men could have become regular superhero team. Sunfire leaves the team in next issue which was first written by Claremont. Second not team player Thunderbird dies at he end of Claremont’s first story. It is not clear why he was in team in first place. Power wise he didn’t bring much to the team. Wolverine, Colossus and Nightcrawler could do same as Thunderbird. Personality wise he was just no team player who wanted to prove himself. In the end he died because he couldn’t work as part of a team.
With Sunfire and Thunderbird gone team had better dynamics. Wolverine was only non team player but he never hated being part of a team as much as Sunfire and Thunderbird. Death of Thunderbird was missed opportunity. It only leads Cyclops grieving for few pages and releasing one issue villain. After that X-Men had moved past Thunderbird. Older Claremont would have taken more out of it. As he would have taken from old X-Men leaving. Now they just say they want to move on and they leave.
First volume doesn’t show much of what makes Claremont’s X-Men so good. Villains have only one or two things in their mind. One being desire to kill X-Men and/or Xavier. Sentinels will return but I don’t remember other villains of this volume returning. I mean villains they won in this volume. So foreshadowed will return as will those whose story arcs were left open. There was one of those. There were so many plots set in motion it is hard to remember everything. But I haven’t read next volumes yet. I talk about comics I have read.
On quality vise this is what Avengers was at the time. At least what I remember from Avengers stories of the time. It doesn’t show much of what made X-Men so good later during Claremont’s run. Which was bit disappointing but understandable. This was start of what became my favorite superhero comic. Best known stories (Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past) are with Byrne but my favorite era was later when X-Men was drawn by John Romita jr.