We’ve reached the penultimate chapter of regression to full-on thirteen-year-old, only with my own house and a much higher credit limit. Last time I tracked my geekdom from a manageable low tide to being reignited thanks to a visit to Brave New Worlds comic shop.
Get ready – we are about to dive deep into comic book nerdness.
![scarwitch](https://www.crushingkrisis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/scarwitch-200x300.jpg)
Scarlet Witch losing her tenuous grip on reality - and on her face.
I thirstily devoured my newly Civil War trade paperback – loving the more-grounded, less-spandexed take on the comic book world. But where were my X-Men? Unlike the video game Civil War I had just played – complete with Cyclops and Jean Grey – here the X-Men were nowhere to be found.
A little internet sleuthing revealed the X-Men were largely holed-up at the mansion during the civil war, recovering from the worldwide reduction of mutants from thousands to a mere 198 thanks to M-Day.
M-what?
M-day was the result of House of M, when an unhinged Scarlet Witch commanded “No More Mutants” after she was forcibly evicted from her pleasant alternate reality where Magneto ruled a mutant-centric Earth.
Um, okay? Sure. Meanwhile, Jean Grey was in my video game, so was she back to life?
![XMv2 - 0139](https://www.crushingkrisis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/XMv2-0139-195x300.jpg)
Emma & Jean ... not exactly fast friends.
Apparently not – Grant Morrison killed her both Jean and Magneto in 2003 during his run of New X-Men, the same one that cemented Emma Frost as an actual X-Man. Except, now Magneto was an X-Man too and Marvel was hinting at a Phoenix return with their new character Hope Summers – a pint-sized mutant Messiah who was the only new mutant born post-M-day. Hope was an infant then, but was promptly whisked away to the future by Cable to protect her from a murderous Bishop, who was sure she was a sign of coming apocalypse (little “a,” not big “A”), and now she was about to return as a not-so-tiny teen that looks a lot like Ms. Grey.
What? WHAT?
I spent the weekend surfing comic sites, trying to make some sense of the convoluted comic history that occurred since I gave up in 1996.
I was about to move into a new house where I could actually have packages delivered, so maybe I’d catch up on a few comic books. Maybe just Uncanny X-Men? From issue #1 to where my collection started, and then to present day. Surely Marvel’s flagship title was entirely collected in trade paperbacks, easy to obtain from my friend Amazon.
Right?
![133_x_force_26](https://www.crushingkrisis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/133_x_force_26-197x300.jpg)
Emma Frost and Hope Summers. Like a car crash, this is so disturbing that I can't seem to look away.
And, hey, even if there were some holes to fill with single issues, surely there was some straightforward guide to X-Men trade paperbacks that I could refer to somewhere on the internet.
Nope.
Nowehere. On. The. Entire. Internet. Try to wrap your head around that. The vast expanse of internet replete with its hard-core complement of geeks was devoid of a definitive guide to X-Men trade paperbacks.
Oh, I searched. I had forty-seven tabs open in my browser, trying to make sense of a tangle of Essential X-Men and Marvel Masterworks and Omnibuses and Premiere Editions. I found an out-of-date continuity site, the patchwork archive of Uncanny X-Men dot net, litanies of lists on Wikipedia, and a slew of lists on eBay and Amazon.
Lots of pieces, but no whole: a single, comprehensive website that tracked every X-Men comic from issue #1 to issue whatever. A guide to collecting X-Men comics as an adult. A logical, sequential explanation of how to catch up in TPBs instead of unwieldy, expensive single issues.
It simply didn’t exist. So, of course, I had to build it.
And I did – in less than two months! You can check out my guide to collecting X-Men now, but to hear how it came together, and how I came to own ten years worth of X-Men TPBs in a fortieth of the time, you have to tune in to one more installment!
[…] Last time I decided to catch up on X-Men comic books only to discover that nowhere on the entire internet existed a definitive guide to collecting X-Men as trade paperbacks. […]