This is available to everyone, but it was made possible via the support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis:
The Revised & Expanded X-Men Reading Order Guide – Era #1: Original X-Men
One of the biggest factors in CK’s popularity exploding in the early 2010’s was the X-Men Reading Order I debuted back in 2012.
It emerged from a moment of frustration, as all of my best projects tend to. This time, my ire was focused on the fact that no one had produced an actually readable chronological guide to reading X-Men. Existing guides were either simply ordered by release date or ridiculously complex lists that broke down every single-panel flashback.
None of them were comprehensive of every book, nor were they appropriate for the Trade Era of collected editions.
Despite being a major feature of CK, I can’t say I’ve ever been proud of the presentation of the Reading Order. A lot of the pages have a certain “git’er’done” quality to them that was a hallmark of CK’s early expansion that I’ve never had the time to improve.
Honestly, they always makes me think of the scrawlings of a Serial Killer, like the notebooks upon notebooks in Se7en. That’s what it looked like to figure out – I had giant rolls of paper unspooled across the floor with scribbles and crossouts and loop-de-loop arrows on them.
While the web pages underwent some editing between that stage and the final product, I launched the entirety of them all at once. They were the best format I could figure out at the time, which isn’t always the easiest thing to follow. And a lot of people have followed them.
Now it’s time to ameliorate this awesome resource up to the current standards of CK’s best reading guides. Era #1 has been vastly expanded and clarified, with new formatting, more comics, better explanations, and clearer notations. (Era #0 received a stealthy similar treatment a few months ago as a prototype for this new format.)
I hope to continue working my way through improvements to the remaining 13 eras at a slow-but-regular clip so CK can remain the #1 best resource for reading X-Men on the entire internet!
As for CK’s most-demanded feature of all time – a Marvel Now X-Men Reading Order – I’ll just say this: I’ve already got it, but it’s in the form of thousands of records in a database. Will that ever see the light of day in a reading guide?
I have no comment for the moment, but if that’s an answer you’re keenly interested in you might want to consider contributing as little as a $1/month pledge to cover CK’s hosting expenses. For… reasons.