Today I am here to announce an update to the one guide that started it all back in 2010 when I asked the internet, “How do I collect all of Chris Claremont’s X-Men onto one shelf” and found a resounding silence where I expected an easy answer. That’s right, X-Men, X-Women, and X-Thems, it’s a complete overhaul of the one-and-only Guide to Uncanny X-Men by Chris Claremont!
Guide to Uncanny X-Men by Chris Claremont
I feel as though I’m saying this same thing almost every time I update one of the pre-2016 comic guides, but: you have to understand that the world of collected editions in 2010 when I created this guide was completely unlike the world we know today!
At the time, if there was an obscure UK edition trade paperback that collected Uncanny X-Men (1963) #274-277, that was a very big deal. Even as one of Marvel’s most-collected titles, Uncanny X-Men had plenty of gaps in its reprints. Putting together a complete shelf of Claremontian X-Men meant having a hodgepodge of mismatched spines and different-sized editions – I know, because that was my shelf for over half a decade!
Uncanny X-Men didn’t get a second Bronze Age omnibus until 2014 and was late to the Epic Collection game in 2016. It really hasn’t been until the past 2-3 years that we’ve had full enough coverage in multiple consistent formats that you could thin out the hodgepodge of old one-off trade paperbacks and hardcovers from your shelf.
Up until today, my Claremont guide didn’t reflect that new reality of collecting X-Men – a reality that has changed as recently as late 2022 with the announcement of Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 5.
Now, the guide is streamlined to reflect the experience of collectors who are starting today with the same question I had back in 2010. If you want a complete shelf of Claremont, you can approach it from multiple different angles – two different omnibus lines that marry perfectly in the middle, a Masterworks line with about 50 issues to go, an Epic line with a few gaps that line up well with other collections, or a complete line of black-and-white essentials.
That doesn’t meant I removed my focus on how to find single issues of Uncanny X-Men in collected format. In fact, I added dozens of collections by issue or storyline, including ones as new as this year and as far back as 1992.
I am confident when I say my Guide to Uncanny X-Men by Chris Claremont is once again the most complete single page on the internet when it comes to figuring out how to best collect and read Chris Claremont’s run on Uncanny X-Men – whether that’s physically or digitally. And, once you’ve got your shelf or digital collection sorted out, read it in order incorporated with every appearance by every X-Men by following my Definitive X-Men Reading Order!
Some of you have been reading Crushing Krisis and using this guide since I first built it back in 2010. Thank you for sticking with me through the years, especially the past few years where some critical guides like this one haven’t been as up-to-date as other resources on the web. I appreciate that you still trust me to be the most-comprehensive and the most-accurate source in the whole world when it comes to building guides like this one. I’m looking forward to bringing all of the rest of the X-Men guides up to this standard in the coming months.