X-Men Updated Edition: The Ultimate Guide

Rating:
Summary: Great Characters--Zero Plot
Review: As a die-hard X-Men fan I had to pick up this trade paperback. Taking the X-Men out of a visual comic form allows more to be written. It gives writers a great opportunity to flesh out these colorful characters. Unfortunately, the anthology format ensured that no plot would survive. Each story is averaging 20 pages. In order to accomodate such a shortage of paper, the writer has to present a plot, flesh it out, and resolve it on the turn of a dime. I was frustrated halfway through the book at the stilted writing and lame ending after ending after ending. This book does get two stars. One, because it is afterall the X-Men, and two--it does focus on a variety of heroes. If you want X-Men fiction that won't leave you unsatisfied, I recommend checking out those novels written by Christopher Golden. (The Mutant Empire Trilogy is nicely written.)

Rating:
Summary: The Best
Review: For me, the best story featured in this anthology was "Out of Place" by Dave Smeds. Very good work,

Rating:
Summary: I'm only saying 2 because some people might actually like it
Review: I checked out this book at my library because it sounded pretty interesting, even though I was told it was for die hard fans only. I pretty much consider myself that. But even I found this book completely...pointless. The stories had either no plot or a pathetic one. If it hadn't been for the names I never would have thought it an X-men book.

Rating:
Summary: Maybe not quite "Ultimate"
Review: I have to admit, this book is nice. The layout is good, the pictures are good, and it does cover a lot of basic information about the main characters in the X-Men series. Also, the drawings of the layout of Xavier's mansion, the Danger Room, and the Blackbird were very nice. But if you're more than a beginner and looking for in-depth info on the characters, you won't find it here. Somebody should write a reference book for those of us who already know how Wolverine got his adamantium skeleton or that Beast wasn't always furry!

Rating:
Summary: The boys love it.
Review: I haven't read the book, but I can tell you this: I can't keep it on the shelf of our middle school library! I'm ordering two more copies.

Rating:
Summary: Incompetence
Review: I picked up the original edition of this book because the "updated" version isn't updated at all and actually contains less information. Anyway, it ended up not mattering since both versions are crap. Like others have mentioned, there are all sorts of problems with the poor layout and incorrect information in this book. In addition to that, most of the art is pretty bad, and there are tons of omissions that kinda defeat the purpose of an "Ultimate guide" (and are not corrected in the "updated" version). The book is slim. The Updated verion is only 8 pages longer (it's not 192 pages as listed here, it's 184 pages.) and those pages are dedicated to the new X-Men movie and lame stuff like X-Statix (which no one likes and doesn't sell, not that that matters to those geniuses at Marvel). To make things worse, each profile of X-Men characters featured in the movies contains a sidebar giving a history of the MOVIE version of that character! That's a complete waste of space and goes against the continuity of the X-Men mythos for a cheap commercial (when you can already buy books and endless DVDs with info on the movies). I can see the feature on the movies at the end of the book, but to interrupt profiles which were (way) too small to begin with for even more advertisements for the movie was too much and ruined this book. Another wasted opportunity, another failure for DK. You guys - and the current powers that be at Marvel - are utterly incompetent and clearly couldn't care any less about the fans. The best guide so far has been the Spider-Man one, which had major problems of its own, but stuck to the COMIC BOOK continuity, not a bunch of stuff about the movies.

Rating:
Summary: Incompetence
Review: I picked up the original edition of this book because the "updated" version isn't updated at all and actually contains less information. Anyway, it ended up not mattering since both versions are crap. Like others have mentioned, there are all sorts of problems with the poor layout and incorrect information in this book. In addition to that, most of the art is pretty bad, and there are tons of omissions that kinda defeat the purpose of an "Ultimate guide" (and are not corrected in the "updated" version). The book is slim. The Updated verion is only 8 pages longer (it's not 192 pages as listed here, it's 184 pages.) and those pages are dedicated to the new X-Men movie and lame stuff like X-Statix (which no one likes and doesn't sell, not that that matters to those geniuses at Marvel). To make things worse, each profile of X-Men characters featured in the movies contains a sidebar giving a history of the MOVIE version of that character! That's a complete waste of space and goes against the continuity of the X-Men mythos for a cheap commercial (when you can already buy books and endless DVDs with info on the movies). I can see the feature on the movies at the end of the book, but to interrupt profiles which were (way) too small to begin with for even more advertisements for the movie was too much and ruined this book. Another wasted opportunity, another failure for DK. You guys - and the current powers that be at Marvel - are utterly incompetent and clearly couldn't care any less about the fans. The best guide so far has been the Spider-Man one, which had major problems of its own, but stuck to the COMIC BOOK continuity, not a bunch of stuff about the movies.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful book
Review: I think this is a great book for all x-men fans.

Rating:
Summary: good read
Review: I would not h ave rated this book a five had it not been for three reasons. The first one is that some of the stories, if not all, in the book are quite nice. The gift of the silver fox is a short story which captures wolverine in the wild and I felt that this story alone was worth paying the price for the book. Wolverine's charector has been captured ever so nicely in the story and that is just one of the few that I liked. The second reason why I would recomnd this book is because some of the short stories are related to some other X-men novels. I mean they do not exactly have anything to do with the novel's plot, but there are refrences to them and if you haven't read this book, you would be left wondering what is going on. The best example of this would be the Novel 'Smoke and mirrors' nad the story from this book 'It's a wonderful life'. The novel takes place three and half months after the short story and once again if you have not read this book you would be left wondering. I could go on giving you more such examples, but I think that I have made my point. But hold on I did say that there were three reasons did I not? The third reason would be collection. If you are a x-fan or even a Marvel fan or you just like Marvel novels, then you would want to have all of the books published right? Take care and have fun reading the book, should you decide to buy it

Rating:
Summary: Not everything if you are a fan.
Review: If you like nice big pictures without going to the full details of the x-men, this book is for you. If you are a long time fan, I would recommend get the previous edition, it still includes the annoying "behind the scenes" of the first movie (as if there were not enough DVD's with such feature) but includes more about the characters of the comics.. This updated edition includes just a few more pages but, some mutants don't appear or are not fully well described as in the previous edition, which you can still get here in Amazon. It's a nice book indeed, the cover and the quality of the paper and great illustrations, but they really need to get in touch with the fans to meet their needs. There is the need of a REAL X-men guide to all the characters, organized alphabetically prefferably.