Rating: 
Summary: Best of all X-Men Essentials
Review: I bought all 3 X-Men Essentials from amazon.com. IMO, the second book is the best of them all. It has gorgeous art, superb plot and it centered around one of the team's most important event. Not to be missed by X-Men fans.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Find!
Review: I bought all of these to back track and read the previous things that had happened within the comic. This serves the purpose but was disapointed that they were not in color.
Rating:
Summary: Good Find!
Review: I bought all of these to back track and read the previous things that had happened within the comic. This serves the purpose but was disapointed that they were not in color.
Rating:
Summary: ESSENTIAL!
Review: I bought this, an older version, at a book store in San Francisco, and I read the whole thing in a fifteen-hour or something flight back to Australia.
I hadn't read any of them, I'd just seen the movies, and I immediately knew who my favorite character was, Jean.
And, it was pure coincidence that I picked up this, the collection of comics leading up to Jean's conversion to Dark Phoenix and eventual 'suicide'. It was absolutely one of the best things I've read.
But the collection doesn't just have those stories, it includes a showdown with a Canadian super-hero team, a menacing mutant who can warp reality, a crazy assasin and his 'Disneyland of Death', two giant monsters and an exclusive club who planned to use Jean to take over the world.
The drawings are superb (mostly, there's one where a 14-year old girl, Kitty, looks like she's an anorexic seventy-year old) and better in black and white, cause I think Phoenix looks stupid colored in.
The stories are gripping, though there's a lot of dodgy dialogue, standard fair for a comic, you know, people stating the obvious, talking when they're about to be zapped into a thousand pieces of mutated flesh etc.
Must have for comic-fans, X-fans or people who like to read, but not to much reading and who like pictures accompanying those words.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Stories!
Review: I have read this book over and over again. It has some of the greatest adventures ever. Many people would clearly point the Dark Phoenix Saga,that is the highlight of the volume. Howver, I also enjoy the X-Men's ordeal with Proteus just as much. Both are tragic on a Shakespearean scale. The other stories with The X-men's battling the likes of Arcade and Wendigo are good too. Cyclops' fight with D'sparye is a good horror story as well. So what if the book is in black and white. That accentuates some of the stories.
Rating: 
Summary: Love the story, but this is a bargain phonebook version.
Review: I was hoping to get a reading/thrash copy to stop the wear and tear on my issues, but had to return this. It's B&W, and printed on very thin cheap newspaper, and is, essentially, the bargain-basement manga version of the X-Men. If you've never seen the Byrne/Claremont run before, this is a nice, inexpensive way to rip right through some of the best stories our Children of the Atom ever had (including the introduction of Alpha Flight, and the Dark Phoenix Saga), but archival-quality, this ain't.
Rating:
Summary: This has almost all the best X-adventures ever!
Review: I've been collecting comic books since I was like 6 (and I'm 14 now, so I've spent over half my life reading about spandex adventures), and I have honestly got to blame Chris Claremont for it all. It's the X-Men TV show that got me hooked, and the last 2/3 of the series almost exactly followed the series. Now with the X-Men movie coming out, I have friends who are trying to carry on a conversation with me, but don't know shite about the mutants, so I recommend this. Essential X-men vol. 2 has like days of future past, dark pheonix, arcade, the brotherhood of mutants and just about all the most important characters in the x-verse. I know I sound like a commercial, but this seriously is the shit if you don't know about X-Men.
Rating:
Summary: The fateful Dark Phoenix saga of Claremont and Byrne
Review: It was nice to see that inker Terry Austin was credited on the cover of "The Essential X-Men Volume 2" along with writer Chris Claremont and pencilers John Byrne and Brent Anderson. Of course, Byrne is also the co-plotter for most of these issues and Anderson only draws one of them, so it is not like all names are created equal when it comes to such things. But Austin was always the best inker of Byrne�s pencils and deserves some of the credit for making "X-Men" the premier comic book of its day during this particular run of issues from #120-144. As the cover shot indicates, this particular collection of stories is highlighted by the Dark Phoenix saga and the "death " of Jean Grey. It was the controversy over the latter that was partially responsible for Byrne�s decision to leave the book, which came from Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter's dictum that superheroes never kill anybody. In issue #135 "Dark Phoenix," Jean Grey's alter ego goes over to the dark side and jets off into space to find something to eat, which ends up being a G-Type star. The problem is that of the eleven planets in that system the fourth is inhabited by an ancient, peace-loving civilization hitherto known as "the Asparagus people." The bottom line was that in the super nova that resulted 5 billion beings died; at which point Dark Phoenix took out a Shi'ar warship as well. The consequence of this was a trial in the count of Lilandra; originally Claremont and Byrne intended for Jean to have the Dark Phoenix entity psychically removed, leaving her a mere mortal who had to live with the great guilt of what she had done. The idea was that down the road Magneto would offer her the chance to regain her power and in a moment of great triumph she would refuse. But Shooter decreed otherwise and the new ending was that issue #137 "Phoenix Must Die" now became a literal fate. I have always been of the mind that Shooter was not just wrong but stupid; following the simplistic rules of 1940s superhero comic books is shortsighted. Eventually Marvel comics would deal with a superhero forced by circumstances to kill: Captain America, without his shield, gunned down a guy with a machine gun who was shooting a crowd of civilians. Even Superman had to take some lives and live with the consequences. Claremont and Byrne had come up with a serious storyline and Shooter threw it away on a simplistic principle. This Volume 2 collection represents the high point of the "X-Men" comic book, not just because of the Dark Phoenix saga, which is still pretty good even with the altered ending, but because we have the Canadian government's attempt to bring back Weapon X (a.k.a. Wolverine), an encounter with Arcade's Murder World, a showdown with Proteus, and a lengthy fight with the Hellfire Club. Kitty Pride also joins the X-Men at this point in their history and one of my all-time favorite stories is issue #141 "Days of Future Past"/#142 "Mind Out of Time" when the Kitty Pride of a dystopian future ruled by the Sentinels sends her mind back in time to her younger body to try and change the future. This two-parter is a great time travel story and ends up being Byrne and Austin's swan song for the "X-Men," even though they did one more issue. I am well aware that there are those who disparage the Marvel Essentials collections because they reprint the original comics in black & white. Getting these same comics reprinted in color in the Marvel Masterworks series would cost you four times as much. From an economic standpoint this is the way to go. But I would also argue that the artwork of Byrne and Austin, as with that of Steve Ditko, actually looks better in black & white. You might not want to go beyond this collection of �X-Men� comics, but picking up the first two Essential volumes does give you almost four years worth of issues representing one of the celebrated runs of a particular title in the history of the field.
Rating:
Summary: The fateful Dark Phoenix saga of Claremont and Byrne
Review: It was nice to see that inker Terry Austin was credited on the cover of "The Essential X-Men Volume 2" along with writer Chris Claremont and pencilers John Byrne and Brent Anderson. Of course, Byrne is also the co-plotter for most of these issues and Anderson only draws one of them, so it is not like all names are created equal when it comes to such things. But Austin was always the best inker of Byrne's pencils and deserves some of the credit for making "X-Men" the premier comic book of its day during this particular run of issues from #120-144. As the cover shot indicates, this particular collection of stories is highlighted by the Dark Phoenix saga and the "death " of Jean Grey. It was the controversy over the latter that was partially responsible for Byrne's decision to leave the book, which came from Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter's dictum that superheroes never kill anybody. In issue #135 "Dark Phoenix," Jean Grey's alter ego goes over to the dark side and jets off into space to find something to eat, which ends up being a G-Type star. The problem is that of the eleven planets in that system the fourth is inhabited by an ancient, peace-loving civilization hitherto known as "the Asparagus people." The bottom line was that in the super nova that resulted 5 billion beings died; at which point Dark Phoenix took out a Shi'ar warship as well. The consequence of this was a trial in the count of Lilandra; originally Claremont and Byrne intended for Jean to have the Dark Phoenix entity psychically removed, leaving her a mere mortal who had to live with the great guilt of what she had done. The idea was that down the road Magneto would offer her the chance to regain her power and in a moment of great triumph she would refuse. But Shooter decreed otherwise and the new ending was that issue #137 "Phoenix Must Die" now became a literal fate. I have always been of the mind that Shooter was not just wrong but stupid; following the simplistic rules of 1940s superhero comic books is shortsighted. Eventually Marvel comics would deal with a superhero forced by circumstances to kill: Captain America, without his shield, gunned down a guy with a machine gun who was shooting a crowd of civilians. Even Superman had to take some lives and live with the consequences. Claremont and Byrne had come up with a serious storyline and Shooter threw it away on a simplistic principle. This Volume 2 collection represents the high point of the "X-Men" comic book, not just because of the Dark Phoenix saga, which is still pretty good even with the altered ending, but because we have the Canadian government's attempt to bring back Weapon X (a.k.a. Wolverine), an encounter with Arcade's Murder World, a showdown with Proteus, and a lengthy fight with the Hellfire Club. Kitty Pride also joins the X-Men at this point in their history and one of my all-time favorite stories is issue #141 "Days of Future Past"/#142 "Mind Out of Time" when the Kitty Pride of a dystopian future ruled by the Sentinels sends her mind back in time to her younger body to try and change the future. This two-parter is a great time travel story and ends up being Byrne and Austin's swan song for the "X-Men," even though they did one more issue. I am well aware that there are those who disparage the Marvel Essentials collections because they reprint the original comics in black & white. Getting these same comics reprinted in color in the Marvel Masterworks series would cost you four times as much. From an economic standpoint this is the way to go. But I would also argue that the artwork of Byrne and Austin, as with that of Steve Ditko, actually looks better in black & white. You might not want to go beyond this collection of 'X-Men' comics, but picking up the first two Essential volumes does give you almost four years worth of issues representing one of the celebrated runs of a particular title in the history of the field.
Rating:
Summary: More of the best!
Review: Ok, first of all, "only" 4 stars, and that's based on the packaging (black'n'white + cheap paper), not on the quality of the material. These are more of the classic X-men stories that turned Chris Claremont into a comic-book superstar. Found within are some of the best stories ever written, the "Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past", stories that by far and wide supercedes anything else written in those early days of the "modern" comic-book. John Byrnes art is flawless, and manages to almost look as good in black and white as it does in it's original glorious coloring. Quite simply, buy this if you are at all remotely interested in the X-Men. There are 4 issues in this series of "Essential" X-Men, but this one is probably the one that has the most to offer for a new fan. Heck, buy 2 and give one to a friend!
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