The release of Uncanny X-men Omnibus 5 has, finally, meant that Chris Claremont’s entire original run on the title is available in Omnibus format. Or at least all of it apart from that final mess of a crossover when everything behind the scenes at Marvel didn’t seem to happy.

In celebration of this, I’ve decided to re-read the lot, and record my thoughts as I go along. The “Claremont Run” is one of my favourites in all of comics. Not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of its inventiveness, its quirkiness, its glorious prose most purple and the way that all of those elements are welded together to tell progressive stories.

As a teenager I started reading the X-men in around 1987 and was instantly hooked. I didn’t know most of the heroes in the titles, and the story was slap back in the middle of what had already become Claremont’s trademark of labyrinthine plots. Yet despite that, I was hooked. I wanted to know more about the characters. I wanted to know both what was to happen to them next, but also what had got them to this moment.

This meant buying back issues and then the latest issues. Following the story inevitably led into buying X-Factor and The New Mutants, and get into a lot of what Louise Simonson was doing on those titles. Broadly speaking my aim in this blog is to stick to the issues reprinted in the Uncanny X-men omnis. But I do own a few Epic Collections of the spin-offs and so I’ll dip into those when the stories seem nicely tied together.

Broadly speaking, each entry should mainly be my thoughts on the issue. I’m going to try and have a couple of running sub-headings for the blog, picking out a fun panel, or a particularly Claremontian turn of phrase. Maybe something spotted in the letters pages also reprinted in the Omnibus. And especially anything the issue made me want to hunt down.

The last is a frequent part of any re-read of old comics for me. As you read, a character gets mentioned, or developments in another title being published at the time. And it makes me intrigued as to what happened to that character or what was happening elsewhere. And so I’ll head to Google or even Marvel Unlimited to find out. Which is probably worth a mention.

Anyway, lets get things going…