On a whim, I picked up the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection X-Men volume. I was a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the mid 2010s, like nearly everyone else, and I picked up a couple of the New Avengers comics in that heyday, but I never really did venture into the comics. But Penguin Classics has published these curated collections of foundational comics and they present them with historical context and literary analysis.

I really appreciated those editorial elements because these foundational comics created in the 1960s were very much a product of their time. They don’t necessarily hold up well against the social justice allegory that I and I think a lot of others associate with X-Men nowadays, but as the introduction by Ben Saunders points out, they do express more anxiety about the atomic age and the effects of radioactivity. So I enjoyed this a lot more, I reckon than I would have a pure, Omnibus edition of the early comics. So kudos to Ben Saunders, the series editor, for his curation and academic analysis.