Rating: 4/5
I received this in the May box from Comic Bento. I probably would not have picked this one up otherwise. This is a classic X-men story, although I've only known variations of it. All of the issues included are originally from around 1980, and that shows through at some points. There is a lot more exposition than modern books that can bog down the story at times.
This felt like an odd collection at first. It begins with Scott Summers leaving the X-Men, introduces Kitty Pryde, includes an issue featuring Nightcrawler and Dr. Strange, moves into the "Days of Future Past" story, and finishes with a Kitty Pryde holiday issue. The "Days of Future Past" story is covered in two issues, which seems short compared to modern comic story arcs. It is executed well enough that it doesn't feel rushed though.
"Days of Future Past" is a time travel story. It looks ahead to 2013 at a time when mutants and other powered people have been killed or enslaved by sentinels. A group of X-Men figure out a way to send one of their people into the past to try to prevent an assassination that started it all. This allows the writers to take a longer scope view of the repercussion of mutants on our world. They incorporate elements present in this setting while taking a look at how humans would react to something like this. It is a clever way to expand the type of stories they can tell involving these characters.
As disparate as the individual issues are, they pull together pretty nicely in this collection. Kitty Pryde is sort of the common factor tying them together even when she doesn't have a major part in the story presented. And despite the elements from this era of comic writing that I don't particularly care for, the creators did a great job keeping me engaged. There are a lot of story elements that I see played out in more recent books. I loved that I could pick out ideas that appear here that are built on or continued in later books, even though I don't feel like I needed to read this first.
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