Comics Buyer’s Guide to the X-Men
with associate editors Maggie Thompson, Brent Frankenhoff, and Jason Winter
Written by John Jackson Miller, Jack Abramowitz, Steve Bennett, Matt Brady, Brent Frankenhoff, Stve Fritz, Steven C. George, Steve Horton, Jim Johnson, Phil Mateer, Nathan Melby, Alex Segura, and Scott Semet
Published 2003
The Comics Buyers Guide to the X-Men was a concept I had developed to get brand of Comics Buyer’s Guide, then still a newspaper, onto magazine stands, using “Retroviews,” a collection of reviews-in-retrospect of comics that had come out years earlier. In full color, the magazine featured more than 700 reviews from our stable of writers for what was, at the time, every issue of the two main X-Men series as well as a bunch of limited series:
X-Men/Uncanny X-Men
X-Men (2nd Series)
X-Men/Alpha Flight
X-Men: Children of the Atom
X-Men: Forever
X-Men: Hellfire Club
X-Men: The Hidden Years
X-Men: The Magneto War
X-Men and the Micronauts
X-Men: The Search for Cyclops
X-Men Unlimited
X-Men Versus the Avengers
Fantastic Four Versus the X-Men
Ultimate X-Men
X-Men Adventures
X-Men Evolution
We also included a price guide, and every retroview included the cover price at the time plus information on the best CGC copy available. It was specifically a magazine and not a book, so it was fully expected that information would go out of date quickly. It was all in support of the review package. The whole point of the magazine was providing editorially independent reviews not approved by the publisher; we said when issues were awful!
But while Marvel would never have been able to produce something like that on its own, the publisher objected to the breadth and depth of the work. The resulting agreement meant that our second attempt already in the works, Comics Buyer’s Guide Presents: The Hulk, would be slightly renamed, be officially licensed — and, sadly, be the last of the series. Ironically, similar magazine “guides” to comics franchises would become the go-to model for many mainstream magazine publishers like Life and Entertainment Weekly in later years; I’d write for several of them.
(Even more ironically, this was while I was starting my comics-writing career, writing for Crimson Dynamo — so much for anyone thinking Marvel and Krause would give one another favorable treatment. Marvel effectively killed the product before we could ever get around to doing other publishers.)
Still, the Retroview idea was sound, and it because a part of Comics Buyer’s Guide when we finally made the move to turn it from a newspaper into a magazine in 2004. No publisher had any objections at all to the feature, even though it would review in full dozens of series over the years.
Reviewer Alex Segura would go on to become a fellow writer on Star Wars and other licensed comics and books; Steve Horton would write an acclaimed David Bowie graphic novel.
The magazine’s release was timed to land near the release of X2, which was how X2: X-Men United had been branded before the film.
The 128-page length we established for this work would be a problem for the Hulk one, because there weren’t nearly that many issues to review to fill the magazine.
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