[...] comic book store clerk and a fan of superhero movies who wants to try comics. (You may recall we discussed something similar here last month.) Find out what KC recommends starting with at the link. [...]

The comics that are the most similar to the movie are:

The Claremont X-men issue that dealt with Magneto and Xavier’s past. (X-men 161)
Early issues of the New Mutants have a very similar feel. Their earlier encounters with the Hellfire Club has at least a couple of characters in common with the movie.

I don’t know of the availability of either.

I’m not calling movie fans stupid or putting down Jeff Parker’s comics (which I have previously praised).

I know plenty of people who go see comic book movies and they like them and they’re not absolute, die-hard nerd-fighter types but they are open to the possibility of reading more comics that deal with the same subject matter as the film. They will go into a comics shop and seek out X-Men comics based on their love of the films. And they’re not stupid. They don’t NEED the movie to match the comics exactly.

It’s true that Parker’s FIRST CLASS is not the same as the movie FIRST CLASS but so what? The comics were supposed to be like a Stan Lee revival and the movies were supposed to be set in another continuity entirely. A friend of mine said “this is actually a different continuity than the other X-Men movies” so, WOW, movie-goers are actual capable of understanding the difference between films directed by Director A and Director B even though both feature the same set of characters.

It’s not that the transitioning from comics to movies requires some sort of mental gymnastics that Joe Average movie buff isn’t capable of. You don’t need the comics to be precisely like the movies because, if you did, you’d just have a bunch of movies that mirrored the comics panel-for-panel or comics that acted as “graphic novelizations” of the movies and that would be crap, obviously.

The problem is that there is no venue for casually buying comics. There is the comic book specialty store but those are fucking dungeons half the time and just way to cliquey and boutiquey the rest of the time. Normal people want normal methods of buying product and, increasingly, the internet is that method. This is why digital comics are so important. For ten years now, everyone has sat around and said “Gee, that’s funny… Joe Average movie-goer doesn’t seem to read Spider-Man/X-Men/whatever comics despite loving the movie. Is the problem the movie or the comics or both?” The truth is that it’s not always about content as much as it is about delivery system.

I think, to a certain extent, this article is misguided. FIRST CLASS the movie was good… FIRST CLASS the comic is also good. Both are different but that doesn’t matter unless the reader/viewer has the comprehension skills of a baboon. The problem with the transition is medium.

[...] a known problem — what comics should a fan, attracted by a superhero movie, start with? There are two Marvel [...]

For what it’s worth, I’m a longtime X-Men fan and find the concept and characters tremendously appealing, and I still haven’t found a fun, inspired X-Men comic since Morrison left the series. (Whedon was entertaining enough, but lacked a more substantial direction.)

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is the first X-Men story in ages that I’m genuinely looking forward to. (The film launches tomorrow in Germany.)

I think there was a “Hellfire Club: the Origin” mini at one point as well. (And if not, why not?)

But to be honest, for the feel of this movie, “X-Men before there were X-Men”, it sounds more like Johnathan Hickman’s SHIELD, where he focuses on Nathaniel Richards and Howard Stark. 60s retro is back again, I guess.

I have checked out a couple of the x-men volumes from the local library and don’t really know who the characters or situations are. Even worse, the tpbs are almost never complete stories, and the library almost never has the companion volumes. The books themselves are well-read, so somebody’s enjoying them, but it’s not me.

i was a die-hard X-men fan – I had an old battered copy of #14 that I picked up at some garage sale when I was younger, and then I bought the reprint issues when they were on the newsstand. So when Giant-Size #1 came out, I was there. But I dropped the original series when the Brood came in (I dropped most comics then). I came back a couple times, but found myself dropping the X-men pretty regularly when the stories just got too convoluted and began to spread to too many titles. I would come back for stand-alone books like X-Statix, but haven’t even done that in a long time.

I tried buying the First Class book in trade, but ended up buying the same volume twice because it wasn’t clear which was which (I think one was digest and one was regular size). I figured if Marvel didn’t care enough to number the volumes or make it clear which content was which, they were making it easy for me to stop reading.

There was an earlier series which consisted mostly of updated re-telling of Lee and Kirby stories – Professor Xavier and the X-Men – which lasted about a year and was largely awful, as you might expect from journeyman creators doing Lee/Kirby cover versions.

There is no obvious way into the X-Men comics at the moment, and to be honest, I wouldn’t advise new readers to even try. If somebody told me they were adamant that they wanted to get into the X-Men, I’d suggest they started with the Essential collections of the Chris Claremont run – which is nothing like the films either.

I know I’m asking for the impossible here, in a way, since the movie team was assembled from across comic eras. It just disappoints me a bit that I have to wait years for a followup (if a movie sequel happens at all), instead of feeding the want for more now.

I never read the series but I remember it being described as a retro book and Black Widow is in her original 60′s costume on the cover of issue #9 (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2322/2294499648_9a33a78461.jpg) so I wouldn’t be surprised if it took place in the 60′s.

At least with Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Thor there was really only one option (at the time). And Marvel fiddled around with the story and continuity of the respective comics to fit with the films. Spider-Man got an overhaul in Spider-Man: The Other (which gave him organic webshooters like in the Toby Maguire films). Iron Man amped up Pepper’s presence in the comics, Black Widow got her own series, etc.

It’s really only in the X-Men world that the movie/comic cross has been fairly botched.