X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills

If you needed a model of why X-Men became so popular/relevant in the 1980s, this is it: not flashy art, or huge crossovers, or even super villains to fight. Instead, we have a strong, thoughtful piece of character work that looks at tolerance, group identification, and the changing political and cultural landscape of 1980s America, and how that would be reflected in a superhero setting.

What saddened me, re-reading this book for the first time in over a decade, is how relevant the whole thing still feels today. I mean, Rev. Stryker might have a youtube series rather than a cable channel, and he'd be hawking certain brands of fried chicken as a way to “stand up for traditional DNA”, but otherwise, it could be published today as a statement on tolerance in the 2010s with little alteration.

Read this one before the X-Plain the X-Men podcast on it, hey it's pretty good who knew? Definitely less impactful to me however because every single plot point has been riffed on a thousand times in the decades since, but glad I went back and read it.