Essential Classic X-Men 3 by Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Don Heck, Neal Adams, Tom Sutton & others

Werner Roth was a bit boring, so a change was welcome, albeit to perhaps the most overrated comic artist ever. Neal Adams can be a spectacular artist, and it is nice to see someone with as forceful a realistic drawing style (helped greatly by excellent Tom Palmer inks) - but my god he has huge flaws. Even if you can forgive the times he sacrifices any storytelling sense for a striking page layout (I just read page 12 of #57, where I realised after reading the page that you should read the panel at bottom left first, then top right, then down the diagonal...), he occasionally produces individual panels that are unreadable, there is too much gritting of teeth in the faces, and many panels are badly overcrowded and cluttered.

This volume mops up the last 13 issues of the original X-Men run, before it went reprint, plus a few odds and sods and the run of Beast solo stories, when he got furry. Frankly there are no great moments in the whole thing, but there is little that is rubbish either. I'm glad to have the whole run - I don't have too much of the collector mentality, but I do have a little.