10 Marvel Graphic Novels You Must Read Before You Die
7. X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga
No other comics property exemplifies just how inaccessible the medium is than the X-Men. Everyone's favourite mutants are literally drowning in decades worth of convoluted cosmic storylines, and while the Dark Phoenix does little to amend such problems, it is definitive, and undoubtedly one of the finest X-Men tales ever told.
The subject of next year's suitably titled X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Chris Claremont and John Byrne's seminal X-Men text is everything fans of the nineties cartoon want to see in a comic book. Although adapted for that very series, the actual comic itself is far more ambitious in scope, bringing together the two biggest cosmic forces in the Marvel Universe (the Kree and the Skrull) as the X-Men face an uphill battle to save Jean from the Shi'ar Empire and, more importantly, from herself.
The book, following on from the original Phoenix Saga, takes place as Jean finds the Phoenix Force inside her impossible to control, curtesy of the villainous Mastermind, who'd psychically manipulated the X-Man into thinking she was the aristocratic ancestor of the Hellfire Club's most famous patron, the Black Queen. Imbued with this newfound dark personality, the force inside Jean bursts free and sends her careering across the cosmos... until she annihilates an entire planet full of people (on accident).
It's tragic, iconic, and a brilliant X-tale all around. Don't let the films tell you otherwise.