No, not one that's held between the covers of any book, but one that is playing out before my very eyes as it has so many times over the years.
My folks brought up another bookshelf and books - yes, a year into my move and I'm still moving books and bookcases - and one of the ones on top of one of these boxes was my The Best of Marvel Comics Vol. 1. If you don't know these books, they are beautiful, hardcover volumes reprinting some of the classic stories of many of the major Marvel characters, along with a few original ones as a bonus. This one had an X-Men classic and then a Wolverine solo short (like 5-6 pages) and, as I'm reading it, I remember - as I always do - why Chris Claremont is a great comics writer.
Yes, he relies far too heavily on catch-phrases and cliches and has a tendency to slip into some truly purple prose, but when he's at the top of his game, he weaves a team story like absolutely no one else. Even the vaunted Frank Miller can't handle team stories like Claremont; Claremont knows exactly when and how to segue from one character and story arc to another without missing a beat. He always manages to focus on each one - each character, their story, their relation to the other characters and the overall story - while still keeping everything in focus and moving the story forward. It's really good.
Plus, he uses solid dialogue - not just writing in balloons. There's a huge difference. Remember how Rogue, the Southern belle, always said "Ah," instead of "I" and used "y'all"; and how Wolvie always talked with dropped "g"s - like "Watchoo talkin' 'bout, bub?" It gets really old really quickly in the wrong hands, but Claremont's literally a pro at it - so much so that long before it gets old, you know who's talking before you even look at the picture. If all the dialogue on a Claremont page were set to the margin in quotes, you'd know who was talking without a single dialogue tag!
So, I read this classic X-Men story - one I have, by the way - and by the time I got to the end of it, I was... I guess in the throes of a slight middle-aged crisis, maybe? So I went into the bedroom closet and dug out the old X-Men and am about to start somewhere. I don't know where or which issue; I'm just going to go to the high 100s - early 200s and go from there. I do this about once every year or two, so there's a good chance one or more of the future posts will be about the runs I've "lost," and how I'm tearing up the house to find them, but I hope not. I find them laying around and file them sometimes, but since pulling them out of the closet is a major undertaking, I don't always stick to that and so I end up with whole runs lost in my books (most of which I find here and there around the house). I'm just nervous because I just moved and I wouldn't know where to begin looking for orphaned comics!
Anyway, call it what you will: a desperate cry for help; a mid-life crisis at least 10 years too early; a pathetic manboy's need to avoid adulthood... but there's nothing to do here and I absolutely loved the X-Men growing up! They really were a part of my extended family when I was a kid, however dorky that sounds, and every so often I miss them. I don't tend to really relive or remember the parts of my life that were happening at the time I first read the books or anything like that; it's far more about the characters themselves. It's silly and maybe a bit weird, but what I tend to think about are things like what else was going on in the Marvel universe at that time, what titles were in print, what was going on in our real world - things like that - not what I was doing or going through at the time because, let's face it, I was a kid! What was going on then was comics.
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