I want to start reading X-Men. Where do I start?
The Stan Lee/Jack Kirby originals are pretty forgettable and not so important; it’s pretty much soft rebooted later on and if you’ve seen the movies, you can pick up kinda what they were going for. The Chris Claremont/John Bryne Uncanny X-men years are a must, though, and readily available both legally and not so much.
Read that at least through the Dark Phoenix Saga and you should have a pretty good idea of what characters you want to follow as the franchise splinters into about a hundred different comic books. A lot of those are ‘young X-Men’ teams which then get orphaned to include new young X-Men teams, so just pick one if you want. Generation X is surprisingly good; don’t let Scott Lobdell’s name scare you. Mark Buckingham is on art.
There’s not really any point in trying to keep the plot by the time we reach the 90s, or so, because no one even knows what Cable’s deal is anymore, he just hangs out with Deadpool. But, you can pick back up with Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, which is another soft reboot of the comics taking a cue from the Bryan Singer films. It’s a pretty self-contained arc, as it would have to be for Marvel to immediately start retconning it. It also introduces Emma Frost as a power player in the X-Men.
From there, Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men is pretty much a direct sequel to New X-Men (as well as the Claremont/Bryne comics up above) and another self-contained story that introduces a few characters who are spun off into some not horrible comics. But then you’re in a morass of Marvel deciding that there should be only two hundred or so mutants while people are still freaking out and spending billions of dollar on combating OMG TEH MUTANTS!, and the X-Men moving to San Francisco and Namor being an X-Man. You can get into that if you want, but it’s all pretty inessential.
