For those who aren’t aware, Marvel has their own subscription based app where you can read through over 20,000 issues and it is updated weekly on Mondays.

One of the newer things they have been doing lately is having industry professionals curating reading list for the app. This week Leinil Francis Yu gave some awesome suggestions.

Of the many he spotlighted, one in particular stood out to me. It was a run on Uncanny X-men by Whilce Portacio. While I own physical copies of this particular run, I have never read them in depth. I think I bought them from the Sidekick store here in the Austin area. The Sidekick store is where Austin Books & Comics sells a lot of back issues for really cheap prices.

I picked most of these issues up because of the covers and the team featured. The lineup was Jean Grey, Iceman, Archangel, Colossus and Storm. Archangel has long been my favorite X-man and this design for him has never needed updating in my opinion.

This run introduced us to the character of Bishop. Bishop is a mutant cop from the future who was chasing Trevor Fitzroy. He and his partners Randall and Malcolm, traveled through one of Fitzroys portals that he left open. They succeeded in apprehending him, but ran into the X-men and had a misunderstanding as heroes tend to do. This allowed Shinobi Shaw, The son of Sebastian, to come in and take Fitzroy.

Fitzroy had a plan to take over the inner circle of the Hellfire Club by taking out some of its members in a game between Shaw and Fitzroy. After this story wrapped up we got a classic story reuniting Colossus with his brother Mikhail.

The X-men went to help Sunfire deal with some aliens who seemed to be creating a portal and attacking anyone who got close. The aliens were actually trying to protect it to prevent it from swallowing the earth.

The X-men and Sunfire got sucked through the other side and scattered in a manner similar to what happened with Ichigo and his friends in Bleach.

This story reminds of how awesome the X-men used to be. Going on adventures, saving alien races and planets and introducing new characters and fun storylines. The art is classic 90’s fare, but it still holds up really well. If you ever get a chance you should pick these issues up.