User blog:Mgeddes/Uncanny X-men Vol. 1 143 Review

This is a book I rolled my eyes at and resisted buying for a long time. It was one of those books that wasn't a must have and had a Christmas tree with Shadow Cat on the front of with a creature that looked exactly like Alien. I thought the idea of a Christmas X-men story was kind of dumb. Plus it's a hard act to follow after 141-142. I finally bit the bullet and bought a mid-high grade copy of it. It sat in my collection for about a year, and then I decided to sequentially read the entire series and it forced me into opening up this one-shot. I was expecting to place it back in the collection to satisfy my perfectly sequenced collection and never pick it up again.

Of course I really liked it. It's widespread knowledge that they were paying homage to Alien, and this issue had me on the edge of my seat the entire journey. I've always been a fan of one-shot stories because it seems like a lot of information to pack into 32 pages and do it right. Some of these stories go on for 4 or 5 or maybe even ten issues, and eh, nothing interesting really happens. But this one says it all in 32 pages, plus it had Kitty Pryde racing through the X-Mansion running from this demon. The demon is no joke either! The whole team went up against one of these things in X-Men 96, and they got their ass handed to them! Kitty outsmarts this thing and by the end of the story, Kitty cements herself as a 13 year old Clint Eastwood.

There is even a clever innuendo to Alien in this book where Kitty quips: "Just like that movie, what's it call?" Pure magic.

I placed this book back in my collection a lot more carefully then when I pulled it out. After I read it, the value increased a lot. Yeah, the cover sucks, but how does that old saying go? Oh, yeah: "Don't judge a comic book by it's cover because it has a teenage girl being attacked by an Alien rip-off in front of a Christmas Tree".