X-Men
There are people out there who have grown up with these characters but never grew out of them. Not in a cliché ‘basement dweller with a poor social life’ sort of way. In the same way some people collect coins or drink beer. The X-Men have been around long enough that they’ve been through comics, cartoons that defined Saturdays for an entire generation, films, games, fight picking arguments that still occur ten years later between adults over dinner. We know that. Because we are them.
Finding presents for the sort of X-Men fan we are describing is easy if you have been keeping up. The issue is that a lot of that stuff is either crappy merchandise designed to be thrown away as quickly as possible or so niche that it only really resonates with approximately eleven people across the globe. We wanted the stuff in the middle. The stuff that will resonate with a true fan but doesn’t come from the questionable gift rack at your local service station. Items with heft. Items that show you cared about what this person loves enough to research it rather than blindly throw X-Men into Amazon and pick the first thing that shows up.
Inside you will find books to please whichever side of that fanbase you fall into. People who want something for their shelf. Something that looks and feels like it can hold its own as an object you will enjoy handling. People who want to wear their love proudly but not like they robbed a toddlers closet. People who want to experience or re-experience the stories that made these characters important for the first time.
Cyclops or Wolverine. Old school blue and gold or the gritty modern take. Whether they jumped on board in the eighties reading Chris Clamont or in the nineties thanks to the animated series or became a fan during the reign of Hugh Jackman’s toothy grin. The passion for X-Men rarely wavers from the same type of love.
Long term, insanely fierce and decidedly irrational yet perfectly reasonable.
Everything we selected for this article is something we would gift ourselves. That’s the only benchmark we use for this site and it’s the only rule we made here.