Every so often a pair of books comes through the door that I genuinely don't want to see go. Uncanny X-Men #141 and #142 are exactly that pair. Sold both today, and honestly, it stings a little letting these two out of my hands, they're that good.
If you don't know the story, here's why these two 1981 issues matter as much as they do.
The story: Days of Future Past
Written by Chris Claremont with the plot co-devised by artist John Byrne, inked by Terry Austin, this two-parter drops you into a dystopian future where giant robotic Sentinels have taken over America, and mutants are rounded up into internment camps, branded, hunted, or dead. An adult Kate Pryde sends her consciousness back through time into her younger self, the present-day Kitty Pryde the X-Men already know, to warn them how it all began: the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly, carried out by a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under Mystique, the spark that ignites the anti-mutant hysteria which eventually leads to this exact future.
The present-day X-Men have one shot to stop it from ever happening.
Why collectors specifically chase these two issues
- First appearance of Rachel Summers, who goes on to have one of the most tangled, important legacies in X-Men history
- First appearance of the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under Mystique
- First appearance of Senator Robert Kelly, a character who shapes anti-mutant politics across decades of X-Men stories afterward
- The direct source material for the 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past
- In 2001, fans voted issue #141 the 25th greatest Marvel comic ever published
- The image of Kitty walking past a graveyard of fallen X-Men in #141 is one of the most reprinted single images in the character's history, and #142's cover, the full roster stamped SLAIN or APPREHENDED, is just as iconic
The bittersweet part: it's the beginning of the end
This was Claremont and Byrne's swansong as a team. Byrne's actual last issue was #143, one issue later, but Days of Future Past was the final full story the two of them told together, closing out a run from 1977 to 1981 that's still argued as the best X-Men has ever had. Two creators pushing each other right to the edge of their partnership, and it produced this. There's something fitting about that, the story that ends their collaboration is also the one that ended up shaping the X-Men's future more than almost anything else they wrote.
That's Kate Pryde, present in the past, looking at friends who in her own future are already gone, telling them plainly that watching them alive again hurts more than she expected. It's the kind of single line that tells you everything about why this story has never stopped being reprinted, referenced, and adapted, more than forty years on.
Why it never stopped mattering
Days of Future Past didn't just work as a two-issue story, it became a whole storytelling template. Characters born from that dark future, Rachel Summers most directly, went on to shape decades of X-Men continuity. The "grim alternate future" idea got borrowed by writers across the entire industry for years afterward. And when it finally hit cinemas in 2014, it did what few comic adaptations manage, it brought both the original cast and the reboot cast together in one film, built entirely on the strength of a story two guys told in 46 pages back in 1981.
That's genuinely rare. Most comics get forgotten within a few years of publication. This one's still shaping the franchise more than four decades later.
Got Bronze Age X-Men in your collection?
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