I don't know, I suppose they're dated, but those first 50 issues or so have a real majesty to them that very few comics have ever had. I picked up the Marvel Masterworks trades a couple years back and had a blast re-reading them. There's a particular energy they have, particulary when he was working with Byrne.

It is very wordy, though, and some of the dialog does seem stilted. I always imagine a Kirk-like speaking pattern for a lot of his dialogue, with a lot of pauses between speech bubbles.

This will seem ironic, because I loved Dark Phoenix Saga in trade form as a kid, but I also think his work suffers when you read it all at once instead of month to month. Some of the storylines like Fall of the Mutants that I thought were these grand stories seem much shorter without the wait between issues.

That's cool, but it is a way to sample before you buy.

Everything seems to take a long time when viewed under the eyes of a kid. I very much remember reading Batman when Tim Drake was introduced, and I thought it was taking FOREVER for him to become Robin. In hindsight, it was barely a year considering Tim was introduced in Batman #442 and officially became Robin in #457. That was a really long year for myself as a kid though.

I was thinking more of the later Claremont period, post-#200, than the early one. The Byrne-era was pretty much a straight-up superhero comic with an edge that other books of that time didn't have.

I remember really loving Claremont's X-Men when I was a teenager; I started reading around "The Fall of the Mutants" crossover. That period, from about "Mutant Massacre" up until the end of Claremont's run, had some really dark, weird, surreal, twisted stuff in it. But a few years ago, I re-read it, and while there was still a lot of good things in it, Claremont's ticks really stood out and it didn't really hold together well.