I had started buying them when X-Men #90 came out.  They were still in reprints, but I was just in time for the revival of the title.  I remember reading a lot of the earlier Lee/Kirby and Thomas/Adams issue as reprints.

The title really picked up after GS X-Men #1 and peaked under JB & Cockrum, but started declining immediately after JB left, despite some fine art by Cockrum, Smith and JRJR.  The stories just didn't measure up to the art by the time I left.

I've been off and on over the past 20 years, jumping on based on creative teams or if I've heard good things about a particular run.

X-Men #113 was the issue that hooked me. Lots of characters on the cover. Clearly I did not know this new team as well as I'd told my grandmother I did. "Colossus?" "Banshee?" "Storm?" Back in those days, I used to cut the figures out of the cover if they were complete enough, keep the cut-outs in an envelope, and take them out to play with on my mattress, colorforms-style, pitting JSA members against LSH members and the like. I probably intended to clip out a few new heroes for my collection...

But that book was one of the best comics I had ever read. EVER. Just knocked me out. I bought the next few issues, the whole Savage Land saga.... Stopped again before Moses Magnum showed up, and then became completely hooked with #135. I bought every issue thereafter, come what may, Hell or high water. 

I became disenchanted during the Brood saga. Claremont's reliance upon "heart's desires" and warrior-speak was growing tedious. I really enjoyed the art through the Paul Smith era, but I was less enamored of the stories. The New Mutants was a regular buy each month as well and so I was burning through my tolerance for Claremont's recycled-Heinlein attitude-not-character approach to writing at twice the rate I would have been had I stuck with just the X-Men. I really hated the way the men were always asses and the women were always splendiferous pillars of spunk, sanctimony, fire, and sass, their power always a song within them...

X-Men #201 was the last straw. Just awful. Cyclops, the guy who held off both teams single-handedly back in #167 loses in single combat to a non-powered Storm. Because she steals his visor, being a master their and all. At that point, I really thought she should have lost the fight, since Cyclops without his visor is very, very dangerous. And it's not as if he hasn't been without his visor before. He's practiced for this eventuality, hasn't he? No? He should know ju-u-ust how far he can open his fingers to let just a little beam slip to take down someone stupid enough to take his visor from him.

I get that he wanted to lose. That being the case, he shouldn't have agreed to the fight. Nevertheless, it was intolerably awful to read. One of the single worst comics I've ever had the misfortune to endure. Writer's pet vs. bad, bad mans because mans are bad bad bad. Just plain awful.

I still bought the book for two more issues out of sheer momentum. I'd been buying it for years. How could I not? #204 taught me how. I opened the book. Looked at the first couple of pages, and realized I honestly didn't care what happened to the characters and actively hated the idea of reading it. So I put it back. That was liberating. 

I revisited for a couple of Silvestri "No one can see or remember us! We're MAGIC!" issues. I liked the art somewhat, but god, Claremont's writing didn't just nosedive, it somehow had distorted space and time in it's headlong plunge into complete garbage. The Bret Blevins cover to the "Welcome to the X-Men, Havok" cover told me everything I knew was already going to be that issue. Havok was going to be a needy, insecure, thumb-sucking loser and the rest of the team Warriors-Born who had no time for little babies who had not proven themselves on the Field of Honor. And that was exactly what the issue was all about. Havok. Hadn't proven himself? Really. The guy who fought alongside the X-Men when Warrior-Born Storm was just NewBorn Storm being taught how to pick locks and spin combination dials with her toes inside her wreckage-strewn cradle? That Havok?

So enough was enough. I was intrigued by Jim Lee's artwork to return a final time for a few issues, but reading those things was a god-awful slog. Just terrible. Unreadable. I'd seen and heard too much. I can't even read Heinlein anymore because That Voice is there in it. It literally nauseates me now... 

I "volunteered" to read and notate some of the trades collecting Morrison & Austen's runs when I worked for the local school district since the person in charge of deciding what was appropriate for cirriculum didn't want to go anywhere near them. Afterwards, I wished I had palmed them off onto someone else as well. 

Ever read the one where Polaris goes on for page after page after page after page about how terrorism is a good thing, all correct and proper in the hands of the right people, the disenfranchised, the put-upon, the just? And everyone should just be okay with terrorism because terrorists are simply trying to say something and if everyone would just listen to them, the world would be peaches and cream and everybody could eat cotton-candy all day long? And so people must die, and people in those issues did die, and it was good everyone died, and yay, people dying... And she doesn't shut up at all and no one contradicts her until the very end when someone, Wolverine, I think it is, says, "Wait a minute..." and then it's to be continued next issue? So anyone who bought just that one issue is left thinking the X-Men is a pro-terrorist book... And they're not wrong. Certainly that month it was. 

Since then, I've tried a couple of the Bendis "All-New" issues. Seriously, why do I do that? Why do I revisit this wretched book? 

The reason...? Somewhere inside, many, many rings down deep in my trunk, there's a thin, tiny layer that remembers the Savage Land saga...

Things like JOHN BYRNE'S NEXT MEN brought me back to comics in 1992.  And, yes, I was very excited when Image Comics began.  I was aware enough of the big names involved and that a "new, integrated universe" was coming!  It gave me just a taste of what it must have been like in the 60's when Marvel started and Spider-Man might run across Dr. Strange or Giant-Man and the Wasp for a few panels and it was great!  The best talent working on their dream projects!  But six core books soon multiplied into dozens of cheap carbon copies (they copied themselves!) that flooded the stands with dross!

Before 1987, I would buy an entire company's output--their whole "universe"!  Since 1992, I have only followed specific talent--like JB.  If a favorite writer or artist left a book, I left the book.