In the mid 1990s, the X-Men entered exposed their franchise to a whacked-out alternate Universe and told their writers to run wild. (Basically, Charles Xavier died young, Mangneto is a good guy in his stead, and a mutant named Apocalypse is killing all humans.) This dictionary-sized tome is one of four collections that gather the various runs, one-shots and origin stories from various X-related comics of the period.
Some bits are better than other bits. For a while there I thought I was going to totally absorb myself in this and really go nuts. . .but the interest, frankly, isn’t there. Too much of X-Men comics is just people flying around zapping one another. (And, as I’ve always said, there are too many X-Men with too many powers and they all have a real name, a code name and then a nickname for the code name. It is impossible to follow unless you are thirteen years old.)
Some of the art and technobabble is really terrific, though.