X-Men

If anyone wants to be up all night riveted to the many tangled, twisting plots of a single story, the thing to do is this:

1) Buy a few X-Men comics. Any will do.

2) Get attached to some of the characters, then realise you need to branch out into different sub-genres of the universe (ie. Generation X, Wolverine & Gambit, Weapon X, Uncanny X-Men) in order to follow their progress, as they constantly move between series.

3) Discover www.uncannyxmen.net, which provides thorough and up-to-date issue summaries of everything ever published in the X-Men Universe. Realise that, rather than wait for the next load of imported comics, or trying to buy them off ebay, you can fill in the gaps here.

4) Get tempted to look ahead to see if your favourite characters die or not. Or, if you've found out they die, keep looking to see if, by some miracle, they're resurrected.

5) Voila. You end up reading everything, when you should be writing.

I mean, I thought Maverick died when Sabretooth gutted him, then threw him off a building. But he comes back. Then - no, wait - it's not Maverick, but someone in disguise as him. It turns out it's his old sidekick, Bolt - but what's this? The mysterious Agent Zero, who accidentally shot Bolt, thinking that he had defected to Gene Nation, takes off his mask - it's the original Maverick!

And another of my favouite characters, Chamber, has just disappeared. He was a mole in the Weapon X program, and phoned Wolverine to say he had found the location of 'Neverland' - the site of a mutant death-camp that the X-Men had heard rumours of. But Wolverine's turned up at the co-ordinates Chamber gave him, and the place is deserted. What happened to Chamber?

It's like a f.ucking good soap opera.