Forbidden Planet X-Men Catalog Review 2026: Three Years of Building a Complete Krakoa-Era Collection

I’ve been chasing X-Men comics for as long as I’ve been buying comics, and that journey eventually led me to Forbidden Planet about three years ago. What started as a one-off pre-order for the Hickman House of X / Powers of X oversized hardcover turned into a quietly expensive habit. I’ve now bought every Krakoa-era oversized HC through them, plus a back-catalog of Claremont reprints, the Epic Collections, and more variant covers than I’d care to count.

Here is the honest report on what it’s actually like to build an X-Men collection through Forbidden Planet — what they do well, where they fall short, and what I wish I’d known when I started.

Why X-Men specifically is hard to collect anywhere else

If you’ve ever tried to build a complete X-Men run from any single source, you already know the problem. The franchise has been running continuously since 1963, has multiple parallel sub-titles at any given time, and the publication strategy reshuffles every few years. The trade paperback collections are inconsistent — same story arc, three different cover treatments, two different editorial cuts. Some runs only exist in oversized hardcover. Some only in Epic Collections. Some are stuck in out-of-print purgatory.

The result is that for serious X-collectors, “buying it on Amazon” stops being viable around the third year. Amazon’s inventory system was never designed for the kind of granular catalog the X-Men line demands. Forbidden Planet’s was.

What they actually stock

The X-Men section is genuinely complete in the ways that matter most:

• Modern Era Omnibuses. Every Krakoa-era oversized hardcover I’ve checked has been in stock at RRP within a month of release. X-Men by Jonathan Hickman volumes one through three, Inferno HC, Sins of Sinister HC — all there, all priced as they should be.
• Epic Collections. The deepest dive into 70s, 80s, and 90s X-runs you can buy. Forbidden Planet stocks the entire active Epic Collection line. New volumes ship the same week they hit US shelves.
• Marvel Masterworks. The hardcover canonical reprints of the Claremont/Byrne era. Their selection here is surprisingly complete — including the older volumes that have been allowed to drift out of print at other retailers.
• X-Men Legends. The recent re-release line aimed at lapsed readers. All current volumes in stock.
• From the Ashes runs. The current relaunch is well-covered — single issues, variants, and the trade paperbacks as they roll out.

What they do not do well is back-issue floppies. If you need a specific issue of Uncanny X-Men from 1985 in raw form, Forbidden Planet is not your shop. Their floppy back-issue inventory is mostly post-2010, and even then it’s hit-or-miss. For the deep-cut single issues, you’re still going to eBay or a specialist auction house like Heritage.

The pre-order system is the killer feature

Here is the thing about X-Men oversized hardcovers — they print in genuinely limited quantities. Marvel has been getting cagier about second printings in recent years, and once a Krakoa-era HC sells through, it stays sold through. Eight months later you’re on eBay paying double cover.

Forbidden Planet’s pre-order system lets you lock in a copy at RRP months before street date. The price is fixed at the point you order. The book is allocated to your name. Even if Marvel under-prints, your copy is reserved.

I’ve used this for every major Krakoa HC release. Not one missed. By contrast, in the same period, Amazon failed to deliver two of my pre-ordered hardcovers — both quietly cancelled the week before street date with a generic “we could not source this title” email.

Variants and the subscription account

X-Men variants are where I’ve spent more money than I should admit. The covers from artists like Russell Dauterman, David Marquez, Inhyuk Lee, and the various retailer-exclusive incentive covers — these are the kind of one-print, never-restocked items where Forbidden Planet’s allocation system genuinely matters.

If you set up an active subscription account (it costs nothing to maintain — you just have to keep up a regular monthly order), you get first refusal on variants at RRP. No queueing. No 9am scramble. The variant is held with your subscription and ships when you ask.

Without the subscription, you’re entering the open queue on release day. For a popular variant — anything from Skottie Young or Phil Noto, for example — you have a window of maybe an hour before sell-out.

The economics are clear: if you collect X-Men variants and you’re not on subscription, you’re losing money to eBay scalpers every month.

Pricing reality

Forbidden Planet lists at RRP. They are not the cheapest retailer for X-Men single issues — Amazon and a few US shops will undercut them on individual trades by £2–4. Where they win is:

• The VIP discount stacks 10% on top of seasonal sales. Easily £30–50 saved per quarter once you’re active.
• Bundle deals on omnibus releases. They run rotating “buy two oversized HCs, save 15%” promotions that work out cheaper than any single-source US retailer including the publisher direct.
• Books actually arrive. This is the unquantifiable but most important factor. A 3% discount somewhere else is meaningless if 30% of the orders don’t ship.

Shipping

UK next-day if ordered before noon. EU 5–10 days. US 7–14 days. Packaging is reliably good — I’ve had one damaged book from over 60 X-Men-specific orders, and it was replaced inside a week.

The one thing US buyers should know: an oversized HC shipped solo from FP to the US is going to cost you $25–35 in shipping. That stops mattering once you’re ordering three or more books in a single batch.

Where it falls short

Three real complaints from three years of ordering X-Men material specifically:

• No advance notice on rare reprints. When Marvel reprints a long-out-of-print volume (the Excalibur Omnibus in 2023, for example), FP lists it the same day as everyone else. There’s no early-access tier for VIPs, which is a missed opportunity.
• Back-issue floppies are a weak point. Not what they’re set up to do.
• The site search struggles with “X-Men.” Because the term appears in so many titles across so many sub-runs, you end up filtering by publisher and date manually. The publisher pages are usable but the search bar is not.

Who this is for

If you collect X-Men in any serious way — Krakoa-era hardcovers, Claremont/Byrne reprints, Epic Collections, From the Ashes single issues, variants — Forbidden Planet should be your primary supplier. The pre-order system alone is worth the relationship.

For casual readers picking up the occasional trade, the savings versus Amazon do not justify the slightly higher list prices — unless you’re after a specific oversized HC that Amazon will inevitably cancel on you.

Ready to browse the X-Men shelves? Head over to the Forbidden Planet X-Men catalog here. The current oversized HC lineup is updated weekly; the Epic Collection restock cycle runs every other Wednesday.