I liked Byrne/Claremont on X-men better than Byrne/Wolfman on FF.

But Byrne solo on FF up until the FF go into the Negative Zone (232 - 250) is one of the best runs ever by anyone on any book.

The stuff after 251 was great too, but I tend to go back to the first 18 issues the most.  Over and over.

As far as other X-men issues, I like the Thomas/Adams issues and most of the Claremont/Cockrum issues up until 150.  After 150, it was hit or miss.  I like the Paul Smith art, but I didn't like Romita Jr.'s or Silvestri's.  After issue 200 it was increasingly hard to follow as I didn't care for the Maddy Prior storyline and I refused to follow the essentially psychotic personality treatment of Storm.  I did not buy for a minute Storm's mastering of Cyclops in 201.  And then Logan suddenly metamorphosed from being a hotheaded beserker/fighter into a genius stratatician and sagely know-it-all with a history longer than Namor.  And then all the X-men died in 226?  And went to Australia?  And then all died again or went throught the "Seige Perilous" and then were inexplicably reborn in other bodies or found on beaches?  Utterly stupidly rediculous.  When someone has writer's block, they should step aside and let another writer take over instead of creating innane havok in a book's history.  The funny thing is, pretty much everything that happened after issue 200 has been rendered irrelevant.  If you stopped then and then picked up the book now, it wouldn't have mattered what has happened in the mean time.  Jean's still dead.  Rachel is still Marvel Girl pretending to be Phoenix.  Colossus is still alive.  The only major differences are the fact that Beast looks dumber and more cat-like, and Cyke is sleeping with the White Queen.  Oh, and there's that little idiotic issue that Professor X is depowered and that he hid the fact that there was another X-team that he never told anyone about and Phoenix never picked up on, even though she was pretty much power incarnate, which team amazingly featured another never-before-even-hinted-at Summers boy, who evidently is pretty much unstoppably powerful.  Yeesh.  OK, end of rant.

Did I rack up my vote for Byrne's FF?

Looks like we have a winner!

Now for a twist from my own "Golden Age"...

TODAY'S TOSS-UP (1/10):

JB's Fantastic Four or JB's Alpha Flight?

Damn you, Pugliese.

FF, for the villains.

Toss-up catch up:

I chose DC over Marvel by way of the phonebook reprint collections. I grew up on Marvel, so I missed  A LOT of what DC had to offer. It's like discovering a whole new universe of characters and stories: Jonah Hex, Unknown Soldier, Haunted Tank (I did have these as a kid and loved them), Metamorpho, Green Lantern, JLA, Superman, et al.

JB's Fantastic Four.

and again,

JB's Fantastic Four, though I did really really love AF when I was young.

This is a really close one but FF just nudges aside AF for me.

Maybe if JB's run on AF had been longer...

I'll go for Alpha Flight for similar reasons to Jeremy. Also, Greg brings up a good point about this book only being viable when JB did it.