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My adventure in 'Crisis'
joewhite73
Posts: 23
So here is what I plan on doing. I have never read a DC comic, seriously, just Marvel (and that only 7 months ago) I am going to read the comics relating to the 'Crisis' theme/storyline. I'm going to use the Crisis reading order from, tradereadingorder.com . I am also thinking about blogging this entire journey. I figure it will help me process it all. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
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My humble suggestion would be to read Justice League, specifically the annual JLA-JSA crossovers that started in the 60s. (Most or all of these have been collected). These crossovers helped to explain the whole Earth 1-Earth 2 (multiverse) concept, plus they are great fun. Once you have that, then the first Crisis book (from the 80s) will make more sense.
What I would recommend is after you are finished with Crisis is jump around DC books. Ask what people like.
Try DC One Million, John Ostrander's Spectre (1992, not the 1987 version which was not that good), Hitman, Byrne's Superman, Perez's Wonder Woman, JLI/JLE, Legends (defined what the Post Crisis DCU would be like), Robinson's Starman, Seven Soldiers, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing.
Even newer stuff like Shadowpact, Checkmate (2006), REBELS (2009), Green Lantern Sinestro War, Simon Dark, Allstar Superman.
The big thing is to remember the DCU is huge, do not feel the need to try to read everything in order, just find good stories and go.
After for the DCU after that, go with what looks fun...but beware that a lot of the Pre-New 52 stuff is going to go out of print, and DC's current leadership puts little to no emphasis on bringing it back to print unless there is a "hot artist" involved or a media tie-in. Their trade backlist is becoming frightfully limited, and the rumors are that they will not being doing a lot of 2nd printings of things, since they want to drive monthly sales.
Just because the width and breadth of a series can be overwhelming in scope, doesn't make it incomprehensible or uninteresting. I'd LOVE to see if a comics reader TODAY can jump in feet first into Crisis and come out the other side enraptured by the DC Universe, not scared away.
All the best, get it up and running, tell me where it is and I'll follow along.
I would just recommend reading whatever looks interesting to you. That's always my advice to anyone starting out. It's more important to pursue whatever excites you to read it than to look for perfect entry points.
One of my first comics was CoIE #8, which I got when I was like six years old. I enjoyed the hell out of it and read it many times over the years.
When I got back into comics several years ago, one of the first comics I read was the Astonishing X-Men vol. 1 TPB. This was a logical point to start reading an "auteur" run like that.
Old hands like us can look at what you're doing and scratch our heads. Because obviously, yeah, you're diving into something that's steeped in like half a century of continuity rather than going for something more inviting to new readers.
But before 2004 or so, this is what every new reader of every comic book did. We just picked up random issues that looked interesting to us. And as long as you've got the spirit to have fun with this stuff and enjoy figuring it out, then it's fine. It works particularly well with the non-decompressed storytelling of yesteryear. Those sorts of comics seemed to encourage engagement and curiosity on the part of the reader specifically because they were so byzantine in their allusions and continuity. They were a challenge to read and get into, and several hundreds of thousands of children enjoyed taking up this challenge. This was before the days when 40-year-old grown men with access to Wikipedia started fussing and tearing their hair out over "OMG where do I start with Green Lantern???" It doesn't matter if you have the spirit of curiosity and discovery in you.
There are other, "easier" recommendations that I'm sure everyone would be happy to give you, but for now -- Good luck with Crisis!