Best Marvel for New Readers?
shaneb
Posts: 109
I'm kind of new to Marvel in general, and have focused mainly on Vertigo and indie titles over the last few years. I have recently been into Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye, but what else would people recommend? Especially looking for newer titles.
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The first six issues of Captain Marvel just came out in trade and if the first volume of Silver Surfer isn't out yet, it should be coming out soon, making both of those titles easily accessible. Also, I personally knew next to nothing about Carol Danvers or the Surfer aside from their basic origins and found both books very easy to follow, so I would definitely say they're reader-friendly to someone just starting out in Marvel.
@jaydee74 How is Cyclops now that it's seen it's first Ruckaless issue? I have really enjoyed it thus far but I'm a bit behind and still need to read issues #5 and #6.
Just curiously, is there any period or segment of Marvel that was similar to the revisionist/pre-Vertigo area of the DCU? I'm thinking of titles like Shade the Changing Man, Sandman, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, etc. Was there ever runs that came in like this on Marvel? I am aware of Garth Ennis's MAX run on Punisher, but not much else.
You might be able to include X-Force/X-Statix too. While the team started out as X-Force in name only (as it was comprised of completely new characters), the book was done in much the same spirit as the proto-Vertigo books, and it was written by Peter Milligan who did a lot of work for Vertigo in its heyday.
Like the titles @nweathington named, these books had room to be a little edgier, more esoteric, in some cases darker, and in all their cases, they were mostly left alone to do their own thing. I don't know that all of them have been collected at all in print (in the case of Black Panther) or kept in print. But they make for some excellent reading on Marvel Unlimited.
Both of those runs are also very dark and psychological and really concentrate more on character development than action.
Not sure if they're exactly what you're looking for but they are good reads.
(Cheap plug) Review of first book on my site: http://www.exploringmarvelu.com/2014/11/the-immortal-iron-fist-last-iron-fist.html
Other books you might dig:
Alias #1-28 (2001) - I can't recommend this one highly enough!
The Inhumans #1-12 by Jenkins (1998)
Charlie Huston's Moon Knight (2006)
That's fascinating. I wonder if it worked in the opposite direction for The Punisher as they were able to essentially see an "R-rated" version before the film property went forward. This could also be one of the business problems for simply trying to take well known properties over to an adult imprint, rather than having a separate set of characters entirely.
The book presents it as a cause-and-effect that just doesn't ring true to me. I mean, I'm not saying that some suit didn't get nervous because of blog chatter around those Ennis and Robertson stories. But it seems like if that reservation *actually* mattered it would have been easy to smooth over.
I think it is more likely that a standalone Nick Fury movie, maybe with the "classic" version of Fury had been in development for years, and it got scrapped in favor of the Sam Jackson Ultimate Fury that was going to move across the various cinematic universe franchises as they built towards Avengers.
Beyond that, there are lots of stories and arcs from various runs that gear more towards the mythology—there have been multiple Ragnarok stories, for example—but you'll have to hunt and peck for them.