So You Want To Start Reading Marvel Comics?

Hey ya’ll, how’s it going? If you’re just joining us, and haven’t read either the comments on my Scorpion villain profile or the seventh viewer log of the Iron Fist Netflix series, here’s a quick summary of why I’m doing this. An anonymous reader let me know that they were interested in getting into Marvel Comics, and were wondering where was the best place to start. A how to guide for newbies, as they put it. While I’m happy to dispense my knowledge and experience on the subject, the question is both simpler and yet more difficult than one might expect. Why? Because comics have been around a LONG time, and the stories continue to march on. That’s a LOT of content to sift through, and honestly I can’t suggest you start from the very beginning. Let’s get to it, shall we?

A slight misnomer, but an excellent start for anyone.

We’ll begin with the most basic place to start. In both the comment and the opening paragraph of Iron Fist ep 7, I suggested that anyone interested in Marvel comics really should check out Marvel.com. This is for two reasons. One, Marvel offers a service called Marvel Unlimited. For a monthly fee of $9.99, you can get access to a major archive of Marvel comics. You can read any of the titles marked as Marvel Unlimited (which is most of them) on any device. And, in the case of phone or tablet, you can use their app to download up to ten comics onto your device and read them offline, so you can spare your data.  As nice as all of that is, there are a few… drawbacks. For starters, with the basic Marvel Unlimited account there is a sixth month delay on titles. So, you can’t read their newest issues, obviously. And, if you were interested in a more obscure character, their archive is patchy. For example, last time I checked they were missing a few hundred issues of Daredevil’s early years. Can’t necessarily blame them---Matt Murdock has only really become a household name in the last few years, so it’s reasonable that they don’t have all of his issues. And, the modern Devil of Hell’s Kitchen bares only a passing resemblance to his original self. I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s get back on track. The second reason is that, even if one doesn’t have a Marvel Unlimited account, you do have access to the basic features of the site. You can look up different comic series, characters, and even look things up based on comic wide events. Like the Infinity Wars, the Superhero Civil War, the Secret Wars, or, Avengers vs. X-Men. By clicking on the series or character, the site gives you both the core issues of their series, as well as any and all tie-ins to said series in order. So if, for example, you wanted to read up on the Infinity War in preparation for Avengers 3 and 4, you can see both the main story and any and all side stories. In this way you can get the full scope of what the event means. I suggest this approach, whether you want to read the comics online or if you want to get something physical to hold.

Okay, you may be saying, I know where to start looking for the comics, Michael, but where should I start READING the comics? That’s a bit trickier.

Now, if you’re planning to read a series that began being published in the last decade or two, you can start from the beginning no problem. Comics that fall under this category include, but are not limited to, The Runaways, Miss Marvel (Kamala Khan version), Toxin, or anything that falls under the Ultimate series. For the first three I mentioned, and others like them, you can start their stories from the beginning with little to no knowledge of the Marvel Universe at large. Since they’re the literal start for these characters, they let you take baby steps towards the main Marvel universe at large. All you really need to know going in is that this is the Marvel Universe, and regardless of how mundane the opening situation is, a gathering of wealthy elites and their children, a teenage rager of a party, or checking out a minor noise complaint, things are about to get SUPER weird. Like pacts with demons, terrigan mist bombs, or being bonded to a chaotic neutral alien monster kind of weird. You’ll get to know the characters that are key to the story, how they fit into or don’t fit into the usual world they live in, what they think of current in-universe events, and so on. And, when they introduce a more established character, they do give you the general idea of who they are and why they may matter to what is currently going on. For example, at one point the new Miss Marvel, Kamala Khan, meets Wolverine for the first time. She explains who he is, that he’s one of her all-time favorite X-Men, and that she’s holding back a “squee.” She’s a dork after my own heart. As their sewer adventure continues, Wolverine himself explains some of the things going on with him, most specifically that at the time he had lost his healing powers. He doesn’t go into all the details, mind you, but it is a nice reminder that Kamala is just a small part of the much grander web we’re dealing with here.

Alternately, you can start any comic that falls under ‘Ultimate Marvel’ title for an entirely different reason: It is its own universe. Let me explain. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s the comic book industry had hit a major downturn. A lawyer who worked for Marvel comics, Bill Jemas, suggest that the massive 60+ year continuity was what scared off a lot of new readers, and caused longtime fans to eventually burn out from. His suggestion was a big fat reset, start a new line of comics that could both update the characters in a more modern setting, and allow for an entirely new continuity of stories to exist. So Marvel took this idea and ran with it, creating the Ultimate Universe. They kept the original universe going, to please long time fans, FYI. Ultimate Marvel took existing heroes (Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, the X-Men and so on) and reimagined them as being products of the new millennium. Well, everyone except Cap, obviously---they just defrosted him several years later than before.  This allowed the characters to reach out to a new generation, and also create a more… cohesive story right from the start. 

Not a terrible costume, but still not very good.
Kind of glad we're kind of forgetting about this.

What do I mean? Well, unlike Stan Lee and his compatriots from back in the day, the writers for Ultimate Marvel DID have forty to sixty years of source material to draw upon. Where, for example, back in 1963 Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko had to think up new characters, conflicts and stories on a weekly basis, the newer writer Brian Bendist had all of the Spider-Man characters and stories to pick and choose from. So, while certain things like Peter Parker’s home life, his uncle Ben and Aunt May, and his…we’ll call it a… falling out with the Osborn Family were more or less set in stone, they could play around with a lot of other things. Rather than have Peter and all of his enemies randomly gaining their powers through multiple lab accidents and experiments, Bendist tied a lot of it back to Norman Osborn and his company Oscorp, which is something Lee and Ditko couldn’t do since Norman and Harry Osborn, and the family company of Oscorp weren’t introduced until a year or more into publication. In the original story, Peter was bitten by a radioactive spider that gave him powers and he later battled many costumed villains who gained their powers through several other random accidents. In the Ultimate storyline, Peter is bitten by a genetically enhanced spider that had been treated to a performance enhancing Oscorp drug called OZ. Norman’s obsession with recreating the effects of said bite, he had illegal surveillance of Peter’s enhanced abilities, is what eventually lead him to accidentally turning himself into “The Goblin,” as well as turning chief Oscorp Scientist Otto Octavius into Doc Oct, and lead to the creation of several other villains that later beset Peter. A much more focused story, wouldn’t you say?

Granted, the Ultimate series isn’t perfect. Captain America is much more intolerant and a tad xenophobic at times from my taste. A man who recently time hopped from WWII would NEVER belittle the French people by calling them cowards, is all I’m saying. And certain characters are taken down… disturbing routes. I haven’t read the Ultimate X-Men myself, but have it on good authority that the characters of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch have a very twisted relationship in this iteration. Think of the kind that fellow twins Cersei and Jamie Lannister have in Game of Thrones. Gross. So again, not perfect, but you can start from the beginning with no trouble. Granted, the entire Ultimate Marvel Universe was effectively erased in an event not too long ago, but several characters and stories have been brought over to the main Marvel Universe, the best example being Ultimate Spider-Man’s successor, Miles Morales. So there is still merit in reading them.

Okay, Michael, I hear some of you saying, but I want to read stories about Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, and/or Wolverine. From the main series, the stuff that they focus on for the movies and stuff. Where do I start with that? And in all honesty, I can say start from wherever. Keep in mind, comic books were designed to try and get someone hooked in regardless of when they started the story, be it issue 1 or 101. Granted, if you start in the middle of a longer running story arc it’s a little bit harder, but by in large, you can start at any time and get the gist of what’s going on. Any longer running characters that may pop up are usually reintroduced in a quick blurb or two when they appear, (example, “Hey look, it’s my good buddy Deadpool, I haven’t seen you since we saved the world together two months ago”). There’s also typically an asterisk and a margin note letting you know what issue off what comic to look up to see this previous adventure.  

Does it seem like I, Michael T. Johnson, the soul content creator of Basics of Superheroes, self-proclaimed super-geek and geek for super people, am trying to stop you from reading the comics straight through from the very beginning? Do I have something against the early comics? The answer is no… but yes. Kind of. Sort of. Maybe. Stan Lee’s stuff hasn’t aged well! There I said it. Stan, if somehow, some way you are reading this, I’m sorry. I love you man, and greatly appreciate all you’ve done for comic books and the super hero genre. But, your early issues have some of the Dumbest Plots I’ve ever seen. I mean, seriously? Spider-Man runs into the Sandman after their first encounter because the big dumb collection of silicon wants to steal a diploma from Peter Parker’s school? Honestly? And don’t get me started on the fact that the early women of Marvel were pretty much all the same person with slightly different hairdos. All secretly (but not really secretly) fawning over the hero. So silly. Maybe I just don’t appreciate these stories like someone from back in the day might. I am a 26-year-old ‘90s kid’ after all. Sixty years really can change the public’s ability to appreciate a work. Just saying.

One of these things is not like the others.
One of these things is lame.

Also, keep in mind that the Marvel comics have been going on for decades. And in that time, characters are written in, written out, have their back stories rearranged, switch from good to bad to good again, gain powers, lose powers, gain status, lose status, change careers, die and get brought back to life again. It’s a… complicated web of events, to say the least. The best example I can think of for this fluctuating and changing is with Daredevil. If you don’t recognize the name, he’s widely considered to be Marvel’s counter to Batman. He’s a highly skilled ninja who battles all sorts of dark and twisted foes, who often finds himself in the morally gray area that his fellow heroes avoid. He’s also legally blind, but has enhanced sense to make up for it. This is not at all how he started out. Other than the blindness, obviously. In the beginning, he was much more akin to fellow Marvel character, Spider-Man. Yeah, when he started out he was more of a wise cracking super-person, that dressed in bright brown and yellow, beating up bad guys, not with his iconic batons, but with a cane. Like an old person, Shepherd’s hook style, cane. And there was an entire subplot about Daredevil considering including a cap with his costume to hide his regular gear when acting as Daredevil. And who, in his first encounter with the villainous mind controlling Purple Man had to mentally debate if it was illegal to ‘ask someone to break the law.’ He also used to battle a portly crime boss called the Owl who could glide for some reason. Not really the stuff of a ninja warrior, now is it? He got the change around in the late 1970s, when author Roger McKenzie took over and made the story significantly darker and rewrote much of the character’s background. This was over 150 issues in, over 15 years in. That’s a LOT of stuff to just kind of write out.

That’s a lot of stuff to digest… hm… ah, here’s a better way to put it. Most people these days seem to treat Marvel comics like a book. They think that there is a definitive beginning, a perfect place to start. And, largely, that is untrue. They’ve spend decades designing the stories, and the way they are told, so that one could literally pick up any issue and hopefully get sucked in. The nature of this structure has its pros and cons, but that’s a topic for another time. In the end, all you really need to do is pick a medium to view it, pick a character or particular event you want to read, and just start. And that’s all there really is to say about that. I hope this has been instructive. If anyone has any further questions, or would like to hear what I think are some of the better comics to start with, feel free to ask in the comments below. Have a good night.

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