rallamajoop (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rallamajoop) wrote2012-10-23 12:05 pm
rallamajoop) wrote2012-10-23 12:05 pm
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Marvel comics I have loved (the definitive rec post)
A commenter in my last post asked if I had any recs for someone trying to get back into comics after many years away. I started writing up a reply, and it quickly turned into a laundry list of everything I have enjoyed from Marvel since I got into them, which is a bit on the long side to fit into a comment. So I figured what the hey - why not turn it into a proper post? It'll be nice to share something positive on the subject for a change.
A few words to put this list into context: like many of us these days, my gateway to Marvel fandom was through the movies. The specific culprits were the 2007 Iron Man movie, which got me into a few various Avengers titles, and the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which I thoroughly enjoyed, I do not care what the rest of the Internet may think of my taste!), which got me into Deadpool. I've rarely strayed all that far from those entry points since.
Cable & Deadpool remains hands-down my favourite comic of all time - great fun, great character work and lots of good ideas, despite losing one of its leads thanks to editorial mandate later in the run. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
On the subject of Deadpool comics, although it hardly classifies as recent, I cannot possibly discuss Marvel recs without mentioning Joe Kelly's run on Deadpool from back in the nineties (original squee/rec post over here). Gail Simone's run on the final issues of Deadpool's first ongoing solo series are also well worth a read, as is her follow-up Agent X series. More recently, I enjoyed the Deadpool Pulp mini-series so very much. The rest of Deadpool's long history and various spin-off series tend to be severely hit and miss at best.
Uncanny X-Force is the only ongoing title that's managed to keep my attention in a long time (here's a slightly more detailed review I posted earlier this year), though I'm heavily biased myself thanks to how I'm a massive Deadpool fan and the author is basically the only writer who's worked with Deadpool in years who captures what I like about the character.
I've enjoyed what I've read of Wolverine and the X-Men, but in honesty I've only read the first few issues, and don't have more than second hand opinion on how it's held up since.
I've enjoyed a couple of recent-ish X-events. Age of X is about the only one that works as a standalone story - it was a crossover that ran in New Mutants and X-Men Legacy for a few issues, and despite what sounded like a pathetically cliched premise (something messes up reality, the X-Men find themselves living in a World Gone Wrong and have to figure out what happened) I found myself genuinely enjoying how it was handled. Lots of characters playing important roles, though it's largely a Rogue story at heart.
Second Coming was a much bigger event which - fair warning - was one of the middle chapters in the whole post-M-Day mess, and also the one that killed Nightcrawler, but one which stands out to me as a surprisingly well-told story. It's mostly about the massive fight over Hope between the X-Men and the baddies who want her dead (and the rest of the mutant species with her), but I thought it did a brilliant job of getting the stakes across and making the X-Men look like a well-organised and competent force who were nevertheless left struggling to keep up with a similarly competent enemy. It was also, unfortunately, the event that originally made me care enough about Hope to leave me incredibly frustrated with how she's been mishandled since. I still have trouble making sense out of how so many of the same writers who did such a great job on this event made such a hash out of AvX. More detailed review here. I also mostly enjoyed Schism, or at least enough to be frustrated with the way everything that came out of it was swept under the carpet in AvX.
Going a little further back, I did love volume 4 of Iron Man (started in 2004), particularly the Knaufs' (authorial team consisting of a father and son) later issues. Some of the stuff leading up to Civil War in the middle... well, suffice to say it sorta worked better if you didn't look at all the continuity issues too closely, but the post Civil War arc is easily one of my favourite comic stories of all time. Very dark, but brilliantly written.
Putting aside all he's done since, Brian Bendis's first twenty issues or so on the New Avengers title starting in 2005 was one of the first things that got me into reading Marvel. Alas, like so many other titles, Civil War took over the plot and it never really recovered afterwards.
Ed Brubaker's early work on Captain America was brilliant. The first dozen issues or so dealing with Bucky's reappearance as Winter Soldier are the best of it IMO; the momentum is thrown somewhat after Cap's death at the end of Civil War, but the rest of the story arc up to the Red Skull's defeat remains very strong. The title quickly lost my interest afterwards, unfortunately.
I can highly recommend JMS's run on Thor. The story largely deals with the reappearance of Asgard and all its citizens just outside (as luck would have it) a small town in middle America, and the resulting interactions between the locals and the Asgardian Gods is surprisingly charming. Also, it features the Warriors Three, and Bill (born of Bills). The change of writers over the final chapters doesn't really do it any favours, but hey, that's what happens when the author quits before finishing, and on the whole it still wraps up quite neatly.
I've always been easily sold on younger superhero teams, and I've been meaning to write up a proper post on Marvel's various entries for ages. A lot of people will rec you Runaways or the more recent Avengers Academy, and though neither quite worked for me I can generally see the appeal. Myself, I got more out of the Young Avengers and New X-Men titles, though they're both a little hard to recommend. The New X-Men were a slightly nebulous group who appeared in a couple of similarly-named books, but who unfortunately only really started getting interesting for me around the time the falllout from M-Day was busy taking a chainsaw to their numbers, and which I feel only really found its feet as a title in the last few issues before being cancelled. This is a real crying shame, because the team who came together over that last arc were characters I loved to bits, and who've had criminally little done with them since. Young Avengers, meanwhile, have spent most of their lifetime suffering from scheduling issues. The original twelve issues are a terrific ride of largely non-nonsensical good fun, but with the writer committed to other projects, they wound up delegated to a series of short-lived minis with assorted other authors for years before the story got restarted properly again, and their most recent series ended on such a downer note that I'm not sure we'll ever see them recover. There's a new series starring some of them in solicits, but I'm not getting my hopes up just yet.
To bring all these random recs to some sort of conclusion, all these titles are what I love about western superhero comics. The big events that have dominiated the scene for the last decade or two have been severely hit-and-miss, but the ones that did work succeeded, IMO, because the world they're set in has been built over the years into something so truly enormous that there are epic stories to be told there in the hands of the right writer. Even when the events themselves are missable, there are enough different writers trying enough different things in the margins that some of those stories will succeed - and succeed beautifully - regardless of what else is going on around them. And heck, even if you hate what's been done with your favourite character over the last few years, there's always a chance some other writer will take over in a few months time and remind you of everything that made you fall in love with him or her to begin with. Besides, gosh but superhero stories can be huge, colourful, id-tastic good fun.
And I guess that's what's kept me spending so much of my fannish time on comics over the last few years.
Well, that and good old Cable & Deadpool. ♥
A few words to put this list into context: like many of us these days, my gateway to Marvel fandom was through the movies. The specific culprits were the 2007 Iron Man movie, which got me into a few various Avengers titles, and the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which I thoroughly enjoyed, I do not care what the rest of the Internet may think of my taste!), which got me into Deadpool. I've rarely strayed all that far from those entry points since.
Cable & Deadpool remains hands-down my favourite comic of all time - great fun, great character work and lots of good ideas, despite losing one of its leads thanks to editorial mandate later in the run. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
On the subject of Deadpool comics, although it hardly classifies as recent, I cannot possibly discuss Marvel recs without mentioning Joe Kelly's run on Deadpool from back in the nineties (original squee/rec post over here). Gail Simone's run on the final issues of Deadpool's first ongoing solo series are also well worth a read, as is her follow-up Agent X series. More recently, I enjoyed the Deadpool Pulp mini-series so very much. The rest of Deadpool's long history and various spin-off series tend to be severely hit and miss at best.
Uncanny X-Force is the only ongoing title that's managed to keep my attention in a long time (here's a slightly more detailed review I posted earlier this year), though I'm heavily biased myself thanks to how I'm a massive Deadpool fan and the author is basically the only writer who's worked with Deadpool in years who captures what I like about the character.
I've enjoyed what I've read of Wolverine and the X-Men, but in honesty I've only read the first few issues, and don't have more than second hand opinion on how it's held up since.
I've enjoyed a couple of recent-ish X-events. Age of X is about the only one that works as a standalone story - it was a crossover that ran in New Mutants and X-Men Legacy for a few issues, and despite what sounded like a pathetically cliched premise (something messes up reality, the X-Men find themselves living in a World Gone Wrong and have to figure out what happened) I found myself genuinely enjoying how it was handled. Lots of characters playing important roles, though it's largely a Rogue story at heart.
Second Coming was a much bigger event which - fair warning - was one of the middle chapters in the whole post-M-Day mess, and also the one that killed Nightcrawler, but one which stands out to me as a surprisingly well-told story. It's mostly about the massive fight over Hope between the X-Men and the baddies who want her dead (and the rest of the mutant species with her), but I thought it did a brilliant job of getting the stakes across and making the X-Men look like a well-organised and competent force who were nevertheless left struggling to keep up with a similarly competent enemy. It was also, unfortunately, the event that originally made me care enough about Hope to leave me incredibly frustrated with how she's been mishandled since. I still have trouble making sense out of how so many of the same writers who did such a great job on this event made such a hash out of AvX. More detailed review here. I also mostly enjoyed Schism, or at least enough to be frustrated with the way everything that came out of it was swept under the carpet in AvX.
Going a little further back, I did love volume 4 of Iron Man (started in 2004), particularly the Knaufs' (authorial team consisting of a father and son) later issues. Some of the stuff leading up to Civil War in the middle... well, suffice to say it sorta worked better if you didn't look at all the continuity issues too closely, but the post Civil War arc is easily one of my favourite comic stories of all time. Very dark, but brilliantly written.
Putting aside all he's done since, Brian Bendis's first twenty issues or so on the New Avengers title starting in 2005 was one of the first things that got me into reading Marvel. Alas, like so many other titles, Civil War took over the plot and it never really recovered afterwards.
Ed Brubaker's early work on Captain America was brilliant. The first dozen issues or so dealing with Bucky's reappearance as Winter Soldier are the best of it IMO; the momentum is thrown somewhat after Cap's death at the end of Civil War, but the rest of the story arc up to the Red Skull's defeat remains very strong. The title quickly lost my interest afterwards, unfortunately.
I can highly recommend JMS's run on Thor. The story largely deals with the reappearance of Asgard and all its citizens just outside (as luck would have it) a small town in middle America, and the resulting interactions between the locals and the Asgardian Gods is surprisingly charming. Also, it features the Warriors Three, and Bill (born of Bills). The change of writers over the final chapters doesn't really do it any favours, but hey, that's what happens when the author quits before finishing, and on the whole it still wraps up quite neatly.
I've always been easily sold on younger superhero teams, and I've been meaning to write up a proper post on Marvel's various entries for ages. A lot of people will rec you Runaways or the more recent Avengers Academy, and though neither quite worked for me I can generally see the appeal. Myself, I got more out of the Young Avengers and New X-Men titles, though they're both a little hard to recommend. The New X-Men were a slightly nebulous group who appeared in a couple of similarly-named books, but who unfortunately only really started getting interesting for me around the time the falllout from M-Day was busy taking a chainsaw to their numbers, and which I feel only really found its feet as a title in the last few issues before being cancelled. This is a real crying shame, because the team who came together over that last arc were characters I loved to bits, and who've had criminally little done with them since. Young Avengers, meanwhile, have spent most of their lifetime suffering from scheduling issues. The original twelve issues are a terrific ride of largely non-nonsensical good fun, but with the writer committed to other projects, they wound up delegated to a series of short-lived minis with assorted other authors for years before the story got restarted properly again, and their most recent series ended on such a downer note that I'm not sure we'll ever see them recover. There's a new series starring some of them in solicits, but I'm not getting my hopes up just yet.
To bring all these random recs to some sort of conclusion, all these titles are what I love about western superhero comics. The big events that have dominiated the scene for the last decade or two have been severely hit-and-miss, but the ones that did work succeeded, IMO, because the world they're set in has been built over the years into something so truly enormous that there are epic stories to be told there in the hands of the right writer. Even when the events themselves are missable, there are enough different writers trying enough different things in the margins that some of those stories will succeed - and succeed beautifully - regardless of what else is going on around them. And heck, even if you hate what's been done with your favourite character over the last few years, there's always a chance some other writer will take over in a few months time and remind you of everything that made you fall in love with him or her to begin with. Besides, gosh but superhero stories can be huge, colourful, id-tastic good fun.
And I guess that's what's kept me spending so much of my fannish time on comics over the last few years.
Well, that and good old Cable & Deadpool. ♥