MetalDooley said:
Ok I've always considered myself to be a Marvel fan.I've watched a lot of the cartoons over the years and still count the mid 90's Spider-man and X-Men cartoons among my favourite animated shows.I've seen pretty much every Marvel movie including the god awful straight to video/made for tv ones and I've played tons of videogames featuring Marvel characters
The thing is I've never really read Marvel comics though(was always more of a 2000AD guy if you couldn't guess from my avatar)and this is what I want to change.Problem is with decades of comics to choose from where exactly do I begin.So my question to ye is..
What are the classic Marvel superhero stories that I should read?
Two things
1 - I'm looking for stories that are easily available in collected graphic novel/trade paperback format
2 - My preferred heroes are Spider-man,X-Men,Iron Man,Thor and The Avengers as a collective but feel free to suggest other heroes/crossovers etc.
Any advice will be much appreciated
Hmmm, well one of the things about the truly "classic" storylines is that they have that status by being fairly deep in terms of knowing the universe and what's going on to begin with. Many people have suggested those that stand alone well on their own (Secret Wars, Infinity Gauntlet, etc...) though honestly to fully appreciate them I think it involves some investment in the characters and world to begin with. When it comes to the X-men stuff "Inferno", "X-men In Asgard", "X-tinction Agenda", "Zero Tolerance", and "X-cutioners Song" are all TPB collections that involved some very key moments of the X-men mythology and still have some influence today. Some of them like "X-tinction Agenda" and "X-cutioners Song" are awesome but jump off the deep end REALLY quick and you won't be able to figure out what's going on, especially in the while Stryfe/Cable thing unless you had some backing as well. "Contest Of Champions 2" is also an amusing, stand alone story (it might just be sold as "contest of champions" the 2 coming from it being similar to another, much inferior story, the whole thing is a plotline that's a thin justification for a bunch of heroes to basically fight each other penalty free for fun and to see who is strongest... Iron Man winds up being one of the big heroes of the story behind that one).
Truthfully if your looking to get fairly up to date with Marvel given all the changes my suggestion is simply to start with the "Civil War" the basic 7 issue series (which is collected) covers the basics, but there are literally dozens of other collections linked to it because it was a company-wide event. The whole Iron Man Vs. Captain America over supers registration bit formed the foundation for a LOT of changes afterwards. This event was from 2006-2007 so your looking at 6-7 years of development afterwards, but that's minor compared to say jumping in based on stuff written in the 80s and 90s. My overall opinion of the whole "Civil War" is mixed because years worth of subtle development and the whole "whose side are you on?" tag got derailed by writers wanting to make it an analogy for modern RW politics, as opposed to a story based firmly on The Marvel Universe and it's reality... so while still good, it's not as good as it could be since sometimes you'll notice a lot of characters suddenly acting REALLY out of character when they start projecting the politics of the writer into the storyline when they aren't exactly a good fit for the reality of Marvel.
A big thing after "Civil War" is of course "Secret Invasion" which is where things get entirely back on track for a super hero story and you start seeing how things got as bad as they did.
If you like The Avengers in particular, the fact that their members have all been fighting each other, leads to some years long drama before they get back together. Avengers "Disassembled" helps set the stage for "The Civil War" (and sort of shows that in the end you can probably blame The Scarlet Witch for the whole thing) and eventual reveals in "Secret Invasion", after The Civil War you have things like "The Intiative" which was a failed project to give each of the 50 states their own super hero team, which is still the explanation for why some current characters remain teamed together, then of course "Dark Avengers" which was the new "Federally Sponsored" Avengers in the spirit of the old "Freedom Force" run by Norman Osbourne (a senator) who was running around as "Iron Patriot" in a suit of Iron Man armor in Captain America colors, then of course you had "Secret Avengers", "The Mighty Avengers" (Hercules trying to get a team back together), and similar things up until they actually wind up getting a real Avengers team back together.
I'd also say that you might still be able to find various Marvel collections bundled on DVD rom which are cheaper than hunting down individual TPBs, Graphic Novels, and comics. Personally reading comics online even with a reader program tends to make my eyes bleed (figuratively... I have trouble with 3D in movie theaters too, but oddly my Kindle is usually fine if I zoom it enough), but it's a good solution for some. I'm not entirely sure of the legality of out of print comics and such or what's out there on E-reader services, so I won't post any links (not that I've checked recently), but at one time you could get torrents (scans) and such of out of print comics from people's personal collections so you could catch up on stuff. I'm guessing like Abandonware it's a gray area, but at the same time Marvel and DC have both undertaken efforts to put a lot of their stuff up on sale online, so it might currently be outright illegal (and immoral) to pursue them that way.
