A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans
Obi-Wan Kenobi, the new Disney+ series, represents the first time the character has been in the cinematic spotlight by himself. But the vast tableau of Star Wars stories across multiple modes of media contains many previous examples in which the wise and cagey Jedi operates on his own. Below is an overview of some of the more notable offerings – both canonical and non-canonical “Legends” – as well as some Obi-Wan Kenobi fun facts, to get you ready for the new live-action series!
Stan Lee, as he so often does, takes credit for coming up with the name “Ms. Marvel.” In 1977’s The Superhero Women, a collection of female-centric Marvel tales, he says that he wanted Marvel to have a signature lead female character; he and Roy Thomas proceeded to come up with the name “Ms. Marvel” for that character. The “Marvel” portion was a nod to the company, of course, and “Ms.”, in Stan’s words, “represented the new, liberated, upbeat spirit that we wanted the strip to represent.” But neither Stan nor Roy Thomas would be involved in the actual creation of Ms. Marvel, the character. That would fall to writer Gerry Conway and artist John Buscema. And while Conway and Buscema are credited as the creators of Ms. Marvel, neither would stick with the character for long. 
Instead, the creative voice that would most come to define the initial iteration of Ms. Marvel—and, ultimately, guide the character for roughly fifteen years—is Chris Claremont’s. Best known as the definitive X-Men writer, Claremont took over Ms. Marvel’s series from Conway with issue #3 and stayed with it until its somewhat complicated end. In the course of his run on Ms. Marvel, he would define Ms. Marvel as a character, developing an affection for her such that, even after the series concluded, he continued to write her as an occasional supporting player in his X-Men stories, and introduced several characters and concepts that echo louder in comic book history than the events of the series itself. While Ms. Marvel would eventually become the character Stan Lee wanted her to be in terms of her place within the Marvel pantheon, her original series is ultimately more notable for the way it impacted the storylines of the X-Men—and the ways it didn’t—while leaving the actual ascendancy of Ms. Marvel to superstar status for later. [Read more…] about What Might Have Been: An Examination of 1970s Ms. Marvel
When Marvel Now looked to the past to drive the future of the X-Men
When Marvel Comics’ two biggest franchises, the X-Men and the Avengers, joined together for the sprawling “Avengers vs. X-Men” event storyline, the two teams came to blows over the fate of young Hope Summers as the cosmic Phoenix Force bore down on the planet. In the real world, the storyline represents something of a pivot point in Marvel’s history. Prior to the crossover event, the Avengers and the X-Men were in two very different places. Throughout the 1990s (and really, much of the 80s), the X-Men had been one of Marvel’s top franchises, consistently posting strong numbers across the line and helping keep the company afloat during its corporate malfeasance-triggered bankruptcy. But in 2000, acclaimed independent writer Brian Michael Bendis came to Marvel and launched Ultimate Spider-Man, reimagining Spider-Man for a modern audience. The critical and commercial success of that project expanded Bendis’ profile at Marvel, and by 2004, he was handed the keys to the Avengers. [Read more…] about Marvel Then: Days of Future Now
It is often said that Watchmen
Marvel Comics certainly didn’t seem to be watching the Watchmen. Despite the massive critical and commercial success of DC Comics’ twelve issue Watchmen, creators at Marvel largely let the series go by without comment, at least in terms of trying to imitate it directly. While the tradition of the two companies riffing on a successful idea started by the other (such as DC launching the maxi-series Crisis on Infinite Earths in the wake of the success of Marvel’s Secret Wars) is a longstanding one, no “Watchmen-esque” series appeared at Marvel in the late 80s or early 90s. Some of that is likely due to the different way the companies are structured. Watchmen was born at least in part out of DC’s acquisition of the Charlton Comics characters, continuing another longstanding DC Comics tradition.
However, Marvel had never really engaged in that practice. All of its biggest characters were homegrown. And while Marvel had its Epic imprint as a place to tell out-of-continuity stories free of the restraints of the comics code limitations on content, those series tended to be like Jim Starlin’s Dreadstar or English-language reprints of Akira: driven by specific creators and/or focused on something other than superheroes. Yet despite the lack of a specific story-arc or series that can be pointed to as “Marvel’s Watchmen”, the outsized influence of that series would still find a way to be reflected in Marvel Comics, albeit in a roundabout way. [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? How “Heroes Reborn” Brought Watchmen to the Marvel Universe
A scant six weeks after X-Men Vol. 2 #1 became the best-selling comic book of all time, Chris Claremont ended his fifteen-year run as writer of the X-Men. His departure (the final issue credited to him is X-Men Vol. 2 #3) wasn’t unexpected–news of his leaving Marvel had leaked a few months before the launch of the new series, and all three issues had been published after he’d left the company. Claremont had agreed to help launch Marvel’s second X-Men title as a kind of severance package for himself (he has since said the royalties from that launch basically paid for his house). Claremont ultimately left the X-Men because his artistic collaborator at the time, Jim Lee, wanted to do more traditional stories with familiar plot beats and villains. Claremont wanted to continue to push the X-Men forward, breaking new creative ground as he’d been doing for the past fifteen years. When it became clear that Lee’s approach was the one favored by their editor, Bob Harras (as well as with Marvel’s sales and marketing departments), and that Claremont’s time as the ultimate arbiter of the fates of the X-Men was up, he left. Bob Harras was comfortable with letting Chris Claremont–the man who, alongside a series of artistic partners, launched the X-Men to the top of the sales charts and birthed an entire interconnected line of “X-books”–leave, because he still had Jim Lee. [Read more…] about X-Men Epic Collection: Bishop’s Crossing Review!