A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans
There is something both incredibly heartwarming and deeply frustrating about Across the Spider-Verse‘s transness.
Let’s start with the heartwarming part: as a trans woman myself, as well as a Spider-Gwen fan who has for many years now interpreted the character as trans, there is a deep joy in seeing that the people who made this movie share the same vision, at least on some level. [Read more…] about Spider-Gwen & the Trans Subtext of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Despite the Young Avengers being a fan-favorite title and team (especially amongst younger comics fans), they have had surprisingly few series to their name in the now 17 years since their creation, only two official volumes and one Avengers crossover series, each between 9 to 15 issues long, plus a handful of tie-ins to different late 2000s events. This scarcity has made each Young Avengers series feel like a small event in itself, and it’s all the more true for their Marvel NOW! revamp, as written by Kieron Gillen and drawn by Jamie McKelvie (plus Kate Brown guesting on issue #6, and various guest artists in the last two issues), with Matt Wilson on colors and Clayton Cowles on letters.
Teenage heroes can be hard to deal with over time in the Marvel universe, as the sliding timescale often causes them to stay young forever; if Tony Stark, Carol Danvers and the other adult heroes have to stay in their thirties forever and never retire, that means the next generation of heroes can never fully grow up and take their place. Teams like the New Mutants, or more contemporary to the Young Avengers, the Runaways, have sometimes had trouble growing up alongside their audience. But in Young Avengers Vol.2, the kids that used to be 14 to 16 years old teenagers are now reaching young adulthood, with all the questions and anxieties that being at that age entails. [Read more…] about Marvel Then! Young Avengers by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie
Picture this: it’s 1967. You are an artist named Gil Kane, and you are working at Marvel on the comic book Tales to Astonish. Stan Lee just asked you to create a new bigger, badder, meaner antagonist for the Hulk, and you’re racking your brain, trying to come up with the right design. When suddenly, genius hits: “What if the Hulk was a weird scaly fish/lizard guy?”
This is the story of the Abomination, one of the Jade Giant’s most recurring foes, always ready to cause trouble for Marvel’s Gamma heroes (as we will soon see on our screens with his return to the MCU in Disney+’s She Hulk), and whose most important characteristic is his ability to be an eternal pain in the Hulk’s green posterior. [Read more…] about Abomination Reading Order!
Clea has come a long way since her introduction by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1964. Starting out as an unnamed stock-standard damsel in distress for Doctor Strange to rescue in the Dark Dimension, she became Strange’s disciple and lover, before leading a rebellion in her native dimension and taking it over as ruler. Across her comic book history, she’s fought her uncle the Dread Dormammu and other mystical menaces, been a member of the Defenders, and now, in the aftermath of Marvel’s recent Death of Doctor Strange storyline, she is the new Sorcerer Supreme, taking up the mantle and legacy of Stephen Strange.
Having spent a lot of time as little more than a secondary character and love interest in Doctor Strange comics from the 60s to the 80s, it has taken until the 2000s to see her break away from the good doctor’s shadow and appear in titles away him, and until 2022 for her to be the main character of her own ongoing series, the upcoming Strange. So read ahead to get caught up on her comic history, as Clea takes her place in the spotlight ! [Read more…] about Clea Reading Order!
When hearing the news that Marvel Studios is developing an Echo show, one could be forgiven for asking “a who show now ?”. Although Maya Lopez has been around in the Marvel universe for the past 20 years, she’s mostly been a secondary character for heroes such as Daredevil, Moon Knight, or Captain Marvel; only getting a central focus in the past year thanks to recent events in the pages of Jason Aaron’s Avengers. And now that she’s under Marvel’s MCU Hawkeye spotlight and hopefully here to stay, it’s time to take a dive in Echo’s comic book history.
Created by David Mack and Joe Quesada in 1999, Echo is both one of Marvel’s few Native American characters, and one of their only deaf heroes. She was raised by the Kingpin, and after turning against him, she became a superhero and an Avenger, using her photographic reflexes to fight crime across the Marvel universe. And now, she is becoming a main player both in the comics and in the MCU, as played by actress Alaqua Cox. [Read more…] about Echo (Maya Lopez) Reading Order!