A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans
On my weekly livestream, Casual Krakoa Live, I review the week’s X-Men comics, and answer big questions about what’s going on with Marvel’s merry mutants! You can listen or watch below:
* Spoilers Follow *
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[Read more…] about Casual Krakoa: X Lives of Wolverine #5 Crashes Hard!2012 heralded an irrevocable change in comics and superhero fandom. The Avengers had just become the biggest movie of the year and one of the most spectacular movie successes of all time. To tie in and capitalize on this major movie, Marvel decided to make an end-all, be-all blockbuster comic event that could entice movie fans to check out the comics, as well as tie a bow on all the major plot threads going on in the comics at the time. The solution was Avengers vs X-Men: a climax to the era that had begun with the twin releases of Astonishing X-Men and New Avengers.
In AvX, the two biggest franchises owned by Marvel, The X-Men and The Avengers, went to war over the return of the Phoenix Force, with the fate of the world in the balance. In this conflict, one of the major tensions is the perceived lack of political action by other superheroes on behalf of mutantkind. After a series of major conflicts, Avengers vs X-Men climaxed with the murder of Professor X by a Dark-Phoenix possessed Cyclops and the restoration of the mutant gene by Hope Summers, the Scarlet Witch, and The Phoenix Force.
Out of the chaos of Avengers vs X-Men came Marvel Now!, an initiative that shuffled the creative teams of all the Marvel books in order to get fresh takes. As promoted by Marvel in the leading months, the flagship title of this initiative was Uncanny Avengers
In part 2, I talked briefly about DC’s lack of diversity during Rebirth and how Infinite Frontier has been a significant improvement. I want to look closer at the data. How many books were given to characters who are BIPOC and/or queer over the last four years? In order to do this, I went through every other solicit since January 2018 and wrote down the number of in-continuity books that had a BIPOC lead character or a BIPOC-majority cast. I did the same for queer representation. I wrote down the number of books each month with a majority-queer cast or a queer lead.
I only included queer characters and books where queerness was a prominent feature in the book. For example, Wonder Woman is canonically bisexual, but the comics consistently don’t showcase that side of her. As such, I did not include her. Similarly, Jonathan Kent is now canonically queer, but in 2018 he wasn’t. As such, Jonathan Kent only contributes to the book being a queer character in the year and era that he came out: March 2021 and after. So Adventures of the Super Sons doesn’t count, while Challenge of the Supersons does, because the latter book was written in late November but released physically during this period of time. [Read more…] about DC’s 2021 Review Part 4: Diversity of Characters
We are not going to give a full history of Moon Knight here – if you’re interested in a Moon Knight curriculum vita, I highly recommend the reading guide by Dave Buesing. Instead, what we’re going to do is touch on a couple of the most influential runs, and the relationship they have with his DID. This won’t provide you the complete history of his diagnosis. but will hopefully highlight some of the themes we find around his DID, themes other creators carry through their own runs.
Previously: DID in Moon Knight Part 1 [Read more…] about DID in Moon Knight, Part 2: Popular Runs
I’ve had Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) since my earliest memories, so when I saw the new Moon Knight show coming out, I immediately raised an eyebrow. Having DID, one’s expectation of media portrayal tends to be… let’s say fraught. But Moon Knight is an interesting mixed case on this subject. Moon Knight has at times portrayed some of the most problematic parts of typical DID media representation, but it’s also done some really interesting work experimenting with new lenses for grappling with what can be a pretty difficult disease to understand. Reading Moon Knight with compassion for mental illness, then, is challenging, but also rewarding in some very unique ways. [Read more…] about DID in Moon Knight, Part 1: An Overview