Question of the Week: How Do Character Reading Orders Fit in With the Guide?

Good question this week that I haven’t done a great job explaining. I’ve been on the grind lately working up some Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men reading orders in connection with the recent films. As a result, Hags asks:

Can you explain (or point me in the direction where you have already explained) How your specific reading orders (i.e. x-men or spider-man) fit in with your complete Marvel reading guide?  Are these a part of the guide, just pulled out and separated for fans of the individual series that might not want to read all of the other titles?

The individual character or team guides that you will find on Comic Book Herald are, in fact, pulled out for fans of those particular series. Generally speaking, my character reading order guides will cover the same time period in the Marvel Universe as my complete reading order guide. This is from approximately 1999 to present day.

The best way to work in an individual character/team guide is to take note of the events, or event tie-in issues. For example, in my X-Men reading order, House of M marks a very distinctive moment in the X-Universe, and is clearly highlighted along with the X-Men tie-in issues. I would use these event markers as a chronology benchmark. Basically, if you see Secret Invasion tie-in issues, that means you’re caught up to the Secret Invasion part of the guide.

Finally, I have added all the completed individual character/team guides to the main navigation on my complete Marvel reading order home page. Hopefully this makes these orders easier to navigate.

Plenty of questions in the backlog for the coming weeks, but as always, if you have your own question, let me hear about it:

email: dave@comicbookherald.com

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