Comics

[rusting-roses.livejournal.com]

Okay, okay, you've got me. The films have successfully introduced me to the fabulousness that is Tony/Steve, so I've got to ask.

What comic collections do you recommend? I've heard fantastic things about the Iron Man: Extremis collection by Warren Ellis for instance, but other than that I'm sort of lost at sea. It seems like any collection that one person enjoys, another despises for one reason or another. So I turn to my fandom brethren (sistren? bresistren?) for your recommendations—dearest fandom, where should I turn to for excellent characterization, art and plot in our marvel universe?

Comments

[muccamukk]

I really liked the Extremis arc. It was very Warren Ellis, and not especially in continuity, but the characterisation was golden and the writing very sharp. I also liked pretty much all of Iron Man Vol 3, but I'm not sure about finding trades for that. It's mostly a lot lighter and less angsty than Tony's usual fare, and has gems like the Living Armour arc, Ty Stone's two arcs, Time Travel, and sea monsters. A fair few Steve/Tony moments as well.

For Steve I liked Captain America Vol 3 by Mark Waid pretty much right though. It's a minor relaunch so you don't need the continuity, it's fun, fast paced and Steve has a sense of humour, also good for Steve/Tony moments. I also liked the first arc of Cap Vol 4, which is Steve dealing with 9/11. Then Chuck Dixon took over, and the book went to hell. There's also a recent mini called Captain America: Man out of Time, which reimagines Steve's origin story. It's also by Mark Waid and very well done.

For Avengers, I loved Avengers Prime, which is their patch up after Civil War. There's hugging. I also really liked the Pre-Civil War run of New Avengers. It's kind of Steve and Tony putting the band back together and having naked adventures.

If you're looking for Silver Age wacky adventures, you can get all the stuff from the '60s and '70s in pulp trades called Marvel Essentials. They're really cheep, and honestly stripping the colours out does the art a lot of favours.

I also quite enjoy Marvel Adventures: Avengers, and Marvel Adventures: Iron Man, which are aimed at a younger audience, but which are super fun crack.

Depending on your tolerance for Mark Millar, I'd also rec The Ultimates, Ultimate Galactus (by Warren Ellis), and The Ultimates 2. That's the Dark and Gritty universe, but it has some really interesting characterisation, and I really like the Steve/Tony dynamic there.

Hope that helps.

Here's some threads of past canon discussions:
http://cap-ironman.livejournal.com/752784.html
http://cap-ironman.livejournal.com/612951.html
http://cap-ironman.livejournal.com/91247.html

[ewanspotter.livejournal.com]

I'm curious what you mean by "not especially in continuity." Ellis' arc updated the continuity, modernizing the storyline and paving the way for the Tony (and the Iron Man suit) that exists in canon today. I haven't read a ton of pre-2000s Tony though. Was the characterization that different?

[muccamukk]

Ellis admitted that he basically hadn't read any Iron Man canon since about the Silver Age. So it's pretty much a relaunch.

No Jocasta, no artificial heart, apparently not broken up about his fiancée just dying, company name changed, underlining his arms dealing, moving his origin forward into Iraq, changed around his college backstory, and so on. Lots of minor stuff, but I'd say there characterisation is pretty consistent with previous volumes.

[ewanspotter.livejournal.com]

So it's almost like an AU that became canon.

[muccamukk]

That's a good way to put it. The difference between Warren Ellis and Matt Fraction seems to be that when Ellis blatantly ignores previous canon, the characterisation still works.

(Then again Fraction ignored previous canon on Iron Fist, and it was lovely, so... mixed results?)

[ewanspotter.livejournal.com]

Hah. I love your Ellis vs. Fraction analysis, because it's ridiculously true. (If only they could get Ellis to come back and ignore Fraction's run...)

[muccamukk]

No good. I've never seen Ellis do more than 12 issues at a go.

[ewanspotter.livejournal.com]

This is why we can't have nice things, Marvel.

(/sigh. Hopefully it'll be bearable.)

[jazzypom.livejournal.com]

Ellis tends to be a jobbing comic book writer. He likes his own creator owned things. He seems to be someone they turn to when a character is in a rut, or they want to springboard new characters/universes into being. Ellis has written a lot of Ultimates short arcs (Ultimate Gah Lak Tus, worked on Ultimate Fantastic Four).

[rusting-roses.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much! ::runs off to ebay and amazon:: With any luck, if I can't find collections, I might be able to find some of the individual comics there :)

[eclecticlioness.livejournal.com]

Also just to put it out there I've found several books at Half Price Books, used bookstore chain, relatively cheap. Though I don't know if you have one anywhere around you...still you might check around any used book stores in your area. Obviously the selection is gonna be limited and probably patchy as hell but hey you never know and it might be a little cheaper.

[finksgirl.livejournal.com]

If you're like me and just love yourself some angst I recommend buying the Civil War: Iron Man trade. It's basically Steve and Tony's breakup. Really well done.
I really dig the Winter Soldier storyline by Brubaker, you can pick up the Ultimate Collection in trade for around $16-$26 depending on where you look. That's more of a Steve and Bucky story but Tony makes an appearance.
I recommend Avengers Prime and Man Out Of Time too. So good. As well as the Essential Avengers trade, just a quick skim through it and you'll understand a lot of the inside jokes the movies toss over to the original Avengers comics. And Marvel Adventures: Avengers is loads of fun.
If you're looking for anything that's AU and weird then I recommend both the Iron Man Noir trade and Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602. Both are fantastic. IMN is basically if Tony Stark was Indiana Jones and Marvel 1602 is absolutely superb. Steve is in it, along with LOADS of other characters, though sadly Tony is not.
Off the top of my head those are my favourites. I'd recommend reading the latest Ultimates reboot. They're up to issue #7 right now and it's pretty great. Though I know Ultimates is one of those things you either love or hate.

[muccamukk]

Oh, yeah! Seconding Noir and 1602. I had some problems with the Gaiman one, but Greg Pak wrote a follow up that fixed a lot of it, and has Tony \o/ (Though not Steve and Tony at the same time).

[ewanspotter.livejournal.com]

Don't know if it's helpful to you, but I put together a reading list for a friend (http://ewanspotter.livejournal.com/734243.html) who'd been asking the same question. It's not the penultimate list, and I'm sure others will disagree on some of it, but it was my personal reading order and makes mention of where some of the arcs intertwine, etc. (I also only focus on the more recentish arcs of the last ten years or so.)

[rusting-roses.livejournal.com]

That is super helpful, really, thanks!!

[valentinite.livejournal.com]

I've been curious about this too -- and as a side question, if anyone is still reading these comments: which ones are easiest to read? This may sound kind of ridiculous, but I have never been good at reading comics; the format just doesn't work well for me. It's like the world's most specific learning disability or something. (And no, I'm not mocking learning disabilities by saying that, I seriously mean it. I have mild audio processing issues and trying to read comics gives me a similar brain freeze-up at times as trying to parse low-quality audio.)

For reference: the only western comic I've made it all the way through was Transmetropolitan, which I absolutely adored and found very readable, and the only manga I've made it through were Death Note (which I slogged through plot-wise but I could read pretty easily) and Monster (which I loved plot-wise but found very difficult to read). A friend who was way into Strangers in Paradise in college kept lending them to me; I gave up when I realized I couldn't reliably tell any of the blonde women apart, and had been thinking what were two separate storylines with separate characters were a present-and-past interleaved set with the same character. Or possibly the other way around. I forget.

Possibly Marvel Adventures, since they're aimed younger? Or would Avengers Prime be a decent starting point? Since the few panels I've seen capped from that were pretty legible for me.

[muccamukk]

Do you know if it's panel layouts that give you trouble, like complicated or non-linear ones? Or the placement of word balloons? Or the style of the art itself, or...?

[valentinite.livejournal.com]

Action panels I have a tough time figuring out exactly what's happening, but as long as all I really need to gather from them is that "there's a fight going on", I'm probably OK not figuring them out. I do have trouble telling who's talking a lot of the time. The other big thing is telling characters apart in a similar art style (if you know Monster, at all, I couldn't tell a lot of the minor characters apart and just gave up, but oddly enough I picked up on the [major spoiler goes here] from pretty much the first panel). The main Avengers have fairly strong distinguishing features, though I expect Steve and Clint may confuse me a bit; the art style changing with different artists I expect will give me trouble, so runs that keep a consistent artist through a storyline would be good.

(I feel so silly saying this. Everyone always laughed at me for finding comics difficult. But it's true.)

[muccamukk]

Marvel Adventures might be a good bet then (they're mostly in costume, and Steve's the only blond on the team), but maybe not New Avengers. I found a lot of the characters look samey there. You might try Captain America: Man out of Time (minis usually have the same artist consistently).

I'm not sure if Avengers Prime would be a good first book. It's so much a closure to Civil War that it may not stand well on its own. On the other hand, Naked Tony on a Horse!

(People are mean!)

[valentinite.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I couldn't tell if Prime was more of a coda or a "let's reboot this and let newbies in after the massive events" sort of restart. I'll try Marvel Adventures, first, then.

[thesilverwitch.livejournal.com]

Uuhhh, I second this. Many times when I read New Avengers, I had to stop and do a double take at everyone so I could get a better feel on who was talking and who wasn't. Especially in the action scenes. It wasn't a big problem or anything, just a bit confusing ngl.

And Marvel Adventures is probably my favorite series ever, I know it's for children but dammit the fluff kills me every single time.

[eclecticlioness.livejournal.com]

Actually I can kind of understand your issues...I find myself sometimes having similar problems, also pretty much only with comics...which would be why I didn't ever really get into them until very recently. Its odd because I am generally a very visual person but for whatever reason something about comics just gives me brain lock sometimes. In my case its something about the page layouts I think...when the page layout is very busy or even just not done in a traditional left right top bottom kind of flow I guess sometimes I get lost and I have to stop and refocus or whatever. This is why I can't and don't read manga, something about the way it goes backwards messes with me and I just can't do it. I tend to have issues sometimes with things that go against established patterns though. So for me the cleaner and less busy the layout and really the art in general is the better, also I have a membership to Marvels website that allows me to read the digitized comics online and their reader thingy kind of directs you around the page which helps a fair amount.

[valentinite.livejournal.com]

I'm usually super-visual too -- though for me, I think trying manga helped me figure it out because it was so weird with the left-to-right that I actually sat down and traced my way through the panels. It's reassuring to know someone else has the same reaction to them. :)

[eclecticlioness.livejournal.com]

Same here, it's always nice to hear my randomness is maybe not just mine. As for the manga thing, most of my friends are very into it in college and tried for a long time to get me into them too. But besides my weird "This does not compute" thing I was just never able to get interested...just not my thing I guess. Mostly I figured out what the issue was pretty recently when I got interested in the Avengers fandom and then curious about the comics and pretty much stubborned my way through a few of them. Also like I said I tried reading them online and was like...oh well that's a lot easier. One of my favorites so far is Extremis, its the first one I bought actually. The art is great I think and not as much clutter in the layout as some have. It was actually really easy for me to read through.

[arachnes-web.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is something you'd be interested in, but at the end of this month Marvel's putting out Avengers Assemble: An Oral History of Earth's Mightiest Heroes by Brian Michael Bendis and it is supposed to be a "prose retelling of the history of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes." It might be a nice place to start at least, being a prose introduction and all.