You want to read new stuff? As in catch up to current point? Or read good books?

 

Either or. Both. Would like some good books and to catch up. Even just the essentials.

 

J. Michael Straczynski's run was controversial, and I didn't read all of it, but what I did read was fantastic. It introduced some new villains and gave a slight mystical reboot to the old radioactive spider; the mystical elements got dropped, but the villains came back for the Spider-Verse crossover.

 

First the recent stuff.

Well, generally a long and pretty bad run by Slott (which included Spider-Verse) on Amazing Spider-Man just ended, so in theory, you would have an ideal jumping point. The problem is that the first arc was pretty weak too. With such things like Kingpin (who is a mayor of NYC now), promoting Spidey as the hero he supports while attacking all other street level heroes. And Daredevil falls for it, despite knowing Peter for years and having facing Kingpin's manipulations for around as many.

On the other hand, Zdarsky started his run on Spectacular Spider-Man recently, which after the first bad arc got really good when Zdarsky finally realised that he is much better at writing serious stuff than comedy. Unfortunately it ends soon, and we don't know who will replace him. If you want to read that I recommend reading Amazing Spider-Man: Family Business OGN before that.

If you for some reason got Stockholm Syndrome strong enough to want to continue reading Bendis writing Miles, then he was transported to the main Earth after Secret Wars (2015) and his adventures continued in Spider-Man title. Fortunately, after Bendis left he ended up with more talented people. Zub took over Champions with issue 19 (a team of which Miles is a part of) and Ahmed (who did a great job on Black Bolt recently) will be writing new Miles Morales: Spider-Man ongoing which will start in December. I hope their plans for character won't clash (because you really can't count on editors in modern Marvel).


As to older stuff, as @Shinysavage mentions, Straczynski's run on Amazing is good, though it has two downs. Sins of the Past which is on Straczynski himself and One More Day which is completely on Quesada and JMS tried his best to make the story not terrible. It's unfortunate that most of the interesting elements Straczynski introduced are screwed over. OMD is followed by the Brand New Day era with rotating writers. It's a pretty good period and even Slott mostly does a good work when not given free reins (focusing on Mister Negative and his "romance" with May in a story that was supposed to be about Mysterio aside), unfortunately after that Slott gets free reins and it gets worse and worse.

Millar's Marvel Knights Spider-Man and David's Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man are two worthwhile runs that take place during respectively early and late part of Straczynski's run.


From even older stuff.

Lee-Ditko Amazing Fanstasy #15 + Amazing Spider-Man - One of the strongest titles of the so-called Marvel Age. Lee continues the run after Ditko leaves with Romita Sr. and is still worthwhile, but not as good. In the space of both, most of the key characters and elements of Spider-Man are introduced.
Busiek's Amazing Fanstasy #16-18 + Untold Tales of Spider-Man - Later comics that fill the gaps in the above. Really good stuff.
Stern's run on Amazing Spider-Man - One of the best runs all around.
David's, run on (Peter Parker,) The Spectacular Spider-Man, along with his Amazing issues from that era - Features classic Death of Jean DeWolf among other good stories.
Michieliniie's Web of Spider-Man - Happens during PAD's run.
DeMatteis's Kraven's Last Hunt and Nocenti's Mad Dog Ward are two good crossovers over all Spider-titles that place during David's run
Conway's run on Spectacular Spider-Man - Much better than his more well-known run on Amazing, follows directly from PAD's run.
DeMatteis's run on Spectacular Spider-Man - Another classic run, follows directly from Conway's. You may want to jump ship when it's pulled into the mess of Clone Saga.
Michelinie's run on Amazing Spider-Man - Starts around the same time as above. The best run in terms of Peter - MJ romance, unfortunately, suffers from editorial interference which led Michelinie to leaving the book.
DeMatteis's Soul of the Hunter, one-shot follow-up to Kraven's Last Hunt which was released during his run on Spectacular.

Well, that looks pretty overwhelming. To easily check relevant issues by the writer use Wikipedia, for the chronology of concurrent books check Marvel Chronology Project.

 

Man, I'd completely forgotten Sins of the Past, never mind that Straczynski was responsible for it. Its never been mentioned again though, right? So eminently skippable.

 

Barely. There is that Sins Remembered story arc in Spectacular and American Son mini, none of which I would especially recommend (though the second one is actually decent). Aside from that it seems that writers decided to ignore that this happened.

 

I've been reading a fair amount of comics recently, mostly catching up on DC from all eras, but a few other things as well. The Life is Strange continuation is interesting, but probably of little interest to anyone except diehard fans of the first game, but I'd definitely recommend Middlewest, by Skottie Young and art by Jorge Corona; it's kind of steam-punk, kind of a western, kind of fantasy mash-up about a young boy seeking answers about his mysterious powers. There's one collected edition so far, I'd guess a second by the end of the year, maybe early 2020.

The Goddamned, by Jason Aaron and art by R.M. Guera was disappointing, but not entirely without merit; set post-Eden but pre-Flood, following Cain as he meets Noah. It's an interesting premise, but it didn't really seem interested in developing it beyond 'people are really, really awful, have some violence', which perhaps explains why no new issues seem to have been released since 2016.

On the Marvel side of things, I binged most of the Captain Marvel stuff since she switched to Captain rather than Ms; lots of fun stuff, although I wouldn't say any of it is essential reading for all comic book fans. I also finally got round to reading the Dark Phoenix Saga, which didn't quite live up to the hype for me, although again, a fun read (if you can get past the older style of writing and art, which I'll admit I struggle with at times).

However, like I say, a lot of what I've been reading has been DC. I started out by reading the big cross-franchise events, pre-New 52, which are a mixed bag. Crisis on Infinite Earths is probably the best, as despite the weirdness of the premise, it's actually relatively straight forward, with a clear plot and structure and minimal background knowledge required beyond a basic understanding of there being a multiverse with different versions of the characters. Infinite Crisis takes a dip, relying on a lot more understanding of recent and not-so recent continuity, including CoIE; neither is especially unreasonable, I suppose, at least at the time of release, but getting to it nearly 15 years after release and trying to work out which stories you need to read/research to completely understand it is something of a black mark, for me. Still, that aside it's not a bad read.

Identity Crisis is fine. Some interesting ideas, I liked that it's a detective story more than anything else, but ultimately nothing particularly special.

Then comes Final Crisis, which holy shit. Much, much more reliant on continuity, and not just recent/important stuff, and also written by Grant Morrison, who's very talented, but...well, let's just say that one of the more comprehensible strands, for me, was the Green Lanterns investigating the temporal black hole caused by a god being murdered with a bullet fired through time. In many ways, it's everything I love about comics, which is to say larger than life concepts delivered with enthusiasm and invention, and it does have one of the single best issues of Batman I've read, but on the other hand, it often felt like a complete mess.

Finally on the event side of things, Flashpoint, which I think was probably more interesting in the spin-off stories than the main event - although granted, it's one of the only Flash stories I've read, so a fair bit of it probably went over my head. I suspect I'm not going to get much out of this until I get round to reading the Rebirth stuff properly, as I understand that they've gone back to some of the pre-Flashpoint stuff.

Away from big events, I've read an awful lot of Supergirl - all the new 52 run, and a lot of the mid-90s to early 00s run, and the stand-alone, non-canon Being Super mini-series written by Mariko Tamaki, art by Joelle Jones; that's rather good, depending on your tolerance for stories focused as much on teen (girl) drama as on superheroics. The new 52 run starts out very strong, but kinda fizzled out by the end (read in isolation of anything else; I suspect that had I been reading it in parallel with, say, the Superman run, or the Justice League or whatever, some of it would have worked better), but I think I still prefer it to the earlier run, which is kind of nuts. Fun, but nuts (starts out with a - I think artificial? I haven't read the preceding series - version of Supergirl merging bodies/souls with the victim of a demonic sacrifice and having to adjust to a new civilian life and family, and also apparently becoming an angel, complete with meetings with God in the form of a pre-teen boy. She also, at the point I'm currently at, might be developing a love interest with Comet, a jockey who got given horse legs and an overall more equine appearance, and the power of flight, in a series of experiments after getting paralysed...but also died trying to save someone in a mountaineering accident...and so has the secret identity of a lesbian stand-up comic, who is also into Supergirl in both her identities).

Easier to wholeheartedly recommend is Paul Dini's Zatanna series, which I really liked. It's pretty much my only exposure to the character, but it's great fun, well written and drawn, and easy to get into for a novice.

 

House of X/Powers of X by Jonathan Hickman.
In his usual style Hickman is completely redefining the X-men with very massive ideas and what promises to be a very long run. This run would be a really good jumping point for most people, it is for me as i've no read most X-men comics in a long time.

 

Worked through some more of my backlog.

Marvel first. The best stuff here was The Ultimates - not the Ultimate continuity Avengers, a more recent main continuity team put together to tackle the biggest problems in the Marvel universe, the first one being 'curing' Galactus' hunger. Comprising Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and a few others who I'd not read before (Spectrum, Blue Marvel, and America Chavez), it's a hell of a lot of fun. Some of the most powerful characters in the franchise tackling a variety of crazy cosmic level issues, using mad science and diplomacy as often as they do their awesome powers. It does a decent job of shaking up some long standing continuity, too, although whether it's been reverted to status quo since I'm not sure (I mean, I assume it has, because comics). There's four volumes, all well worth a read, although there is the downside of it being connected to...

Civil War 2. Which, to be fair, is probably better than the first one. That's not exactly a high bar to clear though. The basic premise is quite interesting, if ripped off from Minority Report, but suffers from quite a few characters firmly grasping idiot and conflict balls. From what I understand, this is later explained by it being partly manipulated by the Hydra Cap...but in the moment, it's just a series of friends beating the shit out of each other because god forbid people have a rational conversation. And it stretches belief that in a universe where many of the characters involved have travelled in time and changed the future and past several times over, any of those characters would put any faith in pre-cognition as a crime-fighting exercise.

Spider-Verse is better, possibly partly because I have a soft spot for the Spider-Man run that introduced Morlun. I did start losing track of a lot of the different Spiders, but other than that it's quite a decent event. Not a patch on the film, although equally, not really connected beyond the basic idea.

Onto DC! And to kick off, the New Frontier, a miniseries set in the 50s and early 60s, which might be one of the best comics I've read. Heavily inspired by the Golden Age, and featuring a wide-ranging cast of all your favourites, although with most focus on J'onn J'onzz, Hal Jordan and Barry Allen as society goes back and forth on whether they like superheroes or not. Gorgeous art and a well told story that takes the time to properly develop the characters. Definitely one to read if you've got even a passing interest in DC as a whole.

The first two volumes of the New 52 Action Comics are pretty fun, although they seemed to be trying to squeeze quite a bit in. Presumably at least some of that will get developed over the course of the series, but particularly in the second volume it seemed to hop from story to story with little in the way of connective tissue beyond featuring Superman. The first volume though is a really good introduction to Superman, so I'd recommend that, at least.

Sticking with the New 52, the first volume of Batgirl, and the Court of Owls storyline. Batgirl was quite interesting, darker than I expected, but did a good job of getting me engaged with a character I'm really not that familiar with. Court of Owls is fine. I've seen it being held up as one of the definitive Batman stories, which seems a little excessive, but it's a solid story that blends character, mystery, horror and cool setpieces...and some faintly ridiculous twists, but hey ho.

Still DC, but earlier, Supergirl - I finished the 90s run and moved onto the run that started in 2005, which finally re-established her as Kryptonian rather than a human/angel/sentient plasma thing combination. Although the 90s run seems to be quite iconic, I'd honestly not recommend it unless you're a huge fan. The whole angel thing just didn't work for me at all - I'm all for shaking up long running characters, and I recognise that Peter David was kind of trapped into doing it by executive meddling, but I might as well have been reading an original story. To be fair, it's well written, just fundamentally flawed for me. YMMV on whether that's better than what I've read of the 2005 continuity, which has a more standard take on the character, but suffers from messy plotting, bad angst and worse character design thinly masking fan-service. I think it's supposed to significantly step up in quality from the point I've got to, which can probably be explained by replacing Jeph Loeb...

And away from the big duo, the first three volumes of Hellboy. I was a little wary of this; I love the del Toro films, but I'd heard the reboot was much closer to the tone and content of the comics, and that Mignola preferred the reboot...which is one of the worst films I've ever seen. I knew I'd at least like the art, but that did make me worry about whether I was going to enjoy anything else about it. Happily I did. It's really great, lots of spooky but thrilling adventures going on, while Hellboy is very likeable, somewhere between the two film versions (which can be said for the whole thing, tbh).

 

Haven't read much lately but I recently skimmed through DCeased, a pretty mediocre zombie apocalypse Halloween special in which the anti life equation becomes a virus transmitted through the internet. Entertaining in the train wreck sense, with a few good one liners. It's a bit like the Injustice series in gratuitous gore and violence but with a weaker story.

Also got hooked into the various Spider Gwen series. Character and visual style are fantastic, writing is solid. They still haven't figured out a decent name though, newest iteration is Ghost Spider. Meh.

 

Didn't know where to put this:

Someone made a comic out of Trevorrow's SW Ep9 Duel of The Fates script. And it's great.