I’ve never been a big reader of Marvel or DC comics. Even when I did get into Western comics a while back, I mostly stuck to Vertigo and indies. It wasn’t out of any kind of principle, it was just because the formats of the big two confused the hell out of me and I could never figure out what to buy and where to jump in to these runs. I did some of the Batman standalone graphic novels, and I did read Alias shortly after the Jessica Jones TV series, but otherwise I stuck with books that were published and structured more simply than the sprawling universes and baroque jargon-filled formats of Marvel and DC.
After getting into the movies from Marvel and DC last year (yes, I was like the last person on the planet to get in on the MCU, which is a trend with me), and also going back and revisiting the DC Animated Universe with Justice League and Justice League Unlimited and now Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series, I decided to finally try out some of their comics. I’ve done a little DC, but I’ve done mostly Marvel, because it has one huge advantage over DC: Marvel Unlimited, a subscription service where you can read digital versions of, like, all the Marvel comics. Like seriously, all of them.
Okay, not quite all of them. Alias is too hardcore for Marvel Unlimited, and some of the more obscure stuff is missing. But they have an insane number of comics available.
When I started, I thought I was going to go back to the roots of all these well-known characters and read them from the beginning. Yeah. That didn’t work out. I made it through about five issues of Amazing Spider-Man before the cheese and crude artwork got to me. Similar with Fantastic Four, and even Iron Fist’s early stuff in Marvel Premiere, which I started reading after I watched the Netflix series to see what a better interpretation of the character might have been like. I’ve managed to stick with X-Men by starting from the celebrated Claremont run, about a hundred issues into Uncanny X-Men, and leaving long gaps in between reading the story arcs so the cheese doesn’t have time to overwhelm me. For the most part, these older comics just haven’t aged well, but the best stuff from about 1980 onward is still good enough that I can enjoy it.
The modern stuff from the mainstream characters is, in a lot of ways, even harder to get into than the older stuff, because it all ties into whatever giant universe-spanning event that will change everything they’re building up to at the time. Spider-Gwen, for instance: I wanted to like it, but it was just too bound up with continuity references to other Spider-books. But I did manage to find a few titles, based on recommendations from various places, that I really enjoy. Some of them are mercifully taking place in enough of a backwater of the Marvel universe that the giant events don’t touch them. Others will have four issue arcs that I just skip, or read having resigned myself to having no idea what’s going on, where the characters suddenly drop out of their own lives to contribute to some tiny corner of a giant event story that was developing at this time. And very occasionally the writers do a good enough job incorporating the event tie-in into the main plot of the book that I can still enjoy those issues (e.g. Ms. Marvel). These are the books I’ve most enjoyed during my time on Marvel Unlimited.
Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
This is by far my favorite of the titles on Marvel Unlimited. I love the silly humor, weird characters, bizarre stories, and computer science-related jokes.
The series I’m talking about is actually two series. There was a 2015 series that broke off in the middle and continued from issue #1 in a second 2015 series that is still running today. Sigh.
Squirrel Girl, aka Doreen Green, is a great character, especially if you’ve had enough of angst-ridden anti-heroes. She’s upbeat, down-to-earth, and spunky. Many of her battles actually end with her talking it out with the villain after showing she understands their point of view, which is both hilarious and very positive. Her supporting cast is great too: her sarcastic friend Nancy and fellow animal-themed superheroes Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi have really fun interplay with Doreen. There are also lots of references to other comics, which are fun when you get them, but incidental enough that you can enjoy the story even if you don’t. I loved all the parodies in issue #5. (The first issue #5, from the 2015 series.) Based on the letters column, a lot of kids read Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which probably explains why I liked it if you’ve read anything else on this blog.
One note: if you’re looking in Marvel Unlimited, you need to choose “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015)” to get the first series. The second series is “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015 - Present)”. Sigh.
Cable and Deadpool
Basically all I knew about Deadpool was from the 2016 movie, and all I knew about Cable was what I remembered from the 1990’s X-Men series, which pretty much amounted to “he’s a time traveler”. I still enjoyed this, but not quite as much as some of the other newer books like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl or Hawkeye.
Since it’s Deadpool, the humor in this series can get crude sometimes, but unlike the 2016 movie, which was mostly Deadpool being crazy in an otherwise serious world, the world of Cable and Deadpool is seriously weird. It starts with a cult that believes turning yourself blue and shaving your head is the only way to achieve world peace, and keeps escalating from there. It has actual character arcs for Cable and Deadpool as the one tries to guide the world down a better path and the other just keeps doing his weird thing (guess which does which), but I didn’t pay attention to a lot of that since it required at least something of a grounding in these characters’ previous adventures, which I didn’t have. I still enjoyed it just for the action and for being so weird. Plus, Cable raises some questions about the world and politics that I found genuinely interesting.
Moon Knight
One of the few older comics I’ve been able to get into is the 1980 Moon Knight series. I started with the 2016 one, but I felt like I was missing too much backstory, so I went backwards until I reached the source.
Moon Knight is a pretty obscure character, and also kind of a confusing one. He was originally a mercenary named Marc Spector who became the avatar of an Egyptian god called Khonshu and started fighting crime. He has two other identities, rich entrepreneur Steven Grant, and cab driver Jake Lockley, which he uses to interact with the high society and low society respectively when he needs to fight some crime. Superficially, Moon Knight’s a bit like Batman; he fights street crime and themed psychopaths with boomerangs, truncheons, grappling hooks, and other throwing weapons, as well as his fists, and he has a fancy moon-copter piloted by his old mercenary partner Frenchie. He also has a wife, Marlene, who’s in on the whole Moon Knight thing from the beginning, and several friends from the street from whom he gets his information about what’s going on down there. This was what confused me about the 2016 series: it brings in all of these characters within the first few issues, and I had no idea who any of them were.
The tone of the book is also reminiscent of what little I’ve read of early 80’s Batman: surprisingly dark, willing to take on real-life issues, interested in issues like the psychology of crime and what makes a criminal, and willing to question its own hero’s sanity and motives. (I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that Doug Moench, the writer on the first Moon Knight series, has also been a Batman writer.) In the first few issues it doesn’t go all in as much as the later Moon Knight stuff, but it’s still pretty damn good for a pre-2000 comic.
If the art of older comics really bothers you, you probably won’t be able to read this as it’s pretty firmly of its time in that aspect. I’m not that into the art style in older comics, but I can tolerate it if the story’s good enough, and the storytelling conventions had become less obvious and clumsy by this point compared to what they were at the time of Amazing Spider-Man.
I discovered Moon Knight because people in the know kept saying what an amazing Netflix series he would make, and I have to agree, he’d be perfect. Unlike the Punisher (or Blade, who’s also been talked about for a Netflix series), I could even see Moon Knight becoming the fifth Defender, or at least interacting with the other Defenders. It probably won’t happen, but it would be amazing. If you’re interested in Moon Knight, you can definitely start from one of the later series (not the 2016 one, but the 2006 one is supposed to be a good starting point), but I’ve found the 1980 series good enough that you can start there too if you want.
Hawkeye
In the movies and the 1990’s Avengers cartoon, Hawkeye is the lamest Avenger. He’s a guy with a bow who wears a lot of purple. But in this 2012 series written by Matt Fraction and drawn by David Aja, he’s a lovable, dorky, hotshot nice guy. This version of Clint Barton reminds me a bit of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man from Spider-Man: Homecoming: a lot of his adventures are small-scale and involve him helping out people in the community with little problems (or problems that seem little when you habitually face planet-ending alien monsters, like Russian mob heavies with baseball bats). Of course, Clint has a grounded maturity that that version of Spider-Man doesn’t have, and he’s not afraid to look stupid if it means helping someone.
The books have a roguish tone, a bit like the more lighthearted parts of Cowboy Bebop or Firefly, which makes Clint feel like a modern Robin Hood. His sidekick / sometime replacement, Kate Bishop, is also a fun and cool character who gets to play the straight woman and point out when Clint is being a dork. Fraction wrote an independent series called Sex Criminals of which I read the first trade, and his mark is recognizable between the two as far as tone and style. Really fun series, and mercifully free of references to giant event comics. My main criticism is that the plot gets pretty muddled, especially towards the middle and end, but the fun of the characters carried me through. There’s a sequel series focusing on Kate Bishop that started in 2016 that I’ve just started. It’s a lot like Kate’s solo stories in Los Angeles towards the end of the 2012 Hawkeye series. Kate is a rich spoiled brat, skating by on audacity and calculatedly cutesy behavior. I enjoyed her LA solo stories, and the new series is good so far, but I could see wanting a break from Kate after a while.
The Pulse
I like this one in theory more than execution. Basically, after some stuff that happens between J. Jonah Jameson and Jessica Jones in Alias, she’s the one superhero that he can a little bit stand to associate with (even though when they first met, she conned him into paying her a bunch of money to go work at soup kitchens and read to sick children–which, by the way, is the perfect illustration of the difference between comics Jessica and TV Jessica. TV Jessica may be good at heart, but I can’t see her doing or even thinking of this). Jameson decides to hire Jessica as a special consultant to work with his reporting staff on a superhero-oriented column called the Pulse. At this point, Jessica is married to Luke Cage and pregnant with his child, so she needs a steady job and health insurance and accepts under those terms.
Some of the early stories are interesting, but later on the series gets embroiled in the Civil War event that was going on at the time and loses its way. I liked the idea of a comic focused on superhero journalism–it could’ve been really interesting to compare it with war journalism and investigative journalism, and delve into the everyday lives of people who follow around weird vigilantes. There were a few stories that did this well–the D-Man subplot, for instance–but it just really lost its way towards the end and became all about setting up Jessica and Luke to join the New Avengers, which I didn’t really care about. (Though Squirrel Girl becomes their nanny after the baby is born–that’s pretty cool.)
Jessica Jones (2016)
This series picks up with Jessica after the New Avengers era with the same creative team as Alias. The writing is awesome. So many times writers don’t know what to do with a character anymore after they have a baby, but Jessica still feels like her old self, and she handles being a mom exactly how you’d expect Jessica to handle it: she’s still a human wreck, but she does her best to do well by her daughter. Jessica’s now even deeper in the seamy underbelly of the Marvel universe, taking on SHIELD black ops and deep cover jobs, so the stories are larger scale and more focused on action than the stories in Alias, but Jessica keeps them grounded and human all the same.
I read Alias and The Pulse and mostly skipped over the New Avengers stuff, but I was able to follow the story in this series, so it’s a good place to go if you want to keep following Jessica Jones after those two series.
Ms. Marvel (2014)
Marvel has had a big push in the past few years to make their lineup of heroes more diverse in terms of race, sex, and sexual orientation. I found out about this when Ms. Marvel, which stars sixteen-year-old Pakistani-American Kamala Khan, made headlines in the mainstream media back when it came out. The letters pages of the Ms. Marvel books are stacked to the rafters with letters from people of all sorts who passionately identified with Kamala and loved seeing someone as non-white, non-male as her as the hero of Marvel comic.
That’s all cool, but it wouldn’t have nearly the impact if Ms. Marvel sucked. Happily, it does not; it’s a fun, sweet, earnest story, and Kamala is surpassingly lovable. It wouldn’t surprise me if the tone had inspired Spider-Man: Homecoming. Kamala is just as geeky and superhero-loving as Peter, just as blessed with quirky friends and family who support her, and just as determined to make a difference and do good any way she can. But being a Pakistani Muslim in Jersey City makes her story unique and different. She faces different challenges than Peter or any other hero, with her parents walking a tightrope between their conservatism and the reality of raising children in America. Yet even though her challenges growing up are different, their shape is still recognizable; her parents don’t want her going to parties and aren’t comfortable with her dating, and Kamala knows they would worry endlessly if they knew she was running around the city being a superhero.
Ms. Marvel is a great palate cleanser if you need a break from the heavy, dark flavor of the Marvel event comics. It’s still a superhero adventure book, unlike the mainly comedic Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but it’s lighthearted and fun while also having real stakes and serious character growth. It’s a great coming of age story that you can enjoy even if you’re not a Pakistani Muslim from New Jersey.
Note that Ms. Marvel has the same deal as Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: there are two Ms. Marvel series on Marvel Unlimited, a 2014 one and a 2015 one. The 2014 one begins with her origin story. Since Kamala’s a recent addition to the Marvel universe, you can pretty much get the whole picture on her just by reading the 2014 series.
