Ack! Marvel Unlimited!

[firecat]

Gods help me, I signed up for a trial of Marvel Unlimited, which for ~$70/yr seems to give you access to many issues of Marvel comics, as long as you don’t mind reading them on a screen.

If you’re a Marvel Comics fan, is there anything you particularly recommend?

Comments

[firecat]

Really helpful, thank you!

I do like MCU Captain America. I hate MCU Iron Man but if he's less awful in the comics I'd be into recs for Avengers in general as well.

[sineala]

I think whether you would like comics Iron Man depends on what exactly you don't like about MCU Iron Man. Comics Iron Man was basically created in the mold of a tragic romantic hero; his origin story is that he takes shrapnel to the chest, has to wear the Iron Man suit chestplate under his clothes and charge it up regularly to stay alive. Everyone envies him and thinks he has everything in the world, but he is sad and lonely and convinced he is going to die soon so no one should love him because they'll just be sad. He's depressed and occasionally suicidal. He's an alcoholic. He's a genius but not really an arrogant one, IMO; there's a lot of focus on his philanthropy and his attempts to do good in the world, because he was created in the 1960s to be basically an ad for capitalism so he's very much the fantasy of the One Good Billionaire. He's occasionally quippy but not like MCU Tony is. So if any of that sounds like a character you would like, I can give you some recs.

(I have some meta about him here and some meta about him and Cap more generally here and a sort of flowchart of reading suggestions for Avengers stuff focusing on Cap and Iron Man.)

My go-to suggestion for anyone to see if they're going to like Avengers and specifically Cap comics is the miniseries Captain America: Man Out of Time, which is a modern-day retelling of Captain America's origin story and how he ended up in the future and was found by the Avengers. And then the part here that's new is "what if he got a chance to go back to the 40s?" and it's just... great. Waid is my favorite Cap writer.

The place a lot of people start with for Avengers is New Avengers volume 1 (2005, I think? somewhere around there), which is easy to get into because the team is mostly people you've already heard of, living in the Tower; it's also the lead-up to Civil War if you decide you ever want to read that. My favorite Avengers run is the one before that, Busiek & Perez' 1998 Avengers vol 3 (which is also the era of my favorite Cap and IM runs -- Busiek's IM vol 3 and Waid's Cap vol 3) and it's an awful lot of fun but it does assume you know who all these people are.

[firecat]

This is really helpful. MCU Iron Man comes across to me as arrogant and stupid because he refuses to listen to his team (or even the AIs he created himself) when they tell him something is a bad idea. The Iron Man you describe sounds more interesting. Thanks for the recommendations!

[sineala]

Yeah, I won't claim that 616 Tony hasn't Done Some Bad Things because he sure has, but for the most part, he really is a team player, as are all the Avengers, or they don't really last long as Avengers.

One of the big differences between the structure of the Avengers in the MCU versus the comics is that in the MCU Cap just basically leads the Avengers and everyone knows that, but in the comics the Avengers are more democratic and have a charter and bylaws and so on and team chair is an elected position; in the beginning they were all taking turns and then it started to be a little more permanent. The three Avengers who have held the position for longest are Cap, yeah, but also then Wasp and Black Widow, the last two of whom were successively team chairs for about fifteen years, and then lately it's been T'Challa. So they basically all have experience listening to each other and following each other's orders.

Unfortunately I am one of the people who believes we haven't had a good Iron Man run since about 2009 so I find it hard to recommend more modern comics. As I've said, I really like Busiek's run from 1998 (as well as the rest of that volume) and I think it's readable without knowing much in the way of backstory and has some of my favorite arcs but I think also the art has started to age a little for modern sensibilities -- but to me that is The Real Tony Stark.

Probably the best modern starting point I would pick for Iron Man is the beginning of Iron Man vol 4 which is from 2005 or 2006 or thereabouts; it begins with Warren Ellis's miniseries Extremis which includes an origin story recap and is a pretty solid intro to the character. It's short, only six issues, and the art is much more modern in style.