The Star Wars comic books are for the most part very good. I recommend Darth Vader and Doctor Aphra, both by Kieron Gillen (start with Vader, since that’s where the Aphra character is introduced).
There are usually a number of “trade” collections available from Unlimited, but it varies on a month-to-month basis.
My recommendation is to go to their “What’s New for Unlimited” list and choose “show all”, then just browse down the list. This month, Kingdom Come is available, for instance.
They have a ton of Hellboy, BPRD etc.
A few I liked…
https://www.comixology.com/Giant-Days-Vol-1/digital-comic/307627?ref=c2VyaWVzL3ZpZXcvZGVza3RvcC9ncmlkTGlzdC9jb21peG9sb2d5VW5saW1pdGVk
First 8 volumes are on Unlimited.
All 4 volumes are on Unlimited, there’s also the sister series Incorruptible.
All 6 volumes are on Unlimited.
The initial 4-issue mini series and the 12-issue ongoing are all on Unlimited, although not all of the collections are, go figure.
A bunch of stuff, and I haven’t even looked at the big 3. CU looks like a great deal if you haven’t been reading comics for a while.
Turns out you can’t get Comixology Unlimited in the UK. I thought they had brought it over a while back. So it may be trickier than I thought to find something to recommend. I think they do show up on the iPad app though, so not impossible.
Thanks a lot, everyone! Lots to check out.
Hugo Award-nominated novelist Saladin Ahmed (Black Bolt) and artist Sami Kivelä (Beautiful Canvas) present one woman’s search for the truth that destroyed her family. Hard-nosed, chain-smoking tabloid reporter Elena Abbott investigates a series of grisly crimes that the police have ignored. Crimes she knows to be the work of dark occult forces. Forces that took her husband from her. Forces she has sworn to destroy.
Signed up for the DC Unlimited, but their search function is pretty terrible at the moment. I grew up mostly with Vertigo(which isn’t on the service), and the well-known Batman stories. What other DC runs should I check out?
Walking Dead, we hardly knew ye.
About 5 days left in this Humble Bundle with just about all of Garth Ennis’ work for Dynamite. FAIR WARNING: Garth Ennis writes violent, profane, cynical, misanthropic, sex-filled comics. If that sounds awful to you, it probably will be.
$15 gets a full run of The Boys, Jennifer Blood, and Red Team, all of which I enjoyed reading. Haven’t read Ennis’ war comics or Just A Pilgrim, and A Train Called Love was a bit too cynical and misanthropic for me to get completely into. Still a hell of a bargain for all these comics.
I like Ennis’ War comics a lot. He’s pretty good at writing WW II stories. In my opinion.
My daughter has recently gotten deep into the MCU movies and wants to start reading some Marvel comics. So I’m curious if anyone can recommend some Marvel collections that are good, mostly self-contained stories of a fairly classic stripe (not too “deconstructy,” if you know what I mean). Spidey, Iron Man, Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers are her favorites.
This is probably too hardcore, but Jonathan Hickman basically drove one of the best Marvel runs in recent years. I didn’t do the entire below list – I did Fantastic Four through Secret Wars.
It has legitimately great Avengers, Thor, Guardians, Spider-Men (both Peter and Miles) and Thanos moments throughout. There’s a fantastic and soulful issue that’s just Peter Parker talking to Franklin Richards. It’s a great proposal for how to introduce Doctor Doom and X-Men into the MCU. Thanos’s Black Order came from this run. And it has one of the most satisfying “I Am Groot” moments I’ve ever read.
My hesitation is that while I’m not caught up in comics, I am familiar enough with most characters. Some of the deeper cuts went over my head, but I think this is a good, singular vision/story that stands apart from other Marvel events.
I bought a buncha trades on Comixology to binge this one summer, and he just started his run on X-Men this week. I’m not sure if I can wait for it to be collected or if I go back to buying comics every week now.
While they were pretty good reading, I would not recommend Hickman’s stuff as a reader’s first introduction into Marvel Comics. He baffled me a couple of times during that run (where the F did Ex Nihilo come from?), and I’ve been reading most of their books since '83.
A cheap way to toe-dip would be Marvel Unlimited, the $10/mo. online service. It doesn’t include anything brand new, but it goes pretty deep.
They don’t tell you what’s in the service unless you subscribe, but based on what’s available through Comixology Unlimited, there’s quite a bit of Spider-Man stuff, and Dan Slott’s run from 2015 to 2018 was both good and easy to get into.
Ms. Marvel and Champions are youth-focused books that are pretty good (particularly Ms. Marvel), although there are no characters among your daughter’s faves in them.
It looks like Matt Fraction’s 2008-2012 run is available, there are a lot of ideas they adapted for the movies in there.
The “colors” books aren’t in any continuity, but they are nice self-contained stories from before Jeph Loeb started being a hack.
Ex Nihilo is a silly example, as he was introduced in that run. Everyone saw where he came from: the first time he shows up on a page, =)
Now, “why does Thor have an axe” or “who’s Molecule Man” can be baffling, as I myself didn’t know, but I just shrugged and rolled with it; the rest of the saga made up for those occasional moments.
Probably the most New Reader friendly stuff might be early stories from the Ultimate continuity for Spidey, X-Men and Ultimates.
Seriously, I spent over an hour going through previous books thinking I had missed something because surely such an important character wouldn’t just pop up like that.
I feel like you’ve answered your own question.
A very general rule is “no MAX, and the nothing within the past six months.” So pretty much any main story before 2019 should be accesible.
Probably true, if a bit meta for an “event” comic.
But way in character for Jonathan Hickman, based on the stuff of his I’ve read (which is to say, the non-supers stuff).
On an answering-the-original-prompt tack, my personal feeling is that one should not worry overmuch about “classic” stories or being perfectly self-contained (Marvel and DC continuity are both total messes). Unless she is specifically looking for the raw classic superhero comics experience, which is nowhere near as consistently high quality as the curated MCU version, I recommend going for comics that have been written by the best of the writers working in the field. Their superhero work is rarely as impressive as their creator-owned (or at least, Vertigo or whatever) work, but they’re still damn good and they generally understand the core appeal a lot better than the…other…folks. (It’s not dissimilar to how I would recommend approaching licensed fiction and for similar reasons.)
A sampling of writers I would recommend:
Warren Ellis
Neil Gaiman
Kieron Gillen
Matt Fraction
Ed Brubaker (his Captain America run is the basis of Winter Soldier)
Kurt Busiek
Grant Morrison
Joss Whedon
Garth Ennis (but maybe not for your daughter depending on age. Actually that goes for Warren Ellis, too.)
Mark Waid
Kelly Sue DeConnick
G. Willow Wilson
(yes, this list skews heavily male. Unfortunately, it’s been a male-dominated field and although female writers are getting some work in superhero comics finally, you’ll certainly find a lot more of their stuff in the frankly more rewarding creator-owned space.)