Before you start your journey on Phase One, I wanted to get into a few main concepts for newcomers. I really want people who’re reading this to be able to add comic books they’re interested into this list for themselves (it’s why I mentioned my sources in the last post) so I’ll explain the basics here:
- There are a couple of main things people might mean when they use the term ‘Volumes’ to talk about comic books. Using Spider-Man as an example, the character has usually had his main adventures in a specific series called ‘Amazing Spider-Man’. When I talk about volumes in this blog, it’ll be in relation to what was collected in a ‘trade paperback’ or ‘TPB’ for short. These are the most commonly sized format when buying printed comics in a single book. That’s because they’re normally around 5 or 6 comic issues long and that is the size that a single-story arc would usually take place across.
- What you might be confused about when trying to find out where to start reading the ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ series is that if you were to find the first issue (think of issues as a first episode of a TV show if that helps) then there’s a number of ‘issue one’s’. The first one being in 1963, then 1999, 2014, 2015 and so on. That’s because Marvel will often try to create a new starting point for new readers at these issues at an ‘issue one’ (or shorthand as #1) of a new volume of the ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ series.
- A TPB or trade paperback is used these for a couple of reasons as the main format in this blog. Mainly it’s because it collects a specific story arc together, often pulling together annuals and crossover issues too. My first struggle with the Marvel Unlimited App (My personal method of reading these comics) was that The Astonishing X-Men (the 2004 run by Joss Whedon) series I was reading didn’t seem to have ended but there weren’t any other issues in the series to finish it with. It turned out that the series ended with a ‘giant size’ final issue which is collected with the others in the TPB; hence the TPB/ volume format. The second reason is quite simply that looking at it as a single bullet point rather than a number of issues helped me keep up the moral to do the list.
- Specific ‘runs’ are a good way of adding work by creatives you’re interested in and a good way to close off plot lines and get what you like out of a series.
- Events: although there are a number of cross character ‘event’ stories from before ‘Civil War (2006)’, this was the point that Marvel decided to start having them every year. These were useful for working out where different series are up to, to align them before they tied into the event and to help make each phase more coherent. (Events are generally good but in my opinion, they have sometimes become a hindrance to other series’ because they make a lot of writers have to work towards that plot rather than being able to tell their own story with that character.)
- If you’re looking at why some series aren’t ordered correctly by the publishing date, that’s because I had to make some corrections to make the whole thing more cohesive. Sometimes delays with the publishing schedule of comic books have resulted with other series that kept to their original schedule already coming out before the end of the ‘universe changing’ events said to have already taken place (I’m looking at you, Secret Wars).
Marvel 616 Reading Order 