A Year in Marvel Comics

[nomadicwriter]

So, what was I doing fandom-wise all last year? Well, mostly reading Marvel comics. I now seem to have moved on from following one or two characters on a casual basis to attempting to consume the entire history of the Marvel-verse. (Yes, I know this is not really technically feasible. And yet, here I still am.) I'm pretty sure I crossed some

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[milkshake_b]

*grimace* My hate for the Ultiverse is more or less intrinsically bound up in my hate for Mark Millar*, and since he got to set the tone I decided eventually to save myself some pain and not bother--especially since the few projects that weren't taking their cue from him (Spidey, X-men) rapidly got so 616-referential as to miss what I always thought was the point.

* If you want to go on liking him, don't ask.

[nomadicwriter]

I'm amazed to have liked as much of Ultimates as I did, considering my reaction to most of what I've read by Millar has ranged from unimpressed to "kill it with fire!" I would not be at all surprised to hear horrible things about him; I've mostly made of policy of learning as little as possible about comics creators while I'm doing this epic catch-up reading because there is just so much depressing information out there to be had.

I've definitely largely decamped for the 616-verse now; most of my Ultimate universe reading was from months and months ago. I liked the early Ultimate F4 and Spidey comics, but they seemed to run out of ideas and start running cut-down copies of 616 storylines pretty quickly, and the whole concept of a newbie friendly universe that was easy to catch up on went right out the window. I decided I was better off just launching into 616 and reading everything I could get my hands on until things started making sense.