With the 1st (Annual?) Salt Lake Comic Con coming up next week and all, I feel like I need to write about my new comic book obsession with Marvel. Its true, I’ve been reading a whole lot of Marvel comics. Nobody is more surprised than me, but I’ve loved it.
In general, for me, these last 20+ or so years Marvel has seemed to have too many big events, too many cross-overs, too much hype, too much time travel, and I just wasn’t interested too many super-heroes or their mis-adventures. Don’t get me wrong, I was never against picking up a Marvel book at all. If I found a book that looked interesting, I’d pick it up. And there have been many Marvel books that I’ve enjoyed over the years. But in general, yeah… been interested in other comics and stories.
It was Jonathan Hickman who brought me back. Funny enough, I first became aware of Hickman through his work on Marvel titles like the Fantastic Four and S.H.I.E.L.D. about four or five years ago. These are both very good books and I’d buy them sort-a regularly. But it was Hickman’s creator-owned work that really stood out for me. Titles like the Pax Romana, Manhattan Projects and East of West helped convince me he is one of the best writers in the business.
When I heard Hickman was going to be writing more books with Marvel, I had to give his new stories a try. Marvel has kinda been branding there newest books as Marvel Now! So… ya know.. whatever. Anyway, the first issues I read was the New Avengers and, holy Toledo, that got me hooked! Then I started reading the main Avengers series, and that was also very good. So good that over the last few months I went on to read more new NOW! titles like Thor: God of Thunder, Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy, Indestructible Hulk, and others. I’ve enjoyed them all and can’t think of a bad one yet (well, I tried that Age of Ultron and it was kinda blah, but I’m not going to dwell on it). And now there is the new Infinity series. Woohoo! Usually I steer clear of the big comic book event type series, but Infinity is off to a good start, and Jonathon Hickman is involved with that too so I think it’ll be pretty sweet.
Geek Out!
