Back to the Reading Lists, Spider-Man: Blue

Greetings Heroes,

Welcome back to the Marvel Unlimited blog, where story arcs available on Marvel.com are covered in detail with direct links to books for viewing in your browser, along with plot information and links to buying collected copies of the stories where possible. This blog post is about the Spider-Man: Blue series, one of the amazing stories by writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale in the Marvel color series that also includes Daredevil: Yellow, Hulk: Gray and Captain America: White (Captain America available after 3/8/2016).

Crafted almost as an alternative perspective to stories from The Amazing Spider-Man #40-48 and #63, this mini-series tells the story of our hero’s love triangle with Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson, after the fact. While Gwen is gone by the time of the book’s story, Peter Parker (Spider-Man) recounts the development of his relationship with Gwen and the burden of that loss. Read more about the Spider-Man: Blue mini-series over at Wikipedia, but SPOILER WARNING, Wikipedia does often reveal major plot points. This is a fun series to read straight through.

Note: You can also buy this series in comic book format for $22.99 delivered from my store (20Zen). Contact me using the contact form to order!

Links to the individual issues on Marvel Unlimited:

Spider-Man: Blue #1

Spider-Man: Blue #2

Spider-Man: Blue #3

Spider-Man: Blue #4

Spider-Man: Blue #5

Spider-Man: Blue #6

Again, this is a great story for Spidey fans and worth the read. You can’t go wrong buying the book from Amazon as a trade paperback, but for you digital copy fans, it is available on Kindle to own or Marvel Unlimited to read. If you aren’t already a member of Marvel Unlimited, there are now more than 15,000 books available and you can even download issues for offline reading on your tablet or phone.

Are you on Facebook? Check out the COMIC BOOK COLLECTING group - it's in the side bar at right!

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

 

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To buy any of the mentioned titles on Amazon, please click through the links below!

Death of Captain America - Marvel Unlimited

Dig it. Captain America, one of the all-time great comic book heroes and an iconic symbol for the United States, Marvel Comics and fandom is back to all-time levels of popularity thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. With Marvel Unlimited, you can read many of the greatest stories about Cap, including the Winter Soldier arcs. Check out my friend Dave’s page at Comic Book Herald featuring a large reading order list of Captain America-related titles.

This story has it all: the end of a hero, the Red Skull, Winter Soldier, the Falcon, Black Widow, Sharon Carter and chaos gripping the American people! Mass insanity and even the “new” Captain America struggling to live up to the legacy of our fallen hero. Indeed, true believers, this set of issues will lead you through the excitement of this gripping story that will have you binge reading!

Captain America (2004) #25
Captain America (2004) #26
Captain America (2004) #27
Captain America (2004) #28
Captain America (2004) #29
Captain America (2004) #30
Captain America (2004) #31
Captain America (2004) #32
Captain America (2004) #33
Captain America (2004) #34
Captain America (2004) #35
Captain America (2004) #36
Captain America (2004) #37
Captain America (2004) #38
Captain America (2004) #39
Captain America (2004) #40
Captain America (2004) #41
Captain America (2004) #42

It was a classic within a couple of years of publishing, and only gets better with age. Enjoy!

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

 

 

Avengers: Kree/Skrull War (Clickable Reading Order List)

The merciless Kree and the shape-changing Skrulls have gone to war and Earth has been caught in the crossfire! Can The Avengers bring about an end to the fighting before humanity becomes a casualty of war?

This 9-issue story is a silver age classic that laid the foundation for Marvel’s cast of (regular) extraterrestrial beings that continue on through today. The Marvel Universe is filled with aliens from Alpha Centaurians through the Z’nox, with both benevolent and badass beings all in-between! Watch for the upcoming “Best of Symbiotes” for a great listing of issues on Marvel Unlimited covering everyone’s favorite modern Spider-Man villain.

Use the links below to get to individual issues on Marvel Unlimited.

Avengers #89 - The Only Good Alien Is A Dead Alien

Avengers #90 - Judgement Day

Avengers #91 - Take One Giant Step Backward

Avengers #92 - All Things Must End

Avengers #93 - This Beach-Head Earth

Avengers #94 - Behold the Mandroids

Avengers #95 - Avenger vs Inhuman

Avengers #96 - The Andromeda Swarm

Avengers #97 - Godhood’s End

A trade paperback of these issues is available from Amazon:

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

And now a word from (not) our sponsor...

Comic book readers,

This blog was created because of Marvel Unlimited and I’ve said ever since that they should be paying me because their search features SUCK. That being said, it’s still a wonderful service and right now you can subscribe and get your first month for just 99¢ so it’s never been a better time to sign up!

 

For more details, visit Marvel’s promotion page and announcement. The deal is in conjunction with SXSW’s interactive 2014.

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Marvel Unlimited - User Interface Upgrade!

Finally, the user interface is easier to navigate. Check out the PREV and NEXT links with drop down views of the issues’ covers ->

 

 

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

1602

In the list of “reimagined” Marvel Universes, the 1602 series is definitely among the most unique, and I dig it. If you want to get the hardcopy, order it on Amazon where it is available from under $4 in hardcover format.

Interesting artwork is just the start of this tale expanding on the idea: what if Marvel’s heroes appeared in the world 400 years earlier?

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Emma Frost (2003) - All 18 Issues Hyperlinked for Your Pleasure

In this short-lived series, we get a little big more of the Emma Frost backstory.

In Marvel’s infinite wisdom, this is another series that isn’t in order on Marvel Unlimited, so I’ve put together this list of issues for you to click and read. Sorry you have to use the blog to get at them in order, but at least they are all online.

#1 ● #2 ● #3 ● #4 ● #5 ● #6 ● #7 ● #8 ● #9 ● #10 ● #11 ● #12 ● #13 ● #14 ● #15 ● #16 ● #17 ● #18

If you want to read all of the issues on paper, check out the Emma Frost Ultimate Collection on Amazon.

In her “own words” in issue #1 - “Emma Frost, everybody’s favorite nobody.”

This is a great book for fans of the frosty White Queen, with delicious (yet simplistic) artwork and a nice plot. I think this is one of those series that if I had a complaint, it would be that the artwork is extremely erotic, and far too much so for a story set in Emma’s teen years.

After a cat fight at the dance:

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Final Runaways - Volume 3

Still want more issues of Runaways? The scripting/art team changes but Volume 3 is still great stuff!

Check out all 14 issues of Runaways Volume 3 on Marvel Unlimited. Remember, you can get these comics in digest format easily here: Runaways series on Amazon.com

 

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

More Runaways - Volume 2

I can’t get enough of this series. The artwork is stellar and the scripting is great (even if I was pissed about the “bad guy” in volume 1) -

Check out all 30 issues of Runaways Volume 2 on Marvel Unlimited. Remember, you can get these comics in digest format easily here: Runaways series on Amazon.com

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

The Marvel Rating System

It’s important to understand the history of comic book ratings if you are a parent and you want to share your love of comic books with your young ones.
First of all, Marvel withdrew from the Comics Code Authority (that we all grew up seeing on the front cover of comics), in 2001 and established its own system when the CCA refused approval of a comic book, X-Force #116 (click the link for the Marvel Unlimited issue).

Marvel implemented its own system, but the page hosted at Marvel.com no longer exists. The only details about it are on Wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Rating_System
For your convenience, I’ve copied the text from the Wikipedia entry:

The Marvel Rating System assigns each comic book one of the following ratings: ALL AGES - appropriate for all ages. A - Appropriate for age 9 and up. T+ TEENS AND UP - Appropriate for most readers 12 and up, parents are advised that they might want to read before or with younger children. PARENTAL ADVISORY - 15 years and older. Similar to T+ but featuring more mature themes and/or more graphic imagery. History [edit] The first Marvel Rating System, implemented in 2001, used the following categories: ALL AGES PG (Parental Guidance) PG+ PARENTAL ADVISORY/EXPLICIT CONTENT However, the Motion Picture Association of America complained, as it holds a trademark on such classifications as PG and PG-13 (see MPAA film rating system). Marvel thus switched to the following system (By changing the PG ratings): ALL AGES PSR (Parental Supervision Recommended) PSR+ PARENTAL ADVISORY/EXPLICIT CONTENT Beginning in June 2005, Marvel switched to yet another system: ALL AGES A Appropriate for age 9 and up. T+ SUGGESTED FOR TEEN AND UP PARENTAL ADVISORY MAX: EXPLICIT CONTENT

Marvel’s MAX imprint now contains most of the more “adult” violence, but you will certainly find sexual themes throughout almost all of the regular series. If in doubt, always read a comic book before sharing with the younger members of your family.

Until next time,
Excelsior!!!

Runaways Volume 1

Greetings comic book fans,

Just finished Runaways volume 1, and it is an amazing piece of comic book fiction. The perfect blend of new characters and concepts with old-school classics, even tossing in some biblical references. The artwork is flawless, you’ll fall in love with the characters and just be angry that it ended when it did.

Never mind that though, because there are two additional volumes of Runaways issues, thanks in part to the popularity of the trade paperbacks!

Because the Runaways issue order on Marvel Unlimited is off (way out of order if you click previous issue/next issue in many places), I’ve added the remaining issues in the first 18’s run below:

We’ve already covered:

Issue 1 - the discovery

Issue 2 - next steps

Issue 3 - the hidden room

Issue 4 - seeking the truth

Issue 5 - the big battle

Issue 6 - the founding of the Runaways

Continuing on:

Issue 7

Issue 8

Issue 9

Issue 10

Issue 11

Issue 12

WTH? These (13-16) issues aren’t on Marvel Unlimited and are $1.99 each, but worth the money. Also consider buying the collected works on Amazon. The Runaways series was collected into “digest” size paperbacks (5” x 7.8”) with Runaways Volume 1: Pride & Joy (Runaways Digest New Ed) collecting issues 1 through 6 for just $8.99, Runaways, Vol. 2: Teenage Wasteland containing issues 7 through 12, and Runaways Vol. 3: The Good Die Young closes the first volume of the series with issues 13 through 18. Amazon is my favorite place to buy comic paperbacks, but I hear great things about DCBS from my friend Nethead.

Issue 13

Issue 14

Issue 15

Issue 16

Free on Marvel Unlimited

Issue 17

Issue 18

By the way, did I mention that Cloak and Dagger are in the series? When I was a kid, I became a fan of them pretty quickly. They were a bizarre pair of runaways themselves, and they had been the victims of drug experiments forced on them that awakened mutant powers (actually, the mutant part is a retcon courtesy of Marvel). They were active on the War on Drugs and had crossovers with the New Mutants and the Power Pack kids. They also had some involvement with the X-Men over the years. Unfortunately, their first appearance in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #64 is not on Marvel Unlimited, but there are a ton of Clock and Dagger issues on MU. Check out Spider-Island: Cloak and Dagger, their X-Men: Nation X one shot (Clock and Dagger 2010) to their run in Marvel Knights (beginning with issue #7).

Age of Ultron - and "why does Marvel change artists on stories?"

Ok, seriously. I LOVE Bendis. His work is amazing.

That being said, why do we get Ultron starting out with masterpiece-level artwork only to see it handed off to Peterson?

FAIL!

Come on Marvel, same thing is going on with X-Men. Lots of rotating of artists in the X-Books and it is almost always crap.

STOP IT!.

Disappointed until next time,

Excelsior!!!

O M G - Runaways - A M A Z I N G

Ok, so you take Bryan K. Vaughan of LOST fame (writer, story editor and producer during seasons three through five) and a totally new set of unlikely heroes who discover their parents are part of a secret society called “The Pride” and witness them sacrifice a girl.

Craziness ensues. Also, this is a great reason to read my blog - the Marvel Unlimited forward and backward buttons will get you to the wrong issues. They really need to work on that.

The first story arc is six issues, originally Vaughan’s entire idea for the series. Later Joss Whedon took over for an arc and then another creative team took over for the remaining issues before cancellation at issue 18. Luckily, the trade paperbacks sold well and there are two additional volumes of issues, volume 2 has 30, volume 3 has 14.

• Issue one - the discovery
• Issue two - next steps
• Issue three - the hidden room
• Issue four - seeking the truth
• Issue five - the big battle
• Issue six - the founding of the Runaways

The artwork is flawless, click on the issues to jump straight in on Marvel Unlimited!

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Memorial Day Weekend - Comic Book Nerd Style!

Seriously, a three-day or four-day weekend and you aren’t going to spend at least some time reading comic books?

If you have limited time, check out any of these “Origins” posts, each a single issue and tending to have incredible artwork.

• Ant-Man & The Wasp
• Colossus
• Emma Frost
• Jean Grey
• Quicksilver & The Scarlet Witch
• Wolverine (or the full series here)

For some of my favorite stories that reference only a few issues each, check out these:

• Marvel’s Illuminati (and a list of crossover arcs in the Marvel Universe)
• Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run (with a link to the Netflix motion comic if you subscribe to Netflix)

Where do I find great reading lists? Well, there’s Google, Wikipedia, and my new friend Dave over at ComicBookHerald.com. You can read all about the coolness that is Dave’s site by reading about it on the blog here.

Finally, if you have the time, please invest those hours in one of the greatest crossover arcs ever: Avengers Disassembled. This blog post and the related What If? post (to be read AFTER the full crossover) are great comic book works that should entertain you for a few hours to say the least. I’ll tell you this for sure: it’s much more fun to read on Marvel Unlimited than to read summaries on Wikipedia. ☺

A brief word about the tag cloud on the right side of the blog. Click it to jump to lists of posts with the words in the tags section of the post. The more posts with a given tag, the larger that tag appears, which is why as of this posting, origin is larger than Phoenix which is larger than new mutants, etc.

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Update: these reading lists are a great thing to do with your time when Netflix crashes under the weight of all of us trying to watch Arrested Development season 4 at midnight 5/26/2013.

 

New in Stores This Week - Excalibur Comics

It’s a slow week in comic book land, so I want to highlight a local comic shop. From time to time on the blog, we’ll look at the best providers in local services. Remember, you want to keep these stores in business. I know I link to Amazon often, and for certain back issues I use the My Comic Shop website (based in Ft. Worth, Texas) to order, since they have a large inventory of older issues. That being said, if you are lucky enough to live within 30 minutes of a full-blown comic book store, do yourself and your community a favor and shop local!

For people in the Shreveport, Louisiana area, Excalibur Comics, Cards & Games offers all the latest comics, plus trade paperbacks, a wide array of hard cover volumes and really cool toys including tons of movie and comic book action figures. On a recent visit I drooled a little over the giant-sized vintage Millenium Falcon (only $175 in-store).

Excalibur has updated its website in recent months and now features great blog posts, new release lists and more. The Excalibur digital store is accessible at this link. The people at the shop are super cool and will pull comics for you if you just send an email to excaliburmail@bellsouth.net with a list of what you want.

Here’s a recent posting from the blog on the Excalibur website:

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What If? AvX #1

WHAT IF? AVX #1-4 (of 4)JIMMY PALMIOTTI (W) • JORGE MOLINA (A/C)The biggest event of 2012 is now the biggest miniseries of 2013! We all know what happened to the Avengers and the X-Men…but what if the story had gone differently? The one and only Jimmy Palmiotti brings his signature style to a mind-blowing reinterpretation of a key event in the history of the Marvel Universe. Featuring Magneto, Hope, and every Avenger and X-Man you can imagine!

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That sounds like an awesome miniseries. What If? has gotten into more and more cool stories in recent years. I suspect this will be a great little run!

Excalibur also has a video series on YouTube that talks about new releases. Check it out for great info!

You can add them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter too.

Do you have a favorite local comic shop? If so, please leave a comment and maybe it can be featured in a future blog.

 

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Avengers Disassembled Clickable List Coming Soon Now Done! Click Here to Read NOW!

Marvel Comics Events (Timeline and Illuminati)

Greetings comic fans,

There are so many crossover events and multiple book story arcs that it can be overwhelming to find links and figure out what’s going on and what order to read things in for the most satisfaction.With that being said, don’t limit yourself to strictly chronological order (time wise) since some of the best events were the more recent ones.

Wikipedia has a great page with a list of Marvel crossovers here.

I highly recommend the Illuminati series, as it puts some of the longer arcs into context as we discover that some leaders of the various communities of heroes (mutants, the Avengers, Atlantis, etc) have met for years secretly to be prepared for a Skrull invasion.

A little about the Illuminati books:

• Brian Michael Bendis is involved - one of today’s (maybe all-time?) writers.
• They span many events across the Marvel universe.
• Did I mention Bendis?

These issues can be purchased via Amazon as a collected edition New Avengers: Illuminati

Bendis can be followed on Twitter here.

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!

Origin - Wolverine's Story Goes On - SERIES TIME

Dearest comic book fans,

The Wolverine story continued in 2006’s series Wolverine Origins. This series continues to fill in the missing parts of Logan’s backstory.

Click here or the image below to begin this long form backstory masterpiece!

Until next time,

 

Excelsior!!!

Origin - Wolverine's Story Revealed!

Part 3 and we finally learn about the man that will become Logan AKA Wolverine.

Remember, you can buy this comic book and many more by visiting My Comic Shop online!

Until next time,

 

Excelsior!!!

Origin - Wolverine's Story Revealed!

Greetings comic book fans,

Thanks to the six-issue, instant-classic masterpiece known as Origin, the story of Wolverine’s early life in Canada (and by early, I mean 19th-century early!!!) was finally revealed to us all. When we first met Wolverine way back in the pages of the Incredible Hulk, all we knew was that this crazy guy in a mostly-yellow costume was a badass dude with metal blades that popped out of the back of his hands.

As you know, Wolverine had long since been unable to remember anything about his past life, and Origin blows the lid off!

You can start reading this classic tale on Marvel Unlimited by visiting this link to get to the first issue, and since the whole story is told in one series, you don’t need a list of links to navigate.

For those of you (like me) who want to hold this book in your hot little hands, click Wolverine: Originto purchase from Amazon. As of this posting, the price for paperback is only $11.65.

There are many other “origin” stories involving Wolverine, so you can look forward to more posts about the man with the adamantium skeleton in the future.

By the way, a version for kids is also available at Wolverine: An Origin Story (Marvel Origin Story)

Until next time,

 

Excelsior!!!

What SUCKS about Marvel Comics Unlimited

Dear readers,

There are some drawbacks to the MDCU platform at this point. It reminds me quite a bit of HBOGO and Amazon Prime videos when they came online. First, you can’t “subscribe” to a comic book series. You can add individual comics to your “library” and you can even have up to six comic books offline if you are using an iOS device, but this is not something that is really helpful.

Surely there needs to be a better way to organize comic books in libraries for users of the service. Marvel doesn’t want to discourage people from buying paper comics (or digital ones) monthly, so they delay digitizing of new issues. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is how sometimes a single issue will be missing from a long line of old issues. I noticed some in Uncanny X-Men that were missing, so you lose parts of story arcs. That sucks.

Another big drawback is one of the reasons for this blog: searching for comic books sucks. The web-based interface is better than the iOS app, but it’s still a real bitch to use.

As you can see, searching for “uncanny x-men 266” gives you a lot of results. Luckily for this particular search, the first one is the correct link. If you click it, you’ll get the following screen.

With many other searches, the results aren’t quite as useful. When searching for age of apocalypse, you get this:

As you can see, it’s not exactly easy to find the comic book issues you want to read. The only way to improve the search is to click the Comics option under the By Category heading on the left.

Although you will still have trade paperbacks and other content (like variant cover editions) that are not available on the online service.

Marvel - please consider adding a U symbol to the listings as shown below where the link contains any MDCU content.

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!