The Renaissance

Marvel almost died in 1996. In 2000 it hired Joe Quesada as editor-in-chief, put Bill Jemas in charge of publishing, dropped the Comics Code, and started handing flagship books to writers who had never worked for it. Four years later the line is the best it has been since 1980, and the modern Marvel house style exists.

Why you are reading this era

Everything you associate with twenty-first century Marvel is invented here. The decompressed six-issue arc built for a trade paperback. The photo-real widescreen blockbuster. The prestige crime book with a mature-readers label. The idea that a superhero comic can be about celebrity, or war crimes, or a woman with a drinking problem and a private investigator’s license.

Two decisions drive it. Jemas and Quesada let writers finish their stories without editorial rescue, which is why this chapter holds runs and not fragments. And they launched the Ultimate line, a separate continuity with no back issues, which took the pressure off the main universe to be an entry point. The main universe got to be strange instead.

For the X-Men reader this is the important chapter. Grant Morrison’s New X-Men #114-154 is the most consequential X-Men run since Chris Claremont left, and it is the one every later writer argues with. It kills sixteen million mutants in its second issue, makes Emma Frost a lead, gives Cyclops a marriage that is failing, and reframes mutants as a culture rather than a persecuted minority with matching costumes. Morrison also inflates the mutant population into the millions, which Marvel spends 2005 violently undoing.

Elsewhere, Brian Michael Bendis arrives and takes over the next fifteen years of Marvel, with Daredevil and Alias. Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch write the comic Marvel Studios later films almost shot for shot. The threads pay off fast: Avengers Disassembled lands in late 2004 and begins the event decade, and Astonishing X-Men #1 picks up Morrison’s last page.

The reading list

The tracks barely touch this era, which is unusual. Read Track A as one block, then Track C, then dip into the rest. Track F can wait forever.

Track A: Mutant

Three things to watch for. Secondary mutation, introduced in #114, lets an established mutant grow a second power with no origin story: Emma Frost gets her diamond form, Beast turns feline. Quentin Quire, in #134, is a gifted student who reads too much theory and starts the Riot at Xavier’s in #134-138, the best arc Morrison writes here. Here Comes Tomorrow, #151-154, jumps 150 years forward to argue that Cyclops choosing to live is the whole point.

On the Uncanny skips. Casey and Austen wrote the second X-Men book while Morrison rebuilt the first, and neither acknowledged the other properly. Austen’s is the run that made Nightcrawler a bred fake messiah. Lose nothing.

X-Force #116 is a bait and switch. Milligan and Allred killed the existing team in one issue and replaced it with a corporate-managed mutant celebrity squad who take contracts for the ratings, sell merchandise, and die often. It renames itself X-Statix after #129. Funny, cruel, beautifully drawn, and the sharpest thing Marvel published this decade about fame.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Busiek finishes with The Kang Dynasty, #41-55 plus #56, in which Kang conquers Earth and it sticks for months. Johns follows for #57-76. Then the volume stops: Avengers #500-503 and Avengers Finale open the next era, and this chapter closes pointing at them. Peter David’s Captain Marvel is the track’s best-kept secret, a cosmic book about a man whose powers give him full awareness of the universe and destroy his mind. Dan Jurgens writes most of Thor vol 2, which ends at #85 in 2004 when Oeming burns Asgard down.

Track C: Street level

Alias #1-28 launched Marvel’s MAX imprint in 2001. Jessica Jones is a failed superhero running a one-woman detective agency in the same New York as the Avengers, and Michael Gaydos draws her as a person rather than a pose. Pinned hidden gem. The last arc explains why she quit, and it is worse than you expect.

Garth Ennis is on this track twice. Punisher vol 5 #1-12, Welcome Back Frank, is the funny one, drawn by Steve Dillon, and it is where Frank Castle became readable again. Born #1-4 is a Vietnam story that reframes him as something other than a grieving father. Punisher MAX #1-60 then drops the Marvel Universe entirely and writes a war-crimes novel with a gun in it. Pinned hidden gem. Start with Born.

Track D: Spider-Man

J. Michael Straczynski takes Amazing Spider-Man with vol 2 #30 in 2001 and stays until #545 in 2007, the numbering reverting to #500 in December 2003. The verdict is Optional, not Required: the run’s second half does real damage and the main thread does not need it. The first half is good. Coming Home, #30-35, introduces Morlun and the idea that Peter’s powers are totemic rather than radioactive, and Aunt May finally learns the secret. The arc is titled Coming Home, after #31. Conversations with a Vampire is not a Marvel title for it.

Amazing Spider-Man vol 2 #36 has no plot. It is Marvel’s response to September 11, published three months after, with Doctor Doom crying in the rubble. It is not a good comic and it is an important object. Read it once.

Track E: Fantastic Four and the cosmic frontier

Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo take a book nobody was reading and make it about a family led by the smartest and least sensible man alive. Unthinkable is the cruelest Doctor Doom story ever printed: he stops pretending to be a scientist, damns a woman who loved him for power, and goes after Franklin and Valeria Richards. The numbering flips from #70 to #500 mid-arc.

Track F: Solo and standalone

The Ultimate line is a separate continuity. It shares no history with the main universe and never crosses over, so treat the whole imprint as optional.

Two earn a detour anyway. Ultimate Spider-Man #1-111 is the longest sustained Spider-Man story anyone has told and the best: Bendis and Mark Bagley take the eleven-page origin, stretch it to seven issues, then keep going for a hundred more with no reboot. If you want to start Marvel with Spider-Man, start here instead of 1963. The Ultimates #1-13 is the other, and its influence is out of proportion to its quality.

Truth: Red, White & Black #1-7 is about the 300 Black soldiers the super-soldier serum was tested on before Steve Rogers got it. Isaiah Bradley survives it brain-damaged. Marvel never walked it back, and it now sits inside Captain America’s canon permanently.

Runaways #1-18 is six teenagers discovering their parents are a cabal of supervillains. Eighteen self-contained issues with an ending. Give it to someone who says they do not like superheroes.

Cross-book checkpoints

Characters introduced

Retcon notes

Adaptation notes

Checkpoint