Hidden Gems

Every Marvel reading guide skews toward events, and the reason is structural, not critical. An event is easy to recommend. It has a start, a middle, an end, a famous cover, and a one-line pitch. You can sell Secret Wars in nine words.

The best Marvel comics are almost never events. They are long, quiet runs on titles nobody was watching, written by people who were left alone because the book did not matter enough to interfere with. These runs resist the one-line pitch, so guides skip them, so readers never find them.

This chapter does that work.

The great runs nobody starts with

Long books on titles that were never the flagship. This is where the craft is.

Excalibur, Chris Claremont and Alan Davis, 1988-1993

Excalibur (1988) #1-24, then Alan Davis solo on #42-67.

Claremont spent seventeen years making the X-Men a tragedy. Excalibur is where he proved he could do farce, and Davis is the only artist who could draw both in the same panel. The Cross-Time Caper, beginning in #12, throws the team through parallel worlds for a year, and the joke is that these are the same grief-stricken characters, just badly lit. Then Davis returned as writer and artist for #42-67 and did the rarest thing in comics: he closed every dangling plot a previous writer left him, on purpose, in #50.

Read it after: the Claremont era chapter, past Uncanny X-Men #227. If you like it, read next: Captain Britain by Moore and Davis.

X-Factor #71-89, Peter David and Larry Stroman, 1991-1993

Marvel gave Peter David the government mutant team as a leftover, and he turned it into the first Marvel book that treated superheroing as a job with a human resources department. Quicksilver, Polaris, Havok, Multiple Man, Strong Guy, Wolfsbane. The proof is #87: the entire issue is the team in mandatory therapy with Doc Samson, one character per scene, no fight, and it is the best-written X-comic of the decade. It also sets the voice - deadpan, fast, cruel to its own jokes - that David spent twenty years refining.

Read it after: the X-Tinction Agenda and Muir Island era chapter. If you like it, read next: X-Factor (2005), below.

X-Factor #1-50 and #200-262, Peter David, 2006-2013

David got the same characters back a decade later and rebuilt the book as a detective agency in Mutant Town after House of M. Start with Madrox #1-5 (2004), which is the real first chapter. The series ran #1-50, then renumbered to #200-262 for the legacy count, and it is one continuous 114-issue argument about a man who can copy himself and therefore never has to choose anything. Layla Miller, introduced as an event prop, becomes the best character David ever wrote.

Read it after: House of M. If you like it, read next: Alias, below.

Fantastic Four #570-611 and FF #1-23, Jonathan Hickman, 2009-2012

The only modern Marvel run built like a novel, with a plan visible from the first page. Hickman starts at #570 with Reed Richards deciding to solve everything, and spends three years showing what that costs. #587 kills the Human Torch and #588 is nearly silent. The two titles run in parallel from FF #1, not in sequence, and the interleaving is the point: one book is the family, one is the school they built. Read it as one 65-issue object, not as arcs.

Read it after: any time, but it lands harder after a Lee and Kirby sample. If you like it, read next: Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers.

Immortal Hulk #1-50, Al Ewing and Joe Bennett, 2018-2021

Fifty issues, no crossover damage, one idea taken all the way down. Ewing decided the Hulk is a horror character rather than an action one, and then refused to blink. #1 is a self-contained gas station murder story where the Hulk is the monster at the end, not the hero. From there the book becomes theology: what the gamma mutates are, where they go, who is on the other side. It is also the only Hulk run that makes every previous Hulk run better.

Read it after: any time. It explains itself. If you like it, read next: Ewing’s Guardians of the Galaxy, below.

Punisher MAX #1-60, Garth Ennis and various, 2004-2008

Ennis is the only writer who found something to say with the Punisher, and what he found is that Frank Castle is not a hero the reader should enjoy. Start with Born #1-4 (2003), the Vietnam prologue, then Punisher (2004) #1-60. No powers, no other Marvel characters, no continuity. The arcs work as crime novels: Irish gangs, Russian bioweapons, and in “The Slavers” a trafficking ring that Ennis refuses to make entertaining. Ennis leaves at #60 and the run has a real ending, which almost nothing at Marvel does.

Read it after: any time. It touches nothing. If you like it, read next: Alias, below, for the other adult MAX-adjacent book.

Daredevil #1-36 and #1-18, Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, 2011-2015

Everyone writes Daredevil as Frank Miller. Waid asked what happens if Matt Murdock decides to stop being miserable, and got a brighter, stranger book out of it, with radar sense drawn as sculpture rather than as wavy lines. The proof is Daredevil (2011) #7, a single issue in a blizzard where Matt gets a busload of blind children off a mountain. Then Waid slowly reveals the cheerfulness is a symptom. It continues in Daredevil (2014) #1-18.

Read it after: Born Again. If you like it, read next: Immortal Iron Fist, below.

Twelve issues or fewer

Complete books. Buy one, finish it in an evening, owe nothing to anything else.

Wolverine #1-4, Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, 1982

The four issues that invented the character everyone else has been writing since. Before this, Wolverine was a short angry man on a team. Miller sends him to Japan, gives him a code of honor he keeps failing, and lets him lose most of the fights. #1 opens with “I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn’t very nice”, which is the last time that line meant something rather than being a T-shirt. It is also the template for every Wolverine story since, so reading it retroactively explains forty years of imitation.

Read it after: the Dark Phoenix era chapter. If you like it, read next: Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #1-6 (1984).

The Vision #1-12, Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta, 2015-2016

A synthezoid builds himself a wife, two teenage children and a house in suburban Virginia, and the book is about how that goes. King writes it as literary horror with an omniscient narrator who tells you what will happen several issues before it does, and it happens anyway. #1 ends with the family smiling at the neighbors. #3 ends with a body in the yard. Twelve issues, no crossover, no reset, a real ending. The best superhero comic Marvel published in that decade and it is about lawn care and lying.

Read it after: any time. It assumes you know only that Vision is an android. If you like it, read next: Alias, below.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. #1-12, Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen, 2006

Ellis was asked for a team book and produced a sustained insult to team books. Five characters nobody was using, a helicarrier run by a suicidal maniac named Dirk Anger, and a plot that exists only to give Immonen the largest possible things to draw. It is officially not in continuity, which is what makes it useful: read it after any grim event to remember comics can be enjoyable. #1 establishes the whole method in twenty-two pages, and the book never develops beyond it, on purpose.

Read it after: any time. Ideally straight after House of M. If you like it, read next: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, below.

Marvel Boy #1-6, Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones, 2000

Six issues about a Kree teenager from a parallel universe who crash-lands on Earth, is tortured by a corporation, and declares war on the entire planet in retaliation. It is the most hostile comic Marvel has published under its own imprint, and the ideas per page rate is absurd: living currency, a bacterial ship, a nine-dimensional insect. Noh-Varr was later absorbed into Young Avengers and softened into a nice boy, which is a shame, because here he is frightening.

Read it after: any time. If you like it, read next: Ewing’s Guardians of the Galaxy, below.

Funny on purpose

Marvel is bad at comedy in the same way it is bad at endings: it rarely commits. These three commit.

She-Hulk #1-12 and #1-21, Dan Slott, 2004-2007

Jennifer Walters practices superhuman law, and Slott plays the premise completely straight, which is why it is funny. Precedent in this universe includes resurrection, time travel and alternate selves, so the firm keeps bound volumes of back issues as admissible court records. That single joke - continuity as case law - generates two years of stories no other Marvel book could tell. Slott ran She-Hulk (2004) #1-12, then She-Hulk (2005) #1-21.

Read it after: enough Avengers to find the paperwork funny. If you like it, read next: Soule’s She-Hulk (2014) #1-12.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1-8 and #1-50, Ryan North and Erica Henderson, 2015-2019

Doreen Green defeats Galactus, Kraven, Doctor Doom and Thanos, and beats almost none of them by punching. North’s rule is that the villain has a problem and Squirrel Girl solves the problem, which turns the standard superhero plot inside out without ever mocking it. Henderson draws a lead built like a person. The run is #1-8 (2015), then a relaunch continuing straight on as #1-50. Read the tiny text at the bottom of every page: North writes a second comic down there for four years.

Read it after: any time. Zero prerequisites, by design. If you like it, read next: Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson, #1-19 (2014).

Journey Into Mystery #622-645, Kieron Gillen, 2011-2012

Loki dies and returns as a child with no memory of being evil, and gets a book about whether a person can outrun their own story. It is very funny for twenty issues and then it is not funny at all. #645 is the ending: Kid Loki understands exactly what has been done to him, and what he must do about it, and the book kills its own lead. This runs through Fear Itself, which this syllabus skips, and it does not matter - Gillen uses the event as weather.

Read it after: Siege. If you like it, read next: Loki: Agent of Asgard #1-17 (2014), the sequel.

The cosmic shelf

Space Marvel has a reputation for being impenetrable. These two are not.

Silver Surfer #1-15 and #1-14, Dan Slott and Michael Allred, 2014-2016

Slott and Allred took the most self-pitying character Marvel owns and gave him a companion, a woman from Massachusetts named Dawn Greenwood, and then wrote Doctor Who. Allred’s flat pop-art panels make cosmic scale legible instead of oppressive. The proof is the Eisner-winning “Never After”, built out of fairy-tale logic. The run is Silver Surfer (2014) #1-15 then Silver Surfer (2016) #1-14, twenty-nine issues, with a real ending that resolves Dawn rather than the Surfer.

Read it after: Galactus in the Lee and Kirby era chapter. If you like it, read next: Nextwave, above.

Guardians of the Galaxy #1-18, Al Ewing, 2020-2021

Ewing writes cosmic Marvel as politics: what the Kree and Skrull merger actually means, what a god is when Olympus is a hostile state, who governs the wreckage after every previous cosmic event. #1-6 handles the fall of Olympus, and the back half becomes a book about an interstellar police force nobody elected. It has the best team dynamic in modern Marvel, because Ewing lets the characters have private lives.

Read it after: Annihilation. If you like it, read next: Immortal Hulk, above, by the same writer.

Books that only work if you have read enough

These four are commentary. Without the thing they comment on, they are merely good.

New Mutants #18-31, Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, 1984-1985

Sienkiewicz arrives on a teen team book and simply stops drawing like a superhero artist. #18-20, the Demon Bear Saga, is a horror comic: collage, scratchboard, negative space, a hospital sequence with no clean lines anywhere. It works because you have already read fifty issues of tidy X-Men art, so the break registers as wrongness rather than style. Claremont writes to it. Legion debuts later in the run and becomes half of Marvel’s future.

Read it after: the post-Dark Phoenix Claremont era chapter. If you like it, read next: Elektra: Assassin #1-8 (1986).

X-Force #116-129 and X-Statix #1-26, Peter Milligan and Michael Allred, 2001-2004

Milligan took the X-Force title, killed almost the entire cast in #116, and replaced them with a mutant team who exist for the ratings. Merchandising meetings, contract disputes, deaths scheduled for sweeps. It is the sharpest thing anyone has written about why we read these books, and it only lands if you have read enough of them to feel implicated. The title became X-Statix after #129 and continued to #26. Allred’s clean bright art makes the cruelty worse.

Read it after: Morrison’s New X-Men. If you like it, read next: Nextwave, above.

Uncanny X-Force #1-35, Rick Remender, 2010-2012

A black-ops X-team, and the whole run is one argument about whether killing to prevent evil is different from evil. #4 ends the first arc with the squad executing a child, and the remaining thirty-one issues are the bill arriving. Remender pays off Archangel, Fantomex and Psylocke, three characters who had been decorative for twenty years. You need enough X-history to know these people were once heroes. It ends properly, which is why nobody has continued it well.

Read it after: Age of Apocalypse and Messiah Complex. If you like it, read next: Immortal Iron Fist #1-16 (2006).

Alias #1-28, Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos, 2001-2004

Jessica Jones is a failed superhero running a private investigation practice, and Bendis uses the Marvel Universe as the thing his lead cannot escape. Most issues are conversations. Gaydos draws faces holding still. The run builds to #24-28, which reveals what the Purple Man did to her, without a single satisfying fight. This was Marvel’s first MAX title, and the reason it needs the imprint is tonal, not lurid.

Read it after: any Avengers era. The more you know, the better it reads. If you like it, read next: The Vision, above.

Also ruled on

Considered for a full entry, ruled on here instead. Nothing below is bad.

The five-book shortcut