Welcome back. Happy new year. Happy new decade.
This blog is primarily dedicated to reading Marvel’s entire comic book universe, starting in 1961 with Fantastic Four #1.
The menu can direct you to some of the key posts to help understand this venture, but it’s worth pausing to reacquaint ourselves.
Perhaps most important page is the Resources page. This attempts to enumerate the many websites upon which I depend to gain enough information about comic books to even attempt such a feat as this blog.
I have a post entitled Why Read the Marvel Universe?, which is a good place to begin. It attempts to explain what the Marvel Universe means to me and why I think this project is worth doing.
As we meet a new significant character, I update Our Cast So Far.
If you want to get right to the meat of it, the Reading Order post contains links to every comic we’ve discussed, and hints about what’s coming next.
We begin in 1961, and I hope to get into the 1980s one day. Anything pre-1961 or post-1991 is certainly out of the scope of this blog, but I occasionally find comics from these eras worth touching on as they relate to other comics. For example, Johnny Storm becomes the modern Human Torch in 1961, but occasionally peeking at the adventures of the original Human Torch gives some context. Sub-Mariner is a character who debuted in 1939, but returned after a 7-year hiatus to have more adventures in the modern Marvel Universe. The “PRELUDE” posts cover these pre-1961 stories I find relevant. If we look ahead at any post-1991 comics, we label them “POSTLUDE”, as with our peek at the 1993 comic, Marvels #0, which gives a new perspective on the origin of the original Human Torch.
We paused this effort just about a month ago, with Tales of Suspense #45, our 89th entry, featuring Iron Man in battle with Jack Frost.
I took some personal time to travel for the holidays and to be extremely jet-lagged upon my return to work. And with the year and decade wrapping up, I made my first blog posts on other topics, discussing my favorite comics of the decade, as well as my take on the decade’s best science fiction films.
But now I’m ready to get back to work. So please join me as we look in on the 90th story from the Marvel Universe, in which the Amazing Spider-Man meets the Sandman!
