Two years down…

Happy anniversary. To me. On April 6, 2019, I started my first blog. This. The goal was to have a place where I could record my notes on my read-through of the Marvel Universe in case anybody wanted to follow along.

One year ago today, I wrote this post to reflect on the first year of Coke & Comics. That’s where we were. Let’s see where we’ve gotten to.

In the first year, we covered the first 116 Marvel stories, from Fantastic Four #1, through Journey Into Mystery #98. I just published a post about the 298th Marvel story in our Reading order, the vastly underrated battle between Spider-Man and the Beetle in Amazing Spider-Man #21, from November 1964. Which means we’ve covered just over a year’s worth of stories in the last year. We may need to pick up the pace, as the number of titles will eventually explode.

More and more people seem to be finding and reading, which is cool. A year ago, I was happy to get 50 views in a day. Now I break 200 pretty consistently and often do far better. Over 600 on Saturday. Woot.

If anybody reading ever happens to notice any Amazon links, you are entirely free to click them, and then, maybe, buy something. Like a television. Or a washing machine. Did you know Amazon sold washing machines? They do.

Marvel has slowed down on the introducing big name characters. We met pretty much all the major ones in that first year of our reading. In the last year, they have reintroduced Captain America, and we met Daredevil. We’ve also met a handful of villains I expect might eventually turn their lives around and do worthwhile things. Black Widow; Hawkeye; Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. Wonder Man seemed to have potential; too bad he died.

You can see a list of all the characters we’ve met in Our Cast So Far.

Once we had introduced all the main Golden Age characters, I did a deep dive into Marvels #1. The plan is to do the same for each issue of that series. Once we reach the big wedding coming up, we’ll read Marvels #2. We’ll read Marvels #3 if Earth survives a devourer of worlds.

If you want to see my opinion of the 50 best stories we’ve covered so far, check out the Best we’ve read.

I have some designs to do other things with this blog besides just cataloguing my Marvel reading. I love science fiction cinema, and want to talk more about that one of these days.

I have been loving the new Marvel series on Disney+. I made a post about Wandavision, which is a very deep dive into the histories of Wanda and Vision in the comics, focusing on their origins, romance, and other stories which seemed to be direct inspirations on the show. I am planning a similar post for Falcon & Winter Soldier I hope to release soon after the show finishes. It will be a deep dive into the comic book stories of Falcon and Winter Soldier, as well as all the times somebody has needed to take up the mantle of Captain America from Steve Rogers.

The other thing I am starting is a Reading great comics series, where I just talk at length about some of my all-time favorite comics, focusing on ones that won’t come up as part of the Marvel Universe reading. There are currently three posts in the series: Sandman #19, Astro City #1, and NFL Superpro #4. The publication date on that last one might be worth paying attention to.

Planned entries include: Saga of the Swamp Thing #21, Tick #3, and Zot! #30.

Let me end with some thanks. Thank you to all the sites listed in the Resources page; I couldn’t do this without the contributions of many dedicated comics fans, especially Markus Müller for the consistently invaluable Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators, and all the scholars of the Grand Comics Database.

Thanks to Brian Cronin of CBR, whose columns often provide the answers I am looking for, and who has helped steer many a reader to my site.

Thanks to my Mother, for being my editor and most loyal reader.

And thanks to everybody for reading along. I couldn’t do this without you.

Check back a year from now for another anniversary post. Actually, maybe check in sooner than that too. We’ll have a brand new post up tomorrow. Why don’t you join us then and thrill as the Terrible Trio scheme to defeat Human Torch and the Thing in a… I’m sorry, I can’t even feign enthusiasm for another mediocre Human Torch story. Maybe come back Thursday for the Dr. Strange story instead. That one’ll be cool. And it will be story #300 as well! Another reason to celebrate!

Excelsior!