Hello,

I am looking at starting to read comics and was wondering if people had some suggestions of good trade paperbacks to pick up. I've done some reading of comics and know a fair amount about the Marvel Universe because my dad is a big comic book guy. Some of the stuff I have read before is World War Hulk, Kingdom Come and The Infinity Gauntlet.

What paperbacks would people suggest that are "classics" or very important to read regarding the marvel universe?

Some characters/teams that I like:

Avengers
Spider-Man
Thor
Fantastic Four
Thanos


I prefer Marvel but do like some DC stuff as well, mainly Batman and the JLA.

Thanks in advance!

Well I suggest reading the story that gave rise to the Heroclix event that WK is running.

CATACLYSM kick starts the first set of dominos that lead directly to NO MAN'S LAND which is a HUGE story arc that should take about a weekend to finish if your up to reading 6-8 hours a day

No Man's Land is my favorite Batman event ever. Not every issue is solid gold or anything, but I love the story, the side plots, and the small characters and nobodies who get featured. It's a great Gotham story.

Fantastic Four #1 to around 70 are classic comics and are still awesome! They have been reprinted so they can be found.

Silver Surfer is pretty good if you like the cosmic stuff.

J. Michael Strzynski's Thor stuff was great but that is very recent stuff.

A good, relatively recent JLA trade is the "Lightning Saga."

It's actually a crossover between the Justice League, Justice Society, and Legion of Super-Heroes, and features the ever-lovable schizophrenic Starman Thom Kallor.

And if I could only suggest one era of the JLA to collect, it's the Giffen/DeMatteis JLI era that's easily found in trade. Some of the jokes are dated (it was written twenty years ago), but it's still classy fun and makes the Booster Gold/Blue Beetle buddy comedy thing work well. This is also the era that developed Guy Gardner as a jerk and Martian Manhunter as a cookie eater. It's superhero comedy fool's gold, but in a good way IMHO.

I'd also list JLI as my favorite league era, although I'd point a new DC reader to Morrison's JLA run. It has been collected and is purely epic. The other DC books, I'd recommend starting with are Kingdom Come and The Watchmen.

On the Marvel side...I'd look at the Ultimate books: The Ultimates, Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Fantastic Four, etc..