whotony

whotony

stingermck

I would start at #1 honestly. The Stan Ditko/Romita years are so good. College Spidey with his great supporting cast is still the best.

majorjoe23

Trevor

I’ve read little Spider-Man in my life, have enjoyed most of what I’ve tried over the decades though. But my collecting mania takes over when Comixology has double dip sales, so I’ve accumulated pretty much every Spider-Man comic for pennies an issue. One of these years I’ll start a read-thru from issue one, skipping many but trying to hit most of the main continuity.

Bronkster

I quoted you twice because I agree with this gigantically.

whotony

Red Hood

Spider-Island. The Superior Spider-Man storyline is good. After that read Edge of Spider-Verse, Spider-Verse, Spider-Men (both mini-series), Spider-Geddon, the Donny Cates Venom book and Absolute Carnage, which just started last week.

Red Hood

This Wiki list has the recent storylines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...Man_storylines

whotony

PhantomStranger

You are encountering Marvel's new house style of the past decade - as cheap and disposable art as possible.

Red Hood

I don't think is the house style but apparently because he's fast and serviceable and had chemistry with Slott, Humberto Ramos was given the reigns to Spider-Man for far too long. I really dislike his art to the point that is distracting from the story.

whotony

DWilson

I'm old, old man, so I grew up on the original Stan Lee and John Romita run and all that followed. I finally left during the J Michael Stracynski disappointing (at least for me) run, which brought us Spider-Gods and the Norman Osborn-Gwen Stacy affair. About two years ago I started getting recent Comics trades from the library and sort of found myself lost without a compass. Spider-Man in particular has so many different series, spin-offs and re-boots. "Spider-Man Worldwide" isn't bad, since it involves the Peter Parker I know and a "Comics-logical" extension of his story (however, I don't know what the current status of the series is. I've enjoyed Bendis's run on the "Miles Morales" version, but I don't know what follows after the writer signed off the series.
About 50% of the art at The Big Two these days seems amateurish to me.

whotony

PhantomStranger

I'd recommend Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, which ran for about 20 issues. I believe it's available in trade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider...oves_Mary_Jane

joltman

Crushing Krisis has great guides on the order of the comics and where to read them. Here's his Spider-Man guide which looks to be pretty current.

whotony

Welp 2 and a half years later…….

I read a bunch of the Slott books of Amazing.
Never figured out why anything was after Amazing 700.
I think that’s when the Superior titled book started and read that.

Would love to know what happened to the numbering between 700 and 800.
Despite the links provided in here it’s still a huge puzzle that I haven’t figured out.

Got the itch to try and figure it out again so wish me luck.

joltman

The link I posted covers it, also there's this graphic from Marvel that explains how they arbitrarily decided legacy numbering

B5Erik

I'm not a fan of most of the modern era Spider-Man. I dropped out not too long after they decided to throw out issues 148-150 and say that the clone wasn't dead and incinerated, and was, in fact, alive AND the REAL Spider-Man! But, wait, that didn't go over so well, so they retconned that a couple years later and said, "Nevermind," Peter was the real Peter and Ben was the clone.

Yeah, it was during that era that I dropped out of buying comics for about 2 decades.

Since then I've bought some trades that I liked. Spider-Man The Next Chapter (Byrne and Romita Jr on the main Spider-Titles), Revenge of the Green Goblinm, and the first Straczynski Omnibus (although the Norman/Gwen affair stuff was horrific, the rest of the book is great). I love those books.

So, for me, it's ASM through most of the Bagley issues (although anything after the Ron Frenz era is a step down for me), and those books above.

whotony

That helps a ton.
Was that from Marvel’s site?

joltman

I just googled 'spider-man legacy numbering' because I remembered Marvel released those graphics for a bunch (all?) of their series at the start of their 'Marvel Legacy' push back in 2017.

teameck

It's no wonder comic books are (again) dying off.

I am not a regular buyer (not for about 20 years), but between two library systems, I was able to borrow Volumes 1-15 of Nick Spencer's Amazing Spider-Man run.

Naturally, Vol 15 was a short-loan and already overdue by the time I got to them, so I decided to jump in there and had almost no idea what the hell was going on.
To make it even more fun, from what I can guess, there was a "Sinister War" mini-series that ran in-between the ASM issues that would have been nice to know (two magical characters had scenes in ASM but the Sinister War TP I read next -- because God forbid there'd be anything in either TP telling me what to read first/when-- seemed to set up their side-story).

Writing is more intricate to match the current long-form serial storytelling everywhere-- and art is generally better than the Good Old Days (the printing certainly is)-- but the above is a major turn-off to someone who read 90% of Marvel and DC output from 1985-2000 (meaning I have some background on these characters). How can a new reader even decipher any of it?

I hate to be the old guy complaining about the new things, but not one single issue of any of those books would have grabbed me like the mid-'80s titles did. You got all or most of a story every issue. There was usually a little hook that had you looking for what came before and some of the time another hook to bring you back next month. But you had a beginning, middle, and end almost every issue.

Between two complete trade paperbacks, I feel I barely got half a story.

I know there are lots of titles out there-- and it is awesome because almost anyone should be able to find something "for them"-- but this is one of Marvel's flagship titles that should be getting new readers into the universe. It should be easier to follow-- or at least easier to know what to read and when.

The fact this thread exists tells us how screwed up things have gotten with relaunches and side-titles, and creator churn.

B5Erik

Continuity is a good thing. It is a writer's best friend. Sadly, most writers over the last 30 years think of it as a frienemy and try to avoid it.

Marvel and DC have totally fucked up in that regard, and lost a lot of readers along the way. AND in the process they've made it extremely difficult to get them back with all of the changes they make. The audience shrinks and shrinks as a result. Not enough kids are getting in to comics, and because the sales go down they become lower and lower profile so fewer kids ever even see a comic book on a rack somewhere anymore.

For me, the last straw was Marvel undoing ASM 149-150. Those issues were definitive and concrete. Changing that sent a big signal to writers working for them at the time and in the future - nothing is sacred, everything can be changed. And when you can change key events to where the old issues become meaningless? The current issues are meaningless. Why get invested in the storyline? They'll just change it in 5 or 10 years. Or reboot it and say that it never happened. There are no stakes anymore, and haven't been for a long time. It's all smoke and mirrors. Stan was opposed to that line of thinking, but he hasn't been in charge since the early 70's. I don't think any of the Editors In Chief from the 70's would have been OK with what they did in the 90's. Hell, as much as I don't like the job he did, I don't think Jim Shooter would have been OK with it.

I'm a big fan of continuity. What we've seen over the last 30 years just proves that maintaining continuity is better than the alternative.

PhantomStranger

I understand why companies like Marvel got sick of established continuity but they should have just set major changes in alternate continuities instead of rewriting the past.