Best Of Silver Age, Marvel Unlimited Edition

December 20, 2014 2:33 PM

Looking for Marvel Unlimited Titles, Snowflakes Inside

So my boyfriend recently got me a Marvel Unlimited membership, which is amazing. I know this question was asked previously, but I've actually read/am aware of a lot of the recommended titles and I'm looking to go a little more old school. I know I referenced Silver Age, but I'm really looking for anything before the 2000s.

I'm actually in a serious X Men rabbit hole, I just read X-Men season one and loved it, and others on my list are:

Children of the Atom
The Brood Saga (X-Men 161)- Apparently Carol Danvers makes an appearance and Binary sounds super cool.
Magik 1-4

I'm basically subscribed to all of the female fronted Marvel titles and loving all of them- She Hulk is my favorite and I've read Dan Slott's '04 run. I also like Hawkeye. I actually wasn't wild about Alias.

I'm not looking for just female fronted titles, but it would be a plus. I'm basically looking for really worthwhile hidden gems in more old school comics.

posted by KernalM to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

I'm not familiar with what all is included in a Marvel Unlimited subscription, so my recommendations may be off the mark...

First I want to say that there weren't many female creators in comics prior to our current era (and still men outnumber women by quite a bit at the Big Two). As you dig back in Marvel's back catalog, attitudes toward women characters will be quite diverse, with some comics reading as really retro. For instance, although most comics fans consider Lee & Kirby's Fantastic Four to be one of the all-time great series, Lee's writing of Invisible Woman (heck, she was Invisible Girl throughout the series!) was pretty... bad...

So, let me try some oddballs to see what you might like. Since this thing is called "Unlimited" I guess you risk nothing by trying things out!

Ann Nocenti is a very interesting creator both in and outside of comics. Her bio on Wikipedia is worth a read. She was a writer on Daredevil for a fairly long period and I think helped create some of its current urban noir aesthetic. She also created the somewhat obscure X-Men character Longshot in a limited series with the same name.

Louise Simonson and June Brigman created Power Pack in the 80s. They crossed over with the X-Men periodically (somewhere in the very early 200s, Wolverine met the Power Pack, if memory serves). The Power Pack were four children with super powers granted by an alien being.

I really like the current She Hulk series, too. I was just thinking today about how I could dig out the second She Hulk series, which inspired the Slott and Soule runs. The second She Hulk series was John Byrne basically reinventing the character in the late 80s and creating the fourth-wall-breaking, bad-villain-hosting, comedy style that the series still employs. Byrne can occasionally be kinda retro in his attitudes, too, but I don't remember much too objectionable about this series outside of the "nude" cover. It is a pretty funny and silly run overall.

Byrne's run on Fantastic Four, which came before his run on She Hulk is strong, too. In fact, I believe it was Byrne who changed the character from Invisible Girl to Invisible Woman.

I think there is a fair amount of interesting Spider-Man to find, although there is so much of it, it may be hard to know where to start. Also, my favorite nostalgic Marvel title is West Coast Avengers. I don't know how it holds up to modern sensibilities, but it was one of my favorites back when you bought comics off a magazine shelf at the drugstore!

Do you have access to Epic titles? I imagine the rights to those are dicey, given that some of them were creator-owned... Anyway, there were lots of creative Epic titles. One that I liked was Alien Legion.

Also, that reminds me, some of the New Universe titles were pretty interesting, too. My sister and I followed Psi Force for a really long time.
posted by Slothrop at 3:15 PM on December 20, 2014

Response by poster: Wow I'm really looking forward to checking some of those titles out.

I probably should've clarified, I don't have high hopes in terms of progressive values/diversity of staff, but there seems to have been a fair amount of interesting female characters who've been around for awhile, and that's what I meant by female fronted.
posted by KernalM at 3:38 PM on December 20, 2014

Marvel themselves tried to collect some of the better than average old stories in some Women of Marvel collections (bibliography of original issues in the link). They're not unproblematic, but maybe sometimes you don't have to do the 're-imagining'/'resistant reading' thing with them.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 3:56 PM on December 20, 2014

Oh, this Women of Marvel Omnibus seems to have a different selection of similar titles.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 4:13 PM on December 20, 2014

Since you are liking X-Men-type stuff, I can make a few recommendations there. I used to have the complete run of New Mutants, which Chris Claremont wrote with a rotating cast of artists. The series really started to pick up with issue 21 in my opinion. It started to go downhill somewhere in the latter issues (like 80+ maybe) as it, along with most Marvel titles entered a dark period in the early 1990s.

Also, I noticed in the other thread you linked that people recommended Whedon's X-Men, which I do like. I also would recommend Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, which was in the early 2000's.

One thing I have never read, but certainly would check out if I had Marvel Unlimited, would be The Micronauts. Michael Golden provided lots of the art and his work is super sharp. Bill Mantlo was the writer and he was pretty creative and socially aware. His Wikipedia page is worth a read, as well; he's had a rather sad history.
posted by Slothrop at 3:26 AM on December 21, 2014

This is more of a recommendation of a recommender than a direct recommendation, but given that you're digging into X-Men I have to recommend Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. It's a podcast that's going through all of the X-Men canon more or less chronologically and they're great about telling you what you're probably safe to skip and what arcs are particularly well done.
posted by jdherg at 12:29 PM on December 22, 2014