Making the invisible really freaking obvious.

Saturday was Free Comic Book Day. It was also the day I had a sadly revealing conversation that got me thinking—a lot—about the state of the culture I so enjoy. Also grammar. Bear with me here.

I’ve mentioned Flatmate, my longtime friend and house-buddy. (We decided when we moved in together that we couldn’t be roommates because we didn’t share a bedroom and, because we watched way too much British TV, “flatmate” sounded better than “housemate” or any variant thereof.) I have not mentioned what she does for a living. Flatmate is a speech and language pathologist. Basically, if your kid has a speech impediment or a speech delay, trouble pronouncing certain sounds or having certain conversations or just talking at all, you’re probably going to take the kid to someone like her. She works with a lot of kids who are on the autism spectrum and a fair number of kids who aren’t. And because she lives with me and we are both massive geeks who encourage each other in geekery, she’s started using comic books in her clinical practice.

It works really, really well.

Most speech therapy relies on traditional therapeutic tools like flashcards to get kids to practice saying certain words and sounds over and over. That’s okay for a while, but when you’re trying to get a five-year-old to say the “f” sound, you can only show him so many pictures of fish before he gets bored. So Flatmate recently pulled one of my Captain America collections out of her tote bag, turned to a page that didn’t have anything too objectionable on it, and pointed at a certain winged superhero.

“See him?” she asked her kid. “His name is the Falcon!”

“Falcon!” the kid repeated, excitedly. And suddenly he was way more interested in saying his Fs.

Flatmate does this kind of thing a lot. She’ll use popular cartoon characters, movies, and the like to get kids to do what would otherwise be boring, repetitive linguistic tasks that most of us learn to do by instinct as we’re growing up. Any comic retailer can tell you that comics are good for developing brains—good for visual and spatial processing, verbal development, the whole shebang. It’s not news to geeks, but it’s just starting to penetrate practices like speech therapy, largely thanks to geeky therapists like Flatmate, who has superhero Mr. Potato Heads in her office right next to her TARDIS cookie jar.

Thor, Potato of Thunder.

Anyway, because last Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, Flatmate and I roamed from local comic shop to local comic shop, trying to collect as many kid-friendly comics as we could for her to use on her kiddos (because Ed Brubaker comics, while useful in a pinch, really are not appropriate for five-year-olds, and there were only so many pages that contained the Falcon and not anything that would freak out a little kid). We picked up most of the appropriate free comics, but Flatmate was most interested in graphic novels and books with sturdy bindings that could take a lot of abuse. I pointed her at youngster-friendly comic lines like Marvel Adventures, Tiny Titans, and so on, and I mostly wandered around the store looking at the grown-up stuff while she sorted through the enormous pile. I bought myself a Winter Soldier bobblehead that makes me smile every time I give him a cognitive recalibration—er, a bop on the noggin.

I don't normally like bobbleheads,
but he's just so cute and disturbing!

But on the way back from the last shop, Flatmate said something revealing.

“I wish there were more girls in these comics.”

I was familiar with the lament, and gladly joined in. Yeah, it’s a crime that there aren’t more strong, well-developed female characters in comics; yeah, it sucks that the gender ratios among creators and creations are so insanely out of whack; yeah, it’s awful that comicdom so often presents itself as hostile to anyone without a Y chromosome. I was just getting a good rant going when she interrupted:

“I’m not talking about that.”

Then what, pray tell, was she talking about? I wondered.

“I’m talking about pronouns.”

As it turned out, because Flatmate so often works with young children and kids whose verbal skills lag seriously behind those of their same-age peers, she often uses her geeky books as part of therapy with kids who can’t actually read. So one of her favorite exercises is to use a series of pictures—including those in a comic—and ask the kid, “What is [name of popular character] doing here?”  The kid then replies, “He/She/It is …” This gives the kid practice at connecting subjects and verbs, creating grammatical sentences, and, yes, using pronouns. But because most of the patients Flatmate sees are boys, she fills her office with superhero and Pixar properties that appeal to little autistic boys … and therein lies the problem.

“I’ve got some great Avengers books,” Flatmate said, “and Toy Story, and Monsters Inc. … but aside from Boo and Black Widow, who don’t show up all that often, there really aren’t any girls in these books. I want to find something that will give the kids practice at saying ‘she’ and ‘her’.”

This picture is only here because it's awesome. Carry on.

Think about that for a second. We spent half a day collecting the very best pop-culture detritus … and we couldn’t come up with enough female characters to teach a male toddler that feminine pronouns exist. Not that girls can be just as strong and competent as boys, or that rigid gender roles do no one any good … I’m talking about teaching kids that the English language contains the pronoun “she”.

We finally found a Hello Kitty book. God knows whether Flatmate’s patients—and remember, spectrum-diagnosed boys far outnumber spectrum-diagnosed girls—will take to it. Iron Man and Captain America are pretty much a lock. Hello Kitty, maybe not. But for now, the fate of the feminine pronoun rests upon a Japanese cartoon cat.

This isn’t a radical feminist agenda. Flatmate’s not part of the wild and crazy liberal Left you hear about on conservative talk radio. She’s trying to teach small children to use basic parts of speech, and she’s really quite innovative about it … but she’s working with the product of a culture that, more often than not, doesn’t admit that girls exist outside of highly girl-centric media like My Little Pony. Girls looking at girl books will still learn to say “he” and “him”, if only because Disney princesses usually end up with Disney princes, and they’re a lot more likely to read boy books than boys are to read girl books anyway (because the Avengers are awesome no matter what your chromosomes look like). Boys looking exclusively at boy books, however, will not learn to say “she” and “her” because Iron Man and Captain America tend to fly solo, at least in toddler-level stories.

Is there a better indication that this culture is fundamentally FUBAR?

Never mind the high-minded attempts to get more complex female characters into pop culture aimed at grownups. I want to see some girls in the toddler market. I want to see boy books that have girls in them. Girls who do things. Girls who show up in a significant percentage of the pictures. Girls involved in the action, whatever it is. I want to see boy books that acknowledge the existence of girls in the same way that girl books acknowledge the existence of boys. I want Flatmate to be able to point at an illustration in a boy book and, at some point, ask a kiddo, “What is she doing?”

Girl books are allowed to say “he”. It’s long past time boy books learned to say “she.”

Stories are the human operating system. What does it say that our operating system, at its most basic level, denies the very existence of half the units using it? There’s a theory in linguistics that holds that ideas that cannot be expressed in words cannot, in most cases, be clearly thought. If you can’t say it, you (almost) can’t think it. It’s certainly very hard work to think it. Not something most people do without a really good reason.

We’re starting an awful lot of humans out in life without the basic tools to think about half the human population. Is it any wonder our culture treats women the way it does if, for the first few years of our lives, half of us don’t happen to learn that women (other than the ones we personally know) exist?

Come on, pop culture. The least you can do is use all the damn pronouns. 

And now, a photo of Winter Soldier Bobble with a tiny
plastic Groot on his head. You are welcome.

Winter Soldier Blogathon, Day 5: What to Read, Where to Start, and Why to Care

Wow, you made it through! Or you skipped here. Either way’s fine by me. This entry is designed to be a guide to the Winter Soldier’s appearances in the comics. I’ll start with a chronological rundown of the graphic novels in rough order of publication, and then do a short list of the best jumping-on points for this character. I’ll conclude with one last bit of fannish gushing on why you should care about this character, and a little bit of what he means to me.

Be warned—there’s a lot of stuff to cover. Here’s a picture of my personal collection of Winter Soldier graphic novels, in order:

Yes, I can lift the entire stack at once. Barely.

Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff. But I’ll guide you through it. And as always, I recommend used booksellers like abebooks.com and Powell’s Books over paying full price at new-book retailers. Onward!

WHAT TO READ:

What to read: This.

For once, Marvel has made your job easy. If you want to get started on the world of Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier and you don’t want to do any hunting, there’s a terrific new hardcover edition of the complete Winter Soldier storyline, put out just in time for the movie. It’s $34.99, and worth every penny. (If that seems pricey for one graphic novel, note that it’s got thirteen issues in it—the equivalent of two trade paperbacks, either of which would retail for about $20. So even in hardcover, it’s a bit of a cost savings.) There’s one issue missing from this book, but it was a one-off “event story” that took place in an alternate universe and had absolutely nothing to do with the Winter Soldier storyline, which I assume is why it’s been omitted. The book does not suffer in its absence. Don’t worry about it.

If you’d rather go the cheaper route, Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Winter Soldier storyline are available in used paperback form, though they appear to be out of print.

If you like that story and want to keep reading, here’s a short rundown of later volumes in the series:

3 and 4. Red Menace: Crossbones returns, and Steve and Bucky end up in London.

5. Civil War. Cap joins the resistance to the Superhuman Registration Act. Bucky does some skullduggery for Nick Fury. Contains Winter Soldier: Winter Kills, a beautiful one-shot special about how Bucky spends his Christmas. Hint: it involves violence and awkward team-ups with teen superheroes.

6, 7, and 8. The Death of Captain America, vols. 1-3 (The Death of Captain America / The Burden of Dreams / The Man Who Bought America). This three-volume saga covers it all, from Steve’s assassination to the hunt for his killers to Bucky’s transition to life as the new Captain America. Some of the knottiest plotting in all of Ed Brubaker’s run. I cannot summarize this, but if you really like twisty plots and a million reversals per chapter, this is going to be your crack.

9. The Man With No Face. Bucky-Cap faces the vengeful survivor of one of his nastiest Winter Soldier missions. Guest-starring the Sub-Mariner, who adds a lot of comic relief.

Namor reacts to Bucky and Natasha having a moment. Thanks a lot, Namor.

10. Road to Reborn. A more or less random collection of stories, collecting a series of clues leading up to …

11. Captain America: Reborn. Guess what? Steve’s not actually dead! There’s time travel and mad science and oh so much crazy. It’s a fun story, though.

12. Two Americas. Steve insists that Bucky keep the Captain America identity, so Bucky and the Falcon go hunt down an insane doppelganger of Steve Rogers who escaped during a previous story. Imagine Bucky and the Falcon fighting domestic terrorists in rural Idaho. Yeah, it’s like that.

13. No Escape. Baron Zemo, the grandson of the World War II villain who nearly killed Cap and Bucky at the end of the war, decides to avenge his grandfather’s honor and kill Bucky-Cap off. He eventually settles for second prize …

14. The Trial of Captain America. Once Zemo has exposed Bucky’s past as the Winter Soldier, Bucky goes on trial for his decades of Cold War crimes. Meanwhile, the Red Skull’s daughter, Sin, proclaims herself the new Red Skull and goes on a rampage. Bucky must decide whether being Captain America means a) going along with due process or b) stopping a supervillain from blowing up the Statue of Liberty. Did I mention Bucky has poor impulse control?

15. Prisoner of War. Bucky gets off on the U.S. charges, but the Russians demand extradition. Bucky goes to the gulag and gets thrown into a series of cage matches, which turn out to have a motive even more sinister than bad guys just wanting to watch an American superhero fight for his life. The Winter Soldier’s legacy just won’t leave Bucky alone. Psychological games ensue. Meanwhile, Steve and Natasha try to prove Bucky’s innocence. Espionage hijinks ensue.

16. Captain America and Bucky: The Life Story of Bucky Barnes. After Bucky “died” during the not-very-good Fear Itself crossover, the monthly Captain America comic became Captain America and Bucky for a while. The first storyline, “The Life Story of Bucky Barnes”, presents a series of untold tales from Bucky’s past—including his childhood before he met Steve Rogers, a couple of wartime adventures, and a Winter Soldier tale focusing on his romance with the Black Widow. I have not included the next volume of Captain America and Bucky in this list because Bucky Barnes isn’t actually in it. Long story. After that the title became Captain America and Hawkeye, and then fizzled out. This volume is the only one relevant to this timeline.

17. Winter Soldier: The Longest Winter. With Steve finally back in the Captain America costume (and a new Captain America monthly title), Bucky sets off to clean up a few Winter Soldier-related messes. Natasha comes along for the fun and because somebody has to stop Bucky from leading with his face. Romance and a machine-gun-toting gorilla ensue. Also, Bucky meets Doctor Doom and they get along as well as you’d expect. Ha.

18. Winter Soldier: Broken Arrow. A Soviet sleeper agent, trained long ago by the Winter Soldier, is out to destroy the world that replaced his. A key part of his plan involves getting the Black Widow on his side, in more ways than one. Creepy and action-packed, with great twists.

19. Winter Soldier: Black Widow Hunt. The saga of the sleeper agent continues, as our heroes discover some nasty parts of that plan that I won’t spill here. Bucky fights Hawkeye, Wolverine, Daredevil, Cap, and the Black Widow. There’s really an unreasonable amount of fighting in this book. Oh, and it also rips my heart out and crushes it before my eyes, because … well, you should know by now.

20. Winter Soldier: The Electric Ghost. With the Black Widow out of his life, Bucky sets about picking up the pieces of another old mission—one that killed a SHIELD agent and left a little girl named Tesla Tarasova orphaned. Tesla has grown up into the rather frightening Electric Ghost, who can get into Bucky’s head like no one else. This storyline is the only one on this list that Ed Brubaker didn’t write, and it’s also one of the weakest.

Winter Soldier was canceled after the Electric Ghost storyline, so since then it’s just been individual comics not yet collected in trade form. If you want to check them out, there are two series:

21. All-New Invaders. This comic, written by James Robinson (a man who knows his World War II heroes) is a big team-up between Captain America, the original Human Torch, the Winter Soldier, and Namor the Sub-Mariner, among others. Lots of World War II flashbacks and some really good Band of Brothers-style camaraderie in a group of modern heroes whose bond goes all the way back to the 1940s. Right now the plot involves the alien Kree kidnapping Namor for plotty reasons and Namor’s old war buddies invading the Kree homeworld to get him back—largely because Namor’s such a jerk to most people that nobody else wants to rescue him.

22. Winter Soldier: The Bitter March. I wasn’t impressed with the first issue of The Bitter March, written by Rick Remender, but the second has piqued my interest. The story follows a lone SHIELD agent, Ran Shen, trying to smuggle a couple of ex-Nazi scientists out of eastern Europe  in the 1960s so SHIELD can have their magic formula. Chasing Shen is a bunch of Hydra goons and the Winter Soldier. The first issue focused mostly on Shen, and Bucky was basically playing the Terminator, coming after him over and over again. The second issue, however, got into the Winter Soldier’s head a bit more; it’s starting to look like Bucky is trying to retake control of his own brain, and that’s not going to end well for anyone. Seems like things are heating up!

WHERE TO START:
I’ll make this short and sweet. Find the quote that sounds like you and read the answer:

“I want to know what’s going on when I watch the movie, but I only want to read one book.”
Read the Winter Soldier hardcover, or its two trade-paperback equivalents. That’s you sorted.

Pictured: You, sorted.

“I want the best Bucky-Cap storyline.”
Read The Man With No Face. Action, angst, and a pretty good mystery. This is good for the Bucky-Natasha shippers, too.

Oh, look, the cover is a Bucky fashion show!

“I want a little bit of everything—a sampling of the character from different periods in his life.”
Read The Life Story of Bucky Barnes. It’s your one-stop shop.

Also, there's interior art by Chris Samnee. You want that.

“I want the most kickass Winter Soldier action you’ve got.”
Read Winter Soldier: The Longest Winter. Then keep reading if you like what you see.

Including a gorilla with a machine gun. And a jetpack.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE
Aside from the fact that I obviously adore this character and these storylines, it’s worth pointing out why I adore them. The Winter Soldier storyline was, at the time, one of the most complex ever to appear in mainstream superhero comics—both in terms of plot twists and in terms of its characters’ emotional arcs. It set the pattern for a lot of the really terrific stories that have come out of the Big Two—especially Marvel—in the last decade. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that Winter Soldier gave a lot of people permission to break the rules of comics—as long as they produced exceptional stories in doing so. At the same time, it set the bar pretty high. As I said at the beginning of this series, this is one of only two comic books that I hand people in order to make them cry. Its cinematic scope and the neverending gut-punch of its emotional impact cannot be understated.

You will spend the entire storyline doing this. I am not kidding even a little bit.

Don’t believe me? Look at this incredibly short summary:

In Winter Soldier, Captain America finds out that his long-dead kid sidekick, Bucky, is actually a zombie cyborg assassin working for the Russians. Fight scenes and angst ensue.

Pretty much what I thought would happen when I saw this.

Does that sound remotely interesting? No. In fact, it sounds completely batshit insane. I’ve quoted this summary to non-geeks and gotten completely baffled looks. And yet that’s the bare bones of this storyline. What makes it work—what made me and a million other fans care about it—is the way in which that batshit-crazy story was told. This book makes you care about one of the permanent corpses so much that even the most rule-conscious nerd can be persuaded not to care about the rules. Screw Steve Rogers’ angsty motivation and screw the necessity of conflict; by the end of this book, you want Bucky to live and be happy, no matter what it takes. And yet we’re talking about Bucky the dead kid sidekick, butt of a thousand nerd jokes. And yet, when Steve Rogers came back from the dead in 2011, there was significant fan outcry against killing Bucky off because so many people liked Bucky-Cap better than Original Cap. He had earned their allegiance. Nerds almost never shift their loyalties like that—but this storyline got them to do it.

I own the T-shirt of this.
I MADE the T-shirt of this. And people bought it.

On paper, this story should never work. And yet it did, and it still does, and it’s inspired a lot of great work from a lot of other writers.

I promised myself when I started this series that I wouldn’t talk about my most personal reason for being a diehard Winter Soldier fan, and I won’t. It’s not something you need to hear, especially on a blog whose audience includes children, and in any case I probably won’t be able to talk about it in public for a while yet, if ever. But I will say this: For a lot of fans, especially younger ones (by which I mean under the age of 35), there’s something in the saga of Bucky Barnes that resonates. If you’ve ever felt like you couldn’t escape some horrible piece of your past, he’s a character for you. If you’ve ever been expected to measure up to an impossible standard, he’s a character for you. If you’ve ever had to sit and wrestle with your demons in silence because, for one reason or another, you just couldn’t speak up about them to anyone—here’s Bucky Barnes.

This page probably sums up James Buchanan Barnes better than any other.

He’ll match you ghost for ghost, burden for burden, demon for demon, and he’ll still get up again the next morning. He’ll make fun of himself sometimes, and he’ll play the hardened cynic, even though he’s really got a squishy romantic heart that’s far too close to his brittle surface.

Bucky and Natasha go for a walk in the rain. Squishy romanticism ensues.

He’ll never be the hero Steve Rogers is, and he’ll never live up to Captain America’s example, and he knows both those things—but he usually has no idea how deeply he inspires the man he admires most.

Steve works on his eulogy for Bucky, just before finding out Bucky's not dead.

“This is what it is to be human,” Spider Robinson once wrote: “to persist.”

Bucky Barnes persists. Half man and half machine, half monster and half hero, he is one of the most human characters in modern comics. So here’s hoping his movie turns out half as good as it looks.

And hey, would it kill anyone to get Natasha back in the book? Come on!

A superhero primer (without Watchmen)

Recently, a friend of mine decided that she wanted, at long last, to get into superhero comics. Just because she hadn’t grown up with them, she told me, was no reason to discard an entire genre. Where would I suggest that she start?

About five minutes later, when I came around from my faint …

Where should she start? Where should she start? The first thing to pop into my head was, “Oh, God, don’t let anyone say Watchmen.” I’ve heard way too many comic fans sing the praises of Alan Moore’s admittedly seminal graphic novel, and seen way too many copies thrust into the hands of unsuspecting neophytes. Those are the neophytes who don’t come back. No matter how many bestseller lists Watchmen makes, no matter how many awards it wins, Watchmen is a terrible place to start reading superhero comics. Watchmen is about taking all the tropes and devices of superhero comics and turning them upside down and inside out. It is, in a very real way, the destruction of superhero comics. I’ve long believed that Alan Moore actually hates his own genre, and that Watchmen is a major proof of this.

So after some thought, I decided to write this blog entry—for her, and for anyone else who eventually decides they need a starting point that isn’t Watchmen.

There are, as I see it, three major approaches. You can begin with the basics of the genre—something that will teach you the rules of the game and why the fans love it. Or you can pick a character you already like, or think you might like, and use that character as a guide to comicdom. Or you can just jump into any story that strikes your fancy. Any of these approaches will do. For the record, I entered comics by method two—I saw Daredevil on the Fantastic Four cartoon, liked him, found some of his old comics in a box in the back of a used bookstore, and never looked back. I got deeper into comics by using method three on my local library’s collection of graphic novels. But your results may vary, so do as you please. What follows is a list of likely titles for anyone wanting to use one of those three methods.

Method One: Begin with the basics. For this approach, you want a story that will give you a strong sense of how superhero stories work—what you can expect of heroes and villains and everything else. To my mind, there’s no better primer for this method than Astro City. Kurt Busiek’s multi-award-winning series, published most regularly in the 1990s but still coming out now from time to time, is a love letter to superhero comics and everything we love about them. Using a cast of strange yet familiar heroes—the Superman-like Samaritan, the Batmanesque Confessor, even the Spider-Man-like Crackerjack and Jack-in-the-Box—the series explores “what else happens” while those familiar adventures are going on.

In the very first story, “In Dreams,” Samaritan goes about his usual day, switching between his secret and superheroic identities, fighting bad guys, accepting awards from a grateful citizenry … all while harboring a secret. You don’t find out until the end of the story what that secret is, and how it informs his life as a superpowered crimefighter, but I dare you to read the ending without a smile. The story covers every major superhero trope while remaining surprisingly original.

Similarly, the second volume in the series, Confession (one of my favorite graphic novels of all time and a major influence on Masks), follows a boy who comes to the big city to become a hero and gets more than he bargains for. This book does a great job of subtly teaching the lessons of the superhero genre, this time from a sidekick’s point of view (the boy learns things like how street-level heroes actually investigate crimes, what sidekicks really do, and what motivates the typical supervillain) while keeping its focus on the relationship between the boy and his mentor. I dare you to read this story without crying. That’s how Astro City works—it relies on your knowledge of superhero tropes, and reminds you how they work as it goes along, so that it can tell real, moving, human stories. Superhero comics at their finest.

Method two: Follow a character. The trick here is to find a good story featuring a character you like. Sometimes you can luck out by walking into a comic-book store and asking a friendly employee, “Can you point me to a good beginner story about ____?” But if you haven’t got a comic-book store, or the employees aren’t friendly, here are some starting points.

DC Comics does a pretty good job with its origin stories, and that’s always a good place to jump on with a beloved character. The recent Superman: Earth One by J. Michael Straczynski, which portrays a young Clark Kent arriving in Metropolis and trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his life (luckily an alien invasion comes along to help him with that), is a terrific jumping-on point for readers who want a 21^st-century approach to that hero. It introduces the central characters (Clark, Lois, Perry, Jimmy, Ma and Pa, etc.) and the fundamentals of their relationships, and still leaves time for smashing alien death machines. (I also recommend Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright, for similar reasons.) 

If you’re looking for Batman, I’m afraid he hasn’t fared as well in recent years, but Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Batman: The Long Halloween and Batman: Dark Victory do a good job of picking up just after Batman’s origin and setting up his relationships with most of his supporting cast. They’re also part of the source material for Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, so if you enjoyed those movies, you could do a lot worse.

Marvel Comics isn’t as origin-focused, but you can still find good entry-level stuff for most of their popular characters. If you enjoyed Thor, I recommend Langridge and Samnee’s Thor: The Mighty Avenger. It’s a terrific collection of lighthearted adventures set during Thor’s early days on earth, and has a great balance of humor, domestic drama, and smashing frost giants in the face. Likewise, Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man does a great job of retelling a lot of classic Spidey tales with a modern sensibility, and it heavily informed the Sam Raimi movies (including the early ones that sucked less).

Going back to the Avengers, if you enjoyed the Black Widow in The Avengers, you could do worse than pick up Paul Cornell’s Black Widow: Deadly Origin, which handily covers the character’s complicated history (both as a hero/villain and in a series of romances with other heroes). The best Hawkeye stories, by far, are those currently coming out of Matt Fraction and David Aja in their Hawkeye monthly series. Alas, I don’t have a lot to recommend on the Hulk and Iron Man fronts—not because there aren’t any good stories out there but because I don’t follow those characters closely and therefore don’t have any good recommendations. 

There’s a lot of good stuff on Captain America, of course, but the best of it will show up in the next section. For now, I recommend Captain America: Red White and Blue, a collection of short comic stories by various artists. You should find something in there to suit almost any taste. And if you’re a fan of the X-Men movies, try the various X-Men: First Class titles, including Wolverine: First Class, which has nothing to do with the recent stupid film. (It’s actually a hilarious buddy comedy featuring Wolverine and his sidekick—a 13-year-old mutant girl named Shadowcat. Weirdly, it’s still a great jumping-on point.)

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Daredevil: Yellow, about the first year of that character’s career (during which he wore a yellow costume, hence the title). It’s the most lighthearted and touching treatment of Daredevil’s origins I’ve ever read, not least because it’s written as a love letter to the hero’s first love interest, now dead at the hands of a supervillain. There’s a sweetness and an innocence to Yellow that makes it a perennial favorite of Daredevil fans, and popular with anyone who enjoys a good romantic comedy with superhero trappings.

Method three: Jump into a story. If you’re not too worried about getting all the previous continuity straight, you might try just jumping into any story that looks good. Superhero comics actually cover a lot of ground, genre-wise—you can easily find good mystery, fantasy, science-fiction and romance stories, to say nothing of the occasional Western and lots of thrillers. A useful guide here is either that friendly comic-shop employee or, sometimes, a list of awards. Usually each year’s Eisner Awards (comicdom’s equivalent of the Oscars) include at least one story worth reading. Check out the awards for best limited or continuing series, best writer, and so on for your best candidates. Then hit up Amazon and read a few descriptions until you find something intriguing. Or just see the list below.

If mystery’s your thing, you might try Peter David’s excellent X-Factor series, about a detective agency staffed by mutants, including former X-Men. Its narrator, a mutant with the ability to create duplicates of himself (and therefore a man with a chronic identity crisis), has a serious case of Raymond Chandler envy, and the results are well worth it as the series covers everything from alternate universes to Norse gods to the question of which duplicate fathered a certain female cast member’s baby. With wacky volume titles like The Invisible Woman Has Vanished, you know you’re in for something strange and wonderful. Start with the first volume, The Longest Night, and watch for Layla Miller, a troubled 13-year-old girl whose mutant power appears to be that she “knows stuff” … which sounds stupid until you find out why she unscrewed the taps from the upstairs bathroom and ordered from three pizzerias at once.

For a good espionage thriller, you’re best off starting with Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America, which heavily informed the recent movies. (I didn’t list it in the previous method because it’s just a bit too complicated at the beginning to make a real primer.) The story centers on Cap’s work with Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D., but it quickly goes zigzagging off through his World War II adventures and some very modern arcs involving espionage and international terrorism. Begin with the first story arc, The Winter Soldier, and see if you’re hooked by the time it wraps up.

Then there are stories and runs of issues that just stand alone really well, even if they’re not designed as jumping-on points. There’s J. Michael Straczynski’s Amazing Spider-Man, which manages to balance some of the most human Spidey drama ever (including the issue where Aunt May finally finds out how Peter spends his nights) and some fairly cosmic bad guys who will completely rearrange what you think you know about Spider-Man’s origins. The run has some of the best Spidey humor I’ve ever read, too, including a delightful rant about why Spider-Man doesn’t have pockets in his costume. To this day, I can’t hear someone pulling Velcro apart without wanting to giggle.

Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways is about a group of teenagers who run away from home after they discover their parents are all supervillains. Think The Outsiders crossed with The X-Files and a heaping dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Start with the first volume, Pride and Joy, and feel free to steal lines like, “We’re like one of those multiethnic gangs that only robs people in bad movies!”

Going back to Straczynski—if you liked the movie Thor, you’ll probably love his run on the character. Start with Volume 1 (search Amazon for “Thor volume 1, Straczynski”, and you’ll find it), which picks up after Thor has been killed during the events of Ragnarok. See if it doesn’t blow you away. The run gets weaker as it goes on—Volume 2 is excellent, but wobbles toward the end—but it’s all pretty good stuff.

Likewise, Mark Waid’s current run on Daredevil is justly featured among the Comic Books You Should Be Reading. Taking a normally dark character into what seems like a sunny, happy-go-lucky storyline in which Matt Murdock tries to take himself less seriously, Waid actually manages to build a subtle and ultimately disturbing portrait of a hero who might be losing his mind. And the jokes are first-rate.

Speaking of jokes, this blog entry wouldn’t be complete without a reference to Joss Whedon’s terrific run on Astonishing X-Men. Start with the first volume, Gifted, or just get one of the omnibus editions. Astonishing follows the premier mutant superteam after the death of founding member Jean Grey, and largely eschews the notoriously complicated X-Men continuity for solid characterization and snarky humor. (My personal favorite moment is when a psychic villain “devolves” several of the X-Men, turning Beast into a growling animal and making Wolverine revert to his childhood self … which seems to be a hilariously naïve and racist Little Lord Fauntleroy. Can a character be hilariously racist? It turns out that Wolverine can … just look for the line, “AND, I met an Oriental!”)

You might notice that DC Comics is conspicuous by its absence from this third method. That’s not intentional, but it is a bit sad. DC has been a lot better than Marvel in recent years at tying absolutely everything going on in its fictional universe to whatever mega-crossover event is being pushed at the moment. There are major ramifications to this. First, almost any good DC storyline requires you to read three or four bad ones just to understand what’s going on. And second, because there’s one of these events every year, the universe changes dramatically all the time … which means a lot of the really good stories don’t have a lot of staying power. Good as they are, there’s no way to explain them to someone who hasn’t been reading DC Comics for years. The few DC stories I considered for this part of the list—mostly James Robinson’s Starman and Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come—are at least 15 years old, and I felt I’d already filled that slot with Astro City. They’re still good stories, though, and I encourage you to seek them out.

What about you, comic-book readers out there? What books do you recommend to friends who want to read superhero comics for the first time?

And if you say Watchmen, I will do my best to punch you through the internet …