Preamble - I used to be a major Marvel obsessive. From the nineties through to just after the millenium I bought anything and everything - Wonder Man, Ghost Rider 2099, even Infinity Crusade, voraciously hunting down back issues and trades, loving the universe. Then in around 2002 a mixture of being poor and Grant Morrison & Kurt Busiek being replaced on my favourite books by Chuck Austen & Geoff Johns put me off. Once I was out I dabbled occasionally - Civil War, nextwave - but never really followed much. Modern ongoing comics had no appeal to me and I was pretty sure it was all rubbish. An attempt to at least follow IDW's disastrous Transformers for some sort of connection to an art form I theoretically love twice ended badly, the most recent resulting in me not actually reading any even vaguely new comics for something like six months, leaving me assuming everything was that smug, that intolerably insular, that derivative and that obsessed with meta. However, a friend recommended I give Marvel's NOW! relaunch a go for something different but not contrarian, sending me a reading order. The same person recommended I watch Drive and that's a track record you can hang a few comics recommendations on. The starting point given was just before NOW!, with the seventh series of Captain Marvel. As said, apart from a few storylines I've read nothing since about 2002, so these are the musings of a lapsed fan trying to get back into the universe. Preamble ends...
