I've been seeing some the Dark Reign trades in bookstores and I was wondering are any of them good reads. Feel free to also recommend fairly recent stories that have happened prior.

 

I totally recommend the New Avengers. Their recent stuff has been very good. The last annual had some beautiful art.

 

Captain America and Daredevil, definitely. I guess New Avengers. It's been on a downturn IMO, but I'm just really sick of the underground Avengers and the Hood. Those are about the only two I can recommend. Stay away from the X-books.

 

DC.

 

Wow really? Sucks that you feel that way, I just read the Utopia HC and really enjoyed it. Of course I've been really following the X-books since messiah complex and love all the X-Force books as well, so I'm definitely biased.

What are your main cons with these books right now?

 

I enjoyed the books up til they moved the team to San Fran, but since then the core books have been the "Cyclops, Emma Frost, Wolverine, Beast, and sometimes Rogue" show. They might as well cancel legacy and astonishing, and just publish Uncanny three times a month.

Also, the editors painted themselves into a corner with House of M by getting rid of mutants, now they have to work around it by creating a billion fake mutants and altered humans for every plotline.

And the "Professor X's deep dark secret has come back to haunt the X-Men" story of the year has just gotten old. It's time to make old Chuck a respected member of the Marvel Universe again.

To me, this is the lowest the X-franchise has been since the Chuck Austen days...maybe even lower than that. I do like X-Force and X-Factor, but if the core books aren't working then the rest of the franchise isn't working IMO.

 

Invincible iron man. The latest story was fantastic, "World's Most Wanted" Tony is on the run from Norman and he infects himself with a virus to wipe his memory. So throughout the story, he gets dumber and must downgrade armors as a result. One of the best Iron man stories ever.

 

The Ultimates 1 & 2, not exactly recent but I liked them.

 

Messiah complex. Messiah war was... well i can't remember it so it couldn't be that good.

Fallen Son: Death of Captain America was alright.

If you want to feel used and confused try reading War of Kings.

 

Also, track down some of the Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day stuff. People like to put the book down now due to the whole OMD thing, but BND has spawned some great stuff.

Also, War Machine. Find it. Read it. Great stuff. A shame it's being cancelled. Good job, Joe. -_-

 

Also Dark Reign Fantastic Four was pretty sweet.

 

Captain Britain and M13 is super-awesome, too bad it was canceled. But there's 2 tpb worths out of it.

 

That's understandable. I actually stopped reading X titles at one point because I was getting tired of the overpopulation of mutants. House of M corrected this for me. I was tired of Charles Xavier's tired mantra of peaceful Co-existence, and like you i'm also tired of his "deep dark secret" angle...put simply, I'm tired of Charles Xavier.

Cyclops went from being a campy boyscout of a character that I never really respected, to finally growing some balls and actually leading in a way that I would respect if I was on his team. Utopia had a lot less Wolverine in it, which I appreciated, and I really enjoy the Emma Frost/Cyclops relationship more than I did the Jean Grey Story. They just seem to have real couple problems, with the whole secrets and communication type things. That just works for me.

I would appreciate it if Beast would just permanently die. I have no love for that character. None.

 

Reason I'm asking for Marvel is because I think I haven't given it enough love aside from the Ender's Game and Shadow trades. I've been buying a lot of Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps because I wanted to all caught up on the current run before the Blackest Night trades start hitting the shelves during the summer.

 

It did get overpopulated, but I felt wiping out Genosha did a fine job of significantly lower the population. House of M would have worked better if they hadn't lower the number of mutants to 198. A couple of thousand would have worked fine, and given writer enough range to create new mutants.

Completely agree about the Emma/Cyclops relationship, and Cyclops as leader. My main problems is Fraction's writing of Uncanny. The stories are just boring and tend to have zero impact. I really miss Brubaker on the title.

He just quit the team so hopefully they'll give his character a rest. Though he was pretty awesome in Whedon's Astonishing.

 

Cable/Deadpool.

Heck, if it has Deadpool in it, you can't go wrong.

 

 

Brubaker is the reason I've been reading Captain America and Immortal Iron Fist. I love me some Brubaker  

 

Someone had to say it, and hey turns out he reads Green Lantern so he's cool.

I'd actually forgotten about Messiah Complex. I liked it if only for the suprise twist ending that seemed so obvious once you actually get to it. The last thing Marvel did that really caught my interest was House of M. Since then all its events have ranged from looking like shit to just "meh". Seriously Secret Invasion? OMG Skrulls!?!?! Ugh....

Ultimate Marvel was awesome back in the beginning. I have Ultimate X-Men vols. 1-14, Ult Spiderman vols. 1-4, Ultimate Galactus 1 and 2. Used to be fun, but then it just started sucking, and finally Ultimatum killed it.

 

Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth - It's not as serious as most of the other Marvel books seem to be these days.

If you want to pick up any X-books go for X-Factor. It's the best one going right now, and they just returned to New York so it's a pretty good jumping on point.