Or so I assumed. Geeks (myself very much included) love to feel like they have special knowledge, that they’ve been initiated into the greater mysteries and are especially adept at navigating their areas of expertise because of some inherent quality of mind, but it’s really just a question of familiarity that anyone can develop given the time and inclination. Comics series aren’t any harder to get into than television series, at least to my mind. There’s just a couple of superficial differences, the biggest one being that television comes into our houses almost as free as tapwater, but comics are found in specialty stores and need to be purchased.
Suppose your interest in a television show were piqued, maybe because you heard some people around the water cooler talking about The Office or How I Met Your Mother. I’m going to go out on a limb and suppose that it wouldn’t even cross your mind to think about where to start getting into those shows. You’d find out what time on which night they were on, and either sit down for the next episode or DVR it and watch it when you had time. If you liked it, you’d come back for more. If you really liked it, you might go to Hulu to watch older episodes, or DVR the reruns in the summer (or in syndication). If you adored it, you could start picking up the box set DVDs of the earlier seasons. None of these possibilities should strike anyone as particularly arcane.
Of course some people (myself very much included again) tend to want The Whole Story From The Beginning. For example, by the time I started noticing other geeks in the computer prep room going on and on about how great Buffy the Vampire Slayer was, I realized that it was a fairly continuity-heavy show, and therefore I had no desire to just catch next week’s episode. I stayed away from it entirely, not wanting an incomplete and unsatisfying experience, until my wife and I started dating and she decided that watching the entire series from start to finish would be a good long-term project for us. (One reason was aesthetic: she had seen most of the episodes and wouldn’t mind seeing them again and filling in the gaps, and she knew I would love it; the other reason was practical: she was an intern on call and when we hung out together we couldn’t plan anything too elaborate because a page could ruin plans without warning, thus we watched a lot of tv.) This was possible because Buffy was out on DVD by then and, lucky for us, a mutual friend owned them all and was willing to lend. So I did, in fact, get The Whole Story From The Beginning and it was rad, but in hindsight now I can see that if I had tuned in to a random Season Five or Season Six episode prior to the DVD project, I still would have enjoyed the show and gotten 80 – 90% of it. I’m happy I consumed it the way I did given my predilections and temperament, but, you know, mileage varies and all that. By the same token I’m glad I’ve seen every episode of The Office because the backstory inherently informs the new episodes and every once in the while there’s a callback or running gag or whathaveyou; but on the flipside I haven’t seen every episode of HIMYM, yet still managed to enjoy the Slapsgiving episode despite never having seen the original Slap Bet episode. (Of course Slapsgiving had some cute Buffy/Dark Willow in-jokes along the way but that’s probably neither here nor there.)
(And I feel compelled to point out that sometimes having seen every single episode can be a burden, too, when the backstory actually undermines the current episodes. Witness the end-run episodes of Friends and compare Joey’s improbably profound idiocy to his premier-season didn’t-go-to-college-but-is-no-dummy characterization. There is a certain dissonance.)
Right, so, if you saw Iron Man and went directly from the movie theater to the comic book store and picked up the latest issue on the stands, would it be any more confusing than jumping into a mid-season episode of a show that’s been on for a few years? It really depends on a lot of things, but I would say that the two experiences should be basically comparable. One complicating factor is that issues of a comic series have a bigger tendency to be continuations of cliffhangers or end in cliffhangers themselves (or both) but that is a risk you run with tv shows too, some more than others. Another is that comics tend to cater to their existing fanbase more than they make themselves new-reader friendly, which means heavier reliance on the implicit understanding that a reader does already have the backstory. But you could level that same accusation at a show like Lost.
Getting back to the original question, if I take it to mean not just “how do I sample a comic series” (which I’ve already answered as “same way you sample anything else”) but “how do I get really deep into the best parts of a series and experience its reputed greatness” or something like that, then we start to get into the more defining characteristics of comics that make them seem impenetrable.
There’s the aforementioned economic component: checking out a tv series costs a half hour of your time, or several hours once the DVDs show up from Netflix. Comics demand $3 per issue or $15+ per trade paperback (about six issues’ worth of stories) plus the time to read them.
And then there’s the fact that comic series tend to go on forever. All told there are less than 150 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, clocking in at 40-some minutes each on DVD, so most people can sit through two or three at a time. Do that once a week and you can get through all seven seasons (conveniently packaged by season and in broadcast order, of course) in a year. There have been at least 500 separate issues of Iron Man published since 1963, not to mention other comic books he appeared in with different titles, and the majority of those issues have never been compiled into trade paperbacks. And the numbering system is fairly screwy because Iron man actually started out in a book called Tales of Suspense, then got his own title, which got cancelled, then re-started with #1, and so on. For certain obsessive types (myself so very, very much included once again) the completist’s quest to track down all of these decades-old uncollected issues at flea markets and dusty used book stores can be half the fun of devotedly following the adventures of a given character, but to everyone else this is understandably off-putting.
The other thing is, there’s really no rhyme or reason to where the good stuff in a comic book character’s history is going to be found, and there’s barely any consensus of opinion. Some people swear by the earliest Spider-Man comics of the 60’s and think his title’s been in steady decline ever since, but others have favorite eras that are more recent. But it’s not that the 60’s were pure magic, because most people agree that the X-Men sucked in the 60’s and only got good in the 80’s (although plenty of people would heap scorn on those same 80’s epics). Where to find the good stuff varies from character to character, and varies based on the tastes of the person looking for good stuff. So “how do you get into any comic series” is a question that really can’t be answered, except to punt by answering “you ask someone whose opinion you respect and who’s already a fan of that series”.
So since I’m the only one here, and since we’ve been talking at length here about Iron Man, I’ll just go ahead and suggest three books that might be good entry points for the comic book version of Iron Man (assuming the movie is what piqued your interest). These are trade paperbacks, by the by, so you could actually order them on Amazon and you’d be getting a more-or-less complete story, not a partial cliffhanger (or at least, no more of a cliffhanger than the movie turned into when Sam Jackson showed up at the end).
If you liked the origin story and want to know more about comic book Iron Man’s earliest adventures, may I suggest
Essential Iron Man volume 1
The Essentials series (there’s one for almost every character) is the best way to be a cheapie completist, or at least make a good sized dent. For twenty bucks or less, instead of six reprints you get twenty to twenty five or more. The tradeoff is you get them on cheap paper and in black and white. But if all you care about is the stories and you don’t mind the stripped down visuals, it’s a good way to start at the beginning and get a huge swath of history. Essential Iron Man volume 1 has the first 33 issues of Tales of Suspense featuring Shellhead, including the origin, and the Cold War atmosphere and totally unscientific pseudo-science is hilarious and charming.
If you liked the climactic final battle between Iron Man and Iron Monger and want pure brain-candy along the same lines, may I suggest
Armor Wars
This trade collects eight issues from the 80’s in which Iron Man hunts down a bunch of disparate bad guys who have stolen some or all of the Iron Man blueprints and made armor costumes of their own. According to most cognoscenti in the comics community, the absolute golden age of comics is “whenever you were twelve” and this storyline fits that criterion for me, so I may be biased about its awesomeness. But it does have solid art (in bright four-color), gaudy villains, a brilliant high concept and Iron Man kicking ten kinds of ass.
If you liked Robert Downey Jr. specifically as Tony Stark, and Sam Jackson showing up at the end for that matter, may I suggest
The Ultimates volume 1 and 2
These are post-9/11 comics and they have a very post-modern feel with super-slick photo-referenced art and pop-culture-name-checking dialogue. The Ultimates was part of a rebooting of Marvel Comics characters for a new, hip, young audience which sounds like a terrible idea along the lines of introducing Poochie on Itchy and Scratchy, but it actually worked far better than it should have. The Ultimates is also a team book, which means Iron Man shares screen time with Captain America, the Hulk and others, but it’s still entry-level for new readers and the bigger cast just signifies bigger brain-melting action setpieces. Plus Iron Man gets most of the good lines.
That’s about the limit of my knowledge on the subject, since I like Iron Man and all but he’s not one of my deep-obsession faves. If none of the above seem appealing, you can always take a stab at anything else with Iron Man on the cover. In theory, in the Americana archetype of a kid with a dollar in his hand standing at the spinner rack of new comics in the corner drugstore, that’s the way it’s supposed to work anyway.
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