Marvel Unlimited Suggestions.

Just subscribed today and started reading Maximum Carnage. I plan on reading civil war and infinity gauntlet after im finished with carnage. Can anyone recommend some must read comics, maybe point me towards a particular writer.

It depends what kind of comics you like. If you like more realistic stuff then pretty much the past 10 years of Daredevil have been great for that. If you want more traditional light hearted stuff then Dan Slott's run on Spiderman has been pretty good for that. For big cross over events Civil War is a must, a lot of the modern one's like Siege and Origin Sin have been fairly lame but I could still see them being appealing to someone newer to comics.

The lead up to the current big event that is going on, Secret Wars, is being carried out through the most recent versions of Avengers and New Avengers and would be worth reading if you are interested in the direction the Marvel universe is taking. Most of it is already up on Unlimited and in a few months all of it should be up.

Johnathan Hickman's Avengers run, the same one Zella mentioned, is great. About halfway through it ties into an event from a couple of years ago called Infinity, which I also really enjoyed.

Thor: God of Thunder is an awesome 25 issue series that has strings picked up in the current female Thor series but reads well on its own. Actually, Thor from J. Michael Straczynski's Thor no.1 to current has mostly been great, save for a brief dip about three years ago right before God of Thunder started.

I'll second Slott's Amazing Spider-man stuff and Waid's Daredevil. Also Brian Bendis' Daredevil run is fantastic but a much darker tone than Waid's, more in line with the Netflix series.

If you want to check out some of cosmic stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy Annihilation and its sequel Annihilation Conquest are good places to start.

X-Force and X-Factor were really decent and fun. I was also fond of the Deadpool and Cable series.

Here we go:

Ed Brubaker's entire Captain America run. Starts issue #1 of Vol. 5. Classic superhero/spy/avenging stuff.

Brian Michael Bendis' entire Daredevil run immediately followed up by Ed Brubaker's run. That's all the modern classics. If you want to go back to when Daredevil first started getting good, look for Frank Miller's run. Mark Waid does a pretty good job as well for the modern stuff. Gritty cape crime drama at its finest. Daredevil's brooding beats Batman.

In the same vein but a little crazier/schizophrenic, Charlie Huston's Moon Knight is good.

Annihilation is one of the best crossover events ever. You should totally read that along with all the tie-ins and the Nova series that runs concurrent with it. Then read Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning's run on Guardians of the Galaxy since that came out of the aftermath of Annihilation. That's also the team the movie is based on. Annihilation: Conquest, which is the sequel to the first, is another pretty good event. If you really dig that stuff, I suggest just following everything Marvel Cosmic offers. The issues themselves direct you to what you should be reading next.

If you dig the sci-fi stuff but want something that plays with even bigger ideas, sets up intricate plots over long inter-connected story arcs, and sets it off flawlessly, Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four run is fucking amazing. It splits up into two books with the original Fantastic Four title and the Future Foundation title. Both titles complement each other's stories.

Grant Morrison's New X-Men is another modern classic run with all the awesome/stupid weird signature style of Morrison. It's immediately followed up by another classic in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run that's a lot more conventional but still cool in its own Whedon-esque way.

Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force is a fantastic "good guys are kinda bad" story.

Warren Ellis' Iron Man: Extremis is a must-read for Iron Man. Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man follows after that.

Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker's Immortal Iron Fist is good pulpy kung-fu action.

Matt Fraction's Hawkeye is a bit more grounded than most of these other titles, but it's got a great sense of humor and a whole lot of heart. Art is fantastic, too.

Greg Rucka's Punisher isn't as long as any of these other huge runs, but it's pretty damn good stuff. The main artist's rendition of Punisher makes him look like Naked Snake!

Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways is just great.

Warren Ellis' Nextwave is hilarious.

So is Nick Spencer's The Superior Foes of Spider-Man.

That should last you for a loooong time.

Make sure you read the Superior Foes of Spider-Man. Truely a comedic work of art, and one of the best things to come out of Marvel in recent memory. If you like Carnage I can recommend Carnage USA as well. Aside from that, it depends on what you like in your comics really.

@josephknows 's list is great. I'd especially like to emphasize the recommendation to read Matt Fraction's run on Hawkeye. Just a great book.

Also really liked Brubaker's run on Captain America.

I tend towards the older stuff

Uncanny Xmen giant size 1, issue 94 to 216ish I think it started getting full of itself following the mutant massacre

Xmen Vignettes is a collection of short stories that fill in the back story of the above Xmen run, I think they are the best stories and art that Marvel has ever done.

Walt Simonson's run on Thor I think it started around issue 330 to 380

Daredevil had some good mini series, The Man Without Fear and Yellow

Garth Ennis did a short run on Punisher that was great

The first story arc on Thunderbolts was pretty good.

The older stuff can be really hit and miss for me personally. As you go further and further back I find the dialog can get REALLY rough with way too much explicit exposition. To be fair the target audience was very different for lot of those early comics.

Was recently reading some of Chris Claremont's original run on Uncanny Xmen. It's kind of nuts to see the incredible seeds for later storylines that have carried through to the modern stories and films, however, it's also kind of odd because some of the dialog and character design definitely suffers from some of that wordy exposition I mentioned earlier.

@josephknows: Rucka's Punisher is easily my favourite version of the character. Bearded Snake Punisher is the best kind of Punisher.

Read Fraction's Hawkeye and Superior Foes of Spiderman.

Both are INCREDIBLE.

@zella: I actually haven't read anything else about the Punisher so to me, Rucka's Punisher is the only Punisher.

I'm reading the original Secret Wars by Jim Shooter and Bob Layton through Marvel Unlimited to prepare myself for when I eventually catch up to Hickman's Secret Wars. The dialogue is definitely stilted in an exposition-y kind of way, but it's also just really cool to see THE first big Marvel crossover event. Doom is just fantastic here, and it helps that his dialogue in today's comics read almost the same way they do in this comic from 1984! Kinda funny, really!

• Annihiliation
• New X-Men (Morrison run)
• Ultimates volumes 1 & 2 (Do not read 3!)

Those are the biggest and best, IMO.

NextWave is great, but I feel like it's more for people who've read a lot of comic book stories over the years. Runaways is pretty good, too.

There's a lot of great stuff mentioned in this thread already, I'll add Ultimate Spider-Man to the list. It's a great update of Spider-Man and really consistent for the most part considering how long it is.Gillen and McKelvie's Young Avengers is also definitely worth reading

Joss Whedon and Grant Morrison's run on X-Men is some of my favorite x-men stories. Too bad whoever followed up on the series kinda destroyed everything they set up but this was 10 years or so ago. The Ultimate stories is kinda fantastic only for the simple fact they're radical takes on the characters and sometimes they don't give a crap of who they kill off.

I also just started reading Claremont's X-men run for the first time, and wanted to recommend the podcast 'Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-men' as a great companion to the reading. They summarize and give historical context for a lot of the stories and are just all around entertaining. I was really not into the idea of reading older stuff till I started listening to them and I'm super excited to read the whole thing and to check Walt Simonson's run on Thor which they also recommend a lot.

I recently saw some links to that podcast and it's queued up in my list now. Nice to see another endorsement.

I actually read some of the original Claremont run when I was younger (the stuff immediately following the Mutant Massacre) and so I know it continues developing as time goes on.

Wow thanks for all the recommendations. Definitely gonna check out Annihilation after I finish Civl War. Looks like I have all the summer reading I need and then some.

@majorfunk: Marvel Unlimited is a good service. I had it for a year and caught up with a bunch of stuff from 1993 forward. I think you'll enjoy it. Lemme know if they ever fixed the weird issues with the pages getting super small when there's a full teo page spread.

@sparky_buzzsaw: It gets small but if you rotate your device sideways it fills the screen again.

I would highly recommend Exiles. It is a fun reality travelling romp, that had some great new depictions of old characters.