I work too close to Forbidden Planet (and even closer to Gosh! Comics). I’ve started spending one lunchtime a week browsing in comic shops and buying stuff.
I’ve been buying the Essential X-Men books. These are reprints of X-Men comics that I was reading in the late 70s and early 80s. It’s been a lot of fun re-reading stories that I last read over twenty years ago. And now I’ve just started buying Astonishing X-Men which is the new X-Men comic written by Joss Whedon. This is also fun, but it’s a bit strange as there’s about twenty years of continuity that I’m missing out on. Emma Frost now seems to be good. Xavier is nowhere to be seen. And Jean Grey seems to have died (again!)
And there are many other X-Men comics to buy. It’s hard to know what’s important[1] to read. I even see that Alpha Flight and The New Mutants have recently reappeared after having their comics cancelled back when I was still reading them. This has potential to get rather expensive.
I’ve also starting browsing (tho’ not yet buying) Avengers comics. I always liked the Avengers almost as much as I liked the X-Men.
But catching up after twenty years exposes one problem in the Marvel (and, I suppose, DC) universe. People don’t age at the correct rate. Kitty Pryde (for example) was 13 when she joined the X-Men in 1981. She should now be 36. But she seems to be in her mid-twenties. If you assume that the original X-Men were about 17 when their comic first launched in 1963 then they should be almost sixty now. And there’s no way that the Scott Summers in Astonishing X-Men is any more than early thirties.
I guess it’s all about suspension of disbelief.
[1] Ok. Granted, none of this is really important.