Reader Question: What DC titles can win over a Marvel girl?

While my book case sports quite a few Vertigo trades, including the full run of The Losers and Y:The Last Man, there's no denying that I'm a Marvel fan. I tell myself that my reasons for rarely straying outside the warm and snuggly confines of the Marvel Universe (okay, so Norman Osborn is currently running much of it, but there's comfort in familiarity) are all reasonable. I defend my near phobia with claims like "I don't like legacy characters," "multiverses are stupid" or "crises give me migraines," but are these just excuses? Come to think of it, there was that one traumatic Superman incident from my childhood...

You see, I wasn't always so hesitant about the DCU. My first introduction to superhero comics as a child was Superman, which I read regularly for at least two or three years. If it hadn't been for the fact that Superman and Spider-Man were the only well-known titles that were published in my native Swedish, I'm sure I would have branched out further, but I didn't understand English at the age of ten and even if I had, the local supermarket didn't carry imported comics.

I loved Superman though, whether on screen (I'm a year older than the first Superman movie) or in print, and was quite content to make do with what I had. That would all change the day I got my hands on an issue that scared me so badly that the image of the page in question remains with me to this day, more than twenty years later. I don't remember the issue or the backstory, but the page featured a dystopic image of a dead Earth - real or imagined - which saw Superman come face to face with a girl, a presumed last human survivor. As she came closer, her clothes turned to rags and her skin began to rot and fall off her bones. I was freaked out to the point where my mom had to throw the comic in the trash. That was the end of reading Superman for me, and some time later, they stopped publishing Superman in Swedish.

Many years later, I would take up reading comics again, this time mostly Marvel titles like X-Factor, Thunderbolts, Daredevil (of course), and a several others. I never really gave the main DC titles much of a chance, though fear of rotting flesh was - quite obviously - never really the reason. Perhaps it's something as simple as laziness that prevents me from throwing myself head first into yet another fictional universe, not counting the usual browsing at the comic book store or what one might glean from much too frequent visits to CBR or Newsarama.

But there's still room for an expansion of my pull list, and I'm starting to get an itch for something new. I'm officially willing to give DC a real chance, and that's why I need your help. In return, I promise to review every new book I pick up right here at the The Weekly Crisis. While I won't be able to bring a "beginner's perspective" to this experience (I'm a little too entrenched in the world of comics in general to mimic the random person on the street in this regard), I gladly offer myself as a subject to test just how accessible modern comics, and DC comics in particular, really are.

What DC titles are you reading and enjoying? Which would you recommend to someone who is moderately well-versed in the mythology of the universe and the characters involved, but who possesses less than the encyclopedic knowledge of continuity of someone who's a longtime DC fan? And if anyone could figure out what issue of Superman scared the crap out of me in the mid-80's, that would be terrific too. I think I have some stuff to work through...

Related Posts