Welcome to my attempt to bring order and accessibility to Marvel comic. If you're anything like me, you started off reading only one or two comics. But gradually, inevitably that number grew to many. And as the numbers grew, the task of reading them in order became more and more difficult.
I started this page in response to Marvel's "Original Sin" crossover event. I wanted to get my self caught up with my comics before starting to read the event. I could only find one reading order, and it turned out to be wrong in many ways, mainly because the story lines and publishing order are so tangled. I finally stumbled a website called Marvel Chronology Project (MCP). It's a great, wonderful and confusing place. Please check it out. However, it was in the forum of this website that I struck gold. Here the members go through each and every issue, and try to untangle the timelines for every character. Unfortunately for me, they have yet to (completely) untangle Original Sin or it's lead up issues. They have, however, done a great job of this process for other events.
At MCP, their aim is map out every single appearance of a character in very single comic in chronological order. This means flash backs are put in the order of their life. For example, if there is a flashback of a characters birth at the death bed, the flashback will be placed at the very start, and his/her death at the very end. This means that you could be reading pages and panels individually, rather than a book at the time.
While this is great and essential for mapping out a characters timeline, and which can then be put along side every one else, it doesn't (IMO) make for a great reading list, which is what I actually want. What have tried to do was take the forums lists and make a simpler version. This was a fairly simple task for the comics between major cross over events, but far more difficult for comics during a cross over event. I'm sure there a mistakes.
Each comic book only appears once in the reading order. I have excluded all flashbacks. I felt this would cause spoilers as well as putting the order way out of wack. So flashbacks are placed as they are recalled, not when they happened. Because some stories occur at they same time, going from whole book to whole book means the time frame will go back and forth a little also. This is unavoidable.
The main tool I use is Airtable, it allows any visitor to this site to use the sort and filter options on my lists.
I will also be recording the list of characters that are in each comic. This is the core function behind Marvel Chronology Project. I will be listing the characters by their real and superhero (supervillain) names. Obviously (hopefully) the real name won't change but the superhero/villain name may change from time to time, Ms Marvel vs Captain Marvel, and the changing ownership of Captain America. This means there will multiple characters entries for some characters, the hero/villain listed name will reflect the name/character he/she is inhabiting in that particular issue. In cases such as Hulk or Thor, it will remain Hulk or Thor regardless of what adjective may or may not come in front. With Airtable you can to filter the list by one or many characters/heroes/villains names. For example, you could apply a filter to read only comics containing Steve Rogers (with whatever hero name is working under) or just comics with Captain American (regardless of who is wearing that mantle) +/- Iron Man +/- Thor ...
Finally I will be grouping some comics into different "Universes", e.g. Spider-verse, Avengers, Cosmic, X-men, which will also be filterable.
Click on the link below to find the Lists available