So I approach superhero comics not as escapist power fantasy but as a lens for examining psychological damage, identity construction, and what heroism costs. I'm drawn to stories that take genre conventions seriously enough to interrogate them, written by creators given room to develop distinctive voices.

I value...

Interiority over spectacle
Consequences over victories
Authorial vision over franchise continuity
Characters who are wounded, marginalised, or questioning

Marvels that matter to me

Not long ago, I immersed myself in Marvel comics - I went deep! I recently took stock of what I've actually loved versus what I've merely read.

Some of my top Marvel reads...

What stayed with me?

The original Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch asked what the Avengers would look like if they were real, messy, government-controlled, and morally compromised. It was cynical and sometimes cruel, but it took superheroes seriously as a political and psychological phenomenon. Later, Jonathan Hickman's Ultimate Comics Ultimates pushed this further into geopolitical thriller territory, while Al Ewing's Ultimates: Omniversal took the post-Secret Wars remnants somewhere genuinely cosmic and strange. Decimation, meanwhile, genuinely changed the X-Men status quo in ways that lasted.

Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye might be the perfect comic. It asks the least superhero-y question imaginable—what does Clint Barton do when he's not being an Avenger?—and answers it with formal invention, genuine humour, and an issue told entirely from the perspective of a dog. Jeff Lemire's follow-up, All-New Hawkeye, continued that spirit while weaving in Clint's childhood trauma through beautiful watercolour flashbacks.

Brian Michael Bendis's Jessica Jones took a character who'd been assaulted, traumatised, and broken, and refused to make her recovery neat or linear. It's noir detective fiction that happens to exist in a world with superheroes—and that contrast is the entire point.

Tom King's Vision is twelve issues of suburban horror. A synthezoid builds himself a synthetic family and moves to the suburbs to be normal, and everything goes wrong in the most literary, inevitable, gut-wrenching way possible.

Bendis's Miles Morales run gave us a Spider-Man who felt genuinely new—not a retread of Peter Parker's story but something with its own weight, its own cultural specificity, its own particular anxieties about legacy and belonging.

And Bendis's Moon Knight—which reframed Marc Spector's dissociative identity not as affliction but as tactical advantage, with Wolverine, Spider-Man and Captain America as his rotating internal personas. It shouldn't work. It absolutely does.

Marvel's Cosmic Saga

There's another thread in my reading: the Marvel Cosmic work from the mid-2000s, anchored by Annihilation and Thanos' early origins.

Keith Giffen and a rotating cast of writers took Marvel's neglected space characters and built an extinction-level war story with genuine stakes and permanent consequences. Characters died and stayed dead. Alliances formed between former enemies out of desperation. The scale was immense but the emotional beats were intimate.

What followed—Conquest, War of Kings, Realm of Kings, The Thanos Imperative—built an interconnected cosmic mythology that rewarded patient reading. The Guardians of the Galaxy that emerged from this era (the Abnett and Lanning version) were ragtag, morally complicated, and genuinely funny. Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire wove the X-Men into this tapestry. It felt like a coherent universe being built in real time.

What connects these?

Looking at these lists, I care about interiority. These are comics about damage. About characters whose internal battles are more interesting than their external ones.

Jessica Jones fighting her own trauma. Moon Knight questioning his sanity. Legion (Son of X) literalising mental illness as a war between personalities. The Vision trying to understand if his emotions are real or just very good simulations. Hawkeye being deeply, persistently bad at his own life while being very good at shooting arrows. Even the Cosmic saga works because Annihilation strips its characters down to survival and moral compromise.

I think I'm drawn to stories where vulnerability isn't an obstacle to heroism—it's almost a prerequisite. Where the people saving the day are also the people who can barely save themselves.

There's also something about authorship that matters to me. I don't follow characters (apart from having a childhood soft spot for the Hulk); I follow writers. It's not that I love Moon Knight—it's that I love what Bendis did with Moon Knight, which is completely different from what Jeff Lemire did (turning Marc's fractured psyche into the narrative structure itself), which is different again from what Charlie Huston did (brutal street-level noir). The character is a great vessel for individual creative vision.

What's next?

I've taken a break from Marvel the last couple years, but next on my list, when (not if) I return:

☐ Immortal Hulk (psychological horror, identity fragmentation)
☐ Daredevil by Chip Zdarsky (consequences, moral complexity)
☐ Miracleman (deconstruction taken to extremes)

What I've read:

Marvel 1610: The Ultimate Universe

2000 Ultimate Spider-Man
2001 Ultimate Marvel Team-Up
2001 Ultimate X-Men 💚Liked this
2002 The Ultimates I (Millar/Hitch) 💜I loved this!
2003 Ultimate War 💚Liked this
2003 Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra
2003 Ultimate Six 💚Liked this
2004 Ultimate Fantastic Four 💚Liked this
2004 Ultimate Nightmare / Secret / Extinction 💚Liked this
2005 Ultimate Iron Man
2005 The Ultimates II (Millar/Hitch) 💚Liked this
2006 Ultimate Power 💚Liked this
2007 Ultimate Vision
2008 Ultimate Iron Man II
2008 Ultimate Human 💚Liked this
2009 Ultimatum 💚Liked this
2009 Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk 💚Liked this
2009 Ultimate Comics Armor Wars 💚Liked this
2009 Ultimate Comics Avengers 💚Liked this
2010 Ultimate Spider-Man v2
2010 Ultimate X
2010 Ultimate Comics New Ultimates 💚Liked this
2010 Ultimate Comics Enemy / Mystery / Doom 💚Liked this
2011 The Ultimates III
2011 Ultimate Thor
2011 Ultimate Elektra
2011 Ultimate Origins
2011 Ultimate Comics Captain America
2011 Ultimate Comics Hawkeye
2011 Ultimate Fallout
2011 Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates
2011 Ultimate Comics Spider-Man (Miles Morales) 💚Liked this
2011 Ultimate Comics Ultimates 💚Liked this
2012 Spider-Men 💚Liked this
2012 Divided We Fall / United We Stand 💚Liked this
2012 Ultimate Comics X-Men
2012 Ultimate Comics Iron Man
2013 Ultimate Comics Wolverine
2013 Avengers: Age of Ultron
2013 Cataclysm
2014 Avengers A.I.
2014 Ultimate FF
2014 All-New Ultimates
2015 Secret Wars 💚Liked this
2015 Ultimates: Omniversal (Ewing) 💚Liked this
2017 Ultimates 2 (Ewing) 💚Liked this

Marvel 616

2004 Avengers Disassembled
2004 Secret War
2005 House of M
2005 Iron Man: Extremis (Ellis) 💚Liked this
2006 Decimation 💜I loved this!
2006 Planet Hulk
2006 X-Factor v3 💚Liked this
2007 Iron Man: Execute Program (Knaufs) 💚Liked this
2007 Civil War I 💚Liked this
2007 Silent War 💚Liked this
2007 World War Hulk 💜I loved this!
2007 Iron Man 💚Liked this
2008 World War Hulk: Aftersmash
2008 X-Men: Messiah CompleX
2008 Secret Invasion
2009 Dark Reign

Marvel Cosmic

2003 Marvel Universe: The End
2003 Thanos
2005 Beta Ray Bill: Stormbreaker
2006 Uncanny X-Men: Rise and Fall of the Shi'ar Empire 💚Liked this
2006 Annihilation 💜I loved this!
2007 Conquest 💚Liked this
2008 Guardians of the Galaxy (Abnett/Lanning) 💚Liked this
2009 Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter
2009 War of Kings 💚Liked this
2009 S.W.O.R.D.: No Time to Breathe
2010 Realm of Kings 💚Liked this
2010 Thanos Imperative 💚Liked this
2011 Annihilators
2011 Annihilators: Earthfall

Jessica Jones

2001 Alias (Bendis)
2004 The Pulse (Bendis)
2016 Avengers Adventures
2016 Jessica Jones (Bendis) 💜I loved this!
2018 Jessica Jones (Kelly Thompson) 💚Liked this
2020 Jessica Jones: Blind Spot 💚Liked this

Legion

1981 X-Men Legion: Shadow King Rising
2009 New Mutants: Return of Legion 💚Liked this
2012 Legion: Son of X 💚Liked this
2013 X-Men Legacy: Aftermath / Age of X / Lost Legions
2018 Legion: Trauma 💚Liked this

Moon Knight

1980 Vol. 1: Origins
1983 Special Edition
1985 Vol. 2: Fist of Khonshu 💚Liked this
1989 Marc Spector: Moon Knight
1992 Divided We Fall / Special
1998 Resurrection War
1999 High Strangers
2006 Vol. 3 (Huston/Benson) 💚Liked this
2009 Vengeance of the Moon Knight
2010 Shadowland
2011 Vol. 4 (Bendis) 💜I loved this!
2014 Vol. 5 (Warren Ellis)
2016 Vol. 6 (Lemire) 💚Liked this
2017 Legacy: Crazy Runs in the Family 💚Liked this
2018 Moon Knight (Bemis)

Tim Ferguson...

Let's talk superheros...