Max: Fist pretty much ignores current Marvel continuity, for the most part. Check out the first trade, and I bet you'll be hooked (it's a nice quality trade too with good paper stock).

I haven't read any of this yet but I love Grant Morrisson. In my opinion his take on the X-men was the peak of that series, then it went downhill and although I occassionally read the books I can't really be bothered to care about them. So I have to read this stuff... but first we'll make it our project at home to buy and read all the old crisis books. I guess that will take some time.

Max

I think the tie ins express what I consider to be one of the failings of the Marvel and DC universes. They annoy me as giant cohesive universes.

I like them internally, and I love say, a lot of Batman arcs, when I can treat them with a loose grip on continuity and a showpiece for my love of a character, but tie-in's remind me of some annoying problems present by having all of your superhero's inhabit the same world.

Things like... anytime a low-rent hero is challenged with the destruction of the world (or a major city, or you know, just anything big time), how come the big dogs don't step in to do something. Once DC reminds me that all of their comics take place in one planet (for the most partY), everytime a villain points a death ray at a major city and makes his intentions known, I wonder why Superman doesn't do something about it and leaves it to the far weaker player I'm reading about. I mean, I don't always keep up on his trades, so maybe he's busy off planet or something, but I'd think if he was just doing his usual shtick he might get off his butt to spare ten seconds to save a city.

Also, all the confusion about diety's, types of magic, etc. It becomes constraining. When they fold stories into their universes, suddenly characters who made deals with the devil (like the Original Ghostrider), now have to be dealing with demons who are just pretending to be the devil. Or say, if they were on the run from a govt. conspiracy, but now we want to fold them into the universe, we have to make sure that what they thought was a conspiracy was already one of the major villainous govt. organizations we've already defined operating under a different name, that takes a lot out of the character for me, it constrains some of the individuality for new characters and arcs, when they have to deal with existant forms.

I could read an episodic comic forever, like I can read tons of Sherlock Holmes, and I love coherent paced continuities that have an ending (like say, Battlestar Galactica, which hasn't ended yet but won't be running forever), but mainstream comics inhabit some strange middle ground that turns me off of them.

I heard it was supposed to be an elsewhere story, but Didio wanted to make a cross over.

Another good book to pick-up, that I enjoyed at least, was the current Hercules stories from Marvel. Oh and Nova.