The Glade 4.0

I remember there was once upon a time a thread about this but I think it was on a past version of the glade, as several searches did not bring that thread up.

I've finally decided I want to read this thing after starting to get back into comics. On pure whim I was in a bookstore today with my fiancée and saw one of the hard covers. Civil War X-men. It was basically a whim but reading through the first bit of it quickly made me realize there's quite a bit more to this series of comics.

What I've been struggling with is how would one go about reading everything if I were to buy the hardcovers that I'd need? In a perfect world there'd be just one large book I'd buy and read from start to end, but so far in my googling that does not seem to be the case. I have access to a torrent that has all of the comics in digital files, and ordered no less, but reading a comic on the computer screen just isn't the same as laying on the couch reading a physical book.

Any help in pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

What format is it in? If I have manga on my PC I use CDisplay. It reads the images from the zip file and I generally like it. Just press space to go to the next page and you can adjust how it sizes and displays I don't know if I'd want to pay for Civil War without reading it first. YMMV

http://download.cnet.com/CDisplay-Image ... 62238.html

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The digital copies are in the .cbr format. I haven't toyed with them very much.

The short answer is that the hardcovers aren't a good format to read the currently popular line-wide crossover events in. It was okay back when crossovers meant 2, maybe 3 titles participating, because you just chuck all 3 series into the collection.

But you can't do that when it's all 18 of your major titles, plus 3 minis. Or whatever. It's one of the primary reasons why I'm getting exasperated with the crossover fappery in the industry.

The more precise answer is that even if you picked up all the appropriate collections, you'd still ideally want to break them down by issue to come up with a decent reading order. And that's often a nuisance in collections, since most will strip all of the synopsis pages, and stick all the covers at the end, if they bother to include the individual covers at all.

So, ironically enough (for the industry, which views these massive crossovers as great ways to boost sales), the best way to read these events is to pirate the individual issues digitally, or to borrow a friend's collection, since those are the two easiest ways to read sequentially by issue.

The other alternative, that is actually somewhat reasonable, is to pick up the "main" line (Civil War, in this case), along with one, maybe two titles (or franchise's miniseries) that cross into the event (X-Men: Civil War, in your case), and try to work out the break points for the issues so you can swap back and forth, which isn't an insurmountable task for 2 or 3 titles. The one positive thing about Marvel's events since House of M is that they at least do the reader the courtesy of containing the most important stuff that's necessary for following how the event affects your specific area of interest in the main title, either by directly depicting all the critical pieces, or alluding to them via newscasts or dialogue that summarizes relevant bits that happen in the intersecting titles. So you can get away with reading only the main title and whatever else interests you, and still be clued into what's happening with the titles you're reading.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Thanks Kaffis.

That was exactly the type of stuff I was hoping to get. I'll order up the Civil War book, and with those two books will cherry pick what I need from the digital files.

Thanks again to both of you!

For Civil War, I'd also recommend Civil War: Front Line. It was almost a secondary flagship for the event, and it was really good. Later Front Lines were done because Civil War: Front Line was good, and they were trying to play off the success, I think, but Civil War's Front Line really had something to say and a story to tell that was worth doing.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Why can't they publish the issues all in one or three books in order as they should be read. That doesn't seem all that difficult.

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Holy shitsnacks!

That's kind of what I was hoping for. Ah well.