With American comics, it’s not even the shattered continuity, it’s that availability is a mess because some of the franchises are so ancient and collectible.
If I want to read through One Piece from the 1997 start, my library probably has/can inter-library loan all 105 volumes, or I can go to mainstream retailers and get any I’m missing without a huge fracas.
If I want to read Batman from the 1940 start, I’d better hope some of the rarer issues come up at auction in the near future AND that I can mortgage my house to afford them.
I’m amazed they never put out a DVD-ROM collection that’s “Everything Marvel/DC did prior to, say, 1990, as PDF scans” just so mere mortals have a chance to enjoy the experience of completionism.
If it’s anything like magic the gathering, whales and third party sellers are to blame
I was surprised about that figure of 105 volumes for one piece, so I googled it and it was 109 (probably just what came out since you last heard about it). I was expecting that number to be like a thousand or something.
A little over a thousand chapters, but a volume has about ten chapters.
I’ve got a DVD of 20 years of Amazing Spider-Man (1986-2006).
Yep. I first saw what he is asking for over 20 years ago. They sold them at a gas station by my house.
TV series: You have to skip the first season, it’s a slow start and kinda shit. Go back to it later, except for S01E07 and 08, those are necessary to understand the story arc.
In S02, watch E03,04,05,08,11 and 02 in that order. Still drags on but there are some memorable moments. S03 is great. Except for the ending, skip that. And it all goes downhill starting in S04.
But if you stick with it, S07 is bearable again.Best series of all time!
When does game of thrones get good? Season 8?
I personally recommend watching all of GoT in order, not because it’s good, but because you won’t appreciate the flawless genius of S8E3 without the other 7 seasons of context. It’s a slow drag through those 7 seasons, but once it picks up in the last 5 episodes, it’ll all be worth it, I swear. There’s so much character development packed into those episodes that they’ll seem like completely different people!
The memes were top tier.
Honestly, if I’m told that I need to watch something in a weird order in order to enjoy it, I just drop it from my watchlist. There’s plenty of good media to watch, I’m not gonna do that stupid shit.
You’re not gonna like Fate then. It is a good series just complicated time-line and a complete mess.
I mean, you can just watch said series in release order as well if optimal order is too much work
(but I do get the sentiment. I’m just thinking of Steins Gate. Watching it and then Steins Gate 0 is a perfectly valid watch order, but since Steins Gate 0 expands on a certain event that just happens in 1 episode in the original into an entire season [and adds a whole bunch of narrative weight by doing so] theres an optimal watch order that has you jump to Steins Gate 0 slightly before ending Steins Gate original and then finishing Steins Gate original after you’ve finished Steins Gate 0)
The walking deads first season is great! Not the rest though
I bought and read the first comic, watched the first series, and called it good.
You did well. The first season and every following season are the exact same. Chaos, find safety, traitor/calamity, run, chaos… Repeat
Does anyone really watch a tv show like that?
Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis.
My friend insists Battlestar Galactica has a crazy order. His partner wants to watch it and he got irrationally angry (at the show, not at her).
I guess she watches it without him now. He refuses to even discuss it. I like to poke at him about it occasionally.
Yeah, I can get into a series if people say to skip the first couple episodes/seasons because it takes a little to figure itself out (like how you can skip the first season of Parks and Rec and miss nothing of importance), but weird watch order is not something I’ll bother with.
I had to get a watch guide for Supernatural. It had some great episodes and a lot of duds. I still never finished it, stopping on season 7.
I thought you were talking about Jojo for the first half and was ready to defend part 2.
I was thinking of what I was told about TNG and Babylon5 but the episode numbers I wrote are just random.
I applied these rules to True Detective and I am now sad and confused.
no shit. that’s exactly how everyone talks about the series I need to watch.^^
TNG or Babylon 5?
Oh, but the power of American superhero comics is that you can just start reading them wherever. Sure, there is deeper lore, but you’re not required to know all that. There’s this bat-dude, see? He punches crooks and does awesome shit in the night. There’s also a bunch of wacky villains. See? Just go read it, you’ll pick up the rest of the details as you go along!
And I also love a lot of European comics because most often they have a pretty good balance between complex writing and manageable size. And publishers here tend to be more lenient toward artists making one-shot kind of comics, without any expectations that it’ll become the next endless blockbuster cash-cow property.
Still, I do like how most of the manga series are like “OK, here’s the beginning, here’s 20 or whatever volumes, here’s the end.”
Why do people understand this about the comics but not the movies?
And that’s why Comics < Manga
and I say that as someone who reads more Comics than she does Mangas (Not really fond of anime aside from specific examples)
I love batman and tried to get into comics many times. But every time I’d ask where to start it wouid be paragraphs of text exposing were I “could start” multiple reboots, side world’s, multi verse who else knows what. So I just give up.
Yeah. I tried getting into comics once and got a multi-gigabyte archive of deadpool stuff.
…couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
Actually couldn’t get into IDW sonic/transformers for the same reason. WHERE DO I START!?
I’m surprised you had this problem with IDW Sonic as it’s an incredibly easy book to follow. If you were confused by the beginning then know that the whole book takes place after Sonic Forces, but before Frontiers in the game timeline. Unlike Archie Sonic which is its own continuity.
Well, it was a spur-of-the-moment sort of thing when I went and looked at their site and it just had a bunch of names with no numbers there under the book art.
Went and checked now and site looks entirely different, and I can clearly see the issue numbers. I don’t know, maybe I hallucinated it.
Annoyingly enough a lot of books are trying to make the issue numbers harder to spot thinking that if readers aren’t intimidated by the issue number they’ll pick it up…
Maybe if they just stop doing reboots every three seconds instead?
And since each issue has “Variant Covers” now you can be tricked into buying the same book twice if you don’t notice those numbers
do comics have as much filler as manga? because most manga and anime I’ve seen (which isn’t too much admittedly) has been full of irrelevant shit just to pad things out.
Most manga and anime don’t have filler. The long-running ones do, because, well, they want to milk them for all they’re worth.
Not really, since there’s such a limited page amount, the only comics with “filler” either are because the editor kept mandating arcs that sell too well be stretched out as much as possible (Marvel infamously did this with Spider-Man’s clone saga to the irritation of EVERYONE!), or because it’s something like Early Archie Sonic where the stories are intended to be episodically self-contained to begin with.
DO NOT ASK ABOUT HOW TO WATCH FATE/MONOGATARI
Literally just watch Monogatari in release order. It’s out of chronological order on purpose
When am I supposed to play Melty Blood?
Any time is fine, as long as you’re in a bathroom, a stairwell, or the woods.
Any place is a good place for laptop grand finals.
Fate is pretty easy nowadays. Just start with literally any series made after 2011. They’re all self contained stories that explain the premise within the first few episodes.
We’re a long way from the old days where you had to read the VN if you wanted to have any idea about what was going on in the UBW movie.
I’ve never watched it: I just read the hentai doujins. It gave me a better idea of the story.
I had a watch guide scare me off of Fate.
Just start with Zero. It’s a prequel that lays out the narrative devices of the series while being a pretty neat story in itself.
But after watching Zero anything else from Fate is just weird.
Like adults murdering each other with magic and famous people makes some sort of sense. Kids doing that is just… stupid. I tried the Stay/Night, UBW many times, and it just doesn’t hit anywhere near as well as the Zero did.
I’m just going to pleasure myself with this fish.
To be fair, the Holy Grail War in Zero is the last one that was kind of played by the rules, and it never properly concludes.
The events of the main routes all depict the fallout of the Holy Grail War going to complete shit, with people and children being used as pawns left and right.
Monogatari was much harder for me to keep track of IMO, Fate content you can start off with most of what’s available (vanilla Fate, Zero, Extra, Samurai Remnant, Prisma, Grand Order). I’d only not recommend Hollow Ataraxia or Apocrypha first.
Where typemoon is concerned, Kara no Kyoukai is more headache inducing
Fate is only difficult for people who are adamant about watching adaptations. And even though I do think the UBW anime at least reaches the threshold of “good,” it’s still inferior.
Make sure you watch the corrected DVD order because Fox thought more action would be better and put the 2nd episode first, the first episode 11th and totally fucked any hope for a second season…
I’m still not over it ;_;
I’m not sure I ever will be…
They took the sky from me =/
He originally appeared as a minor villain in Captainman #743, so you’d have to read that first. And the previous issues, for context.
Jujutsu kaisen has entered the chat.
(But only if you are some random website who thinks the original release timeline isn’t “the correct way”)
Once comics start going public domain, I hope the first thing people do is release them as chapters
Let me introduce you to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
The manga? Start with chapter one. The light novel? Start with chapter one. Only the anime made it needlessly confusing.
What do you mean, needlessly confusing? The release order was genius. Opening with the movie screening showed exactly the kind of show it was. It also allowed the climax to be in the last episode of the season, while still having it happen in the middle chronologically (as Haruhi wanted).
But the second season was where KyoAni outdid themselves. It was an improvement on the first season. While the first season was great, the second was even better. Sometimes you see a series dip in quality in S2, but here it was the opposite - the quality improved. For the second season showed an uptick in the narrative. The first season had already pushed the limits of storytelling, but the second went further. While the first season was greatly enjoyable, the second was even more so. Perhaps the most ardent fans may try to quantify the quality, and say that it was, I don’t know, eight times better than the first.
Star Trek '09 and Into Darkness are both better movies if you read their supplementary comics. This is, I think, already on bad ground. Each work should be able to stand on its own to some degree. Pushing supplementary stuff like this to bring the story together is a cynical cash grab.
Season 1 of Picard then directly contradicts the comic to '09. Specifically, Data was fully revived inside B4 in the comic, while Picard showed that B4 could never handle the complexity of Data’s programming (which, admittedly, is the more likely outcome). Not only that, but Alex Kurtzman was one of the writers of the comic was also on the writing team of Picard. Erasing that plot point was a deliberate choice.
Where does that leave us with those comics?
I - I mean, you really only have to watch, like, season 4 through 17, pretty much. The rest you can just skip.
I wonder if there’s a serialized Mr. Frog comic?
My favourite part is when he eats the bug
Is the guy on the right genetically deformed?
No, he doesn’t exist, he’s an art project.
That’s Zara Boss, not Gigachad.
