Someone please explain comics to me.?

Question

I just finished Watchmen a week ago and since then have been adicted to comic books, but i really don't understand a lot about them. First off, there are all of these different "versions" and "volumes". so far, all i understand is that there are books containing certain sequences of the comics like Moon Knight #1-#6 etc.

but when i want to look at the Punisher, is The Punisher V5 1-50 the same as v31-50? is the story the same, just with different art work? im lost.

my thing is, i dont like having all of this c**p where there are all of the different stories for the same character. i want ONE true, real story to follow. holla if you hear me now!

Answer 1

Its tough to find characters that have one true story in a serial medium like comics.  If you look at DC comics (the company that produced the Watchmen miniseries you enjoyed), in the eighties they had a massive company-wide reboot called "The Crisis on Infinite Earths" where they took the mind-bogglingly confounding back stories for most of their characters and started over with new origin stories.  Recently there has been a movement within the company to return those old stories to the back stories of the characters, but that has only made things more confusing for a new reader such as yourself.

For example look at Superman.  He had a rich history, but some authors felt that he was getting too powerful (it got to the point where he was faster than light and could juggle planets, and he also had some crazier powers you don't hear about much anymore, like an amnesia-kiss, and a super genius brain, which seems to be returning somewhat) and that he was unrelatable. They wanted him to go back to being the lone survivor of a doomed planet. So, they hired writer/artist John Byrne, along with Marv Wolfman, to reboot the franchise.  Krypton was completely changed to a cold, soulless environment where people wore crazy headdresses and all black jumpsuits in order to keep Superman from missing his planet too much, and Clark Kent became the real man, whereas he was merely a disguise that Superman wore previously.    As time passed, old ideas seeped back in, Krypton ended up going back to the way it was before the reboot, and more survivors of Krypton ended up showing up (like supergirl, kryto the superdog, etc, the bottled city of kandor).

Currently in Batman, a similar return of all the old stories has occurred with Grant Morrison exploring what kind of an effect it would have on a person if everything that ever happened to Batman within the pages of his comics had all happened to one person within their lifetime, what kind of effect would that have on them.  

Marvel has never had such a uniform, company-wide reboot, but some characters have had personal reboots within their own comics.  Spider-man recently had such a reboot that ignores his recent unmasking in a company-wide crossover called Civil War, and also gets rid of his marriage to Mary Jane.  The implications of this reboot have not yet been fully explored.  How many characters remember the old days, how many of the old stories are still viable, etc, all remain up in the air.

But so far all of the examples I have given are all books that had one volume (or in the case of The Amazing Spider-Man, it had a second volume for a short time, but soon returned to its original numbering).  The case for books such as the punisher is that, at one point, the books were canceled, or transferred over to another publishing division.  The Punisher on the MAX imprint is for mature readers only, and it is not clear how many of the stories are within continuity or to what extent (although, Garth Ennis has penned some of the best Punisher stories of all time in the pages of his Punisher book).  Punisher: War Journal (the newer volume... I think its Vol. 2 and is still currently being published) are in the in-continuity stories of the Punisher, interacting with the rest of the Marvel universe.

A similar volume change occurred with Daredevil.  All of his stories are within continuity though, it was just a change to the Marvel Knights imprint because of the darkness of the stories.  That imprint has since gone away, but the issue numbering has remained since the switch over.

But then you have a character like Blade who recently had a miniseries that seemed to ignore, if not all, most of the previous mythology of the character.  He will be reappearing soon in the new Captain Britain comic and I suppose we'll see there how much of his history is valid.

The more popular or important the character, the more important their back story and continuity is.  There have been several volumes of Captain America, but all have followed the story of Steve Rogers (well, until recently when he was killed and replaced by his long-believed to be dead sidekick Bucky Barnes).  

Comics can be confusing to a newcomer, but if you grab a few new issues of a character that you find appealing, you'll get into the swing of things in no time.  Don't let their pasts overwhelm you. in most cases the publishers know how to balance it all out so that it doesn't become too much for a new reader to understand what is going on.  Also, most wikipedia articles cover a good amount of the stories you need to know about these characters to understand whats going on if you do indeed end up finding youself lost out there without a paddle.