Civil War/Secret Invasion.

[CMc6]

As a couple of my threads have shown in the last few weeks, I am fairly new to comics so dont really have a full idea of where all these titles fall into place.

Since getting into them I have heard alot about reading the "Civil War" plot and also the "Secret Invasion" plot. I do like the look of both of these but I am just wondering where and what they tie in with....

The main comics I read are to do with mainly the same characters. My favourites are Spider-Man, X-Men, Silver Surfer and Deadpool. So I read like "The Amazing Spider-Man and Ultimate Spiderman" - "Uncanny X-Men, X-Men and Ultimate X-Men" - "Deadpool (1993, 1994, 1997 and have just got the first two issues of his new series 2008)" - I also have the first two volumes of Silver Surfer, in the process now of getting the rest.

So my point would be, should I read Civil War/Secret Invasion and does it tie in with anything that I am currently reading? Yesterday I got to "Amazing Spider-Man #529" and noticed the title above saying "Road To Civil War" so will I just keep reading and this will take me into it?

My only hesitation about both of these titles is they seem to feature Iron Man and Captain America heavily and neither of those are exactly "popular" characters of mine. So if anybody had any info of when/where these would tie in with what I read (if they even do) could you let me know :tongue:

[remoteman]

Civil War and Secret Invasion cross over with pretty much every mainstream marvel universe character in one way or another. The X-Men, as they tend to be during universe wide crossovers are mainly restricted to their own corner of the Marvel universe, and apart from the odd tie in mini series aren't really that involved. Silver Surfer, as with most of the cosmic side of Marvel isn't involved with either Civil War or Secret Invasion. For more of him you might want to check out the two 'Annihilation' series, and their various tie ins. Deadpool played a small part in Civil War, and a significantly larger part in Secret Invasion. Although he wasn't involved with the core series in either, his Secret Invasion tie-in was a lot more significant to the overall story.

Spider-Man is a major player in Civil War, and a lot of the core series is centred around him, with Amazing Spider-Man, Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man and Sensational Spider-Man filling in the blanks. Amazing Spider-Man is fairly essential reading, whereas the other two series, while being good stories are probably skippable. His role in Secret Invasion is fairly insignificant if I remember correctly, and only extended so far as a couple of cameos here and there, and a Secret Invasion: Spider-Man mini series, which mainly focused on Jackpot and from what I hear is very skippable.

If you want to keep up with the Marvel Universe then reading these two stories is probably quite important. I didn't find them the greatest stories ever, but they were both decent and probably read a lot better in trade. While you can read them on their own, I would reccomend picking up a few of the tie-ins to flesh the story out a bit more. Deadpools Secret Invasion tie-in is one I would particularly recommend to you. Both stories do feature Iron Man fairly heavily, but while he is very prominent in Civil War Captain America doesn't feature that much in Secret Invasion, and both series focused on a lot of different characters apart from those two, although Iron Man is arguably the central character in both.