I'm new to comic books. I've been reading some of DC's New 52. So far, I've read Batman, Deathstroke and The Flash. I also read the first issue of Superman Unchained when it came out. So far, even though the character is kind of cool, I'm not digging the Deathstroke series after an issue or two. Superman Unchained may turn out awful a few issues in too and I never enjoyed Batman too much as far as superheroes went, so I may not read all of them either. There are plenty of other DC comics in the New 52 that look interesting, like the Green Arrow or Green Lantern, but I want to look over to Marvel first. Do they have an equivalent of the New 52? Also, I keep hearing about a specific character, Deadpool. He's meant to be good? However, there's more than one series. Which should I read to get a sort of canon understanding of the character?

My advice? Get into some Spider-man comics first. They're easily some of the best out there.

Deadpool is hilarious, because he has a habit of breaking the fourth wall. Needless to say, having a superhero constantly yell at the reader for being lazy is pretty funny when you think about how the in-comic characters think about his random gibberish.

I only really follow the Spider-Man books, which there thankfully are much less variants of these days. Deadpool was initially an awfully generic character created at the height of the 90's "Xtreme" era by Rob Liefeld, but after a while they just turned the character into this deliberately zany, fourth-wall breaking figure.

Marvel's books are split up into 2 different universes with the other one being the Ultimate comics. They are basically just slightly different re-imaginings of all their classic characters, which is honestly a bit pointless when they've always been keeping their classic universe modern and up to date.

I was a huge Marvel fan thru most of the 80s and the early 90s, but then the Spider-Man clone saga during 94-96 kinda ruined the whole thing for me so I stopped reading it. Never was a fan of Carnage either, among other things.

I read the Ultimate comics pretty much up through Ultimatum, and after that I kind of fell off of it.

It also helped that I got a reading list, so I knew what to read in what order, and I also knew when to hold off on reading some things I already had. It made the whole experience SO much better.

A little while ago I wanted to get into X-Men from as close to the start as possible, but with all of the crossovers and things like that, it was just impossible for me to keep up