I, myself, just cancelled all my DC titles after years of loyal devotion. Don't mistake me - I'm still incredibly loyal to the characters, but I'm tired of DC's habit of constantly rebooting the universe whenever it begins to grow beyond it's classic model. For example, Dick Grayson should have become The Bat, like, 20 years ago, and though they've temporarily moved him up into the Batman slot more than once, they keep knocking him back down to Nightwing status so they can encase a 30 year old Bruce Wayne as Batman in amber. Things like that - which amounts to the DCU being developmentally stunted - have become too frustrating for me to put up with anymore, and I suspect you will eventually tire of it as well.
Don't let that discourage you though! Even through all the reboots, I've watched aspects of a persistent mythos emerge organically into things that the Powers That Be at DC can't simply squash with a reboot. Who knows, maybe someday they'll find a way to actually realize the potential of that mythos.

That said, If you weren't all "Fuck that guy" about it, I'd recommend the Green Lantern line of titles, especially the goings-on before the New52 reboot. Incidentally, you'll find that the Brightest Day storyline had a bit to do with Swamp Thing, though I really think they botched that one.
I'd also recommend Aquaman, because - despite whatever bad press he gets over his powers as a superhero - he actually progresses as a character. In fact, all the continuity reboots to the DCU over the years have had very little effect on the linear progression of Aquaman's story.
I can't speak to whether or not Green Arrow is any good right now because I never picked it back up after the New52 reboot. I was a bit turned off by what seemed to be them starting him back at square one, with absolutely no previous continuity carrying over. Maybe that makes it a good choice for you though, not having to decode which pieces of his previous history apply to the current iteration.
Other than that, I don't really know what to recommend other than EVERY FUCKING DC COMIC THERE IS, because they can't seem to resist making them all cross over with each other so significantly that you can't follow what's going on from month to month in a single comic without reading the other titles they cross with. Most comics with a female lead are pretty self-contained (Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Batgirl, and Birds of Prey come to mind), but that's about it. You can expect any Super-Family, Bat-Family, and GL-Family titles to regularly cross over with each other. Justice League titles seem to keep crossing with each other, not to mention the fact that JLDark keeps crossing with Phantom Stranger, Constantine, Pandora, and whoever else has JLDark membership at the moment. Mostly, you have to stick to the third-string characters if you don't want to have to keep buying unexpected titles just to keep up, but even they're not immune as you've seen from the Swamp Thing/Animal Man crossover.
As far as old shit goes, there's a couple old crossover events that had a main miniseries to them that are worth reading: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Legends, Identity Crisis, and Infinite Crisis. Cosmic Odyssey was a decent prestige format miniseries, if you like the New Gods, but Genesis is only worth reading for the sake of knowing what happened, Death of the New Gods makes no sense in the context of Final Crisis, and Final Crisis makes no sense without having read the 7 Soldiers of Victory series(comprised of seven 4-issue miniseries and two book-end issues) and even then you'll be like "What the fuck did I just read?" about 7 Soldiers AND Final Crisis.

Oh, and Secret Six, which they cancelled when they launched the New52, was probably the best series I'd read in a long time.

>>568
>>569
Thanks for all the input.

It's funny that you dropped the New 52 because of the lack of development in the mythos, because that's exactly what appealed to me and drew me in in the first place. The DC universe seemed so impenetrably convoluted. The particular example you use - Dick Grayson going from Robin to Nightwing then Batman then back to Nighwing again, and on and on - is exactly the kind of stuff that frustrated me. It's a comic book, a cartoon, so I've never been particularly interested in big changes like that. Don't get me wrong, I like a forward moving arc and character development as much as the next guy, but I'd be perfectly happy seeing a perpetually 30-year old Bruce Wayne Batmanning it up, the same way I was happy seeing a perpetually 10 year old Bart Simpson prank call Moe for the entirety of the 90s... Thus was the appeal of the New 52 to me: an entry point freed of all the context and complication of 50 years of cross-overs and tie-ins, though I can definitely see getting a little bored/frustrated if the mythos of the DCU starts to feel as stunted and half-assed as it did for you.

I'm definitely interested in Aquaman. He gets a lot of flack, but I was a big fan of the old Aquaman cartoons as a kid. Where would you recommend starting?

I'll also look into all the Crisis arcs, Cosmic Odyssey, and possibly check out Secret Six as well.

Well, despite it's heavy link to the Green Lantern mythos, the 26-issue Brightest Day series is probably the best jumping-on point for Aquaman right now, armed with the foreknowledge that he was raised from the dead in the final pages of the 8-issue Blackest Night event that came prior to it.

As far as the mythos and the impenetrability of the DCU goes, it's one of those things that only seems daunting from the outside. If they're using the format of the comicbook properly the past only matters in an academic sense. It really shouldn't matter, when you pick up your first issue, if Batman is a guy named Bruce Wayne or a guy named Dick Grayson, because BATMAN is Batman, and they tell you on the first page whether "The son of wealthy socialites, Thomas and Martha Wayne; after seeing them murdered as a child, Bruce Wayne dedicated his life to the fight for justice as... BATMAN!" or "Dick Grayson - orphaned when his parents, The Flying Graysons, were murdered while performing their act - was raised by billionaire, Bruce Wayne, fighting by his side as Robin and eventually inheriting the mantel of... BATMAN!" All that stuff is just background info to the story happening "now" in any given comic. It's only once you start to invest in the those stories as a sequence of events, events shaping the character under the cowl, that it really matters who's wearing it. The JSA legacy characters from the previous iteration of the DCU are proof of enough of that. Nobody who had invested in the characters of Stargirl, Atom Smasher, or Sandman cared that they weren't reading the continuing adventures of Starman, Atom, and the original Sandman. It's already started that people don't care that they're not reading the iterations of characters that I'd invested in. DC lost me with that one though and it didn't have to go down that way.

Honestly though, I knew it was ominous the moment they brought Barry Allen (Silver Age Flash) back from the dead. Barry Allen's death was the most successfully executed death in DC history and there was absolutely no reason to bring him back. Flashpoint (which ended the previous DCU and created the New52) might as well have been titled "FuckYouPoint" after that, piece of dark meta-poetry that it was.

But I digress...

I think you'll find that even the New52 has a bit of trouble separating itself from the old DCU. They boxed themselves into a corner with continuity errors from day one, because the current happenings of some characters like Aquaman and Green Lantern's New52 titles continued right out of the old DCU's "Blackest Night" and "Brightest Day" storylines, while other characters that were integral to those very stories had their origins rebooted in a manner that makes their involvement impossible, like Firestorm. I predict 2015's rumored Crisis is going to be another reboot.

>>571
>it's one of those things that only seems daunting from the outside. If they're using the format of the comicbook properly the past only matters in an academic sense.
I hear ya. It seems like the more I have been looking and reading and asking about where to get started, the more I'm finding that "basically anywhere" is the answer. And any time I get a little confused, a little wikipedia-ing of this or that arc gets me up to speed well enough.

I guess the main thing that seems daunting is just knowing what the fuck to buy. It seems like neat-and-tidy maxi-series are outnumbered by convoluted cross-over arcs that incorporate not just the maxi-series but a number of tie-in mini-series and storylines in other titles. It just seems like a fucking mess, but I guess like anything the best thing to do is just dive in and fill in the blanks anywhere I may get lost.

Things are seeming simpler than I was initially worried about.

So as far as Aquaman goes: Brightest Day, then onward into his current solo title from there?

>Aquaman goes: Brightest Day, then onward into his current solo title from there?

Yeah, pretty much. Collected volumes of the first Aquaman series are handy too, though not strictly necessary. The important things to know from the early stuff - other than basic origin shit (which they constantly bring back up anyway) - is that Mera comes from another dimension and that Black Manta killed the baby that Aquaman and Mera had together, but I'm pretty sure you get a quick review of all that between Brightest Day and current issues anyway.

>I guess the main thing that seems daunting is just knowing what the fuck to buy. It seems like neat-and-tidy maxi-series are outnumbered by convoluted cross-over arcs that incorporate not just the maxi-series but a number of tie-in mini-series and storylines in other titles. It just seems like a fucking mess

Yes, this, a thousand times over. It's pretty clear that it's all a shameless sales tactic to get you to buy every single comic on the shelf, despite whatever intention you may have to buy a single title pertaining to a single character. My opinion is that, the way they do things at the moment, they might as well just release one volume a month, 52 times thicker than a regular comic, titled "DC Comic". It's a solid tactic that works well for them once a person actually starts to buy comics, but I think the heavy-handedness of it costs them a good deal of potential customers who decide they'd rather not get wrapped up in all that nonsense.

If it were up to me, I'd give each of the JLA core team a comic (Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Flash, Arrow, Wonder Woman, Lantern). I'd use the Type-Comics as a venue for those character's "Family" teams, with no set central character (Detective Comics for the Bat-Fam, Action for the Super-Fam, etc.) - maybe as a double-size issue used for inter-family crossovers, and double features where the back-up trends toward spotlighting lesser known characters in order to generate interest in them. For characters that have a HUGE family of associated characters (Again, Bat-Fam and Super-Fam), I'd probably broaden the number further with a girl-characters and a guy-characters comic - like Dark Knights and Birds of Prey would be the Gotham stuff, rather than giving separate titles to Batgirl, Batwoman, Nightwing, Azrael, Robin, and any number of other Bat-titles that come and go all the time. I'd make a couple titles specifically for cross-over stories between two or three characters (Worlds Finest and Brave And The Bold come to mind), rather than using their main titles for such things. Then there'd be the team comics, like JLA and Teen Titans, which is the ONLY place I'd let an major event cross into, with the exception of events that crossover into titles with stand-alone stories rather than a single tale chained together throughout them all. After that, there's just some miscellaneous peripheral characters that are "big", but don't have an associated family of characters (worth mentioning) that come with them, like Hawkman, The Atom, Firestorm, Swamp Thing, and the like.

Basically, the whole thing could do with some streamlining and simplification, in my opinion. There's fat that needs to be trimmed, and Type-Comics that need act as a showcase of that type, rather than just another venue for the main character that's now typically associated with it, and crossovers that need to be more restricted so as not lose a reader just because they don't have the money to keep up with it all. I certainly don't think they need a whole 52 titles going all the time, and the rate at which they change some of them out just proves it to me.

Oh, and you haven't complained, but I'm sorry if I don't spoiler-out any back-story stuff. I just don't see that I'm really ruining anything for you, since they'll either enumerate it for you when you need to know it (thus spoiling it for you anyway), or they'll leave you scratching your head over what the hell they're talking about (and a spoiler becomes necessary).

>>575
Nah, you didn't spoil anything. Like I said, in an effort to figure out where to jump in, I've done a fair bit of backstory reading and it doesn't ruin anything.

I'll probably dive into Aquaman (accidental pun :D ) sometime this summer. I just picked up Camelot 3000 for ten bucks on a recommendation based on my enjoyment of The Killing Joke (Brian Bolland did the art for both) so once I finish that, I'll give Brightest Day a go and then start nabbing some New 52 Aquaman back issues.

Are you as familiar with Marvel as you are with DC? Marvel's characters and titles don't appeal to me nearly as much, but I am very intrigued by Doctor Strange, after finding out that Doctor Orpheus in The Venture Bros is based on him and that the early Ditko issues were awash with psychedelic craziness. He seems like a cool character with a lot of kooky story possibilities. I was also a big fan of the Silver Surfer animated series as a teen. Any advice on good arcs, mini-series, or whathaveyou to try out for either of those characters? I'll probably zip into a couple shops downtown and see what they have to say but more opinions are always good.

I never really got into Marvel - not the comics anyway. When I first started reading comics, back in the mid-90s (the so-called "Dark Age" of Comics), I was more attracted to DC characters for what I perceived at the time to be a diversity of origins behind their powers. 90s Marvel was all about mutants mutants mutants, and that kind of turned me off to them. That was back when I was like 9 or 10 years old, but; when I got back into comics after highschool, I stuck with what I already knew. In fact, the whole reason I got back into comics was that I went through my old comics one day, started reading them, and felt compelled to find out what happened next once I got to the end of my collection. Things just kinda snowballed from there.

Anyhow, despite my general aversion to Marvel comicbooks, I did enjoy the X-Men and Spiderman animated series from the 90s, and I worked at a comicshop for a couple years, so I'm aware of a fair amount of Marvel characters and continuity, but not enough so that I could tell you what the "good" stories are. Other than getting a basic knowledge of main continuity events of the past, I really only kept up enough to help customers with the Marvel stuff that was current at the time (about 4 years ago now).

When there was a /co/ board though, I seem to recall there being a good amount of Marvel fans around here. Perhaps if one of them would care to chime in....?