The 12 comic books to start with when you first dive into the Marvel Universe

If you are a fan of movies or television in 2015, then the cultural dominance of the superhero will not come as a surprise to you-water is wet, skies are azure, and two "Avengers" movies have made a billion dollars each.

With the hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped into comic book-inspired movies, television, and toy commercials (sometimes they are one and the same), its easy to feel either exasperated or fascinated by it all. In the midst of all this noise, one name stands taller than the rest in the current pop culture climate: Marvel.

Marvel, as many have noted, has found much success building its multimedia empire by mimicking the model it's established in its comic books: an interconnected, shared universe populated by characters who function both on their own and as a member of any number of teams.

Perhaps you've never read a Marvel comic, but you'd like to start. Lucky for you, Marvel has made it very easy to get into its comics-if you have a smartphone, tablet, or access to a web browser, you can subscribe to Marvel Unlimited: A Netflix-style streaming service with the vast majority of Marvel comics 75-plus year library ready for you to read. That's wonderful, but daunting-75 years of continuous storytelling? Where do you start?

We've put together this simple guide to answer exactly that question >

The amazing upside of 75 years of storytelling is the sheer variety of stories that have been told-from thrilling espionage to generational epics to teen angst, biting satire, and cultural criticism, there's a lot comics have to offer.

In both of these cases, you'll likely need a guide, and that's where we come in. Here are 12 of the very best comic book series to dive into with Marvel Unlimited. Be advised, this post favors more recent work from the last fifteen years, but often recommends classic stories to follow up with should you choose.

Enjoy.