10 Marvel Graphic Novels You Must Read Before You Die
8. Fantastic Four: 1234
You also don't need much more than a working knowledge of Marvel's first family to enjoy Grant Morrison and Jae Lee's 1234, another Marvel Knights limited series that reintroduced and refocussed a set of characters who'd been around for a good forty years at that point.
The origins and archetypes of the Fantastic Four are relatively well known, thanks to blockbuster movies and Saturday morning cartoon adaptations, but this book gives a deeper and more grounded status quo for a superhero team made up of a stretchy genius, a kid who sets himself on fire, a man made of rocks and an invisible woman.
Setting the Fantastic Four up not as a historic superhero team on a pedestal built on decades of back issues, Morrison and Lee instead depict them as the sort of flawed, human characters you get on a good cable TV show. The Thing tries to get back some of his humanity by returning to his home borough, there's some marital trouble and possible infidelity between Mr Fantastic and the all-to-Invisible Woman, and the hotheaded Human Torch gets brought down to Earth for once.
Like Parable this all turns out to involve some alternate reality shenanigans, which is both an extremely comic book-y conceit but also makes 1234 perfect as a standalone graphic novel. You don't need to know much about the characters going in, and everything has to be resolved so as to not mess up all that history. With Morrison's grown up storytelling and Lee's unique art style, this is a truly essential read.