About CMRO and DCRO

CMRO stands for Complete Marvel Reading Order, and it is a website meant for people who are just crazy enough to want to read every single (canon) Marvel comic book, or at least a significant portion.

The CMRO is not a publishing order, and it's also not a chronological order, but something in between: It's a reading order. The issues are arranged with the reading process in mind, meaning that the order would frequently ignore publishing dates and in-universe chronology in favor of a better reading experience.

There are also four main ways of going about reading the CMRO:

• Essential 616: Pretty much the bare minimum, if you want to see the origin of most major characters that is. Most Marvel fans don't need to read even this much, but for continuity buffs, these are unskippable.
• Core 616: Pretty much everything canon within the 616 universe (In case you don't know, 616 is the main universe in the Marvel multiverse). Most people would agree that everything here is canon in some way, and this doesn't include most alternate universes or super obscure characters. For most continuity fans, this is the way to go.
• Main 616: Core, but with extra stuff. This is the "original" concept for the CMRO. It starts from the silver age with Fantastic Four #1 because that was the point the Marvel universe as we know it today was born, and it includes everything in the Core order, but also a lot of side stuff.
• Expanded: This one starts from the golden age and includes absolutely everything even remotely canon. From the birth of the Avengers to obscure stories of obscure characters that are only canon because they were mentioned in a handbook once. Only suitable for people with extremely broad tastes or extreme interest in the history of comic books. Or also, in my case, completionists with a borderline pathological obsession. This is the order we'll follow.

There are also some smaller orders that cover stuff like the main alternative universes or the Golden Age only, but all of those are included in the Expanded one, so we don't have to worry about those.

Now the DCRO is basically the same thing, but with DC comics instead of Marvel (duh), though there are some differences in the way the orders are structured. The main difference is that all of these orders start from the Golden Age, while the Marvel ones (except for Expanded) start from the Silver Age. This is due to the fact that the Marvel Golden and Silver Ages are far more disjointed than the DC Golden and Silver Ages, so reading the Marvel Golden Age is not as necessary as reading the Dc Golden Age. However, there is still some continuity between Golden and Silver Age Marvel, mostly through Captain America, Namor, and the Invaders. Also, there is a gap between Ages in the Marvel continuity, but not so much in the DC one. Anyway, these are the three main ways of going about reading the DC order:

• Essential: Very similar to the Marvel Essential, but it starts from the Golden Age and it appears to be even more slimmed down, but this could also be because continuity in the Golden Age wasn't as big as in the Silver Age.
• Core: Again, very similar to the Core Marvel order, but starting from the Golden Age.
• Full Order: Kind of like the Main 616 Marvel order, but also kind of like the Expanded one. This is the DC order for the obsessive completionist and it's the one we'll follow.

If you want more info, you should probably visit the sites. If you don't want more info, you should still visit the sites because they're absolutely amazing. A huge thanks to especially Travis Starnes, the main guy behind all of this, but also to everyone who worked on these. It's clear that these sites are huge projects with a lot of effort, dedication, and passion behind them.