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Hello, can you people recommend any good CAPE comics? Preferably ongoing. I'd like to start reading

Grant Morisson on the Batman titles is sublime,

Jonathon Hickmans; Shield

Mark Waids: Irredeemable.

I've heard good things about Geoff Johns Flash.

Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-men is collected in four trades or one massive collection. It's not only great for new readers but it's also well written, drawn and is full of references to older X-men story lines to appease the hardcore audience. Something for everyone. If you like drama matched with action then this a good series. Think Buffy but with superheroes.

Geoff John's current run on Green Lantern is great. It's all collected in trades and I suggest you pick up either the Secret Origins trade (if you don't know much about the character) and/or both of the Sinestro Corps trades which all the subsequent Green Lantern storylines develop from. Both good starting points. It's very much a space opera like Star Wars.

If you want pure undiluted Superheroics I would say try reading something like New Avengers (there are loads of trades out there) for Marvel or JLA from DC. New Avengers is both witty and fast paced action. In the last several years it's been the center of the Marvel universe. For JLA a good place to start is Grant Morrison's series written back in the 90's. It's dated quite well and has a cast of thousands. You'll be struggling to identify everyone if you're new to comics but that's fine, I've been reading them for over a decade now and I still struggle, I just go along with the exciting ride.

I think the best thing to do is just pick up a few issues off the shelves that you like the look of. Ask your local comic shop owner what he/she recommends, tell them what you like, to see what's best for you. Assuming they do their job right, they will only be recommending stuff they personally think is great, it's in their interest to have you back in the store buying more comics off them.

If you like an issue you can always get hold of back issues or the trades for previous story lines. After all every comic fan started somewhere. Fortunately there is soooo much variety to choose from, chances are you'll get to something you will like.

I would also say that most newcomers these days are enticed by an event comic that attracts media attention and reels people into the ongoing series of characters that interest them. Event comics tend to be either in the regular series of one of the major characters or in a seperate series and is usually billed as a story containing major events that could potentially alter the state of the fictional universe.

Some of the major DC story lines have been:
Crisis on Infinite Earths
Zero Hour
Identity Crisis
52
Infinite Crisis
Countdown
Final Crisis
Blackest Night

And Marvel have had in recent years....
Secret War
Avengers: Disassembled
House of M
Civil War
World War Hulk
Secret Invasion
Siege

As an extremely generalised rule of thumb DC tends to have massive cosmic epic stories that truly do make really big difference in some of the comics. However the events are often needlessly complex and tend to shoot themselves in the foot in terms of appealing to new readers. Marvel on the other hand tend to have much more self contained storylines that often don't make as much of an impact over the years but each event tends to be innovative, less high concept and more reader friendly.

But, like I say, this is a very general approach. Both have put out some great and terrible events that have been either very high concept or extremely down to earth.

Shame on you for recommending House of M.