Best Comic Arcs

[thekremlin]

I like listing things. Please add to the list or disagree with it. People whose favorite comic is Green Lantern need not respond.

1) The Dark Knight Returns

My nominee for the best comic story ever written. Batman is fucking awesome and never more so than here, in his twilight years. He beats the shit out of that namby-pamby Superman. My understanding is that the comics industry was kind of failing when this came out and gave everyone a shot in the arm. Before it, Batman was the guy on TV played by Adam West, it showed everyone that Batman could be more Christopher-Nolan style. Ironically we would need to learn that lesson again, from Tim Burton......

2) Civil War

Don't know if time will be as friendly to it, but in addition to having some pretty awesome fights and visuals, it gave a really good look at some of the character's defining traits, ie Iron Man happily being a fascist, Spiderman being in completely over his head when it came to the rest of the superheros, and Captain America being badder than anyone else.

3) Secret War

One of my favorite big-time crossovers. It had just about everyone, Avengers, FF, Spiderman, X-Men, along with a shitton of their villains. Hulk carries a mountain on his back and Spiderman meets his black suit symbiote, which later led to Venom. One interesting thing to see is how much the other heroes looked down on the X-Men.

4) Kingdom Come

Another what-if story set in the future, where young heroes are punk kids and the old Justice League guys are dinosaurs. Mucho mucho bonus points for the art.

5) The Death of Superman

The awesome thing about this was that at the time, as a kid, I was like "Holy shit, they actually killed him!" Yeah they brought him back eventually. But this was before Bane broke Batman's back, before Captain America was killed, Thor too, etc. After Jean Grey I guess but whatever. This was huge.

6) The Age of Apocalypse

Another "holy shit they're really doing it"? Marvel rebooted all of its X-Titles after someone went into the past and killed Professor X. As a result, Apocalypse took over the world, and so for four months all the titles took place in this alternate world. We got to see characters that had been killed (Sunfire and Morph), that had never been important (Blink) and bad guys that were good in this reality (Magneto and Sabretooth.) I'm a sucker for alternate realities obviously. Anyone else who is should read Exiles, BTW.

7) Planet Hulk

The earth's heros decide that the Hulk is too destructive to keep on Earth, so they trick him and launch him into space. He lands on a violent planet where he starts as a gladiator and ends up leading a resistance against the emperor. Yeah a little ripped off from "Gladiator" but even Russell Crowe wouldn't fuck with the Hulk.

Could have rounded the list off to be a top 10 with the dark phoenix, the long halloween, or gone off the marvel-dc dichotemy and thrown watchmen in there. But a) I wanted to keep it a list of REALLY GOOD ones, and b) I grew up reading Marvel and DC. I was surprised to realize I had no spiderman in here, because I love spiderman, and I was surprised to find that DC kept step with Marvel, because to be honest, DC for the most part sucks in comparison. But a) Batman is cool and b) Superman lends himself very well to epic battles. I could go on another rant about the best X-Men stories, and maybe someday I will. But it will take another week where I am as bored as this one, being home for thanksgiving