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

[vaga1220 *]

I'm definitely going to try to read some, if not all of those as soon as I'm done with Punisher MAX and considering the quality, I may be done with it sooner rather then later.

[ninjaface]

I already posted this one in the Graphic Novels thread.

A fairly quick read, but great nonetheless. It's an alternate-reality/possible-future type of deal. It's set 50 years after all the villains got together and absolutely fucked up the good guys. Wolverine is obviously the main character. I don't want to give too much away because its pretty sweet not knowing exactly what happened and getting that "holy shit" feeling when you get to that part. Basically, they fucked Wolverine up so badly that he became a pacifist and didn't use his claws once in the 50 years since the incident. A lot of characters are mentioned/involved. I highly recommend it.

[Der Fuhrer]

Do I have to buy these things in order to read them?

[Mr. Blonde]

I have read the first 4 of kremlin's suggestions and I can verify that they are indeed fucking AWESOME.

DF, you should be able to torrent a lot of them and DL a comic reader. the format is usually .cbr

Alex Ross is one of my favorite comic illustrators, he captures a much more realistic view of the characters IMO. "JUSTICE" was a fucking excellent read:

[ninjaface]

Originally Posted by Der Fuhrer

Do I have to buy these things in order to read them?

If you were a big enough dick, you could go into a comic book store and read Old Man Logan in one go. But you need to have a good reading comprehension and you'll have to be able to look at the pictures and get the jist of it pretty quickly.

[SittinOnDubsWGW]

Am I the only person here that thinks Superman is fucking horrible. I honestly have never liked the Superman character and just generally hate it.

[Repugnant Abomination]

Comics are for children.

[thekremlin]

Definately agreed. Superman is weak sauce. His best function is to make Batman look even cooler by comparison.

[thekremlin]

Just read this little gem:
Earth X

I'd read Universe X a while ago and wasn't that crazy about it, but Earth X I liked a little more. It's kind of the Kingdom Come for Marvel... set in the future, more careful artwork, more literary aspirations. It's definately written for the longtime reader, and a lot of it is kind of inward-looking, about the mythology of the different marvel heroes. If you haven't read a lot of marvel don't bother, but I got my personal geek on.

THIS was a big story arc that I thought sucked:

The premise: skrulls have been hiding among earth's heroes for a while, can't trust anyone, blah blah blah. The story is not that great and the art is kind of meh with the exception of the full-page massive battle threads which, fortunately, there are a lot of.

I've been reading comics on the marvel iphone app, am getting an ipad 2 soon and comics are really my main impetus for buying. I have a good deal going with my dad... we share kindle and marvel accounts, he buys books for his kindle and I can read them on mine for free, and I pay for comics which he can read for free. I love the future.

[thekremlin]

Secret Wars just became available on the iphone app. Worth a read.

DC is doing something relatively ambitious:
Newsarama.com : The DC UNIVERSE Reboots in September, New #1s Across the Line

They've basically hit the reset button on 52 titles, trying to lure new readers and also clean up the continuity problem that is going to plague any story that has been ongoing since the 60s. Not unprecedented.

1) Marvel started the Ultimate series (new spiderman, x-men, avengers, fantastic four, few others) in like '99, although they kept their old storyline, and just had two. The Ultimate comics were pretty good, tried to be a little more "realistic", as far as you can be realistic and still be talking about teenagers with spider powers, etc. But realistic in the way that the movies are less cartoony than traditional comics. In fact, the Captain America movie seemed to have been based off the Ultimate Comics. Also, Ultimate Nick Fury looks exactly like Samuel L.

2) At one point, the X-Men titles all got reset into the Age of Apocalypse. Marvel "pretended" that it was a permanant change but they only made it last 4 months, working the hiatus into the plot of the ongoing series. It sold a ton of comics, and was actually really, really good.

3) At another point, Marvel and DC announced that they were both going out of business and decided to merge. This was purely publicity to try to sell a crossover. Looking back, I'm annoyed that I honestly thought it was a business move. Stupid gullible me.
Amalgam Comics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anyway, I don't read DC comics very much, but I'll read some of the reboots, give them a chance. The Justice League, which comes out today, is drawn by Jim Lee, so it can't suck. One nice thing they're doing is releasing print and electronic issues at the same time. Smart move, since I think they probably make more money through iphones/ipads than print, might as well embrace the shift. I'll post reviews if they're worth a read.

[thekremlin]

Better article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/bo...ef=arts&src=me

Also, great Grant Morrison interview:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/ne...omics-20110822

He still lives in Glasgow, is there a chance of bumping into him?
There's a very good chance of running into him, and I hope I'm going 100 miles an hour when it happens.

[Beebs]

[thekremlin]

This is great:

The Death and Return of Superman - YouTube

The Death and Return of Superman - YouTube