The end of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run. It genuinely felt like anything could happen. And it did! The Candlemaker was scary as ****, The Chief, and the near solo issue of Crazy Jane. (One of my fave DC characters)
The Death of Superboy issue in LSH was very nice.
Jim Shooter’s Korvac Saga in Avengers.
And finally…Frank Miller’s limited series Elektra: Assasin doesn’t seem to be talked about a lot. No real protagonist at all, just evil and those who don’t mind doing evil to stop others.
A couple years ago there was a BRILLIANT Jimmy Olsen special. College-age aliens were coming to earth for a spring break party…which would end up destroying the earth. Jimmy had to dissuade them.
The writing was Whedonesque. (The art was good, too.) One of the single best comics one-shots ever, and too few people know about it.
Lots of trope breaking and fanboy stuff. Such as Hobgoblin getting taken out like a punk (Yes i know everyone hated it and it was retconned. I loved the randomness of it).
I realizes she catches a certain amount of flak, but I liked Dazzler a lot. She had an interesting power that wasn’t wildly destructive, she found creative uses for it and still managed to have a somewhat normal life, and when it turns out she had nearly god-level power levels, she handled it pretty well.
Plus,
she got to eat The Claw. There’s no coming back from that, sound-boy.
A six-issue limited (due to poor sales) run written and inked by Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Birnbaum in the early 90s. By far the strangest superhero comic ever written this side of Powerhouse Pepper. Chock full of weird characters (and not just villains), slapstick comedy (one villain was obviously based on the Roadrunner as he invented fiendish deathtraps that always backfired), and a healthy dose of bizarre. The Heckler bounced around Delta City, his only power, his superhuman ability to wisecrack villains into submission.
He also wrote the file cards that came on the back packaging of all the action figures. There’s a Kickstarter going right now - I think it’s still got a week or two left on it - for a Larry Hama action figure in the style of the GI Joe figures.
In Thriller, published in 1983, writer Robert Loren Fleming predicted Islamism, the media as a tool of terrorism, a black US president, skin grafts for burns victims, and machines which could be controlled by paraplegics’ brain activity. And as the article in the link says, DC publicly humiliated him and sacked him for being too highbrow.
I also liked Wasteland, written by John and Kim Ostrander, which was innovative horror pre-dating Vertigo Comics.
I really liked The New 52’s "Darkseid War’, between the Anti-Monitor and Darkseid, by the amazing Geoff Johns with awesome drawings and art by Jason Fabok and Anderson. It was truly amazing stuff, especially with Darkseid’s death, and then rebirth.
I don’t know if it “doesn’t get mentioned often”, and it’s kind of old now, but I really loved the four-issue run of Phil Foglio’s take on the 1960 DC comic Angel and the Ape that ran in 1991. He managed to actually make it coherent and funny, and brought in the unfunny Inferior Five as well, and to tie it all into DC continuity.
He later tried to do the same thing with DC’s 1960s series Stanley and his Monster, but it wasn’t as good. Although it did provide the first mention I saw of The Heterodyne Brothers, and an inkling of Agatha Heterodyne.
