I also nominate Gilbert Hernandez’s Poison River. It started out being Luba’s early years, but evolved into a cast of thousands involving gangsters, drugs, the politics of the 50’s through the 70’s, baby-napping rings, and how one man’s obsession for bellies can upset the entire structure of a national crime network.
The short form: Watchmen is about a world with relatively few costumed heroes. The first appeared in 1939 and eventually an organization formed around them but that generation died out. Then in the fifties and sixties a second generation came which included a character named Dr. Manhattan who was the only truly superpowered person with effectively the ability to control energy. He works for the US government and decisively tips the Cold War in the US’s favor. In the mid-seventies there’s a police strike and the costumed vigilantes are outlawed and all but three go into retirement; two working for the government and one who just refuses. Jump ahead to 1985 where Cold War tensions are running high and someone killed one of the remaining active heroes. The story starts with the one that refused to retire investigating the death.
Watchmen is often praised for being a “realistic way of doing superheroes”. While I wouldn’t call it realistic it certainly featured richer characters and a more detailed examination of how society would respond to them than most other books.
The real genius of Watchmen is how it used some very clever stylistic tricks. A continual nine panel grid layout though it might seem constricting allowed some interesting use of pacing. There’s a parallel story that runs through that often mirrors the ongoing story. And the eleventh issue features a plot twist that’s almost guarenteed to make you go back to the beginning and read it again when you reach the last page.
My Britzone bias will show here but I think both the Apocalypse Wars and some of the Slaine gns from the 2000AD stable are pretty damn amazing.
Unfortunately I cannot recall the names of the actual droids Zarg allowed to produce these epics of thrillness, but the writing and artwork (particularly in Slaine) blew me away when I read them.
Legomancer:
To be fair, James Robinson was very conscientious about briefly recapping Starman guest-shots, including the JSA series, in the pages of Starman itself. That scene in the last that you felt was a slap was pretty well telegraphed not in another comic, but in the opening pages of issue # 75.
And aside from that one element, I thought the send-off worked rather nicely, although a certain dues ex machina scene in there made me roll my eyes.
Well, perhaps it’s just me, but I didn’t feel it was telegraphed. In fact, I had no idea who that person was at the end of #80 (I wasn’t reading JSA). I may be a poor reader.
Wait, which person are you talking about Lego? I thought the issue was a nice send off. I was sad to see the book end, but it was pretty obvious that it was a planned end, with everything (more or less) wrapped up.
We’re talking about the last issue, when Jack is making the rounds, visiting people, talking about who he’ll hand off the Starman mantle to. I was thinking it would be someone who had previously appeared in the book for more than one panel. Since I was only reading Starman and wasn’t reading or keeping up with the rest of the DC Universe, imagine my surprise when it’s handed off to the Star Spangled Kid. Now, as I said, I may be a poor reader. It may be my own fault for expecting the book to stay isolated from the rest of the DCU. But I didn’t see it coming, had no idea who the person was, and felt kind of gypped. One of the things that appealed to me about starman was the fact that I didn’t have to read a dozen other comics to know what was going on in it.
Anyway, back to the OP.
“Who Killed Retro Girl” is nice for the atmosphere, but the plot is kind of wanting. I think the plotting got a little better later on in the series (“Roleplay”, for example).
I’d throw in something from the Wolfman-Perez New Teen Titans era, but I’m not sure what.
Oh, okay. Got it. I wasn’t surprised, myself. I expected it. (I do read JSA though, so I can see how if you didn’t it would be unexpected.
Mike Baron and Steve Rude on Nexus, before Steve left and came back…
Legomancer:
Well, here’s the caption (Jack’s thoughts) verbatim from pages 2-3 of Starman # 75…recapping the events of the “Sins of Youth” crossover, in which Jack participated as a member of the JSA:
[spoiler]“The best was seeing the woman Courtney will become. The heroine to be.”
And the picture is first of a mature woman with a star-motif uniform with a bunch of juvenile JSAers around her, and then of a teenaged girl with a star-motif uniform with the real JSA surrounding her, approvingly.[/spoiler]
Even if you don’t read JSA, you know that the person in question is one who has earned Jack’s admiration in the course of an adventure not told in the Starman series. While this person wasn’t seen much in the pages of Starman, I think James Robinson filled in Starman-only readers on the important details and made his intentions if not crystal-clear, certainly not devoid of foreshadowing in the Starman book.
Chaim Mattis Keller
‘Ghost Dance’, from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. About a house that’s haunted by every human and animal ever killed by a particular kind of gun. It’s always bothered me and stayed in my head for some reason. Very powerful story, particularly the ending (one of the survivors buys that kind of gun and goes home to shoot his wife).
‘24’, from ‘The Sandman’. Once again, it’s a very dark and haunting story. It’s actually not very representative of ‘The Sandman’ itself; that’s not really horror for the most part.
Oh, YES.
Someone on my gaming forum told me that I had to read Starman. So, I strolled down to Chicago Comics and picked up the first compilation.
I bought all of them that were out within that week. Absolutely amazing.
Though, for me, the best stand-alone story in there has to be "Talking with David ‘96’ (may have the year wrong). Where David invites Jack to a dream-dinner with deceased heroes that give him advice.
Must…have…next story arc…comes out in…February…
-A2K
I’ll stick up for you there, I did like the Death of Superman story, it’s just that his sudden turn around left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and I think, in the end turned more people off the book.
The Watchmen is a 12 issue mini-series published out of continuity by DC Commics in 1986 Done by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It recieved massive critical acclaim on it’s release, and had a review in Time Magazine. It’s about a group of crime fighters from the 60’s, Like the Justice League (although the characters were based on heroes like The Question) who are now in the 80’s, now retired or otherwise out of the business, and someone is killing them off, one by one. That’s the barest bones of the plot, as it’s full of political critiques and deception and betrayal. But it’s also, IMHO, firmly grounded in events that were occuring while I was 8 years old, and not as potent as it once was.
I don’t mean this as a slam, Scott, because Watchmen certainly is somewhat dated by its setting, but anyone who thinks that it doesn’t hold up probably also thinks that Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are no longer worth reading since we abolished slavery. The Cold War is Watchmen’s setting; it isn’t what it’s about.
–Cliffy
I think it’s differen than that.
I mean, the Watchmen is rooted in the time of Reagan and post Viet Nam time in the US. As a reader, you have to imagine what it was like to read it during those years in order to fully appreciate how powerful a critique it was.
I wouldn’t give it to my sixteen year old neighbor and expect him to see how strong those social commentaries are in the same way that I realised it when I read it as a sixteen year old. (Even then, it was a bit of work to set my mind back and try to think what the US was like in 86).
And it is dated, and the themes it plays with aren’t front page news anymore, but history. And if it’s not front page news, it doesn’t pack the same punch as it did before.
Huh… this is a toughie!
I read both Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, and despite being a Marvel fan, I loved both of them. They would certainly be near or at the top of my list. DK2 is, well, yeah… “passable.”
If we’re considering “re-readability,” just about anything in the Mills/O’Neill Marshal Law series is a good read. The original six-issue series was fantastic, and the little two-issue follow-ups that came out later were pretty good, too.
It’s odd that I consider myself a Marvel fan and can’t think of a single story that really enthralled me. If were to dig out my old comic books, though, I would hunt down two issues of X-men: the one in which Arcade makes the X-men fight against a horde of Dr. Doom-manufactured duplicates of themselves, and the one in which the X-men must join forces with the Hellfire Club to fight Nimrod before he wipes them out!
As far as manga goes, I’d skip Ghost in the Shell and read Shirow’s Appleseed instead. The anime is an awful embarrassment compared to the original story from which it comes. If turnabout is fair play, I actually preferred the anime for Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind to the manga, but they are both very good.
Those have both been reprinted in the “essential” series by Marvel. I especially like the panel in the latter where Rogue is trying to save Colossus from Leland sinking him into the earth, and Selene melts away her gloves so she steals his power and makes things worse for him. (That one was around ish # 202-203, I think).
As for really good Marvel stories, well, I’ll say “Dark Phoenix Saga” again. It’s really the reason I read comics today. It totally hooked me, and still does to this day.
I read the X-men comics for a few years a while back. My favorite story arc was The Phalanx Covenant which crossed over most of the X titles. I could see them making a movie of that, though it may be too much like the Borg from ST.
My favorite comic story of all time though, is:
Moonshadow by J.M. DeMatteis
I’m going to throw some odd votes in for:
SCUD
and
Doom Patrol (Grant Moorison)
I’m in an extremely small minority of fans who actually liked Dark Knight 2. I hated it the first time I read it, so, for some reason, I re-read it. There’s a major disconnect between book 2 and book 3, which hampers the story… apparently Miller rewrote the ending after 9/11, and added all the stuff of Superman and Marvel digging through wreckage, which takes forever, and doesn’t really mesh with the end of Book 2, and forced the real climax of the story to be truncated.
However, I think it still holds up. I think part of the reason that people hate it so is that its everything that DK1 is not… it’s loud, instead of quiet, extroverted instead of introverted, explosive instead of subtle. The continuity between the two is very poor, and I was upset that Jim Gordon (by far my favorite Batman character – they need to bring him back in the “continuity” comics) wasn’t in it aside from one or two bits. But i think that, taken on its own – and taken with the grain of salt that its not really a Batman story, but a DCU story – it stands up.
I liked Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn back in the day, but haven’t read it recently to see if it still stands up.
I’m very disappointed with the current Spectre books. DeMatteis should drop his mumbo-jumbo nonsense religious proselytizing and give us some stories where Hal actually does something. The recent bits with Sinestro were decent.
And I second whoever it was who offered up The Killing Joke, a marvelous book, and far superior to its contemporary, the far more in-your-face Arkham Asylum, which pretty much sucked.