My favourites were The New Teen Titans. I don’t know if that’s old school enough for ya, but the books my sister and I collected (from issue 2, I might add) were way back in the 80’s, so they’re 20ish years old now. I have also loved the Legion of Super Heroes since I started reading comics - I like the idea of a vast spectrum of super powers to draw from.
Is there no love here for Conan or Sgt. Rock? What about the Doom Patrol? The Metal Men? 
My comic book reading years were the late 1960s. I was a Marvel guy. Generally I bought every issue of:
Dr.Strange
Fantastic Four
Silver Surfer
Spiderman
Many times I also bought:
Incredible Hulk
The Mighty Thor
X-Men
I guess Doc Strange, Silver Surfer and Spidey remain my sentimental favorites.
I was never a comics fan. Not a snob, just never really exposed to them, except that I had a friend for a couple of years who would invite me to his house to play catch and then would open a trunk full of comics in his basement. There were hundreds of them, not carefully filed, indexed and sealed in plastic, but not crumpled or dirty, either.
I suppose the character I looked for, once I had read enough to want to look for anything, was Dr. Strange. I sort of liked him because the comic seemed to say that being good didn’t really come naturally to him; it was a choice enforced by a costly and continuing act of will. I also sympathized with the fact that he started out as the closest thing to a superhero there is, a talented surgeon, lost everything, and had to start over with nothing but his brains and determination to sustain him. Also, a disproportionate percentage of his adventures seemed to happen in dreams, which made him the best-rested hero on paper, and I, for personal reasons, appreciated that. Also, he was about the only guy who didn’t wear some kind of quasi-military uniform or really stupid-looking tights (though in some books, he did – I don’t know why). Finally, he screwed up a lot, but not for comedic effect: he made perfectly ordinary, understandable mistakes with which I could easily identify, and it made me feel better to think that goodness and venality and strength and weakness and wisdom and occasional incompetence could all coexist, and that imperfection wasn’t a synonym for failure.
Again, don’t know if this is old skool enough for you purists (but they must have come out around the same time as Punisher?), I was a big Power Man/Iron Fist fan.
I remember it seemed totally “Street” to me at the time. I think PM lived above a movie theater, scarfing a handful of popcorn everytime he went in. They would go out for pizza all the time. And they charged for their services, calling it “heros for hire”.Their personalities played off of each other well. Plus, at that time, I thought their outfits were pretty cool.
Wasn’t a huge collector of Master of Kung-fu, but man, it had a great ending to it’s original run.
Less recognizable, maybe - but second string? He was in the top three most powerful members of the JLA, and when you have competition like Dr. Fate and the Spectre, #3 looks pretty good…
Er, JSA. Think-o.
In my day, there was Superman, and everybody else was a supporting character. That’s all you would know about if you didn’t actually read the comics – Superman had the first successful superhero movie, and there was little in The Superfriends that looked like it couldn’t have been done by Superman alone. Everybody else just seemed like lesser versions of the Man of Steel. Because I had this impression, I also had the notion in my head that superheroes were generally all-powerful and bulletproof.
When I first actually read a Spider-Man comic, I was puzzled that he was dodging bullets. I had a sudden epiphany that Spider-Man wasn’t bulletproof. He wasn’t just running up to the bad guys and being invulnerable, he was taking a very grave risk. That was his ass on the line. After that moment, I could no longer take Superman seriously. And as I delved into it further, I discovered that Spider-Man was also not fighting for broad principles. He was fighting because he cared about people, because he was driven by guilt. He was emotionally vulnerable. Now, of course, as an adult his angst often comes across as sophomoric, but back then I’d never really seen such a thing before. To me, it made the heroism seem far more genuine.
The first issue I actually bought is still one of the best I’ve read, in my opinion – Web of Spider-Man Annual #1. It had everything that me fall in love with Spider-Man – he fought for people, not for truth and justice, he was vulnerable. Furthermore, it featured Peter Parker as a man of science, an aspect of his character too often ignored.
