And okay, this may be a little out of line but it's a funny anecdote for me. I was in a bar a few months ago and this dude and I were talking comics. The subject was Ditko so "Shade" came up and we both were big fans. This eventually led to us finding out that we had the same "ho-hum, what's the big deal" attitude about "Sandman". Now I didn't say this, but if you're part of the comics community and this will resonate with you on some level whether you want to admit or not. The guy said this, "Sandman and Shade have a lot of commonalities, they're just written for different people. "Shade" is written for anyone who enjoys a good story, "Sandman" is written for goth girls..." I'm not saying this is the truth, but it made me laugh!

Maybe I should dig out the Prometheas next.

My first taste ever of non-superheroe comics came from getting practically the entire Shade run in a quarter bin (number 1 was even signed by Bachalo himself, go figure) and reading the whole thing in one night, until 5 am and just being blown away. As good as Bachalo was, I don't think Shade lost anything after he left, and I don't think that story point in ish 50 broke the book either. It just makes it all the more real.

Milligan admitted that the book lost steam after #50, not because Bachelo left but because of a certain story choice he made regarding the death of a major character (a mistake I think he repeated in X-Statix). I would also say that Bachelo was never again as good as he was on this book.

Powers survived three or four purges in my comic book buying. It's been a consistently enjoyable book since its inception. I thought the first arc was the weakest, however, and felt the book got really good around the third story.

Yeah, I'm really unhappy with this classification. There is no hard and fast rule about what is a "superhero".

Forgive me for being politically incorrect for a moment, but I think I've ended up resorting to the same way people are classified as "Afro-American" in America. If you got even one Afro-American grandparent, you're likely to be considered "black", even if you have much lighter skin than many "whites" in other countries.

To make things easier for me and avoid second-guessing myself, I'm just considering "superhero-related" anything that remotely looks like superhero. Not ideal, I know. Like I said, I'll try to do a more through analysis after we progress more into the countdown.

That or they all do further down the list, and instead of being an indie kid, you’ll find yourself with ‘mainstream’ tastes and then be too ashamed to look in the mirror!]

Nah. I'd be surprised and pleased that other people have such good taste. Like I was when Plastic Man made it.

I couldn't decide between the first Peter David X-Factor run or the second, and in the fear that my list would be too X-Men dominate, I ended up leaving off both. I actually think I liked the second run better, but it would have been hard for me to vote for it since it's still ongoing, so it may just cleave off mid-story when David gets fed up enough with all the crossovers to leave. Maybe that's what prevented it from placing whereas the original run did. Still, it's one of Marvel's best current books, hands down.

Bill Sienkiewicz is definitely not a kid-friendly artist; shortly after getting into comics as I was snatching up back issues left and right, I came upon his New Mutants issues and just didn't get it; I didn't dislike, but it was just so different from everything else I was reading and my rookie comic reading vocab didn't know how to process it. But every year that went by, when I'd go back and reread those issues I "got it" more and more each time. They really were fantastic.

Haven't read Shade yet; I've been picking up issues here and there, mainly because of all the good things I've read about it around here, waiting to get a good solid chunk of them in hand before diving in.

I have all the Concrete books, and i wouldn't put him in any kind of "superhero-related" category. Ron's massive body is treated more as a handicap than an advantage he doesn't have any real enemies except for when he has to fight depression. He does decide to accomplish inhuman feats, but it's mostly to put his alien form to the test. My two-cents!

I also like your work on statistics, it's the official spin-off post of Brian's Top Comic Book Runs!

On an unrelated note, two of my top 10 choices have appeared so far :

4. TOP 10 (Alan Moore - Gene Ha)
9. X-FORCE/X-STATIX (Mike Allred - Peter Milligan)

I kept hoping that once Milligan and Bachalo became popular we'd start seeing the series collected, I third the suggestion of a hardcover collection.

I suspect that DC will start to close the gap on Marvel as the poll progresses - they had a flowering of really top class comics in the years following Crisis, and if Shade made the list then we can expect to see some of the higher selling comics appearing soon.

I was totally bemused by Bill Sienkiewicz when he first started on the New Mutants - and I wasn't alone, I believe the series haemorrhaged readers during his run - but twenty years later those images are still with me, unlike lots of stuff I prefered at the time.

Still haven't got any of my choices on the list - does this mean that I'm really predictable and they're going to show up in the top twenty or that my tastes are really obscure?