It should be noted how poor the trade collections really look.

Warren Ellis & Bryan Hitch's Authority - This run was huge for me. It didn't make my list but would have definitely been in my Top 20. This run moved the bar up in a way that hasn't happened since the New X-Men debuted. This was crazy good. If you dig spandex and are somewhat familiar with Ellis' work, how could you not like this ? All this an The Bleed.

Denny O'Neil & Neal Adams' Green Lantern / Green Arrow - Truly a ground breaking series, though O'Neil gets a little preachy and heavy handed and his dialogue is painful in spots, but Adams works is, once again, legendary and always a joy to behold. An essential part of any collection IMO but not overall making the cut for me.

Stern's Avengers - Missed this run with art by Big John Buscema and Tom Palmer (nice). Sounds good but I haven't read it.

Alan Moore's Supremen - Don't know how a Silver Age Superfan couldn't love these. Definite keepers.

Johns' Flash - I picked it up from the first issue and pretty much didn't let it down until the end. Johns really got the character and his world, just like he did with JSA and GL. The only Johns stories I haven't cared for are the latter Infinite Crisis. His fleshing out the Rogues Gallery was great and I liked how he tried to add some new dimension and characters. Solid reading.

Van Sciver's comment bears some agreement, and does take the world of DC comics into account, but not the climate of the early seventies.

Reading it now - even as the lefty that I am - I shudder at how lacking in nuance the arguments being made were, but if you consider the time they were written, things were unfortunately viewed pretty polemically by any mainstream media/entertainment.

I think that what tends to get missed because of the political aspect of these stories in GL/GA is that it was the first serious time that DC tried to give more of a defined - as opposed to generic - character to these two characters.

This has had both good and bad consequences for both of them.

In the case of GL, it too Johns to finally reconcile the aspects of character, so that Hal wasn't JUST a navel-gazing and introspective whiner.

In the case of GA, I think that has started to happen to some extent only now.

My other problem with the writing is that it actually condescends (though I appreciate it does so unintentionally) towards left-leaning people as well as right-leaning people, by presenting caricatures of both. Though O'Neil was at times 'fair and balanced' - he did afterall write more than a few were Oliver got it wrong, and where his extremist tendencies actually created more problems.

However, it was a step in the right direction towards using the medium as a ptential tool for ideas beyond simple super-heroics.

Ethan Van Sciver had the best line about this - When Lantern hangs his head in shame after being confronted by a black man ("You save the purple man, but what about the black man") what he should have said was "Do you live on Earth? Then I'm pretty sure I've done something seeing as how I've saved the planet over a hundred times"

I do agree that the writing is dated - and I know I am splitting hairs here, and feel you would probably agree with me - but what I found interesting when I re-read the run recently, and compared it to its contemporaries at both Marvel and DC, was that the writing was actually 10 to 15 years AHEAD of itself.

So, dated "yes" but in my opinion dated in the way that average comics of the 1980's are. Head and shoulders less dated than most stuff published in the 1970's.

But O’Neil’s writing is top-rate too. His GA is a great character, while his GL is less a straw man than a thoughtful individual unsure of the right thing to do in a complicated & conflicted world. If you don’t see yourself in O’Neil’s Hal Jordan, it’s because you don’t read the news often enough. These stories have an urgency & emotion that hits you in the gut.

It’s not just that O’Neill brought modern politics into mainstream comics (setting a precedent for everything from Moore’s “Watchmen” to Millar’s “Authority”). It’s that they derive their conflicts from the political & social subjects, through dramatic metaphors & character conflict. It’s simply smart writing, far beyond the supervillainy & slugfests that are standard even forty years later.

I'm with Mr. Strange. I had GL/GA in my list too because of much the same reasons. Any DC comic that will quote from Norman Mailer in 1969 is doing something right in my book.

But I think the characterisation is really what defines it for me. Hal and Ollie have such wonderful and distinctive voices. They felt to me real in ways that no comic character of its time ever felt. They were different politically and yet both very haunted people in different ways. I loved that aspect of it.

I think it's honestly better than their Batman-- O'Neil and Adams influenced each other and stretched each other creatively on this book in all sorts of ways. I think it's dated insofar as the approach to the issues have dated but I think there's something about it that's still quite vital.

I found Ellis's run on The Authority to be a real let-down after his excellent run on Stormwatch. Not bad, but not that great. Hopefully this means that Millar's run (which I much preferred) is still to come....

GL/GA is historic and all that, but both the writing and art date really badly (strangely considering neither dates badly from O'Neil + Adams's Batman run)

Supreme was reasonably fun, but I wouldn't put it in the top 100.

For My tastes, probably the only run here that I'd put in the top 100 is Geoff John's Flash - which is strange considering O'Neil, Ellis and Moore are all much better writers than Geoff Johns.

This is a disturbingly common misconcption. Millar’s take was blunt and upfront, but it’s all there in Ellis’s run, particularly in Jenny Sparks’s speeches. Ellis’s run also ends far better, without the backtracking stupitiy of Millar’s final issue that undermines the whole thing.

Being more political did not make Millar's run better or anything.

It's not a value judgment to say Millar's run focused on politics while Ellis' did not. It's just a description of their respective runs.

And the political aspect of the Authority that has become such a major aspect of the series was introduced by Millar, for the most part. Ellis let his characters, like Jenny, each have their own particular political beliefs, but it was not the driving force of the comic the way it was in later issues.

But O'Neil's writing is top-rate too. His GA is a great character, while his GL is less a straw man than a thoughtful individual unsure of the right thing to do in a complicated & conflicted world. If you don't see yourself in O'Neil's Hal Jordan, it's because you don't read the news often enough. These stories have an urgency & emotion that hits you in the gut.

It's not just that O'Neill brought modern politics into mainstream comics (setting a precedent for everything from Moore's "Watchmen" to Millar's "Authority"). It's that they derive their conflicts from the political & social subjects, through dramatic metaphors & character conflict. It's simply smart writing, far beyond the supervillainy & slugfests that are standard even forty years later.

Also, to claim that the issues have dated is simply ridiculous. Social problems like racism, sexism, drug abuse, corporate exploitation & pollution, and over-population are still very much with us. O'Neil & Adams point the way for comic books to be involved & informed by political activity & social work.

And don't forget that this run not only raised Green Arrow's & Black Canary's profiles, it also introduced John Stewart. This is the real deal: superhero comics for adults.

This is a disturbingly common misconcption. Millar's take was blunt and upfront, but it's all there in Ellis's run, particularly in Jenny Sparks's speeches. Ellis's run also ends far better, without the backtracking stupitiy of Millar's final issue that undermines the whole thing.

I totally want to read that lunch story.

I've never really understood the love for GJ's Flash. Maybe that's because Waid convinced me that Wally should be a fundamentally happy hero, one who thinks he's got the coolest power in the world, a wife he adores, and lots of heroic friends (speedsters, the Titans, the JLA). The Zoom/ miscarriage/ Spectre/ secret ID story and the darkening (and, for some, the de-reforming) of the Rogues, especially in the Top story and Rogue War, made Wally's world a much uglier place, and while they might have had the skill and talent GJ usually brings, I kept failing to enjoy them at all.

"Under Siege" remains my favorite Avengers story. I haven't read the rest of Stern's run (are any other issues collected in trade?), but I could see voting for his run on Avengers based on that one story.