Promethea ! Yes !! Of course a lot of Moore's work will be on this list but this is one of my very favorites. It's truly unique and I was crazy crazy about it. It's about as perfect as a comic comes. It was trippy on a grand scale like the first time you're reading Ditko's Dr. Strange. I loved the last issue send off too. Sure Moore was full of himself, but if anyone's earned the right I would say it's him. It's his world and we're all just begging for him to tell us another story.

The Flash has always been one of my favorite characters but I hadn't read it with any regularity until Johns took it over. Waid is overrated IMO but I must confess I haven't read this run, but will. Impulse is cool but I cannot believe he held his own series for what, 6 years or so, including a two issue mini that I was pretty unimpressed with.

Astonishing X-Men : I still have not read this. In the last few years I've really carved back by purchases paying down bills and have been pretty hesitant to buy any mutants. I thought this series couldn't lose and am stunned reading all the feedback with most saying it's meh. The Cassaday eye candy is beautiful and if the story isn't 90's terrible I'm still guaranteed to buy this later.

Hitman ! I can't believe what a retard I am. I know Ennis was behind this earlier in his career and I was introduced to the character via his first appearance in The Demon. I guess I'm the only guy that wasn't wowed. McCrea's art wasn't my cup of tea either. I've bought a few issues here and there in the past and thought it was pretty meh. I've really dug almost every work Ennis has done with Preacher and Punisher both being some of my very favorites. Haven't read The Boys yet but again, will down the road.

Did Grant Morrison watch them? (There are quite a few parallels to the Invisibles.) Did Alan Moore somehow see them? (Quite a few parallels to Miracleman, though less so than Invisibles.) Did the Warshowskis see them? We know they like anime. Or did they just read comics based on them? Or were the comics inspired separately, but the Warshowskis also saw the anime? Or...

... well, this is why trying to argue that X was based on Y in any sort of conclusive way, as opposed to "X is very strikingly similar to Y" is something of a fruitless task on the internet.

Mike, there is a mistake in what I’ve said. There IS a comic book that seemed to inspire Matrix a lot, it was The Invisibles. There are a couple of sites in the Internet that remark on the various similarities. The resemblance to Miracleman seems more incidental to me....

Mike, having read both the Invisibles and Miracleman, I still think Matrix owes more to the Invisibles in general structure.

I think it's worth noting that that wasn't your initial reaction to my observation.You demonstrated associating the Matrix with the Invisibles wasn't intuitive to you, and now you seem to be citing your intuition as the basis of your opinion.

In contrast to this, my reaction watching Revolutions in the theater was, "holy crap, this is Miracle Man!" and was potent enough for me to be what may be a dick about it here 4½ years later.

1. He did a comic book story -- might have been in his FF run, I'm not sure -- in which various characters spent most of the story wearing carved masks, apparently modeled on the ones out of the early dramas of Classic Greece, over two thousand years ago.

2. He later met a fan at a convention who said something like this: "It was shameless, the way you plagiarized that whole 'carved masks' concept from a 'Doctor Who' episode I saw, not so long before your story came out."

3. When Byrne asked if the fan was aware that the basic concept of different characters wearing carved wooden masks as they recite their lines onstage went way back to the old Greeks, the fan claimed to have some awareness of that fact -- but he was still absolutely convinced that a) Byrne must have seen the same "Doctor Who" episode the fan had seen, and b) must have shamelessly swiped the idea from that specific use of it in that episode, because c) if he hadn't just recently seen that general idea being used, it "obviously" never would have occurred to him to do it that way himself in a new story!

In short, the fan was obsessed with the idea that the most recent use of this concept that he personally had observed (Byrne's story) must have been plagiarized from the next-to-most-recent use of this concept which he personally had observed (the "Doctor Who") episode. Any suggestion that Byrne and the script writer for that episode might have independently chosen to gleefully swipe the general concept from much older sources simply fell on deaf ears!

It's a strange feeling, some comic book characters that are so familiar to us fans, and yet so unknown to the general public, before a cartoon or a movie makes the characters "visible". The X-Men are a case in point. I remember how it was in the 80s, how almost everyone who read superhero comic books was crazy about Claremont's X-Men, but they were completely unknown to the general public.

Then the cartoons came in the early 90s, and later the movies, and now the characters are recognized.

Mike, having read both the Invisibles and Miracleman, I still think Matrix owes more to the Invisibles in general structure. The resemblance to Miracleman seems to be in couple of elements (the visuals of the villain, the virtual reality tanks), not the general plot, that sometimes seems to be lifted entirely from the Invisibles.

But this is the kind of thing that is hard to be "proved".

I wrote a review of that one for Epinions.com. I also read a bunch of other reviews written by other participants on that site. One amateur film critic had said approximately the following (paraphrased from my memory):

Those scary metal tetacles thrashing about are so obviously swiped from the ones on the evil robots in the Matrix films that it's just pathetic. Couldn't they be more original in designing their villain's gimmicks? [Or words to that general effect.]

As you could probably anticipate, I thought that was hilarious, and tried to break it to the guy gently that he probably had the chronology of the sequence of cause-and-effect mixed up!

I said something like this: "Evidently you aren't very familiar with the Spider-Man comic books, or else you'd be aware that in the comics, Doctor Octopus has been depicted using metal tentacles -- the basis for the ones seen in this film -- on a regular basis ever since the early 1960s. If anything got swiped, it's far more likely that the Wachowski Bros. are the ones who were inspired by fond memories of how scary Doc Ock's tentacles could look, instead of the other way around!"

The literal consideration of our emerging from a virtual world is at least 400 years old with George Berkeley, if you don't count Plato. The notion of a society constructed to farm humanity doesn't seem so dependent on the myrmidons with the Morlock/Eloi relationship standing by as the better analogy. The Morpheus/Cypher/Neo triangle fits the grail-king/pagan-king/grail-champion triangle as I remember Joseph Campbell describing it in Hero w/ 1000 Faces (as well as Freud's ego, id, and superego, if that's how you take your dialectics).

That leaves dramatising the jump scene from the Invisibles (which I haven't read, if that disclosure is necessary, but if you're going to offer the article as proof, that's all I really need to address). Contrast that with the finale showdown in the last movie pitting Neo against Agent Smith performing for the most part as Kid MiracleMan, I feel comfortable saying the trilogy (which is what I've been casually referring to all this time, if that requires clarification) is more of a hostage to Miracle Man than the Invisibles.

'Promethea' is a pretty title, for sure, but hard to get into. And I'd rather Moore told stories instead of lecturing to us uncultured hicks.

'Flash' introduced Impulse, who was an ok character but not someone I cared about all that much about, I felt nothing when they killed him off. There were 2 things I especially didn't like about Waid's run: 1)The introduction of the Speed Force (what, they can't just be people who run fast?), and 2)The new status of the the worshiping of Saint Wally. Yeah, I preferred him more when he was a prick, as opposed to Waid's "The bestest person evah!" version. Bad enough he fulfilled whatever masturbation fantasies Waid had about the character...but then everyone else in the DCU fell in line with worshipping Wally? I realize he needed to get him out of Barry's shadow, but come on...

'Hitman' does have a bit too much superhero hatred (the Superman issue aside). If you're that embaressed about superheroes or working in the comic book industry, find another job. Still, he gets points for taking a Bloodlines characters and writing a series that lasted 5 years.

'AXM' looks pretty, but the writing....'Danger' seems like a rejected plot for Star Trek, Hellfire was a 6 issue fight scene which did nothing but lead into the current story, and the current story seems like a rehash of an old annual Claremont did better involving the X-men, the FF, Akron, and the Badoon. And he did in IN ONE ANNUAL. Then again, I find Whedon to be an overrated hack, so maybe it's just me. Buffy and Angel were ok, but I never found them to be as exceptional as the critics and cult sized audience found them to be (the less said about Firefly, the better). But again, it looks pretty. Def not the run I would recommend to someone who wanted to discover the X-men.

I'm pretty sure I put it third on my list.

http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/niven/142/recycleb/rb40.html

Dunno about that, I think Matrix was more inspired by cyberpunk novels than by any comic book.

Well, Miracle Man predated the term cyberpunk and the Wachowskis demonstrated their interest in Moore with their interest in adapting V for Vendetta beginning in the early 1990s. The cyberpunk influence seemed to have been employed as an introduction, however well, to a story they intended to end with a fight with Kid MiracleMan. I'm not sure what the virtue of denying this is except as comic-audience low-self-esteem

Mark Waid made Wally grow up, and maybe it was about time that he became more heroic and smart. But he also became a bit more conventional.

That was always my one complaint about Waid's run. The impulsive, flirtatious Flash was a totally unique charater that Waid seemed over-eager to put into the past. Personally, I miss the Wally West that ate six cheeseburgers and cracked wise about it to the waitress. We were around the same age and I really related to him.

I know this may seem weird, but among all the other things I liked about Messner-Loebs' run on the Flash was that Wally West was a young guy that meant well, but he was also a bit of slacker, immature, and not the sharpest tool in the shed. All in all, a much more realistic take on young people than the "little adults" that you often see in fiction. Peter Parker and Invincible and Smallville's Clark Kentcan agonize about their choices, but when you get down to it, they're really very responsible and mature. Even more than most adults.

Well, the Human Torch and Iceman are depicted as truly immature many times, but they're also depicted as abrasive and jerk-ish. Messner-Loebs' Wally was unique in that he was both amicable and immature, a mixture that contributed to a certain charm.

Mark Waid made Wally grow up, and maybe it was about time that he became more heroic and smart. But he also became a bit more conventional.

I see a lot of this too. People who use that title as their first-ever comic. And I think that's who it is written for, too. There are a zillion X-books. They don't all have to be for the same fanbase. Hell, they shouldn't be.