Cerebus is definitely one of the best things I've ever read, specifically, Church & State. The early Conan riffs are entertaining too as we see Sim really develop and mature as a storyteller. I don't remember much after Church & State and traded my issues years later to get the collected editions which I still have to do, but Sim, controversial as some of his views are, is a truly gifted creator and I will be getting the entire Cerebus run in collected editions.

Garth Ennis does some of his best work on the Punisher and I've lent some of his collected works to non-comics reading friends who have loved it. Why isn't this the Punisher based a movie franchise on ?! Entertaining as it's been, I wouldn't begin to put it in my Top 25.

I've only read a little bit of Transmetropolitan and liked it. The same with Fables. I'll be getting both of these in collected editions later.

Animal Man leaves me with mixed emotions. It was of wildly varying ranges of sort of entertaining to gripping taut can't put down the book greatness. I think the Bolland covers definitely helped to contribute to the fond memories and impressions of this run. Good, but overrated IMO.

Thanks for doing the tallies.

Pun Max is not about gratuitous violence or sex, or language. If you can't see past that.....

Each arc has explored a different aspect of crime or violence and how it can destroy people . Nothing repetitive.

For me, post High Society, Sim became very concerned with regurgitating issues with scant regard to storyline or even coherence. It could be regarded as the ultimate self indulgent comic. For all that, let me also say that I did also enjoy 'Melmouth' - the storyline which focuses on the end of Oscar Wilde's life (an amazing piece of shoehorning, if ever there was one - but an admirable piece at that.)

(And, for the record, I really like Transmet.)

(And even at his worst, Spider Jerusalem is still a huge improvement over Pete Wisdom, who not just passed the Gary Stu test but went screaming over the "Gary Stu" line in rocket-powered roller skates.)

I like Warren Ellis a lot. I admire his imagination. The guy is able to come up with more cool concepts per minute than most any other writers, and I also like it that he is brave enough to go into out of our comfort zone and show how the world can be an ugly place.

But the one thing that bothers me is that for all his sophistication, it seems like he is surprisingly manicheist, in a way. His hero, Spider Jerusalem, can be foul-mouthed and cynical and "street" and everything, but he is like Captain America and Superman, in that Spider Jerusalem is ALWAYS RIGHT. He just is. His moral compass is perfect. And his enemy, the bad President, is ABSOLUTE EVIL.

It was surprising when I realized that Transmetropolitan was like a Silver Age comic in that it was a good versus evil tale. The one comic in the whole run that shows Spider Jerusalem as not perfect is that one that tells us how he was careless with his former assistant and unwittingly helped ruin her life. But that is one issue in the whole run. The rest is all about how wonderful Spider is.

(And no, I don't have a problem with an American president being portrayed as evil. I'm not one of those crazies who runs around defending George W. Bush or anything. I like it when authority figures are made fun of.)

It's just that something about it bothers me, it's like Warren Ellis loves his heroes too much. There is almost no shade of gray. In the Authority it doesn't bother me that the baddies are EEEEVIL, because they're usually dead soon. In Planetary it also doesn't bother me that The Four are so satanic, because they're kept shadowy for most of the series, and that is great. But in Transmetropolitan, the struggle of Spider versus the President takes center stage and becomes much of what the book is about, and this "flaw" in Warren Ellis's writing comes to the fore.

The issues of Transmet that I most liked were the ones where Warren Ellis would show us these interesting facts about the future world he created. When the focus shifted completely to the President stuff, I started to like the book less.

I think that Garth Ennis is another writer that is supposed to be sophisticated, but has heroes that are always right, and bad guys set up to take a fall, but I think Ennis is still able to create sympathetic villains, like Herr Starr in Preacher, for instance.

And 6 I collected in back issues (possibly with the help of masterworks)

My list leaned heavily non-present. I like Fables, but wouldn't think of considering it for my favourite runs before it's completed. The only two current-ish series to make my list were Astro City and Usagi Yojimbo. But they've both been around a while and Astro City was the newest comic to make my list.

But I had been saddened to see Warlock, my #2 choice, as low as it was. Only about 13 issues, but I'd stack them against any 13 issues of Fables.

That said, I understand that its exposure that determines things largely. I've read very little that predates 1960. I think I can count them on one hand, in fact (Superman, Batman, Marvel Comics, Toth's Zorro, Spirit), so really old stuff got the shaft from me. The '60s and '80s were by far the best decades to be in to get my votes. And I'm not old or anything. Started reading comics around 1990.

That’s why The Spirit is not on my list.

fourthworlder said:
I agree with Mutt, all my picks were runs that I either read as they came out or hunted down as back issues, (often read out of sequence, I came into the Moore Swamp Thing run in his last issue and basically read the forty-six issues in reverse). If I read something as a trade I tend to view it a bit differently.

Interesting. This triggered some introspection. Of the 10 picks on my ballot, I had 1 from the 40s, 1 from the 60s, 5 from the 80s, and 3 from the 90s (although at least 2, and maybe all 3, of those "90s runs" actually continued into the 2000s. Heck, one is still coming out today!)

I wasn't even born until the 70s, so it's obvious that I haven't been in the "breathlessly wait another month to see how the plot threads develop from this cliffhanger" situation regarding my picks from the 40s and 60s. (My 40s pick was, in fact, the same Will Eisner Spirit run which Mutt rejected due to not having experienced those endless waits between installments.)

On the other hand, all 3 of the 90s runs are things that I started reading while they were actually coming out . . . although two of them had each been coming out for roughly a year and a half apiece before I actually bought and read any samples, and then I had to start shopping around to make up for lost time, of course!

Now let's take a look at the 5 1980s runs that filled up half my ballot. 3 of them are, in fact, things I was eagerly buying at monthly intervals for awhile when I was a schoolboy (although it was only much later, in the 90s, that I managed to fill in a bunch of gaps and turn those into "complete" runs in my collection).

On the other hand, 2 of the 1980s runs are stuff that really only came to my attention many years later, in the 1990s. One around 1994, I think, and one some years later when I had the chance to buy a bunch of back issues at once. So in each case I ended up reading several consecutive issues very quickly now that I had them all in my possession -- none of that stuff about sweating it out for long intervals between installments!

I think that makes a score of 60/40 - 6 of my "Top Ten" include many issues I collected as they arrived, "hot off the presses," at some point in my life . . . and the other 4 are things I only discovered in hindsight, as back issues or reprint collections (or, in The Spirit's case, both at once, when I bought numerous back issues of a reprint series, with each issue collecting, I think, 4 of those little "newspaper insert" stories from the Golden Age!), years or even decades after the source material had been "the hot new thing." Whether or not these runs became some of my favorite things to reread after I'd first collected them seems to have been luck-of-the-draw in each case, rather than depending heavily upon my having fond memories of once suffering through those month-long gaps, asking myself, "How on earth is the hero going to wriggle out of this one?"

I'll do a complete listing later. But since you've asked...

The 15 non-superhero books are: Transmetropolian, Fables, Cerebus, Bone, Acme Novelty Library, Strangers in Paradise, Howard the Duck, Hellblazer, Lucifer, 100 Bullets, Usagi Yojimbo, Lone Wolf & Cub, Love and Rockets, Invisibles, and Groo.

To spare myself the trouble of analyzing the books in depth, I used a simple rule: everything that even vaguely looks like superhero is put into the superhero-related column. Even so, some calls were hard. Invisibles is the most superhero-y book of all the books I didn't consider "superhero". On the other side of the frontier, Concrete and Punisher are only very borderline superheroes.

The comedic superheroes are: X-Factor, Deadpool, X-Statix, Plastic Man, Nextwave, Hitman, and Howard the Duck. I know, how can Howard the Duck be non-superhero and a comedic superhero at the same time? That is because Howard was partly a parody of Marvel heroes, was set in the Marvel Universe, etc. but Howard himself was very much not a superhero.

22 runs from the 1990s, but it's not really surprising. When people think of the 90s as a disaster zone in comics, they're really thinking only of the usual suspects: the crappy stuff that was going on in the major Marvel titles, the early Image titles, Heroes Reborn, the "bad girl" comics, the Death of Superman comics and other gimmicky stuff. But there was a lot of acclaimed comics in those years too: the titles at the borders of the Big-Two universes (Hitman, Starman, Thunderbolts), some non-superhero comics (Sin City), Dark Horse, the later Image titles by non-founders (Astro City), and the late-90s stuff (Busiek's Avengers).

But note that none of the Image founders has appeared in this list, except for Marc Silvestri in the X-Men. And they're the guys most representative of the "90s comics" people usually hate now.

I loved Animal Man but it came in finally at my #11, with Morrison's DP in #12.

Four of my pix made it so far. The others are all locks (I'm pretty mainstream) with the possible exception of Shooter's LSH, my #6.
C'mon Shooter's LSH.

Ennis' "Punisher" is something that I have sampled, but can't really speak to. However, I am AMAZED how lucky that character has been with the creators who have worked on it. "The Punisher" was a third-tier Spidey villain, but after Miller, Baron, Janson and Ennis there will always be a market for his adventures. It is amazing when you consider how many cool, under-used characters there are waiting to be cannon fodder in the next big event.

I have read some, but not all, of "Transmetropolitan". It is good and I understand why people adore it. Ellis is better when he is doing his own stuff. He is such a natural cynic that he is a really poor fit at Marvel telling stories about their self-involved baby boomer heroes. I'm not sure he'd be much better at DC, although I'd wager he could write a killer Lex Luthor. On his own, it just all clicks.

"Fables" is a lot of fun. Wllingham was an under-rated writer for so long that it is nice to see him doing a break-out series. Being unfinished, it is hard to properly rate. He is working toward some type of conclusion. Hard to judge the movie before the end credits roll, but so far it is great.

Morrison's "Animal Man" is probably my least favorite of his work. The ideas were better than the story for me.

If I had discovered a title because of the trades I read years after the fact, they probably wouldn't have registered in my mind as "runs" at all.

That's why The Spirit is not on my list.

At this point as well, I think the only series still in production that we'll see will be Brubaker's Captain America and Ellis' Planetary.

Hellboy was already listed.

I... think I'm glad it was this high.

It is *the* defining, long-form, personal work in American comics. And it's really, really good, a lot of the time.

Still, I didn't even consider voting for it. Just watching Dave Sim, who always seemed like such a smart, funny, guy, completely lose his shit on paper was a fairly disturbing thing to watch. (And I wasn't even there! I just read the trades, up 'till READS, in order.)