Man oh man oh man oh man. Every one of these is good, though I’m just taking what I’ve heard of the Brubaker Captain America as I haven’t read it yet but from what I’ve read and heard I’m very, very jazzed when I finally do get to it. I’m familiar with everything that’s been mentioned here but in the last year or so I’ve kept up on comics news via the internet while I’m selling off a lot of my collection to get debt free.

Brubaker and Epting on Cap look to me to probably be the best team ever on the title, more so even than Stan & Jack, Stern & Byrne, or even Steranko’s issues.

I haven’t read it but I’m definitely not attracted to what I have read about Bendis’ Avengers. His Daredevil, however, is almost as good as the Miller stuff, which I did vote for in my Top 10 list.

PAD Hulk. Peter David reinvented and tweaked the Hulk more than any other single writer to that point, and him making Bruce a split personality was pure genius. The art was awesome by McFarlane, Frank & Keown and it was practically the only Marvel title I was buying in the early 90′s. It deserves all the praise it gets.

Planetary is, along with The Authority, one of the best things Ellis or WildStorm ever produced. Cassaday, of course, is flawless. The secret history of the 20th century is right up Ellis’ alley. What kills about this series is the huge huge infamous amount of months between issues. I love the way each issue has a different homage or theme ranging from Big Monster / Godzilla to Edgar Rice Burroughs / Pulp.

John Byrne’s FF was a partial recycling of previous ideas, as most runs are, but Byrne really shined here. I think it’s the best work of his career. The art is loose in kind of a European way but still classically Byrne. Him adding certain tweaks along the way were great including the inclusion of She-Hulk. There were hardly any clunkers in the bunch and I think this string of stories is the most consistently excellent post-Stan & Jack.

I’m not too interested in what the Internet critics have to say about superheroes. Usually they show too much love for the Silver Age, and too little for many creators that I think are essential to the superhero genre (Byrne, Claremont, Thomas, Englehart, Mantlo, Shooter, Wolfman). In short, the opposite bias that has dominated this poll, but still a bias.

(Though I have to say that, except for Byrne and Claremont, the other creators I’ve mentioned have not been doing too well in this poll either).

There is no combination of 100 comic runs that would not have a high number of people bitching about it missing some essential runs. I agree with the previous poster (whose name I forget, and I wasn’t able to find it scanning through the comments real quick) who said instead of complaining about stuff you like that didn’t make the list, give us reasons why the stuff you like should have made the list. I’d like to think that when all is said and done with this Top 100, we can all find some new titles to read we might not have been aware of before.

B: When I was 10, my parents got me & my sister a stack of Tintins from a trip to England. That stack pretty much changed my life. I’ve always thought it a damn shame that more US kids don’t get to read Tintin.

C: I have a ton of poblems with Grant Morrison, but if Doom Patrol doesn’t show up I’m gonna be genuinely bummed.

D: I think the next batch of 5 will tell us if DC has a chance in hell of catching Marvel.

Peter also made Doc Samson an interesting and fully realized character. Love seeing his appearances in X-Factor, something that never would have been possible without the Hulk run.

I didn’t realize there was so much Byrne-FF hate here. I didn’t read it all, but I read a bunch of it, and I thought some of it was excellent. I frankly loooove the Trial of Reed Richards. The Watcher as defense council? lillandra prosecuting? Odin showing up and scaring the crap out of everyone? that’s pretty cool stuff, man.

My favorite segment was the Mr Fixit period–because it was so different and yet so natural. And it was entertaining. I also loved MacFarlane’s art from earlier. He was much better suited to the Hulk than Spidey. The story where the Hulk gets drunk to keep Bruce Banner from getting his way–was classic.

I placed that run at #4.The only runs I placed higher were Ostrander (& Yale)’s Suicide Squad & 2 others I expect to see in the 15.

It’s hard to figure at this point. (Yes, I’m also baffled, but one person’s crap is another’s fertilizer.) It wouldn’t be such a big deal if some of these were below the top 15, but at this point, if they don’t show up they’re not in the top 100, which doesn’t seem possible, and yet it must be! In Tim Callahan’s Sequart column, he mentioned that he voted Doom Patrol #4. I would have thought that was a pretty common opinion, but I’ve been surprised by a lot of the things showing up here, so who knows…

Incidentally, would anyone else be interested in a “critics poll” to go along with the fan poll—a similar list put together by polling known critics and bloggers, as these people would presumably have a better overview of the bigger picture of comics history than the average fan?

I have no right to complain about the lack of foreign comics since I too decided to limit myself to American comics in order to make things easier, but when “Lone Wolf and Cub” showed up early on, I assumed that AKIRA would be in the top fifty. Come to think of it, AKIRA is NEVER mentioned on this blog. Surely it’s up there with Cerebus and Bone among the great long-form comix novels? Everybody know that, right?

If I had allowed myself to vote for works in translation, I probably would have voted for AKIRA and Moebius’s “Airtight Garage”.

I’ll admit, at first I had David’s run split up, but I quickly realized it was a bad idea, for the reasons explained.

In any event, calling Claremont/Byrne a “Claremont run” is just neither accurate nor fair to Byrne, who basically co-wrote the majority of his run with Claremont, particularly the stuff that everyone loves so much (Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past).

Peter David’s the primary creative force behind his entire run on Hulk. Whoever was drawing it at the time, it was indisputably David’s book

In the case of the X-Men runs, Byrne was at least as integral as Claremont to the stories they worked on together. It’s not really fair or accurate to lump the Claremont/Byrne run in with X-men stories that Byrne had nothing to do with. And once you’ve split off one Claremont/artist pairing, you sort of have to do them all. The same is true with Spider-Man where Lee scripted over Ditko’s plots- it’s not fair to Ditko to just merge his stories with the Romita stuff that he had nothing to do with.

I’m surprised to see Planetary so high, even though it’s a favorite of mine. I thought the wait between issues would be enough to dampen many readers’ enthusiasm.

Yes, read PAD’s Hulk as an adult! Be prepared for an excess of puns and a serious dip in quality between issues 425 & 454, but try it out. I think it holds up.

Bendis DD starts with a cool enough idea: mob gets sick of Kingpin being too busy acting as a supervillain to be an effective mob boss, Silke moves to get rid of him.

Then Kingpin survives, kills Silke, and pisses all over that premise, and we go into a transparent attempt at writing a “definitive run” complete with Black Widow, Typhoid Mary, Elektra, Bullseye, etc. all showing up like clockwork…except the whole thing is so decompressed that it takes like a half a year of books for any one thing to happen…and then the whole ridiculous “hey Matt, do you, do you think maybe your entire life since Karen’s death has been one big nervous breakdown?” concept that was too stupid for words…