I'm certainly glad you like what I've recommended. It's hard to find stuff that's worth it, especially if you've been out of comics for a while, so I'm glad I can help.

Those are some good choices - the ones I've read, of course! It will be a while for some of them, because I do these in alphabetical order, and I'm going through my back issues before starting on the ones I have exclusively in trade. Luckily, that means I'll never run out of posts! But those are some good choices ...

greg, thanks for all these great analyses. they're a great boon to me trying to catch up with all the comics i missed out on when i gave up on comics from the late 80s until about two years ago. my ebay addiction is very healthy thanks to your good self!

the last comics i ever bought were,i think, cerebus during mothers & daughters and love and rockets at around issue 36. had to give them all up to save money for university. i couldn't justify spending £1.75 on twenty pages of talking heads in cerebus. - even though it was enthralling.

[i come back and an ordinary marvel/dc comic is £3.50!]

based upon your recommendations, i now own complete runs of: the heckler, the extremist, hellstorm, atlantis chronicles, alias, dr. fate, arrowsmith, doom patrol, enigma, flex mentallo, four women, planetary, morrisson's animal man, and have started collecting the hulk visionaries tpbs.

my favourite so far would be the heckler. a really serious funny comic. and jessica jones rivals maggie as the best female character i've read in comics.

here's some suggestions from me for series that deserve the greg burgas treatment:

moonshadow [would love to know your thoughts on this, my favourite comic series], 'mazing man, journey, all of p craig russell's opera adaptations & the night music series, simonson's thor, cerebus, timespirits, stray bullets, strange embrace, madman, yotsuba!, lone wolf & cub, blade of the immortal, plannettes, eden....aaarghh!! there's too much and my ceiling's going to fall in with the weight of it all!!

ps. any chance of getting some of the archive links to work again?

I can’t think of a horror story from before Hellstorm that had somebody usurp, Satan.

I'm pretty sure it had already happened in the DCU... can't remember where, possibly in Swamp Thing, but at the start of The Sandman, satan has been replaced and has to share the duties of running hell with two other demons.

I was also thinking about it the other day, and I'm really annoyed DC scrapped the issue that led to him leaving Hellblazer - he was setting it up to be a run that rivaled Ennis' on the book.
Does anyone know where the scrapped issue is available online?
I remember that it was at the time it got canceled, but I never got around to reading it.

This deprived the world of Satana, a sequel of sorts to Hellstorm. I read a few sample pages Ellis had on his old website years ago. It was great, and kept the mood of Hellstorm.

Well, Ellis had written or plotted the first issue, I believe, and mapped out the rest, and he then took that to Avatar and turned it into Strange Kiss.
It was interesting at the time, as Marvel were going to use his plot and have, I believe, John Ostrander write the Satanna series.
However, Ellis issued a press release telling the story - so that he wasn't accused of plagiarism - and Marvel decided not to go ahead.
It's a shame, I remember Ellis saying he was actually quite interested in seeing where his ideas went compared to Ostrander's.
Would of been interesting seeing two very different, but very good writers, starting from the same point (I think the first issues were going to be very similar) and going on from there.

Stupid Marvel and its cancellation policies!

It wasn't a mini-series.

It was a regular series that was canceled before issue #1 came out, as part of the same sweep that took out Chaykin's Fury of SHIELD and, IIRC, Skrull Kill Krew.

It wasn't going to end with Hellstrom zapping Druid...that was thrown in to tidy the lose ends.

I’m not saying he doesn’t enjoy writing Astonishing X-Men or anything else he churns out for Marvel, but in the past few years, it seems like he’s become “Warren Ellis,” and everyone knows what they’re going to get from “Warren Ellis,” and he doesn’t disappoint. Even though I read this with the full knowledge of what he would write in the next decade, this feels fresher, as if Ellis just couldn’t wait to write the next sentence of his twisted epic.

Yup, it sure was good when he wrote that way.
He seemed to lose it for me right around the moment the ink dried on the DC exclusive contract - not because he 'sold out' or any such thing, it's just that around then his work lost something.
Apparat and Fell are the only recent works that have felt as exciting for me (possibly because in both times he was trying something new), and perhaps Desolation Jones (although ironically I like that so much because of how polished and in control of the medium he was with that one).
I have a similar thing with Neil Gaiman - I really like his work, but I don't enjoy it as much as I did before he was NEIL GAIMAN.
Although he has a much stronger voice, and his stories are probably better crafted now, his first short story collection 'Smoke And Mirrors' is much better, in my opinion, than his most recent one, 'Fragile Things'.
Smoke And Mirrors was Gaiman trying different genres, taking more risks etc.
The stories were more raw, and were better for it.

Perhaps it's like rock stars where the latter albums may be technically better, but you struggle to compete with the rawness and energy of their early music.

Either way, Ellis has slipped from a must buy whatever the cost writer, to one whose projects I'll get if the concept interests me.

Daimon may not have been especially sympathetic (perhaps Jagger could have worked some up, I don't know), but he was charismatic, and that went a long way with me. Ellis' ideas were so fresh, especially considering the rest of Marvel's output back then, that it was amazing- and remember, we look at it now with a decade plus of hindsight. As I understand it, Ellis was just preparing a long, multi-part epic when news of the book's cancellation reached him, so he just tied it all up in one issue, bang-bang-bang, and pulled it off surprisingly well, I thought!

Druid, too, was intended to be an ongoing but was soon truncated into a 4-issue mini, and it shows.

And yes, for the next ten years I had sort of a Didn't-I-read-that-in? moment during many future plots. But hey, that's the advantage of having unbelievably low sales on your early stuff!