I went Blood Sundicate, but Static was close.

Part of me wanted to vote for a McDuffie written title because he died and I respect his legacy. Unfortunately, my favorite Milestone titles were all the ones he didn’t write. I always liked him as a big concept guy, which is why I appreciate what he did as an architect of the Milestone Universe, but his writing on a personal level never really grabbed me.

For me it came down to Blood Syndicate or Static. I chose Blood Syndicate because to me its quality was most consistent. Static was good but once Ivan Velez left the book the quality was very uneven.

XOMBI!

This is where I admit to my shame that I only ever really read Hardware. I’m going to have to abstain.

XOMBI!

Blood Syndicate, followed closely by Static. I liked Shadow Cabinet, but to be honest, I had a hard time following the story and knowing what was going on. But I enjoyed what I could figure out. Probably didn’t help that I was collecting and reading back issues out of order years after they were first published. Also enjoyed Icon here and there.

Sad to say I never read the Milestone books at the time. Considering how much I came to like Dwayne McDuffie’s writing later on, I clearly missed out.

I went for Static – it’s just a fun character.

That said, I’m pretty much limited in my reading to the few trades that DC have released.

The stores around here stopped carrying Milestone partway through the line’s run, so I can really only judge by the first couple of years’ worth of stories. That being said, I went with Static. I always did like the character.

Static edges out Icon for my vote

Blood Syndicate was the JLA meet the X-Men with a realistic bent to me. When I read it, I always thought THAT is how ‘real heroes’ would sound. So I picked that first…but Xombi, Static, and Hardware are all right there….

Xombi was always my favorite, with Icon a very close second.

Voted for Xombi, as it’s no secret how much I loved that series (and I am looking forward to its return). Blood Syndicate was another standout. I’ve been trying to finish my Shadow Cabinet run, but the last issue is hard to find. Lastly, not sure if Heroes counts as an ongoing; was it converted to a miniseries after sales came in?

Icon. Icon by A LOT, and I really dig almost all the Milestone titles.

Blood Syndicate all the way. I was a huge fan of that book back in the day. Like some others the Milestone books I liked the most were generally not the ones McDuffie actually wrote but he was a constant presence and he will be missed.

I guess cause it was a team book, Blood Syndicate was actually the most diverse book Milestone put out. It was also one of the very few books at the time (or since) that dealt with LGBTQ issues. Fade, my favorite character in the book, was a deeply closeted gay man. It was heavily implied in the book that he and the gang’s first leader Tech-9 were lovers (something confirmed in the never published Fade miniseries). Masquerade was a transman who used shapeshifting to change her gender from female to male. There were a couple of gay supporting characters as well.

The numbers on this should be way, way down. Almost no one has read all of these, or even more than a couple of these.

I voted for Xombi, though partially just because I want people to know about the upcoming relanuch. Buy it!

Static was really good too (though suffered from some inconsistant art), but pretty much all of the initial Milestone titles were pretty good. (Shadow Cabinet and Kobalt never grabbed me.)

@Ryan Voss: I’ve read at least one issue of all of these titles (enough so that I know that Heroes was only ever a miniseries), and I did that around 2003/2004. I hauled most of them out of quarter bins, and they’re totally enjoyable stuff. Go look!

Where is the “none” option?

Seriously: I never could get into ANY of the Milestone titles, not even the ones with Puerto Rican characters such as Blood Syndicate. It wasn’t an “ethnic” thing- I just think none of them were very good. Which is a pithy because I could see what they were going for and hoped the line would succeed. (I DID like Static, however it was the made-for-TV version, so I’m not counting it here.)

Tough call. I voted for Icon, but Static andXombi might have won on another day.

I went with Blood Syndicate. I actually thought that was going to be a rare choice, but reading the comments it seems like a lot of people are on the same page. I didn’t read all of the Milestone titles, just some issues of Hardware, Icon, Blood Syndicate, and Static. You know, the ones that were part of the “Worlds Collide” crossover. I may have to pull out the issue with the colorform cover.

I recently re-read all of them, and Icon stood out to me. Just amazingly consistent and coherent. Of the 42 issues in the series, Dwayne McDuffie wrote 36 of them. Mark D. Bright drew 37 of them and wrote a couple, too!

Xombi is a close second, and Blood Syndicate had a lot going for it, but kinda fell apart at the end.

And Sijo, there’s no accounting for taste, I guess. But I wonder why you bothered to comment?

Wait, there’s a “no comment” option? Damn, I wouldn’t have said half the crap I say on here if I’d known that.

I guess complaining about needless negativity on the Internet is like complaining about water being wet.

I had to say Blood Syndicate. Followed by Static, Hardware and Icon. Blood Syndicate was the one that made me the most exited when I saw a new issue was out.

I haven’t read enough of any of these to vote, but what I have read was all pretty interesting.

One thing that was interesting about the Milestone books was the coloring. It looks a little odd at first, but you realize that it is in fact memorable.

To the back issue bins!

@Paul: I commented because, as a non-White American who was looking up to the Milestone Media comics only to be disappointed by them, I thought I had a point to make. I’m not trolling, I honest-to-God feel they just weren’t that good, and that many people may be misremembering them now in the nostalgia over McDuffie’s death.

(THAT said, I was younger back then and perhaps didn’t judge them fairly. McDuffie certainly impressed me with his writing in Justice League and Static Shock. Maybe I should give them another read. I am, however, hardly the only one who complained about the books’ quality back then.)

I have to pick one and only one from the list?

Bowing out, because this is a Hobson’s Choice to make.

I’m surprised you found Milestone so bad Sijo. Not because I think they were flawless, far from it, but rather because in the 90s just about everything else from the big 2 was considerably worse, at least to me.