My Favorite Creator Runs

Brian Cronin's Comics Should Be Good prompted the topic of favorite creator runs, and I responded in the comments with my picks, so I figured I ought to expand on that here.

Now, I'm going to cheat a little here, because Cronin only wanted a very specific set of criteria to be met, mostly to keep mini-series out of the equation, so I'll list my selections and then add the exceptions.

Without further adieu:

1. Mark Waid/Humberto Ramos - Impulse (DC)
Generally the first twenty-five issues (though various artists interposed throughout) of the series, this was the most fun I ever had reading a comic book.  Starring Bart Allen (raised in a virtual reality, hence an inability to accept actual reality most of the time) and his mentor Max Mercury, the Zen master of speed, and spun off from Waid's epic Flash, which Impulse reads like a more perfect version of, with the added benefit of the anime-inspired art of Ramos, which perfectly captures the chaos and wonder of youth.  Released between 1995 and 1997.

2. Grant Morrison - Batman/Batman & Robin/Batman Incorporated (DC)
Other writers have gotten to do iconic stories with the Dark Knight, but no one has defined the character better than Morrison, grasping his entire career, even if that means figuring out how the most outlandish elements fit in.  In a lot of ways, "Batman R.I.P." was only the beginning, what was an updated version of "Knightfall" that tied in with Morrison's own Final Crisis to temporarily remove Bruce Wayne from the playing field (his journey back chronicled in The Return of Bruce Wayne, a more mainstream version of Seven Soldiers of Victory).  No reading of of Morrison's Batman would be complete without Arkham Asylum, a standalone graphic novel that explores the psychology of the franchise better than any other example.  The continuing run began back in 2006.

3. Geoff Johns - Green Lantern: Rebirth/Green Lantern (DC)
No creator has revolutionized a franchise more thoroughly than this.  Starting in 2004 with the resurrection of Hal Jordan in the pages of Rebirth, Johns has added layer upon layer to Green Lantern lore, not the least being the concept of the complete spectrum, building on the Star Sapphires and the renegade Sinestro, who had long slung a yellow ring (curiously Guy Gardner's temporary possession of it has been overlooked).  There are the peaceful Blue Lanterns, the cult-like Indigo Tribe, the vengeful Red Lanterns, the curious Larfleeze (sole representative of the orange power battery of greed), unifying White Lantern, and zombie-inspired Black Lanterns.  Regardless of how you feel about the 2011 movie, it would not exist without this run.

4. Grant Morrison/Howard Porter - JLA (DC)
Famous as the iconic reboot of the Justice League, Morrison and ideal collaborator Porter worked together (with many art substitutes) from 1997 to 2000, pitting DC's biggest heroes against such threats as the White Martians, Darkseid, Prometheus, and others.  Unlike virtually every other incarnation, Morrison was able to capture the essential big and small elements of the League, something he was able to do thanks to Porter's ability to be distinctive and personal at the same time.  The curse of JLA is that it almost stands apart from regular continuity, something later creators didn't seem to understand (a problem Superman/Batman didn't understand either, once Jeph Loeb left), not in a way where any story could be told, but that made sense in a grand scheme.  The final story of the run was foreshadowed at the beginning.  Morrison's One Million crossover event was later reprinted as a volume of the series, but it was the self-contained nature of the book that helped make it so great.

5. Mark Waid - The Flash (DC)
Starting in 1992, Waid revolutionized the characterization of Wally West, the successor of Barry Allen as The Flash.  He put an end to Wally's angst, which had typified the character and series prior to Waid's debut.  He instead pulled a James Robinson/Starman before that series ever existed, figuring out the concept of legacy in the matter of speedsters, and very early on deciding it didn't have to end with Wally and Barry, but could embrace every other known fast runner the company had ever known, unified by a concept known as the Speed Force.  (I was always partial to Max Mercury, a character Waid cobbled together from various existing Golden Age heroes, creating a backstory that still remains mostly untapped.)  Most fans consider Waid's second run (which can be referred to as the Wild Wests era, both because the first collected volume uses that title, and because it features Wally's emerging family) to be inferior to the first, but his creative juices were becoming altered well before that, with "Chain Lightning" an intended culmination that never quite reverberated with fans like "The Return of Barry Allen" (the essential arc), "Terminal Velocity," "Dead Heat," and "Race Against Time," in which Waid gets to plays with John Fox, a character he created before this run technically began.

6. Ron Marz/Darryl Banks - Green Lantern (DC)
Before Geoff Johns, no era had a greater impact on the Green Lantern franchise than its almost total reinvention after the cataclysmic "Emerald Twilight" event that saw Hal Jordan become Parallax.  In the wake of that, the entire Corps was snuffed out, rescued from oblivion only by the rogue (and at the time only surviving) Guardian known as Ganthet giving the last ring to Kyle Rayner.  Marz pulled a Mark Waid and emphasized the legacy as much as the future of the franchise in his stories, which ran from 1994 to 2000.  Banks was his most frequent and distinguished collaborator (though his style tends to look a tad dated today at least as far as his women are concerned; it might also be noted that Marz and Banks are responsible for the "Women in Refrigerators" phenomenon, in "honor" of Kyle's girlfriend Alex, killed off within a few issues of their debut).

7. Karl Kesel/Steve Mattsson/Paul Pelletier - Superboy and the Ravers (DC)
I hold no minor series in greater fondness than this one, a rare spinoff of a spinoff.  Running from 1996 to 1998, for a total of nineteen issues, it features Superboy (one of the "Reign of the Supermen" creations, who received his own series in 1994) and a group of teenaged heroes (including such notables as Sparx, Hero, Kaliber, and Half-Life) united by a mysterious party scene run by Kindred Marx.  Pelletier does provides roughly a year's worth of art in the series.  For anyone curious enough to know what it was all about, it was basically a '90s version of the New Teen Titans.  Curiously (and perhaps because a new Titans book was launched at roughly the same time), no one ever seemed to notice that.

8. Chuck Dixon/Scott McDaniel - Nightwing (DC)
McDaniel's highly stylized, cartoon/action art helped distinguish Dick Grayson's first ongoing series for me, but Dixon helped establish a firm status quo of corruption in a city worse than Gotham for Nightwing, a premise that lasted for more than a hundred issues.  As a unit, Dixon and McDaniel lasted from 1996 to 2000, with a reprise five years later for a Nightwing origin story.  Although building their definitive story around Blockbuster ended up leaving a strong Daredevil impression, the team helped define the character by those around him, something that had been done with both Batman and the Teen Titans before, but never so that Nightwing dominated the landscape, as he most obviously does against a peculiar vigilante wannabe who steals his name but none of his abilities.

9. Louise Simonson/Jon Bogdanove - Superman: The Man of Steel (DC)
To me, the '90s "triangle era" was a renaissance, remembered by most fans for Doomsday and the death of Superman, but filled with exceptional creators.  Simonson and Bogdanove launched Man of Steel in 1991, and were notable participants in many of the events that followed, including the inclusion of John Henry Irons (Steel) in "Reign of the Supermen."  They didn't work on every issue together, but lasted until 1999, the biggest mark of sustained continuity in the franchise that decade.

10. Devin K. Grayson - Nightwing (DC)
Chuck Dixon's successor became controversial in the way she concluded the Blockbuster arc, notably in the character of Tarantula, but there's a reason I've included two separate creative runs from a single ongoing series, because they were equally brilliant.  Spanning roughly 2002 to 2006, Grayson left Nightwing on a high note, bringing the town of Bludhaven down around her, enjoying the moral ambiguity she'd fostered but was always there right to the end.

Honorable mentions, then:

Chuck Dixon & Tom Grummett on Robin; Karl Kesel & Grummett on Adventures of Superman and Superboy; Stuart Immonen on Adventures of Superman, Action Comics, and Superman: End of the Century; Grant Morrison on Seven Soldiers of Victory; Tony Bedard & Scott McDaniel on The Great Ten; Morrison, Mark Waid, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, and Keith Giffen on 52; Dan Jurgens on Superman and Justice League America; Dan Vado & Marc Campos on Justice League America and Extreme Justice; John Byrne on Jack Kirby's Fourth World; Dixon & Graham Nolan on Batman; Allan Heinberg & Jim Cheung on Young Avengers and Avengers: The Children's Crusade; Marc Guggenheim on The Amazing Spider-Man; Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale on various; Dave Gibbons & Patrick Gleason on Green Lantern Corps; William Messner-Loebs & Craig Rousseau on Impulse.