My All-time Favorite Comic Books, 10-1

The final countdown...!

#10. Geoff Johns's Green Lantern

Creators: Geoff Johns, Doug Mahnke, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, various
Publication dates: 2004-2013
Issues: Green Lantern: Rebirth 1-6, Green Lantern 1-67, 0-20, Blackest Night 1-8

Green Lantern was already my favorite comic book franchise when Johns strolled into the story in 2004.  I thought I already had my definitive era in Ron Marz's Kyle Rayner.  Then Johns brought Hal Jordan back, and exploded the whole mythology.  I mean, literally, he took the basic building blocks and figured out the best possible expansion, and led the whole thing to its greatest heights.  It's the epitome of creative storytelling, the single best innovative run in superhero comic book history, one that will continue to be felt for years. I mean, even Larfleeze has gotten his own ongoing series now.  Larfleeze!  How awesome is that?  Saint Walker made it into the pre-New 52 Justice League, the Red Lanterns have had their own series since the DC relaunch, and Johns has made a strong case for a Sinestro series.  No one would have ever thought that possible before 2004.  That's the definition of a substantial legacy.

#9. Air

Creators: G. Willow Wilson, M.K. Perker
Publication dates: 2008-2010
Issues: 1-24

Along with 52 part of a very select group to top my annual QB50 list twice, Air was an unabashed obsession of mine throughout its publication, even though it struggled to find an audience that did not have the name "Tony Laplume."  But it was brilliant, typical of the Vertigo breed in having a distinct and imaginative mythology, but atypical in its intimate approach, like Sandman without all the Goth touches.  G. Willow Wilson managed to spin a conspiracy and hero journey into one yarn.  The closest proximity I've found since was the similarly short-lived Saucer Country.  As with most of my selections, widely deserves a much larger audience.

#8. Cobra

Creators: Mike Costa, Antonio Fuso, Christos Gage
Publication dates: 2009-2013
Issues: 1-4, Special 1-2, 1-13, 1-21, The Cobra Files 1-9

This is basically everything I loved about Superboy and the Ravers, The Great Ten, Seven Soldiers of Victory, and Young Avengers in a nonsuperhero title, and surprisingly with another famous franchise it managed to totally reinvent from the outset, featuring an obscure Joe named Chuckles in the mission of his life, a reboot timeline where Cobra is just being discovered.  And from there, it's basically the Assange/Snowden/NSA era well before any of those scandals broke, one brilliant bit of character exploration after another in a world of paranoia and secrets, an unexpected phenomenon publisher IDW never expected, assuming it had merely a good mini-series when it acquired G.I. Joe in 2008, leading to a series of extensions that eventually transformed the whole line with the sensational death of Cobra Commander.  You don't need to know or care about the franchise to love this saga.  You just need to love great comics.

#7. Sandman

Creators: Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, various
Publication dates: 1989-1996
Issues: 1-75

For simplicity's sake I'm sticking to the original series rather than also include subsequent additional materials, such as the recently-launched Sandman Overture mini-series.  Simply put, this one needs no introduction.  It's perhaps the most literary comic book ever published, filled with classical elements and one of the best-known mythologies outside of superheroes ever created.  It's a masterpiece.  Move along, move along.

#6. Bone

Creators: Jeff Smith
Publication dates: 1991-2004
Issues: 1-55

This one I owe entirely to a friend who was obsessed with it.  For a while, there was a very small cult audience obsessed with it.  And it expanded, thanks to word of mouth.  It started making in-roads to full-blown mainstream awareness.  There was talk of a movie.  All of this is for good reason.  Like a cartoon strip wedded perfectly to epic fantasy (such as you would never have believed possible until Bone), Jeff Smith's vision was a dream come to life, so popular Image for a while took over publication, until it went back to Smith's own company, where it completed its epic journey, only to be reborn in a series of reprints, where its legacy (as I've been hoping throughout this list for many other series) has grown.  Oh, and because it's my favorite phrase from Bone: stupid, stupid rat creatures...

#5. Wasteland

Creators: Antony Johnston, Christopher Mitten, Justin Greenwood
Publication dates: 2006-2014
Issues: 1-60

I've attempted for years to be an ambassador to this series, a classic post-apocalyptic yarn that explodes the genre into a startlingly rich landscape filled with intricate relationships between isolated figures.  Unlike The Walking Dead, Wasteland has made the riddle of what created the world after the Big Wet the whole point, except it's taken the whole journey to reach it.  In the meantime social politics have defined the story, especially the betrayals at the heart of life in Newbegin, the perfect representation of civilization after civilization's end.  My favorite character remains Michael, a sort of Wolverine if Wolverine had never joined the X-Men.

#4. 52

Creators: Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, Keith Giffen, various
Publication dates: 2006-2007
Issues: 1-52

DC's first weekly series in years, an ambitious effort to put out a new issue every week for a year, could have been its riskiest gamble ever.  Instead it turned out to be a stroke of genius, one of the best single comics it ever put out, following a hodgepodge of characters who could never have been mistaken for the mainstream (although some of them, including Booster Gold and the new Batwoman, received their own ongoing series as a result) as they embark on the greatest stories of their careers, including the Elongated Man's long-awaited response to Identity Crisis and Black Adam's shot at redemption.  The league of creators who wrote it remains a who's who, and to my mind in no small part to their participation in this book.  The company's later attempts to duplicate this remarkable accomplishment never seemed to capture the same interest from the fans, but that's to be expected, although I would highly recommend Countdown, while the bi-weekly Brightest Day is another winner.

#3. The Death of Captain Marvel

Creators: Jim Starlin
Publication date: 1982
Issues: [graphic novel]

This is the comic book that made me a fan of comic books, and it is also among the first I ever read, and completely by accident, something my sister had randomly come across and I stole a look, and no joking, I was changed forever.  The death of any comic book character wasn't as common in 1982 as it is today, and the true testament of this event is that Captain Marvel remains respectfully deceased.  It's a surreal, literary exploration and epitaph for a character who was never really that popular but whose legacy was instantly cemented by this effort.  What more could you ask for?

#2. Kingdom Come

Creators: Mark Waid, Alex Ross
Publication dates: 1996
Issues: 1-4

You might notice that I love my comics to be literary, and no superhero comic was ever more literary, not to mention seminal in my own creative development, than this landmark event that peered into the future of DC's icons and saw nothing good.  Lois Lane dead.  Superman forced into retirement.  The next generation, led by Magog, the reverse of everything that had come before them.  Narrated by a simple preacher and steeped in religious imagery (this is the secret origin of my obsession with the number 7, and why I subsequently adopted the term "seven thunders" from the Book of Revelations for what I always assumed must be my own magnum opus, because it was used in the previews for Kingdom Come), this was both creators at their absolute finest.  One of them ended up chasing this achievement for years (Ross) while the other only occasionally revisited it (Waid, in The Kingdom event that was as close to Seven Soldiers of Victory as DC ever got before Grant Morrison), while Geoff Johns famously brought it all back in the pages of his Justice Society of America.  Even Magog eventually entered the regular canon and had an ongoing series.  Often seen as DC's response to Marvels, it is more accurately seen in its own distinctive light, which is ultimately a more hopeful version of The Dark Knight Returns, taken on the grand scale.

#1. "The Return of Barry Allen"

Creators: Mark Waid, Greg LaRocque
Publication dates: 1993
Issues: The Flash 74-79

I choose to include only one storyline from Mark Waid's extended run on The Flash for a specific reason, because it was the earliest and best example of the whole thing, which often lived up to its potential and sometimes didn't (and the best of it wasn't even in the pages of The Flash but rather Impulse), so it's better to remember what remains the most memorable than complicate matters.  Because "The Return of Barry Allen" is most certainly the best of it.  And for the record, it doesn't even feature Barry Allen.  This was years before Barry came back.  The Flash throughout Waid's run was Wally West ("and I'm the Fastest Man Alive"), the third speedster to carry the name, and he was keenly aware of the whole mythology, which before Geoff Johns on Green Lantern, Waid was the first to attempt a wholesale expansion, introducing the concept of the Speed Force and old as well as new faces to the family, including my personal favorite, Max Mercury, the Zen Master of Speed.  If there is any weakening to this legacy, it's perhaps that even Waid seemed to let it slip by the wayside after a while, perhaps after "Dead Heat" (acknowledged within the pages of Johns's The Flash: Rebirth with a cameo by the villain Savitar), while Johns himself in two separate runs (with Wally and Barry) went in different directions.  Better, again, to remember it at its most pure, most perfect, most serene, most effective, when it's Wally struggling with his role in the grand scheme of things.  James Robinson would later take the same basic concept to similar heights in the pages of Starman, but has no comparable single storyline to this one.  This is the one, if you love superheroes and their legacies, that you have to read.  This is the love letter of all love letters to the whole phenomenon.

(All covers via Comic Book Database.)