DC Comics is bad at their job

[Octopus Prime]

Batman '66 is far and away my favorite thing DC has done in the past decade.

And One Million is probably my favorite DC story in the companies entire history. It's available as either a small trade that just covers the main story, which is just fine, and as a huge omnibus that has that and every spinoff, sequel and side-story of that arc, which is just amazing.

[Loki]

Long Halloween for crackerjack Batman with great art, the follow up Dark Victory is a legit good Robin story.

[ghosttaster]

Besides All-Star Superman, I really dig Flex Mentallo and Doom Patrol by Grant Morrison. Netting that dude was probably DC's biggest coup in the last 30 years, but it didn't take long for them to lean on him too hard, for him to receive too much validation to maintain a good critical check on his ego, and to generally get old and run his unique perspectives into the ground.

Other than that, for me, it's mostly old weird stuff I like for the drawings. Leonard Starr's Doctor Thirteen stories, Howard Chaykin's Sword and Sorcery comics, Kirby's Fourth World and Kamandi books, etc.

I'll also second Long Halloween. About as good of a standard-issue Batman story as you're gonna get, but with gorgeous artwork.

[madhair60]

I kinda need things that don't assume a basic familiarity with the characters because outside of Batman I know sweet FA

[Loki]

Also Grant Morison's run on Animal Man. I've heard the New 53 Animal Man is top notch but I haven't read it.

[Reinforcements]

Originally Posted by madhair60

Realtalk: What are the good DC comics? And "good" by my standards means fun and not excessively mired in continuity. I enjoyed Court of Owls but the conclusion and reveal were like "who?" for me.

I've read All-Star Superman, I've enjoyed some Flash, I liked Red Son, I like the silly Harley/Ivy comics Bruce Timm did, I like a bit of Hellblazer. I'll read literally anything I'm recommended.

Last time I asked this on the internet I was told to jump in with Blackest Night.

No fucking clue.

Blackest Night is awful garbage. But a-HEM:

Originally Posted by Reinforcements

Gotham Academy and Batgirl are really really good.

And speaking of Batman comics that don't actually have Batman in them that much, Gotham Central is maybe the best Batman comic except maaaaybe Year One. And I should maybe qualify that I mean the current run of Batgirl by Stewart, Fletcher, Tarr and Wicks.

[Rascally Badger]

Originally Posted by Loki

Also Grant Morison's run on Animal Man. I've heard the New 53 Animal Man is top notch but I haven't read it.

It was, though there is a really big sticking point. Lemire kills of Cliff at the end of the interminable Rotworld crossover with the also generally good Swamp Thing.

[ghosttaster]

Originally Posted by madhair60

I kinda need things that don't assume a basic familiarity with the characters because outside of Batman I know sweet FA

Skip alla this and just read Love and Rockets, dude. It's the best.

not really but its super super good

[Wolfgang]

honestly Sandman comics are pretty great, as well as the Books of Magic series, which is actually Harry Potter about a decade before Harry Potter started and is a lot better

Seriously, Books of Magic is literally Harry Potter, no joke or hyperbole, Harry Potter was actually created by Neil Gaiman

[Loki]

I always forget that Sandman is DC.

[ghosttaster]

Is Sandman consistently good throughout the full run? I only ever read the first four trades, and my understanding at the time was that the 'real' plot of the book was only just beginning.

[Loki]

Yes..

[Sven]

Read:

All of Waid's Flash run, and most of Johns' (plus you'll get to understand what makes the TV show so awesome). That's like 130 issues that are basically very good at the absolute worst, and excellent at best. Just don't listen to anyone who tells you to start with Return of Barry Allen*. Start with Flash: Year One, which basically lays out the thesis that Waid and Johns proceed to knock out of the part for the next decade.

* Waid's best story, but one that really doesn't pack a punch anymore for obvious reasons. At the time, though, it was a true "holy shit" moment.

All of Johns' first JSA run (history heavy, but a great team book.)
David's Young Justice (very good light superheroing). I'm not so much a fan of his Supergirl, but others loved it.

All of Starman (very good, more adult-oriented, superheroing)

Dixon's Nightwing, Robin, and Birds of Prey (Nightwing got pretty bad after Dixon left, but before that it was basically the best Spider Man / Daredevil hybrid book ever. Gail Simone carried on pretty well with Birds. There's a terrible bridge between those two, however.)

Morrison's JLA. Waid's follow-up, as well.

Marz' GL.

Pretty much anything from the DCAU line is, of course, great, but that's a whole other thread entirely.

The actual No Man's Land event itself is probably a bit too unwieldy, but it's the second best DC major event (I agree that One Million was the best, as noted above).

I know that's mainly late-90s stuff, but that's the last time DC was run competently and everything was great outside of the Superman books. Like, there's all sorts of smaller-run stuff like Chase / Aztek / Star Spangled Kid that got killed off but were brilliant while doing so.

More recently, Gotham Central is absolutely tremendous. Rucka's Batman run was great, but I tend to prefer the first half (with the unique art) to the second. Dini's run on Detective comics was also a bunch of fun self-contained stories, but he didn't last very long. And all of Snyder's Batman stuff is great; Black Mirror really is the jumping-on point, though, since it sets up the Court of Owls and really everything else.

Oh, and read Manhunter, which was a tremendous book that was killed off well before its time in spite of everyone in comics basically begging everyone else to read it.

Is there a lot of history involved? Sure, but it enriches the experience when these writers dug into it and really turned DC into a universe based on heroic legacies. More importantly, all of this stuff feels like part of a larger shared universe, which is the biggest thing missing today with DC's clusterfuck booking outside of the Batman books. Like, remember how they turned Superman blue for a while (... I told you the Superman books weren't that good...)? Today, it would be ignored. Instead, Morrison took the idea and told a great story with it early on in his JLA run.

If you're so closed-minded that you reject the potential of superhero books in the first place, then you're obviously not going to have fun with these. But there's a reason that everyone talks about the 95-02ish period of DC with fairly reverent tones, and the above books are it. A bunch of really talented writers hitting stuff out of the park on a monthly basis, and all playing nice with each other at the same time.

(Oh, if you want something completely divorced from continuity... just trust me on this one.)

[madhair60]

Originally Posted by Loki

I always forget that Sandman is DC.

[madhair60]

Could you be specific about numbering for the Waid Flash run, because I love his work on Daredevil soooo much, and I kinda dug what I read of New 52 Flash.

[upupdowndown]

Originally Posted by Loki

Yes..

if anything, it gets better and better. One of the deep pleasures of reading Sandman all the way through is watching Gaiman's craft develop and grow. the ending arc of the comic and its 6 issue epilogue draw together all o fthese different disparate threads and it's just a joy.

[Octopus Prime]

Oh, JLA Year One by Waid is also spectacular.

I guess the point of this thread is "Mark Waid can not produce a bad comic, even under threat of violence."

[Rascally Badger]

You should read the Palmiotti\Gray and Conner Power Girl. Actually that should just read anything drawn by Amanda Conner. Also, Justice League International. (Specifically the original Giffen DeMatteis stuff, not the similarly named revivals) Then read I Can't Believe It's Not Justice League and Formerly Known as Justice League.

[Sven]

Originally Posted by madhair60

Could you be specific about numbering for the Waid Flash run, because I love his work on Daredevil soooo much, and I kinda dug what I read of New 52 Flash.

Year One starts at #62, and I think he left exactly 100 issues later. Johns picks up an issue later (if memory serves, it was a fun fill-in starring Jay Garrick) and then goes to #225, although the last two years aren't quite up to the standards of his first three.

Oh, and fair warning: DO NOT LOOK AT THE COVERS OF #78 - 80 UNTIL YOU READ THEM.

(Once again, it may not be as big a surprise as it was at the time. But... you can't ruin that story.)

I guess the point of this thread is "Mark Waid can not produce a bad comic, even under threat of violence."

On that note, Waid's LSH run in the mid-00s was pretty great. Especially the letter columns.

Also: Impulse. All of it. The pitch: imagine if an ADHD kid was raised in a video game and then dropped into small town Alabama with super-speed.

I'm actually racking my brains to come up with a BAD Waid comic. It's really fucking hard. Underworld Unleashed, I guess?

Oh, wait... I forgot he actually returned to Flash just before he left DC. That stuff was... not as fun, even with the kids.

[chud_666]

Originally Posted by Sven

Is there a lot of history involved? Sure, but it enriches the experience when these writers dug into it and really turned DC into a universe based on heroic legacies. More importantly, all of this stuff feels like part of a larger shared universe, which is the biggest thing missing today with DC's clusterfuck booking outside of the Batman books. Like, remember how they turned Superman blue for a while (... I told you the Superman books weren't that good...)? Today, it would be ignored. Instead, Morrison took the idea and told a great story with it early on in his JLA run.

I love when people take bad plots and redeem them somewhat. I hate when stuff is just ignored. OWN IT!

[Sven]

Originally Posted by chud_666

I love when people take bad plots and redeem them somewhat. I hate when stuff is just ignored. OWN IT!

Shit, that was basically Johns' MO until he went out of control like Skynet and started trying to 'redeem' good plots.

[Parish]

Originally Posted by Vaeran

I've only had the smallest sampling of DC myself, but Kingdom Come is really good, and features gorgeous Alex Ross art.

Kingdom Come is really weird because it's DC, 20 years ago, saying, "You like grimdark, huh? Well, here's what it would be like if we went grimdark. Isn't it terrible?" And now Kingdom Come is basically DC Comics in general.

[LBD_Nytetrayn]

I like what I've seen of Harley Quinn's book.

It's the only thing that keeps me from wanting to burn their entire enterprise to the ground after what they did to Batman Beyond.

Seriously, I hope whoever's idea this was got punched right in the face. Even just an obligatory "So, what do you think?" *PUNCH* "Yeah, I was expecting that" sort of thing.

[Vaeran]

Can someone explain the Batman Beyond fiasco? I want to get mad too.

[Rascally Badger]

They did a weekly book (Future's End) that was basically Terminator and Days of Future Past where Batman Beyond is one of the few remaining superheroes and he goes back in time to stop Brother Eye and Brainiac from destroying everything. But he ends up 5 years too late and everything has already started. Over the course of 50 or so inexplicably terrible issues considering some of the creative team, he dies and Tim Drake, Robin, becomes Batman Beyond and stops Brainiac/Brother Eye, only to return to the future and find out nothing changed. And since it all takes place five years in the future of the real DC Universe, it didn't effect any other title either.

Then DC started a Batman Beyond ongoing starring Tim Drake in the terrible future, which has almost nothing to do with the cartoon Batman Beyond and its unbeatable premise of "What if Batman was also Spider-Man?"

The recentish digital first Batman Beyond comic was actually pretty good, at least what I read of it was.

[smacketh]

I'll go to bat for Gotham Academy and Batgirl as current runs that are good.

It ended almost a year ago, but I'll recommend Azarello/Chiang's run on Wonder Woman as I think that gets overlooked a bit now. Although, from all accounts, the moment their run ends, stop.

Batman 66 was great. I was never a big fan of the tv show, but I still enjoyed them for a while and only dropped it when the digital weekly issues had a price hike.

[Excitemike]

Seconding Waid's Flash run. Some of my favorite superhero books ever. Starman is a book I haven't thought of in a long time, but I did think it was pretty terrific at the time. The father-son-dead brother dynamic was emotionally engaging and the book had a really unique character to it.

If you like space opera, maybe give the New Gods a sniff, but it does get pretty complicated.

Obligatory mentions for the one-two punch of "for the man who has everything" and "whatever happened to the man of tomorrow?", one of which was faithfully adapted as an episode of Justice League Unlimited.

[Sven]

I love the art on Batgirl, but it's being written for a readership that is decidedly not me. Which is fine, but it all just seems like a waste of Babs when I think it was conclusively proven that she's much more interesting as Oracle (although I guess that's another ship that sailed three years ago).

(On the other hand, the Brubaker / Cooke Catwoman is a really great book, as is Cooke's work on The Spirit.)

I also get why they did what they did with Batman Beyond (namely, Tim's a better character than Terry to begin with and they couldn't have him languishing), but at the same time there was no real pressing need to get rid of Terry, especially as he's still such a blank slate. They wanted this whole thing to be Tim's version of the Judas Contract (when Dick became Nightwing), but they didn't come close to setting it up properly. Not that Nightwing was an overnight success, either - it took the better part of a decade to get his solo series launched - but it wasn't the right move for Tim. But he'd been screwed ever since Damien showed up anyway.

[Sven]

Originally Posted by Parish

Kingdom Come is really weird because it's DC, 20 years ago, saying, "You like grimdark, huh? Well, here's what it would be like if we went grimdark. Isn't it terrible?" And now Kingdom Come is basically DC Comics in general.

Man of Steel was uncomfortably close to Kingdom Come in the last act. But that's because Snyder's fucking clueless when it comes to Superman. What I've seen of the Superman comics themselves have actually been quite refreshingly upbeat.

[Adrenaline]

Originally Posted by Zef

Didn't they kill off Damien a couple of years ago?

Superhero comics