12 (and then some) Reasons Why

Because Jeff asked and David Brothers threatened, here are 50 things that I love about comics, including at least one comic that I really, really would love to write, in case anyone at DC Comics is reading and desperate (Actually, I think that the next weekly book DC does should be an anthology of work by internet critics, forced to do at least one strip each so that all the professionals get to point and laugh at us for a change. It'd sell like crap, but imagine the schaudenfruede!). Anyway - More reviews later this week, I promise. For now, click that "Click to read more" and... well, read more.

(Also, if "anonymous" called Jeff a fanboy, he/she'll love me.)

50 Things I Love About Comics, because two people demanded it.

5 Creators That I Will Buy Anything From, Sight Unseen
1. Kevin Huizenga
2. Bryan Lee O'Malley
3. Darwyn Cooke
4. Grant Morrison
5. Brandon Graham

5 Creators That I Would Probably Buy Anything From, But Would At Least Look At First
1. Jack Kirby (I know, heresy! But it's got to be late-period, and I admit it; Devil Dinosaur let me down hard.)
2. Paul Pope
3. Nick Abadzis
4. Eddie Campbell
5. Matt Fraction

5 Artists Who Continually Blow My Puny Little Mind
1. James Jean
2. Gabriel Ba
3. Jack Kirby
4. Kent Williams
5. Dave McKean

5 Pretty Much Perfect Comics, If You Ask Me
1. Seven Soldiers #1
2. Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness
3. Graffiti Kitchen
4. Or Else #2
5. Mister Miracle #3

5 Comics That Changed My Life, And Why
1. Uncanny X-Men #185 - The first one I read and thought, I'm going to collect these.
2. Animal Man #1 - When I realized that the Grant Morrison from 2000AD and this Grant Morrison were the same person, and then realized that Scottish people could write American comics, which oddly enough made them more real.
3. Cages #4: For the craft, and the realization that Alan Bennett didn't have a lock on monologues like that.
4. Graffiti Kitchen: My first auto-bio comic, I think? And the first one that, as the song goes, said something to me about my life.
5. The Invisibles: As a series, it weirdly mirrored my life for the five or so years it ran, and changed my idea of what normal was. Possibly for the better; I'm not quite sure about that yet.

5 Comics I Collected The Entire Run Of
1. Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol
2. Steve Englehart's The Green Lantern Corps
3. Green Lantern: Mosaic
4. Tom Peyer's Hourman
5. Marvel Super-Heroes: Secret Wars, the British version that also included Secret Wars II and all of its crossovers.

5 Characters That I Wish I Could Speak Like
1. Dr. Doom
2. Luke Cage
3. The Watcher
4. Namor, the Sub-Mariner
5. The Thing

5 Minor Characters I Love So Much That I WIsh I Could Write Them (and, just because, what I would do with them)
1. The Manhattan Guardian (Create a franchise of Guardian newspapers all across the DCU America, so that there'd be a Metropolis Guardian, a Gotham Guardian, a Los Angeles Guardian, etc. Hilarity ensues.)
2. OMAC (Turn him into DC's version of Iron Man during "Armor Wars", working for SHADE from Frankenstein.)
3. Dazzler (Make it into the romance book it so clearly wanted to be when it started, and bring back lots of minor supporting characters from other books for her to date.)
4. Rick Jones (When Epic was around and Marvel had no standards, I almost pitched an Ultimate Rick Jones book where he was this retro beatnik loser who idolized Kerouac teamed up with Ultimate Doc Samson, who was a former pro-wrestler turned radio talk show shrink. Together, they fought monsters.) See also: Snapper Carr.
5. Ralph Dibny (Is he really minor? I'm not sure. But I love love LOVE the idea of Ralph and Sue as the Thin Man meets Topper: Deadman and Wife, anyone?)

5 Items That Only Exist In Comics That I Wish I Owned In Real Life
1. The Time Bubble
2. The Cosmic Treadmill
3. Clothes made of unstable molecules
4. A Green Lantern ring
5. Weather Wizard's climate-controlling wand

5 Random Other Things That I Love About Comics
1. John Workman's sound effects in Walt Simonson's Thor
2. Death Note, in general
3. Being able to read all the old comics that didn't work in Essentials or Showcase format, like those Teen Titans and Defenders runs...
4. Newsarama and Comic Book Resources. Completely seriously, no matter what you may think.
5. 52's Oolong Island of Mad Scientists, which may have been the greatest one idea out of a series of wonderfully dumb and dumbly wonderful ideas.