Diana's 50 Favorite Moments In Comics

Because all the cool kids are doing it! In no particular order, my 50 favorite moments in comics:

1. SWAMP THING #56, "My Blue Heaven": Stranded on a distant planet, the Swamp Thing recreates his hometown and is content to live an empty fantasy until a replica of John Constantine starts voicing some inconvenient truths. It's even creepier when you realize that every character on the Blue Planet is really just Swamp Thing throwing his voice.

2. BOX OFFICE POISON: Towards the end of the book, Hildy tells Ed about her little sister Marlys. It turns out the reader has already met Marlys in an earlier, seemingly-unrelated part of the story... a part that becomes incredibly tragic once the missing context is in place.

3. WHY I HATE SATURN: Anne sets out for California to find her sister, only to get hit by the Deluxe Edition of Murphy's Law. If it can go wrong, it will. If it can't go wrong, it will anyway.

4: NIKOLAI DANTE, "Amerika": After a decade of watching Tsar Vladimir commit atrocity after atrocity, Nikolai reaches his breaking point and stabs the Conqueror, only to be struck down a moment later by Konstantin.

5. SPIDER-MAN 2099 #25, "Truth Hurts": One of the better examples of the "everything you know is wrong" plot twist - Miguel learns about his mother and Tyler Stone, and the whole story gets turned on its head.

6. FANTASTIC FOUR #524, "Tag": The Fantastic Four are racing across Manhattan to reclaim their lost powers, but Reed has sabotaged Ben's equipment, intending to become the Thing himself and leave Ben human. But Ben figures it out and swaps his gadget with Reed's, unwilling to let his best friend take the fall for him.

6. STARMAN #80, "'Arrivederci, Bon Voyage, Goodbye": Jack Knight leaves Opal City.

7. CATWOMAN #19, "No Easy Way Down": Still reeling from the aftermath of the Black Mask's attack, Selina gets drunk and decides to rob a museum, until Batman talks her out of it.

8. RUNAWAYS #16, "The Good Die Young": Alex is revealed as the Pride's mole. Quite literally the last character I suspected.

9. INCREDIBLE HULK: FUTURE IMPERFECT: The Hulk defeats the Maestro by sending him back to the gamma bomb detonation, turning Bruce Banner's entire history into an ouroboros.

10. DAREDEVIL #182, "She's Alive": Convinced that Elektra faked her death, Matt digs up her coffin, expecting it to be empty. It isn't.

11. FRAY #8: Melaka kills Urkonn, her mentor and friend, when she realizes he murdered Loo to get her to accept her destiny.

12. DEADENDERS #16, "Smashing Time": Even after the universe rewrites itself, Noah (formerly Beezer) has a moment of distant recognition when he finds an abandoned scooter in the middle of the road. For a split-second, he can almost remember the friends and the life he left behind.

13. BONE #37, "Harvest Moon": In a genuinely creepy scene, a disoriented Thorn pulls her cloak over her head, looking exactly like the defeated Hooded One. It was ultimately a red herring, but that doesn't change the "brr" factor.

14. BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: Jarred out of a vegetative state by the return of his nemesis, the Joker's first words are "Batman. Darling."

15. SPIDER-GIRL #41, "Funeral For A Fiend": Normie Osborn (Harry's son) stops by the hospital to visit Mary-Jane Parker. As he turns to leave, he bumps into Peter - and for a moment, Peter only sees the Goblin and Normie only sees Spider-Man. Then Peter offers his hand; a moment later, they embrace, finally laying the past to rest.

16. TOP TEN #11, "His First Day on the New Job": This is such an Alan Moore thing to do: Joe Pi, the latest officer to join the Neopolis police department, is a robot. He's also the most human character in the series. When Joe realizes Irma Geddon's kids were attached to the late Sung Li, her previous partner, Joe decides to cheer them up with a trick of his own.

17. NEW X-MEN #149, "Phoenix In Darkness": In many ways, I see this as the quintessential post-Claremont Magneto story - "I am your inner star, Erik. I am the conscience you can never silence. I will never let you be."

18. HELLBOY: THE RIGHT HAND OF DOOM: Igor Bromhead has bound Hellboy using his true name, Anung un Rama; moments later, the demon Ualac steals the Crown of the Apocalypse off Hellboy's head. Things seem pretty bleak until Hellboy is informed that "Anung un Rama" quite literally means "he who wears the crown" - that no longer applies to him, so it's not his name. The spell is broken, and much butt-kicking ensues.

19. DEADPOOL #11, "With Great Power Comes Great Coincidence": Deadpool and Blind Al time-travel into a Stan Lee/John Romita Sr. issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. The whole issue's hilarious, but special mention goes to Deadpool's reaction to Harry's (and Norman's) "unique" hairstyle.

20. ASTONISHING X-MEN #15, "Torn": Cassandra Nova turns Wolverine into a six-year-old girl. Awesome.

21. THE AUTHORITY #12, "Outer Dark": The death of Jenny Sparks.

22. GRAVITY #5: His nemesis, the Black Death, has been defeated, but Greg Willis still doesn't feel like a superhero... until Spider-Man stops by to congratulate him on a job well-done.

23. ULTRA: SEVEN DAYS #8: Having been told by a psychic that she would find her true love in seven days, Pearl reaches the end of day 7 alone. When she realizes it's not going to happen, she maintains her composure until someone asks her for the time, at which point she starts crying.

24. BIZARRO COMICS: Mxyzptlk browses through the Hall of Superman Spin-Offs.

25. VEILS: Vivian discovers the truth behind the story of Rosalind and the Sultan.

26. WATCHMEN: The whole book is one big Favorite Moment for me, but if I have to pick a scene, I'll go with Ozymandias' revelatory monologue in the penultimate issue, coupled with the immortal "I did it thirty-five minutes ago." I'll bet you guys anything the studios will rewrite that "downer" ending so that Rorschach and the others save the day.

27. Y: THE LAST MAN #30, "Ring of Truth": Hero faces her demons.

28. COMMON GROUNDS #4, "Time of Their Lives": Forty years after their last battle, Blackwatch and Commander Power meet again. But they're not who you think they are. That last panel with the newspaper clipping turns the whole story on its head.

29. ALIAS #28, "Purple": It's a complete deus ex machina, but I can't help smiling whenever I see that double-page spread of Jessica punching the Purple Man square in the mouth.

30. SANDMAN #37, "I Woke Up and One of Us Was Crying": Barbara defiantly crosses out Alvin's name on the tombstone, and - in Tacky Flamingo lipstick - writes WANDA instead.

31. SUPERMAN: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW?: With the Fortress of Solitude under siege and Superman preparing for his last stand, Jimmy and Lana sneak out to fight the gathered villains themselves. "We're only second-stringers, Jimmy, but we'll show 'em... Nobody loved him better than us. Nobody!"

32. ASTRO CITY #0.5, "The Nearness of You": Michael's decision to remember Miranda puts your typical Crisis-esque multiversal time-travel epic in a completely human context.

33. FABLES #55, "Over There": Having heard the Snow Queen's plans for the conquest of Earth, Pinocchio lays out a surprisingly vivid counter-scenario where the human race unites with the Fables and tears the Adversary's Empire apart.

34. H-E-R-O #4: Jerry finally does something heroic, after losing his superpowers.

35. EXILES #34, "A Second Farewell": Mariko gets another chance with Mary.

36. DOCTOR STRANGE: THE OATH #5: Doctor Strange and Night Nurse get together. Aww, they're so cute!

37. MY FAITH IN FRANKIE #3: "You've broken Commandments One through Three, Seven and Nine. I'm taking you down, Frankie."

38. THE ADVENTURES OF BARRY WEEN: MONKEY TALES #6: Barry jumps into the past to save Sara's life; when he realizes he's succeeded and everything's back to normal, he heads into the kitchen and promptly bursts into tears. It's a powerful reminder that, despite his intellect, Barry's still just a kid.

39. EMPIRE #5: Golgoth realizes his daughter Delfi has become as corrupt and monstrous as he is. So he snaps her neck.

40. MARTHA WASHINGTON: GIVE ME LIBERTY: President Howard Nissen tears down Cabrini Green at Martha's request.

41. THE BIRTHDAY RIOTS: Troy Adams' death shakes Max to his core - when the rioters surround his car the next day, Max just opens the door and lets the crowd beat him, in penance for his betrayal.

42. SUPERGIRL #79: Seconds after she decides to live Kara Zor-El's life, Linda Danvers chafes at all the "secret weapon" talk and goes public, changing everything.

43. LOKI #1: It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing, but Rob Rodi suggests a different angle on the Loki/Thor rivalry: in a flashback, we see them as teenagers, and Loki idly carves a heart in the dirt as he watches Thor.

44. MAUS: Not so much a "favorite" moment as one that haunted me for a long time; Vladek describes a particular instance in the Nazi purges where they murder crying children. Despite the fact that it's cats and mice - or maybe because of that - it's an image that stuck.

45. THE SURROGATES #5: Rather than face the reality outside her apartment, Greer's wife kills herself. The real world has a price.

46. ZENITH PHASE 3: Everyone's pretty shocked that the self-absorbed, spoiled superbrat Zenith sacrificed his life to save the Multiverse. Turns out he didn't: that was his mirror-universe double Vertex, the guy who actually was a hero.

47. CRIMINAL #5: For a split-second, you think Leo might have made it in time to save Greta. But, of course, he doesn't.

48. I, JOKER: The unnamed protagonist finds the last recording of Bruce Wayne prior to his death.

49. V FOR VENDETTA: Valerie's letter.

50. WE3 #3: 1 starts howling and wailing for 3 as it goes off to face 4 alone. Breaks my heart every time.

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.

Tuesday-Type Content: 50 Things Jeff Likes About Comics.

I really liked David Brothers' '50 Things I Like' list he did recently over on 4th Letter, as well as some of the lists he reprinted and linked to as a result. And last time I saw him, David said, as we parted, "hey, you should do a list." Somehow that led to me not being able to sleep past 6 AM on a Sunday morning as I sorted and re-sorted the little sublists I'd do.

Anyway, post-jump: 50 things I like about comics, with hopefully just the right amount of commentary.

5 Great "Eras" for Publishers

DC in the late '50s, early '60s: A legacy that's like the pyramids in Egypt--lovely to look at, but I'm damn glad I didn't have to work on 'em. (Reading Weisinger-era Superman is like having dinner at the home of a wife abuser: you feel sick at your complicity but, you gotta admit, the pot roast is perfect.) The mix of genuine talent being ground under by fierce editorial formula, the considerable resources of the company, and an aggressive approach to creating IP (although at the time it was probably called something like "following the marketplace") paid off in a huge back library of material and properties that DC could reinvent for years to come.

Marvel in the early to mid-'70s: Of course, I'm going to pick this era since it was the era I fell in love with comics, but still: Marvel finally being able to publish as many titles as it wanted, combined with a ton of new talent inspired by Marvel's heyday who had absolutely no conception of what work-for-hire work meant. I mean, it's not just that you had more than twenty issues of a title called Man-Thing; it's that you had Howard The Duck, a character in Man-Thing so popular he got his own book.

Fantagraphics in the early '90s: Los Bros Hernandez were still doing Love & Rockets (at what could be argued was their most ambitious period, if it wasn't for the fact they've always been, and continue to be, outrageously ambitious); Peter Bagge was doing Hate; Clowes was doing Eightball. While none of these books were monthly, their publication schedules were such that if you kept coming to the comic book store every week, it seemed like one of them would pop every sixth visit or so.

Despite all the praise and accolades at the time, I think nobody--not the readers, not the publishers, not the retailers--realized how exceptional a line-up this was. I'm not a sports guy, but the closest analogy that comes to mind is when the 49ers replaced Joe Montana with Steve Young. Sure, we San Franciscans knew we were fortunate to have two great QBs in a row, but we didn't realize how unbelievably fortunate: we also believed that, hey, of course we got two great QBs in a row because the 49ers are the greatest football team in the world, and San Francisco is the greatest city in the world, etc., etc. I think that there was a similar feeling at Fantagraphics that, yeah, these guys are geniuses, absolutely, but when they start to burn out (or slow down), we'll have the next generation of geniuses ready to come up. And when they published the first issue of Acme Novelty Library #1 in 1993, it looked like that would actually be the case. But it wasn't.

Vertigo in the mid- to late-'90s: Preacher, The Invisibles, and (pulled over from the failed Helix line) Transmetropolitan. Also, the last great era of letter pages.

Viz, right here in the mid-'00s: This is my own opinion deliriously unmoored from anything like historical knowledge, but Viz strikes me as generally lazy and complacent, willing to write off its lack of hustle as a commitment to the long haul. So it took Tokyopop licensing and dumping materials cheaply on the shelves to get Viz to step up its publishing schedule, and it took Vertical publishing high-end niche materials to get Viz to dip its fiscally conservative toes into riskier waters. Whether my opinion is at all close to the mark or not, all I know is I've got Drifting Classroom, Death Note, Monster, Tekkon Kinkreet, Cat Eyed Boy, and thirteen volumes of Golgo 13 on my shelves. And I've got 20th Century Boys to look forward to in 2008. I feel exceptionally fortunate.

5 Creators I'd Kill To Make Documentaries About

Dave Sim: I mean, c'mon. I can't think of a better post-Crumb documentary subject.

Eastman & Laird: Counting them as one creator is a bit of a cheat, but I think cutting between, say, Eastman and his wife Julie Strain doing bondage photoshoots of models on their palatial estate to Laird handing out Xeric Awards in some half-empty convention hall, would be worth it.

Evan Dorkin: And it's a bit of a cheat not including Dorkin's wife Sarah Dyer in this category, since she's an interesting creator and cartoonist in her own right. But just Dorkin talking, talking, talking, while alternating between his detail-filled panels, and the more depressing views of Staten Island? How can than not half-fill a screening room at Opera Plaza for thirteen days?

William Moulton Marston: Again, a gimme.

Rob Liefeld: Kind of the rise & fall of the Image Seven, as focused through this one guy who, from what I can tell, has never been honest about a deadline a day in his life.

5 Perfect Comic Books

Boom Boom #2: David Lasky's retelling of Joyce's writing of Ulysses using pages rderawn from The Origin of Marvel Comics. Up there with Spiegelman and Moore as far as sheer formalistic brio.

: Featuring "Art School Confidential," "Chicago," and, yes, "Needledick the Bug Fucker." The first time I read this, I realized how people could talk about how reading Mad back in the '50s could completely change the way they saw everything.

Omac #1: If you had to pick one last superhero comic to read, this would be the one. Every panel of this is jammed with subtext and possibility. Even the rest of the Kirby issues aren't half as good as the comic series that exists in your brain after you've read this one issue.

Arcade #6: The first comic where I finally "got" Crumb, but it's also got Spiegelman's 'Malpractice Suite,' which still floors me. And S. Clay Wilson! And Bill Griffith! And Rory Hayes! And Mark Beyer! Pretty much bifurcated into Weirdo and Raw, both of which I loved, but never quite in the same way I loved this.

Sam & Max's Freelance Police Special #1: The inspiration for Hit The Road and one of my picks for all-time funniest comic book. Most of my perfect comic book picks were chosen by how many times I've read and reread them; this issue of Sam & Max has to be in the double digits by now.

5 Writers Whose Work For Marvel in the '70s I'll Always Adore

Steve Gerber: Yeah, that's probably a given.

Steve Englehart: Somewhere tucked away in my brain is an essay about how Englehart made comic contuity work in a way that fooled just about everyone into thinking it was an easy and positive benefit to superhero universes than it actually is.

Don McGregor: My goal for this year is to re-read Panther's Rage, which was pretty much my version of Watchmen when I was, I dunno, nine? And review it here, is the plan.

Doug Moench: Overwrought? All these guys were overwrought--it came with the territory. But Moench's overwroughtness also underscored the fact that he seemingly took every assignment seriously, be it Planet of the Apes, dialoguing duties on Rich Buckler's Deathlok, Godzilla, or, of course, Master of Kung-Fu.

Chris Claremont: Claremont was pretty much the last and latest of this generation and, of course, by far the most successful. For better or for worse, so many of the techniques (both strengths and weaknesses) of the '70s Marvel writers found their apotheosis in Claremont's work on Uncanny X-Men.

5 Portrayals of Comic Characters in Other Media I Love More Than The Originals

Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon: I saw these serials when I was really young and they were perfect. I wish I could show you what I see in my mind when I think back on these.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark: Yeah, absolutely. Tony Stark of the comics is pretty much a whiny beeyotch, when he's not being painted as a great big tool. RDJ somehow transcends all of that, while remaining faithful to it? Like, how the hell did he do that?

Chris Evans' Johnny Storm: Kinda similar to the above. Never liked Johnny Storm until Evans gave him crack comic timing.

300 The Movie: Zack Snyder's 300 is so much better than Miller's 300, I think, in the same way Pierre Menard's Quixote is so much better than Cervantes' Quixote.

(I'm shocked I left both Heath Ledger's Joker and Bava's Danger: Diabolik off this list. But that speaks to how much I love the original material, I guess.)

5 More Perfect Comics, With Far Less Commentary

Acme Novelty Library #1: Barely edging out that one awesome issue where Jimmy, his Mom and Superman get stuck on a desert island (and mainly because I can never remember the issue number on that one).

Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein #1: Barely edging out Seven Soldiers #1.

Swamp Thing #32: "Pog."

Love & Rockets #4: the conclusion of the first Heartbreak Soup story and 100 Rooms.

Giant-Size Captain America #1: A collection of Lee & Kirby Cap stories that were just excuses for Kirby to draw fight scenes for six or seven pages at a stretch. True comic book crack: I didn't even have an opinion about it the first 15 times I read it.

Twenty Other Things I Like About Comics, Unsorted & Without Comment:

Paul Pope
Angel & The Ape
The Fortress of Solitude
Dr. Slump
"Tricky Cad"
Skull the Slayer
Those Giant Working Props (in Finger & Sprang's Batman?)
Analogues of corporate controlled characters
Letter pages by Ennis and Morrison
Ghost Rider
Guido Crepax
Snoopy's Doghouse
The Giant Gil Kane Heads o' Drama
Sgt. Frog
Bêlit
Kirby fingers
Golgo 13
The initials "LL"
Alan Moore's beard
The comics blogosphere