Comic books for comic fans

Last week we went all mature. This week we're totally immature...for a change...'cause I'm always ever so mature...let's be honest, I practically walk around quoting from Proust all day long and wearing tweed jackets

For the DC readers in the crowd...

• Superman/Batman: Absolute Power - this one's totally for the hardcore DC fans out there. Jeph Loeb goes on an entertaining tour of the various what-ifs in the DC universe, taking Clark and Bruce through dozens of possible paths as supervillians from the future drop back and spin history a little differently. If you haven't been reading DC for a while now, you probably don't want to start here. If you have been, though, run straight for this as the artwork is marvelous and the story spectacular.
• Batgirl: Year One - Absolutely beautiful, one of the prettiest trades to come out in a decade, wonderful coloring underlying the retelling of some of Babs's earliest adventures. We've had Barbara Gordon paralyzed so long that it's almost hard to remember her as the original Batgirl, swinging around with Pointy Ears and Pixie Boots and bringing a bit of levity to the Bat world. This volume is all about the fun and excitement of being a new crime-fighter, and it comes through in absolute spades. Wonderful read.
• Superman: Secret Identity - There are tons of comics that can only be read by comic book fans. There have been thousands of issues of Superman smacking down bad guys and saving the girl. Not a single one of them could possibly hold a candle to the beauty and humanity and universal understanding that Immonen and Busiek have imbued these four collected issues with. This volume brings me to tears every time I read it, and it's the one that I recommend for anybody who says that comics can't be read and enjoyed by everybody. You could hand this one to your mom, and she would instantly fall in love. You could hand it to anybody with a pulse, and they would change their tune about comics being for geeks. This is the perfect gateway drug to something harder like Watchmen. I can't possibly praise this trade highly enough. Honestly, it shouldn't be on this list because to say that it's for DC readers is to sell it vastly too short, but anybody who's been reading Superman comics for a while should take a moment and wander this way. It's not even remotely part of the continuity, but it's easily the best of the canon.
• Supreme: Story of the Year - on the other hand, only hardcore Superman geeks should apply to this journey. Alan Moore goofs on every comic book cliche - from the double initials of Superman sidekicks and villians to the continuous retconning of Superman's origins and the shifts in tone and artistic style over the past decades. In the process, he tells us more about comics than most of us could have realized. It's a good story made so great if you get all the jokes. I'd like to think that I got most of them, down to the references to Captain Carrot in the Citadel Supreme.
• Justice League and Justice League Unlimited from cartoon network - they aren't graphic novels at all, rather cartoons in the Dini/Timm style, evolved right out of Batman: TAS, Batman Beyond, and Superman. The last two seasons - with the Cadmus and Legion of Doom story arcs - are the finest, but you kind of need to see the work that leads up to them. Rarely have there been better adaptations of a written work as so many comic fans/geeks were there to make sure everything was taken in perfectly - even down to the nods to the non-comic Super Friends who become the Ultimen. Non-DC-geeks will probably enjoy the show. DC geeks will love it.
• The Dark Knight Returns - comics had gone jokey, having endured the '60s of camp and POW!, the seventies where Bats's ears kept growing and growing, and then along came Frank Miller's hardest shot ever. TDKR was like a shot of cold water, throwing down the darkest, oldest, baddest Batman we'd ever seen. He wasn't cruel or sadistic, but he was clearly hardened by a world that had turned from the heroic ideal, where Superman is turned into a Ronnie Raygun Repbulican lapdog, where the only way to tame the gangs was to kick the crap out them and then take them under his wing. It's a classic of the genre, and it brought in way too much darkness, too much sadism, too much sickness in its wake, to be sure, but it has to be read and digested. And the sequel is to be avoided at all costs.
• Action Comics #775 - the best single issue ever written...I'll lay my blog on it. Superman gets his backside handed to him by the new, sick, evil good guys who aren't afraid of lobotomizing the villians in a hearbeat instead of dragging them to the cops. And he takes it, eventually beating them a dozen ways to Sunday without breaking his oath to be the good guy, and he narrates it in the end as he smacks down the bad-good guys with a wink and a nod. Classic...marvelous...wonderful... And available in the Justice League Elite trade.
• Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow - Alan Moore back in the hizzouse. The Silver Age was a time of goofs and imaginary stories, people gaining and losing superpowers with the wind and an an innocence rarely seen since, and this was its swan song. Another one where only the diehard Superman fans need apply for entry because every panel has a nod to some quasi-obscure character that we haven't seen for decades, but Moore gives the old guy a sendoff like no other hero got before or since. And it makes the earlier Absolute Power ending absolutely note perfect.
• Superman: Red Son - An Elseworlds tale of what if has Superman landing not in Kansas but in Soviet Russia. From there, much of the tales are twists on the DC universe we know, but the recasting of Lex Luthor as genius, science hero of a revitalized United States raises the stakes from neat pastiche to classic, and the ending is marvelous, cycling back on itself for a perfect finish. To say more would be cheating, but this one's better than most every other Elseworlds that we've seen.
• Batman: The Long Halloween - great artwork, surprising mystery, another aspect to the shift of Gotham from gangland to freak central...this maxi-series has it all. The sequel, again, falls short as so many of them do. It's a big work, and it includes nearly every important Batman villain of the next portion of his career, but it's seminal to so much of what has come after this tale was told, that it needs to be read.
• Superman: American Alien - (added after the fact) - The collection touts that this isn't a Superman story, and it's not really. It's a story of how Clark Kent became Superman, how he explored and was terrified by his powers as a child in a Smallville where everybody kind of knows that Clark is a special kid. It's a story of how he learns of Krypton. It's a story of how he first meets - not in canon - Lex and Bruce and even Oliver. It's a great story of a young man finding his way with some pretty awesome skills.

I feel odd not including anything other than Superman and Batman tales, but so much of the DC Universe is those guys, those twin titans of the realm, that I couldn't find much in the way of other things to recommend. Sure, Rucka's run on Wonder Woman was excellent, but to read one trade without the others wouldn't do it justice...the Flash runs by Messner-Loebs and Geoff Johns are outstanding, but again, no single volume would tell the tale...Crisis on infinite Earths is great, but I don't know that it can be read without so many other interconnectors...Kingdom Come just missed out for me even though it was right on the cut line - don't quite know why it did, but it's on the outside looking in...Batman: Year One also just outside, but I enjoy all the Batman stories I listed above even more...DC: New Frontier fell apart in the second volume - the first would've made the cut, though...

I'll admit to a blindess toward the new, and that's something I'm aware of. If anybody has any suggestions, please make 'em because I'd like to know what I missed.

For reference, may I suggest the DC Canon series over at Sequart?

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Admittedly, I'm a little stumped as I'd like to finish this off with a group of recommendation for Marvel readers. I'm way less experienced and knowledgable of Marvel, however, so I'm looking for suggestions in advance. Here's what I've got so far...

• Daredevil - Bendis run
Marvel Zombies

Marvels

Ultimate Fantastic Four

Wolverine: Enemy of the State

Astonishing X-Men - Wheedon run

And I know there have to be more. Don't bring me the Dark Phoenix saga, however, as that's been retold and untold so many friggin times that I'm tired of it. I officially hate the old X-Men stuff at this point.