A couple weeks ago, Brian Cronin’s “Comics Should Be Good” column at Comic Book Resources ran a DC/Marvel Top Ten survey. The idea was to name your top ten favorite characters for both DC and Marvel comics. (And the results are starting to appear).

While this isn’t exactly a Marvel vs. DC thing, the effect is the same: blogging red meat! It’s more meaningless than even the average comic book blog, it fills up column space, and it gets fans riled up over all the distinctions-without-a-difference in voting for the different clowns who have worn the Flash costume through the years. It’s a cheap stunt: an easy-to-write column designed to drive clicks.

I find it appalling and I disapprove.

Here are my picks.

DC Comics Top Ten

#10 Dr. Fate

Just for the headgear. I don’t give a damn about the character, but I love the helmet. Put Dr. Strange in that helmet and I’m all-in.

huh, looks like Dr. Fate grew boobs when I wasn’t looking

#9  Mister Miracle

Yes, he’s ridiculous — an exiled god from an dysfunctional home who wears a red-and-yellow costume and masquerades as an escape artist? But he was the favorite character of a friend I lost to childhood leukemia and I don’t care what you say, the core of the New Gods mythos would make a dynamite motion picture.

(But no Funky Flashman!)

#8  Superman

Love the character — the iconic man of tomorrow standing guard over the ideal big city metropolis. I enjoy the Superman mythos with its bottled cities, science villains, and flying dogs in capes. The character and world are inherently optimistic and utopian, and ultimately, Superman is the only superhero that really matters.

I just never want to read his comics.

is that a rocket in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?

#7  Wildcat

Yes, Wildcat. Again, because of the headgear. And also because I think the character is ripe for revival. Wildcat is a prizefighter and you have to try like hell to mess up a boxing story. Stick to the boxing movie formula and even a story about Hugh Jackman fighting with robots looks like a good idea. Mix the sweet science with a fatal disease, the mob, a dame, an orphan, and a little bit of that Barton Fink feeling and I smell a winner!

Plus, Wildcat rides a Cat-O-Cycle.

#6  Aquaman

I don’t care about the comics character — no one cares about the comics character — but the version of Aquaman who frequently appears on the Batman: Brave And The Bold cartoon series is a scream.

Fast forward to 3:50 in this video to see the true Aquaman … the poor schmuck stuck on an RV vacation road trip with his undersea family.

#5  Hawkman

Headgear fetish, part three.

note preference for Golden Age “full beak” Hawkman (these things are important)

#4  Swamp Thing

Frankly you could throw out the first six names on this list. I’ve never been a DC guy and I had to grope around to come up with my ten names. That I put Wildcat on the list and passed up a chance to show Power Girl in her white t-shirt shows how much I am slipping.

Let me correct that.

there you go … Power Girl, plus Superman and Wildcat (yes, Wildcat)

With Swamp Thing we come to the first of the DC characters that I hold in truly high esteem, and not merely because he is the most successful of a host of muck monsters reaching all the way back to The Heap. This admittedly second-tier character has twice been touched by genius, first with Bernie Wrightson’s brilliant character design …

… and then by Alan Moore’s seminal run on the book, which changed the character (and comics) forever. (Moore’s Swamp Thing will eventually get a Longbox Graveyard column all it’s own).

Wrightson’s design is worth a closer look. Swamp Thing’s powerful, hulking build gives him a strong presence on the page, but the character sports subtle touches that lend him uncommon visual depth. Exposed roots on Swamp Thing’s back and shoulders offer highlight points where artists can add visual flourishes and kinks (following artists would have his body sprout moss, roots, and flowers to dramatic effect).

Swamp Thing is just on this side of uncanny valley, with a face that is recognizably human, but sporting craggy brows and a characteristic nose-and-face design than can by turns be human and warm or a mask of skull-faced terror. A classic comic book monster design.

#3  The Flash

My favorite of the Silver Age greats, though I will confess I liked him best as a cartoon character. The sunlit and nostalgic memory of my youth casts the Flash as a safe, colorful, reassuring science hero who was both the fastest man alive and the smartest guy in the room. I particularly loved the “swishing” sound effects deployed every time Flash went for a sprint.

In filling out the ballot over at CBR I probably invalidated my submission by just listing, “The Flash,” instead of “Barry Allen Flash.” But really, is there a greater single indictment of comics than having to identify which Flash you mean when you say, “The Flash?”

C’mon.

And apropos of nothing — instead of the turgid Green Lantern-style disaster that DC is bound to bring to the screen, the Flash movie should be lightly comedic (more The Mask than The Dark Knight) and should star Neil Patrick Harris as Barry Allen.

You’re welcome.

#2  The Joker

DC in general and Batman in particular have a pile of great villains, and I probably could have filled out this list with bad guys alone (and another cheap blog idea has just occurred to me) … but the Joker is clearly DC’s finest villain, and likely would be so even without his apotheosis through the talents of Heath Ledger a couple years ago.

The brilliance of the Joker is in his versatility. He started life as a knock-off of Conrad Veidt, and has survived Jokermobiles, Cesar Romero’s mustache, and Jack Nicholson’s check-cashing to emerge as everyone’s favorite mass-murdering mental patient. The Joker’s bizarre plots resonate more deeply than your run-of-the-mill megalomaniac bent on world conquest. He’s unpredictable and always a twisted delight, seemingly just as at home whether he’s stealing a kid’s report card or putting Batgirl in a wheelchair. You can’t keep a good clown down!

#1  Bat-Mite

No, my favorite DC character is Batman, of course, but where’s the fun in admitting that?

And since I’m tumbling to the blogging cheap trick of a top ten list, I might as well go balls deep and drag this thing out for a second column … so you’ll have to come back in a couple weeks to see my Top Ten Marvel Comics characters!

In the meantime, I’d be delighted to see a nerd skirmish break out in the comments section about YOUR favorite DC heroes along with excoriating indictments of why I was a Philistine to leave (insert character here) off my list!

UPDATE: Mars Will Send No More has posted a rebuttal over at his epononymous blog! Check it out!

NEXT WEEK: #13 The Stuff of Legends — Thor!

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A month ago I posted my Top Ten DC Comics Characters list, and today I weigh in with my favorite Marvel characters. That DC post ended up being one of the most popular entries here at Longbox Graveyard, with a nice little nerd skirmish breaking out in the comments section — hopefully this entry will provoke even more Geek Rage!

Thanks to Brian Cronin’s “Comics Should Be Good” column at Comic Book Resources for the survey that inspired these entries (and those CBR results are in now if you want to check them out).

Marvel Comics Top Ten

I had a hard time coming up with ten characters for my DC list, but as a “Marvel guy” I had the opposite problem this week. I could easily list two or three times as many characters than those mentioned here, but rather than resort to trickery like the scoundrel who runs the otherwise-excellent Mars Will Send No More blog, I’ve knuckled down and made the hard choices, holding myself to just ten Marvel characters! Agony! Pain!

#10 Black Panther

When I filled out my list for CBR’s survey, I was fresh back from San Diego Comic-Con with a stack of Jungle Action back issues and all hot for the Black Panther. I could have picked any number of characters for this #10 slot, but with that pile of books on my nightstand, Panther got the nod.

Since then, I’ve read those books, and found them a little … overwrought.

above scan snagged from the aptly-named (and recommended) Diversions of a Groovy Kind blog

The “Panthers Rage” saga from Jungle Action #6-18 is regarded as a minor classic, and even holds some claim to being the field’s first graphic novel. The run is certainly a cut above for 1970s-era Marvel, with inventive layouts and a storyline set entirely in Africa that was largely bereft of the usual superhero action. My problem with the series was that I thought Don McGregor’s script just didn’t flow. I found the books over-written, and presented in a kind of fractured syntax that I couldn’t quite grok.

“and the words lose their meaning,” indeed

Even if I found the series a disappointment, it only slightly dented my enthusiasm for the character, who is intriguing on a lot of levels. He’s the king of a hidden African kingdom, heir to the mystical powers of a panther cult, and his country is a weird mix of tribal tradition and sci-fi high technology thanks to the wealth afforded by Wakanda’s stock of the precious metal, Vibranium. Panther’s powers aren’t much (he’s just a guy who jumps around in a cat suit), but I respond to the character’s nobility, and in the 1970s it was a rare thing when a black Marvel hero wasn’t shouting “Christmas!” to remind us how “street” he was (sorry, Luke Cage). After struggling through those Jungle Action books I am a bit less attached but no less intrigued by the character, so maybe I’ll fast forward a bit and try the Christopher Priest run from the 1990s (which I sampled and remember as being too clever by half).

#9 Warlock

Like Black Panther, Warlock was born from Jack Kirby‘s pencil, and like the Panther, Warlock definitely had his best days on another author’s watch. Jim Starlin is one of my favorite comics creators (for all that I graded down his Captain Marvel), and of his Marvel work, I think his run on Warlock is his best.

Warlock himself is kind of a pain in the ass … he swans about the space lanes, swinging wildly between ennui and rage, stumbling into allegorical adventures against a weird gallery of villains (including his own future self). He’s a limited, doom-driven character in the mold of Michael Moorcock’s Elric. There are probably fewer than a dozen of his books that are genuinely worth reading. But as a tormented teen I identified with him … and he’s just so damn glam with that blonde perm and the SKULL clasping his cape to signal how he’s — you know — all grim and deep and stuff.

I could totally see myself walking around a Los Angeles airport hotel for a 1977 science fiction convention wearing that outfit.

#8 Hulk

One of the reasons I prefer Marvel to DC is because of Marvel’s many anti-heroes, with the Hulk being the best-known of the bunch. Hulk was the first comic character I ever knew about (probably thanks to those crappy 1960s cartoons), and purchase of a Hulk Aurora model kit got me started buying comic books stuff (followed shortly by actual comic books) in the first place.

aside from being unpainted, with gaps where the parts didn’t fit, and covered with glue thumb-prints, the Hulk kit I made in 1974 looked EXACTLY like this pro build!

I love the idea of the Hulk — the Jekyll/Hyde rage thing, the Hulkbusters out in the desert, the radiation-saturated villains, purple pants, “Hulk Smash!”, the works. Unfortunately, as I found when sorting through my Accumulation, I don’t own a lot of worthwhile Hulk comics. I came to comics too late for the Roy Thomas run, and was out of comics entirely during the Peter David era. I still have a pile of really bad Hulk books, though, which means I kept buying the comic, month after month, even though I knew it would be terrible.

What a damn idiot.

#7 Daredevil

Sure, Daredevil is really just Spider-Man with his eyes closed, but Spidey never grabbed me, while I found myself collecting Daredevil books even before Frank Miller came along and made his magic. With his dark, street-level villains, and his subtle powers based on elevated senses of everything except sight, Daredevil seemed a more down-to-earth hero than Spider-Man (who blasphemously does not make my Top Ten).

I want to attribute some of my affection to Gene Colan’s flowing pencils …

… but the truth is I came to the book during Bob Brown’s less-than-memorable 1970s run. Memory is a funny thing, I could have sworn I had a bunch of Gene Colan Daredevils … guess I will have to knock over a bank so I can own those Silver Age classics. (And in the meantime I still have Colan’s run on Tomb of Dracula — one of my favorite Marvel books, though Drac himself doesn’t rate for today’s list).

#6 Red Skull

I won’t even try to suggest that the Red Skull is the best villain in a comic line that is home to Doctor Doom, Magneto, and Galactus … but he is my favorite, in all his two-dimensional glory. The Red Skull benefits by drafting behind Captain America, who (SPOILER!) heads this list, but the Skull is here mostly for punching above his weight.

The Red Skull doesn’t have a battlesuit, or magnetic powers, or a colossal physique letting him eat whole planets. Nope, he’s just a rage-filled bell-boy armed with a Luger, fear gas, and the impossible-to-satisfy expectations of Adolph Hitler.

With those scant powers, the Skull has gone on to battle Captain America to a standstill for three quarters of a century. And while most every other Marvel villain has had an issue or two where they seemed vaguely sympathetic, the Skull remains an unreconstructed Nazi bastard. I love to hate the Skull! That’s why I have a Funko Red Skull Bobblehead on my desk at work (one of only two bits of superhero swag I keep in my workplace).

#5 Thor

To understand my affection for Thor, look no further than my recent columns (parts one and two) on Walt Simonson’s take on the character … but I loved the character from the moment I discovered his book in 1974, a decade prior to Simonson’s brilliant run.

That first Thor book blew my twelve-year-old mind. It had ancient mythological gods, in a space ship, fighting an insane living planet, told as a superhero story. Crazy, man. It scratched my interest for fantasy in a safe superhero setting (it would be a few years before I’d get into Conan), and it immediately broadened my mind to what a comic book could be. The Marvel Universe wasn’t just Spider-Man swinging around Manhattan — it was an actual universe, a wide-ranging cosmos of gods and men! That idea thrilled me.

Still does.

#4 Sub-Mariner

An outright dick.

Seriously, Subby is a dick, and I love him for it. Perpetually pissed-off, trying to steal Reed Richards’ wife, leading sea monster invasions of New York City … and that’s when he’s a good guy. When Sub-Mariner is batting for the other team — as in the so-bad-it’s-good Super-Villain Team-Up — Subby emerges as Marvel’s greatest anti-hero, putting even the Hulk in the shade. I mean, Hulk is a moron, and not really responsible for his actions. But the Sub-Mariner? Guilty!

Sub-Mariner is ancient even by comic book standards, dating to World War II-era comic strips by creator Bill Everett. Originally re-introduced to the Marvel Universe as a quasi-villain in the pages of Fantastic Four, Subby has been like a professional wrestler, by turns a good guy and a bad guy as the story and audience demanded.

Subby was extra-cranky during his fashion disaster Pimp Suit era

During the war, Subby put aside his differences with surface-dwellers to battle Hitler, but he was still a prickly ally. When Ed Brubaker took over Captain America, he caught the soul of Sub-Mariner in this 21st century Christmas Eve exchange between Subby and the Winter Soldier (himself a resurrected wartime Bucky Barnes):

I love the concept of this character — the superpowered fishman, king of Atlantis, acting out his rage against everything that lives on the other 30% of the Earth’s surface. But here’s a crazy thing — for all that I rank this character #4 on my list, I don’t think I own more than a single Sub-Mariner comic book. I love him as a guest star, or a bad guy, or a crappy team-mate in the Defenders or the Invaders, but I never got into his solo books.

If the group wisdom of my readership would like to suggest a half-dozen best Subby stories, I’d sure like to read them. Give a shout in comments.

#3 The Thing

I have enormous affection for this character, the rocky elemental from the Fantastic Four that is the archetypal tough guy with the soul of a pussy cat. Defined by powers he regards as a curse, the Thing wears his heart on his sleeve and is the warmest, most approachable, and most heartbreaking of Marvel’s epic-scaled characters.

He reminds me of my Dad, and my old pal Bear Peters from Arizona, of my video game colleague Jeff Brown, my buddy Sarge at Appy, and of all the craggy, larger-than-life characters I’ve known through the years. In his long, slow coming to terms with his monstrous appearance, the Thing makes a powerful statement for diversity and identity. One of the best-developed characters in the Marvel line, it feels strange to call him “The Thing” — he’s a character that has evolved beyond his powers and his form. It’s much more natural to call him Ben Grimm.

Of all the characters on this list, he’s the guy with whom you’d most like to share a beer.

#2 Conan

Maybe this is a cheat, because Conan isn’t even published by Marvel any more, but the classic 1970s run for this character was a Marvel production through-and-through.

in the 1970s, Conan was one of Marvel’s biggest books, garnering a cover feature of Marvel’s in-house fanzine, Foom

I’ve already enthused about the Barry Windsor-Smith era on this book, and the truth is I could write about Conan every week, but my sad devotion to Robert E. Howard’s barbarian already led me to waste fifty bones on that dreadful 3D movie earlier this year, so I shouldn’t push my luck by further trying the patience of a readership that’s already soldiered through two Conan blogs in the first ten issues of Longbox Graveyard. Suffice to say that Conan has virtue enough strictly as a comic character to rate highly on this list, even if he is a rapidly-diminishing part of Marvel’s history. Like Thor, Conan was a genre-stretching book that changed what comics could be.

(And in December, I’ll write about him again!)

#1 Captain America

Even if I didn’t telegraph my number one choice when talking about Red Skull, it should come as no surprise to Longbox Graveyard readers that Captain America tops my list, given that I’ve already devoted columns to writing about the character, both old and new. Another character that I’ve stuck with since childhood, Cap’s always been my favorite, owing to his iconic nature, spectacular costume, and his connection with another great fascination of my life — World War II.

As living legend, leader of the Avengers, and the most badass guy in any room full of costumes, Captain America is the hero that other heroes find heroic — the superhero’s superhero, and unchallenged champion of my Top Ten list of Marvel Comics characters!

All right, for better or worse, that’s my list … the comments section is open for you to tell me how I got it wrong!

NEXT WEEK: #17 Supergods

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One of the pleasures of publishing Longbox Graveyard has been meeting other fans in the online comics community. One of the first to comment on this blog was the enigmatic Mars Will Send No More, who has proven a kindred soul with his love of Marvel’s “Cosmics” and his admiration of classic Bronze Age comics runs, such as Walt Simonson’s Thor. Mars further endeared himself by giving me good-natured grief over my Top Ten DC Comics Characters list (and responded with a wobbly list of his own), so when he threw down the gauntlet on Twitter about doing a Top Single Issues list, I was eager to pick it up.

Mars has already led off with a thoughtful Top Issues list at his own blog, with a far-ranging collection of deeply personal choices well outside the mainstream focusing on dinosaurs, dragonflies, and monoliths, and with little reliance on “dorks in tights punching each other.” Lacking Mars’ eclectic tastes, my list is almost entirely about costumes in Fist City, but that’s a good thing — it means we can provide lists with minimal overlap, and together recommend a full twenty single issue stories worth reading. (Well, fifteen, actually, but more about that later).

Like my Marvel and DC Top Characters lists, this list of Top Single Issues isn’t comprehensive. These aren’t the best stories ever told, or the best-selling, or the best-known, or the most significant. They’re just my favorites, to the degree that I can remember them after reading comics for better than thirty years. My list is idiosyncratic and deliberately so, and presented in no particular order. They’re just superior stories I feel are worthy of note.

my blog, my rules … any objections?

A staple of the Golden Age, the single issue story is a dying form. Even in the Bronze Age which is the focus of Longbox Graveyard, the emphasis was generally on two-part stories, with the single-issue form usually reserved for the dreaded fill-in story. In recent years the single-issue story has all but vanished from DC and Marvel books, as storytelling has “decompressed” into six or twelve issue arcs intended for republication as trade paperbacks.

It’s a shame the form is going away, because the single-issue format forces creators to focus on a small and polished slice of action, with only minimal reference to greater events. Single-issue stories strip away many of the things I most dislike about comics — languid storytelling, dense continuity, and long and confusing fight scenes — in favor of economical storytelling. A single-issue story is harder to write than a multi-part arc, but when done well, a single-issue book is about as good as comics get.

For this list I tried to pick stories that genuinely stand alone, without directly extending into the previous or following issues. I looked for stories with minimal dependence on continuity (though some continuity is impossible to avoid in comics), and I wasn’t especially concerned about page-count — if the tale was published as a single story, then it was eligible for the list, whether it was a 48-page original graphic novel or a Will Eisner seven-page masterpiece.

Speaking of which …

Ten Minutes

While I appreciate and respect Golden Age comics, I don’t much like reading them, preferring the reinvented sensibility and sophistication of Silver Age and later stories, but for Will Eisner’s Spirit, I make an exception. Partly this is down to Eisner’s work being so modern — or at least seeming modern, given than Eisner practically invented modern comics storytelling whenever he put pencil to paper. Eisner is a comfortable destination for modern comics fans wishing to sample books from a distant era — I guarantee you will flip to the copyright page and shake your head in wonder that these stories were published decades before the 1961 birth of the Fantastic Four.

My knowledge of Eisner is far from comprehensive, and that I have so much of his work still to discover is a happy problem to have. I am working my way through the hardback Spirit Archives, which collect the Spirit in publication order, but I also jumped the line and picked up The Best of The Spirit, spotlighting twenty-two Spirit tales from the 1940s and 1950s. Any of those stories would be worthy members of this list (and Eisner could take every slot on my top ten!), but for today I’m restricting myself to a single story — “Ten Minutes,” originally published in September of 1949.

You don’t need to know a lot about the Spirit to enjoy this slice-of-life story — the Spirit is basically a guest star in this particular strip, which tells the tale of the last ten minutes of the life of Freddy, a neighborhood nobody who crosses the line to capital crime and pays the price in this short-but-sweet seven page story. Delivering a complete story in just seven pages is difficult, but Eisner embraces the time limit of the story, telling us in the first caption that the story will take ten minutes to read, then counts down the time by putting a stopwatch in the first panel of every page that follows.

What would seem a gimmick for any other creator is just another day at the office for Eisner — in those seven pages he tells possibly the first “real time” story in comics history; introduces us to luckless Freddy; shows us how his shiftless frustration boils over into a heartbreaking murder; follows Freddy to his own foredoomed end; and shows how a heedless world goes on ticking, oblivious to Freddy’s little rise and fall. Like all of Eisner’s work, it’s a tight, soulful story told with masterfully illustrated emotion, humor, action, and pathos.

You can read “Ten Minutes” (in just ten minutes!) and other classic Eisner tales in The Best of The Spirit.

Winter Soldier: Winter Kills

This book almost doesn’t make the list, because it’s deeply enmeshed in Marvel continuity, drawing on the Civil War cross-over event, and two years’ worth of Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America (to say nothing of the seventy-five years history of Cap himself). But the book is so sharply-written that I cannot leave it off my list, and Brubaker, as always, uses continuity with restraint, deepening the entertainment for readers who understand the references, while at the same time imposing few barriers to new readers.

The story is simpler than it sounds — a lonely Christmas Eve in New York for the Winter Soldier (Captain America’s resurrected World War II sidekick, Bucky Barnes), the first such holiday “back in the world” for Barnes, who was thought lost during the war, and is trying to shake off the effects of being a brainwashed Soviet sleeper agent for the last half-century. Christmas Eve isn’t silent night, of course, as Barnes gets pulled into a raid on a Hydra base, and the book does have a nice bit of action, but where the story shines is in it’s characterization. Barnes, Nick Fury, and the Sub-Mariner all have richly nuanced dialogue in this tale, and Captain America, appearing entirely in flashback, tells the only joke of his life when he reminiscences about punching Hitler.

The story concludes with a poignant graveyard scene that I referenced in my Top Marvel Characters list two weeks ago, which again displays the right way to use continuity, as Barnes struggles with guilt from his murderous past, and receives friendship and emotional support from the least likely source — the remote and imperious Sub-Mariner. A beautifully-written and pitch-perfect story.

You can read this story (along with the best Captain America stories ever written) in the highly-recommended Captain America Omnibus Vol. 1.

The Song of Red Sonja

In my review of the Barry Windsor-Smith era of Conan the Barbarian I remarked that Conan stories follow a certain formula — but it’s a good formula. The formula is front-and-center in issue #24 of Conan the Barbarian, which marked the second time we’d meet Red Sonja, and the last time Windsor-Smith would pencil the book.

The plot is something you’ve seen a hundred times before — Conan and Sonja are off to steal some treasure, and along the way there’s a tavern brawl, a tower to climb, and a giant snake to kill. By-the-numbers stuff, for all that it is brilliantly drawn by Windsor-Smith, who’s insane attention to detail could not be appreciated in the original printings, but which is marvelously on display in the Dark Horse Conan reprints.

What makes this issue stand out from others of its era is Roy Thomas’ script. The plot may be off-the-shelf, but Thomas provides sharp dialogue that shows Conan at his headstrong and lusty best. Conan knows that Sonja is taking advantage of him, but he figures it’s worth it for a chance at some treasure and (even more promising) the hope of getting inside Sonja’s pants. For her part, Sonja seems unusually tempted by Conan, musing that breaking her vow of celibacy for Conan wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, and seeming at least slightly guilty when she steals the treasure, hops a horse, and tramples over Conan at the end. This is one of the very few Conan stories where the Barbarian doesn’t get the girl … and the story is better for it.

John Buscema would take over the book with issue #25, and overnight Conan would seem to age about ten years. The youthful, narrow-waisted Windsor-Smith barbarian would be replaced with Buscema’s powerful, thick-shouldered brute. That pending change makes the scene where Conan and Sonja frolic in the pond unexpectedly sweet and innocent. Conan’s youthful joy in that scene — and his childish punching of a wall out of frustration on the final page of the story — would feel inauthentic with Buscema’s version of the Cimmerian, but Windsor-Smith’s more subtle pencils unintentionally capture the end of Conan’s adolescence.

The Song of Red Sonja is reprinted in Dark Horse’s The Chronicles of Conan, Volume 4.

The Anatomy Lesson

Swamp Thing #21 is not just a great comic — it might be the single most important book published by DC Comics in the 1980s. This is where Alan Moore made his mark in American comic books, proving that he could magnificently re-invent one of DC’s most cliched characters — in one stroke changing the way we looked at superheroes, and opening the door for Watchmen, which DC would publish two years later.

The Anatomy Lesson is vintage Moore, coloring inside the lines of Swamp Thing’s past history while simultaneously turning the book inside-out. The Anatomy Lesson tells the tale of Swamp Thing’s autopsy, conducted by the sinister Jason Woodrue, who makes the startling discovery that Swamp Thing isn’t what we thought he was at all. Rather than a man who because a swamp monster, he’s a swamp monster who dreams of being a man — the ghostly aftershock of a dead scientist, who created a body for itself (including non-functioning internal vegetable organs) in imitation of the human form it once wore.

Not content to tell us one of the most unexpected and brilliant origin stories of all time, The Anatomy Lesson also winds in a horror story where narrator Woodrue hatches an elaborate revenge scheme using Swamp Thing’s not-so-dead-after-all corpse, told with creepy mood, atmosphere, and blood.

(Swamp Thing scans courtesy of the ubiquitous Mars Will Send No More)

The Anatomy Lesson kicks off one of the all-time great runs in comics, but it also stands alone as a superior single-issue story. Not that it matters — read this tale and you’ll be hooked for the duration.

You can read The Anatomy Lesson in Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 1, or check it out online over at Mars Will Send No More!

In Dreams

Sometimes the best way to write about icons like Batman and Superman is to not write about them at all. Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is inhabited by iconic heroes who are clearly supposed to be those more famous characters, but possessing their own names and costumes, Busiek has the freedom to approach these well-known heroes in new ways, without regard for the continuity or publishing agendas that encumber the “real” characters.

In the very first issue of Astro City, Busiek tells one of the finest Superman stories of all time — except it isn’t about Superman! Our hero is Samaritan, strange visitor from another world, who is faster than a speeding bullet, and in his alter ego is a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper.

OK, it’s Superman. But don’t call him that, OK? We don’t want DC’s lawyers showing up and ruining the fun over in Astro City.

In Dreams tells the story of a day in the life up Super– eh, Samaritan, from the morning when he dreams of flying free through the skies without a care in the world; to his commute to work where he stops a tsunami before arriving at his newspaper office; then sneaks away to knock out a giant robot and contain an exo-biological outbreak. And that’s just before lunch! On his break, Samaritan meets with the not-Justice League, and through the rest of his long day gets on with the full-time business of being (call it what it is!) a superman, fighting bad guys, accepting awards, and rescuing a cat from a tree. Samaritan even pauses to lament there is no time in his life to have a relationship, before streaking into orbit to dispatch a monstrous supervillain, then flying home to sleep, and dream (again) of soaring through the clouds without the weight of the world on his shoulders.

It’s a great story, and that’s exactly what a day in the life of Superman must be like … but it’s not the kind of story you could tell in Superman, demanding as it does a new story every month that can’t be more of the same-old same-old superpowered routine. But the anthology format of Astro City allows Busiek to tell just this kind of story without regard for topping himself the month after, and the result is a fun, breezy, and insightful romp that ranks among the finest Superman stories you will ever read. (Except that it’s not Superman … wink wink).

In Dreams is reprinted in Astro City, Volume 1.

And that brings me to the end of this week’s list.

But wait! That’s only five issues! A proper Top List must have ten entries!

You’re right … but I’ve blithered on long enough for a single blog, and if I’ve learned nothing else from writing a weekly column it’s to never do in one blog what you can divide into two! So I’m going to cut this list off at five, and return in a couple weeks* with a second column to complete my list. That will give you time to sample some of these stories, and (more importantly) it will give me time to unearth five more worthy single-issue tales from my vast Accumulation. Thanks for reading!

*Editor’s note: Rather than publish another Top Single Issues list here at Longbox Graveyard, the feature morphed into my Dollar Box column over at StashMyComics.com, where I look at single issues and short runs of comics where the original cover price was a dollar or more. Check it out!

NEXT WEEK: #19 Tomb It May Concern

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• Will Eisner (hilobrow.com)
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Visual sound effects notwithstanding, comic books are a silent affair. Were you to witness my reading some random book from The Accumulation you would be hard-pressed to hear anything beyond pages being turned, and maybe soft weeping. Matt Murdock-level listeners might detect the near-silent death agonies of expiring brain cells.

But when superheros vault to the small and large screens, they bring music with them, and that’s what this week’s Longbox Graveyard is all about! It’s been awhile since I did one of my idiosyncratic top ten lists, so here we go with my Superhero Music Top Ten. These are the tunes that I (sometimes) put on in the background while reading funny books, or (more frequently) welcome with relish as they get stuck in my head and shout down the many voices whispering at me to do unspeakable things. As with my other lists, these songs aren’t necessarily the best, but they are my favorites, and I hope you will agree (or better, disagree) in the comments section below!

10) Batman Brave And The Bold

Coming in at number ten is the brassy and wild opening titles for my favorite superhero cartoon, Batman: The Brave And The Bold! The show, sadly, has recently gone out of production, but you can track it down on DVD and I expect it can still be found on Cartoon Network (although I haven’t seen even a re-run pop up on my DVR for several weeks now). The show is broad, tongue-in-cheek superhero fun, and the tone is set right from the start, as wailing horns and jungle drums conduct Batman through the streets of a Gotham City overshadowed by the many friends and foes the Dark Knight encounters in this freewheeling animated series.

The show scores bonus points for a playful sense of musicality throughout the series, with unexpected musical numbers breaking out in the strangest places (usually when Aquaman is around), and going completely over-the-top with Neil Patrick Harris leading the vocals in the Broadway-quality original score for the musical episode, Mayhem of the Music Meister!

9) Kick Ass

Kick Ass is notable for several things, such as it’s relentlessly bleak and violent outlook on youth culture, a star-making turn by Chloë Grace Moretz as Hit Girl, and one of the few watchable performances by Nick Cage since he collected his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas. But the movie also scores points for its opening theme — “Stand Up,” by The Prodigy. To be fair, I don’t believe this song was created specifically for this movie, but still makes my list because it so nicely sets the scene and sums up the energy and off-center viewpoint of the picture.

8) X-Men First Class

A more conventional film score rings in at number eight. I could have selected the main titles from the original three X-Men pictures, but I think I slightly prefer the lesser-known theme from last summer’s X-Men First Class, maybe because I find it more heroic and optimistic.

It is unfortunately almost entirely absent the groovy 1960s vibe of the picture itself, aside from those French horns banging in at the end, which conjure impressions of a John Barry 007 track.

7) Iron Man

Energetic and up-tempo, Ramin Djawadi‘s theme sets the tone for what is still the best of Marvel’s superhero movies, with building strings beneath rock guitars giving a big-shouldered, machine-like beat to what might otherwise be another disposable summertime popcorn movie anthem. It gets your motor running and is the perfect warm-up for the fast-paced, industrial superhero story that follows.

6) Batman (Tim Burton version)

Batman claims another slot on my list (and it will shortly become evident why this list could as easily have been the Batman Music Top Ten). I was never wild about Tim Burton’s Batman but it was one of the biggest films of all time, and Danny Elfman’s film score has achieved iconic status. In 1989, Elfman was still in the early stages of his film score career, and hadn’t yet begun to relentlessly recycle the “dark carnival” sound that characterizes his later work. Elfman’s Batman score is by turns shrill and moody, with a cheeky, big-film self consciousness that is unafraid to slap you in the face and say, well, you knew you were lining up for a big-budget Batman picture, so let’s get this show on the road!

5) Batman Begins

Better for me than Elfman’s Batman is the film score for Batman Begins. The four-color heritage of Elfman’s Batman has been entirely flushed from the system in this more serious, urgent, and threatening theme, which I could see Bruce Wayne popping in his CD player when he needs to get across town in his Lamborghini Murcielago LP640. That co-composer Hans Zimmer so thoroughly cannibalized this score for his later collaboration with Christopher Nolan in Inception shouldn’t be held against what is a powerful piece of music that works as well for the opening titles as it does for the action sequences of the film.

4) Wonder Woman

Finishing just short of the podium and owing it’s placement more to nostalgia than quality, the first season mix of Wonder Woman’s theme song sports an extra-funky mix of this theme’s catchy beat. Maybe it gets points for being ahead of its time, because I could have sworn this was a 1980s song, but the series dates to 1975!

I will admit that this is the worst song on my list … but it fits comfortably into the so-bad-it’s-good category. Hear it once and the song burrows into your brain like an earwig.

Plus — Lynda Carter, in her satin tights, fightin’ for her rights!

3) Superman Theme

In any sane world, John Williams’ theme from Superman would rate the top of the list — it is the first music that leaps to mind when most people think of superhero themes, instantly-recognizable and sending chills down the spine. But this isn’t a sane world … this is Longbox Graveyard!

An indispensable component of what is still the only Superman movie to get it (sort of) right, this score comfortably resides among the greatest in film history, alongside Williams’ classic music for pictures like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The most unabashedly heroic music on this list (of the “serious” pieces at least), the score is old fashioned and schmaltzy in places … but then again, so is Superman, and rather than aging poorly, I prefer to think that Williams’ Superman score understands the heart of this iconic hero, and refuses to bend to the temporary tone of the day.

2) Spider-Man

This list begins and ends with TV themes, and only one superhero TV theme is more iconic than the opening credits of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon show.

This song hails from the great era of expository television theme songs, where the song was anthem and series summary all in one. There’s no way even the most sugared-up Saturday morning cartoon viewer could fail to understand what Spider-Man is all about after absorbing this tight, psychedelic, sixty-second aural bludgeoning that leaves nothing to chance. Hear this song once and you’ll know every one of Spidey’s most important powers, and you’ll be revved up and ready to go for a show that never quite delivered the goods as well as its sensational opening. But sheesh, kid, what do you want? It’s 1967, and no one in their right mind is going to spend a nickle on a superhero show. Now shut up, eat your Frosted Flakes, and pay attention to the commercials!

1) Batman

You should have seen this coming when I put Wonder Woman at #4. Obviously Longbox Graveyard is not afraid of cheese, which means I’m not afraid to name the cheesiest superhero theme of all time as king of the hill.

The Batman theme shoots the moon on the “expository theme song” style, performing a reductio ad absurdum to arrive at an anthem that uses only one word — Batman! Batman! Batman! Batman! Batman, Batman, Batman!

It’s the perfect, spy movie/surf guitar 1960s theme for what would become Batmania. The series also features good incidental music, though lightning would NOT strike twice when they rolled out the Batgirl theme:

And there you have it! Ten titanic tunes for your superheroing pleasure. Where did I get it right? What is my most egregious oversight? Sing out in the comments, below!

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #45 Panel Gallery: Avengers Assemble!

BONUS! Since you’re in a listening mood, mouse over to the We Talk Comics podcast, where you can hear the voice of the Longbox Graveyard in my rambling interview and rant (mostly rant) about digital comics! Check it out!

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With this installment, Longbox Graveyard hits the half-century mark! While you can always reference all past Longbox Graveyard columns through the Checklist link at the top of every page, to mark this solemn occasion I thought I’d count down the top ten Longbox Graveyard blogs by hits.

Cue the drumroll and the David Letterman voice as we begin with the #10 item on our Top Ten List of Longbox Graveyard posts for the past year!

10) Tomb It May Concern

Tomb of Dracula is a seminal comic of the 1970s and one of the reasons I started Longbox Graveyard. I was anxious to revisit this book, but my memories were based on the final issues of the run, and the early numbers were rougher sledding than I’d anticipated. I do remain enthused for this book and have been actively filling in my missing issues. I will get around to reviewing the rest of the series, though at this point it doesn’t look like that will happen before Halloween.

one of my recently-added Tomb of Dracula back issues, purchased out of the bin at the excellent House of Secrets comics shop in Burbank, California

It’s good to see this post has gotten some attention through the year, though I think most of that was down to a surge of hits from the Reddit comicbooks group, when I advertised it over there with the headline, “Before Vampires Sparkled, There Was Tomb of Dracula!” Never underestimate the power of nerd rage — about the one thing comics fans can agree on is that they hate and shun Twilight. Unfortunately, those Reddit readers are mostly interested in contemporary books and I don’t think I converted many of them into regular readers. I do think I made some valid points about the harder-than-expected edge of this series and it’s unsparing look at a genuinely evil protagonist — in a lot of ways I think Tomb of Dracula was (and still is) ahead of its time.

Longbox Graveyard has a long future ahead of it because so many of my favorite books have yet to come up for review here. In addition to finishing off Tomb of Dracula, I want to do several columns on Master of Kung Fu, Daredevil, and Swamp Thing, none one of which much figured in the first year of this blog. It’s crazy that I haven’t touched those books but that I did a Godzilla review this year! This project keeps getting bigger the deeper I get into it.

9) Top Ten Marvel Comics Characters

I did a pair of favorite character Top Ten blogs this year, and they both made this year end lineup. Lists are red meat for bloggers — easy to put together, and likely to draw comments, as everyone has an opinion about the best and worst of everything. My Marvel list wasn’t especially good writing, but it was important in that it helped bring together an emerging community around this blog, challenging my understanding of Sub-Mariner and taking me to task for snubbing Spider-Man. Community is critical for blog retention (and Top Tens are a nice, lazy way to structure a blog), so this list did its job, even if I’m not terribly proud of the work.

Plus anything that got me to take another look at Steve Ditko‘s Spider-Man must be counted as time well spent.

another special benefit and unexpected pleasure of this past year has been a new appreciation for Steve Ditko

8) This Female Fights Back!

My Ms. Marvel column represents the best of Longbox Graveyard on a personal level — not because of the quality of the column, but because without Longbox Graveyard, there’s no way on earth I ever would have rediscovered this series. This really was just another stack of books that I intended to offer a cursory glance on the way to eBay, but issue after issue I found myself unaccountably caught up in this admittedly marginal book, and not just because I developed a crush on Carol Danvers. Longbox Graveyard has been about rediscovering the comics of my youth and Ms. Marvel was among the most pleasant rediscoveries of the past year.

Carol is coming back as Captain Marvel, but I like her old look better

There is a vibrant female comics fandom scene on the internet, particularly at sites like DC Women Kicking Ass and Has Boobs, Reads Comics, and I think my Ms. Marvel column gets a few referrals from those sites, but mostly I think this column resonated because there isn’t a lot on the web about the original Ms. Marvel run.

I think the Ms. Marvel character is an important part of the dialogue about sexism in comics, and how female characters are generally sexualized while male characters are idealized, but it’s above my pay grade to sort that out. I just like this book (and since running this blog I’ve addressed my old mistake in filled in the rest of my Ms. Marvel, volume 1 collection, and look forward to reading those last few issues soon).

7) Panel Gallery: To Me, My Board!

My “Panel Galleries” were an experiment born out of desperation, and this first Panel Gallery only did so-so at launch, but it has continued to attract views so I shouldn’t be surprised to see it elbowing into my top posts of the year. Panel Galleries are the “fill in issues” of Longbox Graveyard, and while I will sometimes run them to coincide with outside media events (like the “Avengers Assemble” gallery I ran just before the movie came out), more often than not a Panel Gallery is a last-minute offering to keep my weekly posting streak alive while I work on a meatier subject or just take a couple weeks off to recharge.

This particular Panel Gallery focused on a narrow and obscure trope — the stock phrase the Silver Surfer calls out to summon his flying board. I have several other Panel Galleries on the boil, with panels excerpted and squirreled away in secret folders as I encounter them via my Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited subscription. A few panels that might otherwise have wound up in a Panel Gallery were repurposed for the “Say What?!” features I will be contributing this summer over at the Stash My Comics blog, and past Panel Galleries have new life as the backbone of Longbox Graveyard’s presence on Pinterest. Not bad for a fill-in feature!

If you have suggestions for future Panel Galleries, let me know. My next scheduled Panel Gallery will appear in July, focusing on the faces of Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man and supporting characters. The Ditko Panel Gallery I did on Doctor Strange faces finished well down the list for the year, but I really like seeing those Ditko faces up close, so you’re still going to get a lot of larger-than-life Ditko supporting characters in July when the new movie comes out.

a preview of my forthcoming Amazing Spider-Faces Panel Gallery

6) American Dream

I was still finding my footing when I published my fanboy rave for Ed Brubaker’s Captain America. I was in a honeymoon period of rediscovering comics and this Cap run likely benefited from that in scoring a rare A-plus score on the Longbox Graveyard Report Card. As much as I enjoyed the run at the time, two follow-on volumes remain unread on my shelf. Even with excellent modern books immediately to hand, I still prefer to spend my time with sometimes-inferior Bronze and Silver Age books.

Which isn’t to say I over-rated this series — not at all! It’s just that I went a little overboard with Cap in the early days of Longbox Graveyard and I haven’t quite recovered. Those aforementioned volumes are still in the shrink and while I hunted down the missing numbers to fill out my Jack Kirby Cap run from the 1970s, and I haven’t mustered the enthusiasm to plunge into those, either. Life is long, and it will seem longer still if I start treating comic books like homework assignments. I’ll get to these issues when the impulse strikes me. In the meantime, I’m happy to have them in my collection.

This particular post benefited from a surge of readers when author Ed Brubaker mentioned it on his Twitter feed, but like many spikes, that exposure appears to have resulted in few continuing readers. Still, it was nice to make contact with a working pro (and I would also exchange Facebook messages with Walt Simonson over the columns I did on his outstanding Thor run). For several weeks, that was my single strongest traffic day for Longbox Graveyard, eclipsed only by a mysterious surge of hits when I published my Beneath The Longbox Graveyard blog in February (which paradoxically did not end up making this year-end list), and then shattered by last week’s Thanos post.

5) Have You Seen This Barbarian?

This column might have been my best writing for Longbox Graveyard. Certainly it was my most heartfelt, and it’s good to see that my prescription for how Conan the Barbarian might be better handled on film proved one of the most popular posts of the year. A similar post lamenting the misfire of John Carter was also popular, falling just outside this top ten, despite being live for only a fraction of the time of my Conan piece.

it also helped to linkbait Jason Momoa naked

Almost a year later, this movie is forgotten, while the half-life of my Hyborian disappointment has burned off, and I’ve started reading some Conan again, thanks to the Savage Sword of Conan reprints published by Dark Horse Comics. I did a lot of Conan columns this year but I might sneak in one more in the year ahead …

4) Nemedian Chronicles

… because it seems my Conan coverage was more popular than I’d surmised. This is one of the earliest columns on this list, and it doubtless benefited from accumulating hits for nearly a year (and from the aforementioned linkbaiting), but I think the gorgeous Barry Windsor-Smith artwork in this run remains worthy of celebration, especially in their Dark Horse reprint form, and I stand by the high marks I offered Conan the Barbarian #1-25 on the Longbox Graveyard Report Card.

great cover, despite the helmet

3) Longbox Shortbox

Another format born of desperation that proved a successful innovation, my first “Longbox Shortbox” came around when I found I had several reviews that weren’t gelling as longer pieces, but still had one or two points I wanted to share. By combining them into a single post I felt they added up to the substance afforded by my “full” review format, and so the circle was squared, giving me a format to publish shorter reviews and also letting me discuss books that didn’t merit a full column all on their own. I’ve since made the format “official”, though I will be ratcheting back on the number of mini-reviews in each Shortbox column, as five mini-reviews ends up being longer, more exhausting, and less focused than a single stand-alone piece.

There were some decent insights here. My review of the earliest issues of the Avengers would warm me up for more extensive coverage of that book these past few weeks, and reviewing Don McGregor’s Black Panther in this format let me write a negative review in the fewest words possible. It’s not that I shy away from negative reviews — it’s just that my distaste for this Panther run came down to disliking the author’s style, which isn’t the greatest basis for criticism. The biggest misstep with this column was “grading down” New Teen Titans to B-plus (when it surely deserves an “A”) but that was also fodder for comments, which is never a bad thing.

2) Young Justice

An outlier on a comics blog, my animation review of DC’s Young Justice cartoon continues to pull hits each and every week, seeming to strengthen through the year, and might have come in as my top post of the year if I’d taken my traffic snapshot closer to press time. It might be because there are kids out there looking for news on this show’s notoriously erratic broadcast schedule … or it might be because mentioning “Batman Handjob” in your lead paragraph is powerful SEO mojo! Either way, the intertubes loves them some Young Justice!

I was happy for a chance to talk about Young Justice, which I continue to watch with my boys (when it is on). Warners did contact me with an offer to review another Young Justice DVD release, but I turned them down, as I felt I’d already said everything I needed to say about the show. Film and television reviews will remain the exception, rather than the rule here at Longbox Graveyard, but I suspect you can look forward to reviews of Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Batman The Brave And The Bold in the year ahead (provided I’m still on the Warners freebie list!).

1) Top Ten DC Comics Characters

Told you that lists were popular! Still, I was surprised to see this post proved the most popular of the year, and I think a lot of that popularity has to do with the robust comment thread this post generated, with thirty-odd posts offering their own Top Tens and debating the merits of Aquaman. I certainly can’t credit the success of this piece to my writing, which was some of the flabbiest on offer here at Longbox Graveyard, and displayed my general ignorance of DC characters by picking a third of the list strictly on the basis of their headgear!

I do promise more DC coverage in the year ahead, starting with some Batman as soon as next week. I’ll also be checking out some of the DC New 52 relaunch now that the trades are hitting the market, though I don’t know if they’ll prove blog-worthy.

Those were the hits. There were misses, too, with my Supergods column proving especially disappointing in terms of the traffic it (didn’t) pull, but even my top posts don’t get a lot of hits in the scheme of things, and the first purpose of Longbox Graveyard is that I please myself, so traffic numbers are of secondary importance. I do like watching my hit numbers increase, though, so if the impulse strikes you, please revisit these or other Longbox Graveyard posts, and tell your friends about the blog.

Thank you for supporting my work these past fifty issues!

NEXT WEEK: #51 Escape From The Longbox Shortbox

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• #36 Longbox Bulletin! (longboxgraveyard.com)
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Comic book heroes are usually rendered in an impossible physical ideal, but today’s superheroes go beyond Olympian physiques and into some crazy realm where even their muscles have muscles. Trying to pick the fittest and strongest amongst them is a mug’s game. Even Forbush Man looks like he’s been working out!

Manliness is something else entirely. You need a lot more than a square jaw and chiseled abs to join this particular club — you need a manly attitude, too. And since we’re talking comic books, we’re looking for exaggerated manliness, while stopping short of being — ahem — too manly. Stubbly chins, stogies, and gravelly voices all count for a lot. So does pimp style, womanizing, and a tendency to think with their fists.

It also helps to be kinda sorta a regular guy, or at least as regular as you can get while infused with gamma radiation, cosmic rays, or a super-soldier serum.

Who is the manliest superhero of them all? Joining me for today’s oh-so-serious nerd debate are Tom Mason, comic book scholar extraordinaire (and when he isn’t doing more important things, you can find him over at Comix 411). Also here is Chris Ulm, last seen at Longbox Graveyard as a part of my WonderCon panel, and also my co-host for the blog I did on Deathlok several weeks ago (and it occurs to me that Deathlok is pretty damn manly, too, but dead men are excluded from consideration).

(Both of these gentlemen will join me at my upcoming Comic-Con panel, so if you don’t like their choices below, c’mon by our panel and throw rotten fruit at them).

Our goal is to come up with a list of the ten manliest superheroes, but knowing these guys, it’s going to be a chore to stay on target …

PAUL: Who gets an honorable mention before we get to the list?

ULM: Aquaman might get my vote — the fact that he has the sheer swinging stones to show up riding a seahorse and spends his time talking to sea-spiders says a lot about his confidence — he obviously doesn’t give a crap what anyone thinks — not even Batman.

PAUL: Not Aquaman, no — not since he went sitcom on us. Plus he let his wife push him around during that family RV vacation. No one can be hectored by his spouse and make the list. That’s the reason Spider-Man doesn’t make it — Gwen Stacy, MJ, and Black Cat are the holy trinity of comic book girlfriends but Peter’s a mommas boy and he’s whipped.

TOM: Everyone knows Flash and Atom are whipped.

PAUL: Flash is SO whipped! I spent half a review column on Iris bugging Barry about being late and not the man Flash is and blah blah blah. It goes beyond the Lois Lane trope into some kind of power exchange fetish play.

TOM: Flash has never appealed to me because of this weird henpecked way they wrote him in the Silver Age. I like strong female characters, but they made Iris some kind of naggy harpy and turned Flash into a guy who was constantly fretting about getting in trouble. The whole recurring “Barry’s late again” with Iris standing in a doorway checking her watch is just too much. All those 60s DC editors, especially Weisinger and Schwartz, always put out comics with these bizarre male-female dynamics that seem mean-spirited and misogynistic and out of touch with reality.

And the Atom, the Ray Palmer one, is another weird 1960s domestic drama, with a guy who has the powers of a man but’s just six inches tall. I’m not buying it and no one else is.

ULM: Speaking of little guys, Ant Man has to go to bars explaining that he’s … Ant Man. And he STILL nailed the winsome Wasp. That’s MANLY. If he had manned up and just stayed Ant Man, he’d definitely get my vote. After all, he did create Ultron in his spare time. But since Henry Pym keeps changing his name like a giant pussy (“Oooh, check me out: I’m YELLOWJACKET! I’m GIANT-MAN now!”) he’s off my list.

plus, being a dick does NOT make you manly!

TOM: How about a lady’s man like The Spirit?

PAUL: The Spirit is interesting. Because of the femme fatales?

TOM: I think yeah because of the femme fatales. He’s got chicks falling all over him – most of them are evil and trying to kill him and he doesn’t catch on until it’s almost too late, but they keep a’coming. And he likes it. After fifteen beautiful women have tried to kill you, you might get suspicious of #16, but The Spirit welcomes her with open arms. That’s a special kind of guts, or the biggest lack of self-awareness for at least seven pages of every eight page story.

PAUL: By that criteria we’d have to include Daredevil. He notched up Black Widow, Electra, and pre-crackwhore Karen Page. Plus he holds his own with crap powers, and wears a costume only a blind guy would think is cool (and pulls it off).

TOM: What about Green Arrow? No powers, but he took stupid equipment and made it work. He’s got some manliness/sexist issues that often threaten to overwhelm him, but for awhile he had a love arrow for Black Canary.

PAUL: Good one, it crossed my mind, I suppose every case I make for Daredevil would apply here too.

TOM: Exactly. Plus, Green Arrow has very strong opinions about a lot of life issues and isn’t afraid to point his finger into anyone’s chest for emphasis. It takes a special kind of man to make an arrow with a boxing glove on it. Oliver Queen is always ready for a fight.

PAUL: All right, I’ll put The Spirit, Daredevil, and Green Arrow on the list at number ten. It’s my list and I can break the rules!

10) The Spirit, Daredevil, Green Arrow (half-mad chick magnets)

If stupid gear is going to score manly points, how about Guy Gardner? Moe haircut. Bad attitude. Jerkwad. But no way is anyone manly enough to pull of a Green Lantern costume.

Anyone else?

TOM: Fawcett’s Capt. Marvel is like the Tim Tebow of super-heroes. He gets the job done, but he’s not going to clear out the biker bar in the middle of the night.

PAUL: How about that other big boy scout — Superman?

ULM: Superman technically should get credit for being manly because one can only imagine the damage a swarm of super-sperms could do to Metropolis. That alone should give him high standing in the manly sweepstakes. However, as an alien, technically he’s not a man, so forget it.

PAUL: Superman’s seemed a little limp to me since that Brandon Routh picture. I don’t much like Zack Snyder but if anyone is going to give Superman a testosterone injection, he’s the guy. Though I expect he’ll go all 300 and make Superman just a little … too manly.

TOM: Superman’s now this wistful nostalgic character content to sit atop tall buildings, smell flowers and pick out shapes in the clouds. He’s like Dr. Manhattan in the early parts of Watchmen. He’s like Xanax in a cape now. At least in the old days, Jimmy would turn himself into a giant turtle or Lois would throw herself out the window to make his life interesting.

ULM: Since you mention Jimmy …

PAUL: We didn’t. C’mon, I need someone for number nine.

TOM: How about Lobo?

PAUL: Never read Lobo. Whaddya think?

TOM: Lobo is technically some kind of alien freak biker badass. He doesn’t take crap from anyone and doesn’t fight fair. He’s manly in the same way that a Hell’s Angel is manly at 2am Sunday. He would totally own Burning Man and those people would follow him anywhere.

PAUL: I’d put him on the list but Ulm’s already disqualified Superman for being an alien. And if a motorcycle was enough to get you in I’d pick Ghost Rider. With that flaming skull head, he’s like a living tattoo on the back of a mass-murderer’s neck. Leather. Hotline to Satan. Charter member of the Legion of Monsters. Problem is that Nick Cage has played him twice and he’s also a charter member of the Champions, the lamest superhero team of all time.

TOM: How about Wildcat? My understanding is that he is/was a boxer. He’s got no super powers except brute strength and a mean right hook, so he’s a little like Batman in that regard (but without any gadgets). I’d say it’s manly for a guy to put on a cat costume to fight crime. That’s the nine lives of brass balls.

PAUL: Plus I think in one of DC’s innumerable reboots, Wildcat is the guy who taught Batman how to fight. OK, I don’t know if he belongs or not, but we’re not making a lot of headway so he goes on the list.

9) Wildcat (are YOU going to tell him he’s NOT manly?)

Wildcat seems like a regular guy, too. Like Ben Grimm. Ben’s got the stogie and you could drink beer with him and he’d pay. He’s got the New York street kid gang thing going on. Test pilot. He’s approachable but too much like your uncle to make the list.

ULM: The manliest super-hero is Thundra. You know she has penis, but maybe you’d still date her for the story …

PAUL: Sorry, you need to have a Y chromosome to make the list.

Thundra is NOT amused!

OK, since this is going nowhere fast I’m going to just start putting names on the list. Like … Black Panther. So, so cool. African king. Many wives. Pimp style and for awhile he was a hip hop guy (maybe still is). Downside: Token Avenger.

8) T’Challa (but you can call him Black Panther)

If pimp style counts, then we have to consider Sub-Mariner. Goes to work in his underwear (and when he doesn’t he wears the Pimp Suit and pulls it off). Perpetually pissed off. Royal blood. Has a giant octopus for his wingman. Fought Nazis AND the Japanese. Attacked New York a bunch of times. Downsides — Shares many of Aquaman’s negatives, he’s a Pretty Boy, plus couldn’t steal Sue Storm from Rubberman and he’s a fish. And if being a fish or an animal knocks you out, then there goes Howard the Duck, who has a stogie and no pants, but there was definitely something happening with Bev.

And it’s apropos of nothing, but I think we have to include Thor. Divine hammer. Muscles out to here. Can drink the whole mead hall under the table, got the whole viking thing going on. Downside: Cute little wings on the helmet and talks funny. Pretty. But I thought the movie last year did a decent job of making Thor seem like a regular guy, that he wouldn’t cockblock you or make you feel like a sidekick. He’s got those Warriors Three always hanging around and they don’t seem any worse for it.

7) Thor (long hair, thees and thous, but still manly)

I guess Gods are in, while aliens are out. Any other edge cases I’m forgetting?

ULM: What about Black Bolt? He is the ultimate version of the tall silent type. Apart from the occasional tear slowly crawling down his cheek, he keeps his lips zipped and only opens his mouth to destroy ancient Kree cities.

PAUL: Not sure I’d pick him over someone like Orion of the New Gods. He’s heir to the throne of a deathgod. Bad dad issues. Messed-up face and wants to fight everyone. But all the New Gods are kind of sissified — not as bad as Seraphim, but still …

How about someone more down-to-earth. Like Luke Cage! First, he’s Luke Cage! Should have been played by Samuel L. Jackson, but now he’s too old. Defends the ghetto and has a steel chain for a belt. Curses by saying “Christmas!” Downside: Curses by saying Christmas!

6) Luke Cage (Christmas!)

Who am I missing?

TOM: Judge Dredd?

PAUL: Dredd definitely, completely forgot about him. He’d in the running for #1 if he had even one lady on his dance card. His one-dimensionality holds him back, if you consider being the fifth manliest superhero being held back. He wears that helmet to bed, you know. Not sure if that helps or hinders his case.

5) Judge Dredd (he is the Law … which means no time for the ladies)

And if ladies are part of the equation, then you have to give it up for … Iron Man. Fought the Commies, and he’s a merchant of death.

ULM: Iron Man. Heart condition. Drinks. Smokes. Womanizes. Builds cool shit in his garage. Drives fast cars. Hangs out with thunder gods, super-soldiers and Nick Fury. Most importantly, Tony Stark has man-servants like Happy Hogan to do his taxes and drive him around to bang super-models. C’mon — is this really a contest? Think about what Bruce Wayne does in his spare time — obsess about crime and train young men to be his “ward.” NO CONTEST.

PAUL: Yeah, but there are some drawbacks, especially as he compares to Batman. Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are a push on the millionaire playboy thing, but Batman scores points for working without a net. How manly do you have to be to take on bad guys in what is essentially the battlesuit version of an F-15? Plus, Batman has the stubble while Tony has that pencil-thin mustache. And he can’t hold his booze.

Still:

4) Iron Man (manly enough for this room)

But technology only gets you so far. Guts counts for more than gears, and Wolverine gets points for the stogie, the hair, the tortured past, and the chip on his shoulder — more than enough to make up for the showtunes thing.

3) Wolverine (despite the Hugh Jackman thing)

Keep the stubble and the attitude, remove the Canadian thing, and add a whole bunch more women and you get …

2) Batman (despite the Val Kilmer thing)

Man points up for the gravelly voice and stubble (when Jim Lee draws him at least). Major playa with disposable starlets and supervillainesses like Cat Woman. Put a bun in the oven with Talia al Ghul, and probably Talia Shire too. No real powers. Loses points for hanging out with Robin.

manly pajamas

ULM: Really, all this stuff is just throwing you off the track. The real manliest man is JIMMY OLSEN. Yes, the alter ego of multiple super-heroes through the years including (but probably not limited to) Mr. Action, Giant Turtle Boy, Elastic Lad, Flamebird, Speed Demon, Insect Guy, Morbidly Obese guy, Gorilla, Viking guy, etc.

When not solving crimes in one of these guises, Jimmy has to always be on call and kowtow to a his “best friend,” a homoerotic alien fixated on a crazy woman desperately climbing the office ladder of a two-bit newspaper. Non-stop drama with no escape in sight. The fact that Jimmy Olsen is not swinging over a drain makes him, by far, the manliest super-hero in any universe.

PAUL: Sorry, Ulm, I’m not buying it. Maybe you could squeeze Jimmy in at number ten with that kind of logic but you missed your chance. We’re talking about numero uno now, and that means just one person …

1) Nick Fury (Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

He’s number one and it’s not even close. Eye patch. Stubble. Stogie. Actually IS played by Samuel L. Jackson. No super powers but he’s still The Boss. Pretty sure he nailed Madame Hydra and he had that tragic lost love in the old Sgt. Fury comics.

played by Samuel L. Jackson AND the Hoff? THAT’S Manly!

TOM: Also, Nick fury has the Infinity Formula so he will live forever.

Nick’s got a special kind of manliness. He fought Hitler, founded a secret agency, built a secret base that hovers in the air, he gets to boss around the superheroes despite having no actual powers, and he carries a gun, even when he’s on his giant secret hovercraft base. I’ll say it again: He bosses around the Avengers, and they like it.

PAUL: Damn right they like it. And you know why? Because Nick is MANLY, that’s why, manlier even than Giant-Sized Man Thing!

And that’s the list! Thanks to Tom and Ulm for their wise contributions (notwithstanding the whole Jimmy Olsen bit).

Agree, disagree …? Sound off in the comments, below!

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #55 — The Amazing Spider-Man

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I’ve already enthused about Instagram as a social media channel for superheroes, and since July of 2012 I’ve been posting images daily. I’ve worked my way up to 800+ followers on Instagram, and have begun to develop a little community over there … I’ve found that comments are more likely to break out on Instagram than on Tumblr or even Twitter, where my Instagram image feed is echoed. I don’t think Instagram drives a lot of traffic back here to Longbox Graveyard, but it is proving to be a surprisingly strong and vibrant superhero community.

I thought it would be interesting to see which images I’ve posted to Instagram these past six-odd months have been the most popular, ranked by “likes.” Of course it helps to keep these things in perspective. When I say “popular,” I mean “popular by Silver Age superhero standards” … my top image has scored only a fraction of the top images on the service, where pouting self-shots by celebrity narcissists ring up 5000 Likes or more.

The success of my images is also closely linked to the size of my network, and as my Followers have grown, so too have my Likes. Even though I’ve been posting since July, the oldest image on this list only dates back to November 2012. As the list will show, having my Followers experience significant growth during the Christmas season also attracted a lot of eyeballs for holiday-themed images.

Anyway, here are the ten eleven most popular images I’ve posted to Instagram, ranked by Likes!

10) (tie) Old School Avengers by Jack Kirby, and …

… Hebrew Hulk by Jack Kirby!

Silver Age images from masters like Jack Kirby have proven popular on Instagram. The Avengers have been a strong draw, I think owing largely to their movie success, and this cover image of a Hulk comic localized in Hebrew benefitted from being posted as a holiday greeting on the first night of Hanukkah.

9) (tie) Hulk vs. Batman, and …

… Surfing Super-Friends!

Batman is solid gold for Instagram “likes,” and this surfing Super-Friends hits the hipster Instagram demographic head-on.

The Hulk/Batman cover from DC Special Series #27 by José Luis García-López shows one of the last and least-likely of the inter-publisher superhero crossovers of the 1970s and 80s, and to judge by comments, many current fans didn’t know this book even existed! These kinds of images also help spur conversation by posting them with messages like “Batman vs. Hulk — who wins?”

7) Giant Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag 1974 by John Buscema

The covers of Marvel’s holiday editions were often the best part of the package. My Instagram followers took a big jump toward the end of 2012 and these holiday-themed images proved especially popular over the Christmas break.

6) The Bat-Man by Bob Kane

Batman makes the list again (and not for the last time) with this classic image from the cover of Detective Comics #31.

5) (tie) Hulk vs. Thor from Defenders #10 by John Romita, and …

… Japanese Batman!

I can’t account for Japanese Batman … I don’t even know where I found the image … but like those surfing Super-Friends, Japanese Batman is a shaped-charge designed to penetrate Instagram sensibilities.

The Hulk vs. Thor image also helped stimulate a “who would win” conversation (which leaned toward the Hulk) and reminded me that I’d never read the famed Avengers vs. Defenders War, of which this issue was a part. (An omission I will remedy shortly!)

3) Batman by Melissa Smith

Batman strikes again! I saw Melissa Smith’s artistic impression of several superheroes over at Robot 6 and her Batman image proved especially popular on Instagram. The formula of popular hero + a humorous or artistic take seems to yield dividends.

2) Santa Thing!

Not sure who drew this image, which originally appeared in a Marvel Comics holiday house ad. Longbox Graveyard readers may remember this image headlined my Holiday Gift Guide. This image also benefited from a holiday period bounce, along with …

1) Giant Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag 1975 by John Romita

The most popular image I’ve posted to Instagram was another classic Marvel Christmas cover … and for a full review of the issue behind that cover (which sadly does not live up to Luke Cage trimming a Christmas tree with his belt chain), be sure to read my column here.

Feel free to comment if you have art credits that I’ve missed or mis-attributed above, and I’d especially like to hear from you if you’ve found your way to this Longbox Graveyard blog from Instagram. Remember that you can find me on Instagram as longbox_graveyard, and you can also take a web-based peak at my latest images here.

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #85 The Defenders: Who Remembers Scorpio?

Other Longbox Graveyard Comic Book Social Media Guides

• Guide To Comic Books On Instagram
• Guide To Comic Books On Pinterest
• Guide To Comics Bargains On eBay

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