The art definitely helped for me, perfect for portraying superheroes as signs and portents of doom, emphasizing the sinister aspects of the idea. Ross has taken a lot of heat lately but I just feel he's like anyone else with a distinctive style in this game: he has to be on the right project, with the right script, or…

Has anyone mentioned the Schmidt/Giffen Annihilation mini yet? That's really the birth of the Guardians of the Galaxy film right there, not all the Abnett & Lanning crud that followed. If you like sci-fi blockbusters and want to know superheroes better, that's your book. The real problem with that series is that you'd…

What worked for me in the mid-2000s was a bunch of Marvel issues I ended up with for some reason with the covers removed, like they'd been donated to a physician's waiting room or something, and maybe they had and they'd been rejected, because some of them sure weren't appropriate for kids. Ultimate, main imprint,…

Lois Lane is a little more tolerable than "Jackie Jokers"

Doctor Strange v. 2 would be a good introduction to the genre for anyone who likes psychedelia. And that should be a lot of people who want to check out superheroes, I'm thinking.

Not a bad suggestion. Brubaker's work in general works well for neophytes, because it tilts superheroes back toward political thrillers, police procedurals and neo-noir, things people have encountered anyway through film and TV even if they couldn't define those genres for you if asked.

I think it would have to be a particular sort of person who would want to start superheroes with Simonson's Thor, a space opera fan, but that's close enough to the subgenre anyway that there are probably plenty of them.

Still, with our trigger-warning hefty society today, I'm surprised that DC hasn't come under fire for some of its Golden Age collections with their racial stereotyping.

"any real Superman" is kind of funny since the best books for Superman have been outside of the main titles for quite a while now.

When I was new to DC, I found Waid's Flash inaccessible to newcomers and Kingdom Come entertaining. Complete flip of what you said.

I'm not too fond of Bendis, but he's got good material for newcomers if you go back to the mid-2000s. New Avengers helped me start reading comics as an adult, although that was partly because I was used to character speech from the 1990s, which Tim O'Neill describes as "mannered", a great word for it. Bendis's…

You'd mentioned your instructor took a lot of time to establish everyone's preexisting connections. I just don't understand why someone would do that. Most of them are superfluous to the story and it would intimidate the hell out of a new reader.

I remember from the cartoon that while Richie Rich had a dog named Dollar, his poor cousin had a pig named "No Cents". Cruel, but memorable.

Seconded. I didn't even know who Captain Marvel was when I read that book. I knew Superman and Lex Luthor, of course, and Batman, and Ra's al Ghul from the 1990s cartoon, and Wonder Woman, sort of, and I knew the Flash was a guy who could run fast? That was it. No problems following the book, though.

It's just a joke about how Liefeld is still one of the most reviled artists among comics critics. McCloud was an early adopter of iconoclasm on Liefeld and it's trickled down since then.

I think it's fair enough, since most people in the United States who have seen Ross's work have probably seen his watercolor political cartoons, not his comics, and they're a little provocative if you're a Republican.

I just don't get this. I read Watchmen and Kingdom Come with next to no knowledge of the characters or their origins. I didn't have any problems, although of course Watchmen was more interesting, because it's better written.

People keep saying this but I read Kingdom Come with no more knowledge of DC than I'd acquired through watching the 1990s Batman cartoon. I liked it more then than I do now, because it was kind of a goody bag. I'd never seen those characters before, never knew the history of the Charlton or Fawcett characters, etc. I…

I always thought it was a little weird when people talked about how making the original Ant-Man a little messed up "ruined" the character. Like this article says, he was boring as hell to almost everyone until they re-established him as a mad scientist. I still wonder why they didn't just adapt Eric O'Grady for the…

Mark Millar's good work (citation needed)