Author Archives: comiczombie

10 (More) Great Spider-Man Stories

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Spider-Man, obviously, is one of the most popular characters in comic books (or movies, or cartoons, or video games, or…) and has been for decades now. His popularity has meant for most of the 60+ years of his publishing history he has had more than one ongoing title running simultaneously. Not counting what if…? or Ultimate stories (those would need to be different lists), I wanted to pick out 10 tales of the webbed wall-crawling wonder that will show you why he, his villains, and his cast of supporting characters are second to none.

I should point out this is NOT a top 10 list, in that these are not ranked in any particular order, nor are they the 10 BEST Spider-Man stories, or my absolute favorite 10. These are just 10 cool stories that maybe slipped your radar or were out before you were reading Spider-Man and/or were born. I imagine I will revisit this topic, because it was hard to narrow it to just 10 for this article.

So, if you haven’t read these, do yourself a favor and check them out, and if you have read them, well… good.

Check out our first installment of great Spidey stories here, and check out some X-Men recommendations here and here!

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Essential Reads: Captain America

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On our latest podcasts (issue #51) we gave our recommendations for the star-spangled sentinel of liberty: Captain America!

The good Captain has been around for close to a century (!!!!) now, so there are quite a lot of Captain America comic books! Wanna start reading some awesome Captain America comics but aren’t sure where to start? Here are our recommendations (and some honorable mentions) for some awesome Cap comics!

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Essential Reads: Green Arrow

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On one of our latest podcasts (issue #48) we gave our recommendations for the emerald archer: Green Arrow!

Here are some honorable mentions and both Chris and Erik’s picks for their favorite- or at least most recommended- Green Arrow stories!

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10 (More) Great X-Men Stories

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You know ’em, you love ’em, it’s Marvel’s- maybe comics’- greatest team, the Adjectiveless, Exceptional, Astonishing, Wolverine & The, New, Immortal, X-Men! They’ve been around for over 60 years now, and insanely popular for 40+ of those years. Combining that with the fact that for many of those years there have been numerous titles running simultaneously, you end up with thousands of X-Men comics!

Out of those thousands there are so, so many great stories. The Marvel universe’s best and most important moments are full of X-Men stories. There are so many amazing ones, and many of them so drastically different, that creating any kind of ranking is both impossible and leads down the road to madness.

So, that being said, the following are not necessarily my favorite X-Men stories, but I love them all the same. There are still so many more I could include, so we may have a couple more installments of these.

All right, let’s get to it! Here are, in no particular order, 10 great X-Men (or X-Men adjacent/related) stories! (Also, you can find the first of these here, and one for Spider-Man here!)

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10 Great X-Men Stories

Posted by comiczombie on

You know ’em, you love ’em, it’s Marvel’s- maybe comics’- greatest team, the Adjectiveless, Exceptional, Astonishing, Wolverine & The, New, Immortal, X-Men! They’ve been around for over 60 years now, and insanely popular for 40+ of those years. Combining that with the fact that for many of those years there have been numerous titles running simultaneously, you end up with thousands of X-Men comics!

Out of those thousands there are so, so many great stories. The Marvel universe’s best and most important moments are full of X-Men stories. There are so many amazing ones, and many of them so drastically different, that creating any kind of ranking is both impossible and panic inducing, so instead of ranking I will do what I did with our buddy Spider-Man and just list ten great X-Men stories that have connected with me for whatever reason over the years.

These are not necessarily my ten favorite X-Men stories, but I love all of the ones listed today. There are so, so many more I could include that it’s maddening, but I’ll save those for another future installment.

So, let’s get to it! Here are, in no particular order, 10 great X-Men stories!

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5 Coolest Moments From… Batman: Knightfall

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We already discussed some of the more awesome moments from the most famous of the early 90’s DC epics, the Death of Superman, but somehow, we have yet to touch on the best of the early 90’s DC epics, Batman’s ‘Knightfall’!

Generated originally as a cool idea to really hammer home to fans why Bruce Wayne is Batman, and why it’s important that a guy like Bruce is Batman, it quickly grew into a monster of a story that spread across all of the main and ancillary Bat-titles in 3 massive parts: Knightfall, Knightquest, and Knightsend. As each of these chapters of this bonkers big story have a LOT going on, we are just going to focus on the first (and most famous) chapter: Knightfall!

So put your Batman soundtrack tape in your walkman, put on your most comfortable Hyper Color t-shirt, take the house phone off the hook, put your feet up and bathe in glorious early 1990’s nostalgia with me as we delve into 5 of the very coolest moments from Batman: Knightfall!

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15 Underused Marvel Characters

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Marvel sure has some great characters; characters that, thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, pretty much the whole world knows. Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the Black Widow… you can probably keep going without me.

But for every Spider-Man or Wolverine out there, there are (literally) hundreds of characters that, for whatever reason, either never really hit a chord with fans, or had a run of popularity, usually pretty brief, that they’ve never been able to duplicate. And while everyone loves Marvel’s big guns, if you ask any comic reader, they will probably have at least one lesser known, if not outright obscure, character that they’ve always loved that they’d love to see get another shot in the spotlight.

There are far too many to narrow it down to any kind of ranking, and it’s such a subjective topic, so instead of ranking the ‘top whatever’, here are 15 (for now) characters that, hopefully, we can all agree are under-represented in Marvel comics. Anyone we left off that you think deserves a spot on the list? Let us know!

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10 Great Spider-Man Stories

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Spider-Man, obviously, is one of the most popular characters in comic books (or movies, or cartoons, or video games, or…), and has been for decades now. His popularity has meant for most of the 60+ years of his publishing history, he has had more than one ongoing title running simultaneously. Not counting what if…? or Ultimate stories (those would need to be different lists), I wanted to pick out 10 tales of the webbed wall-crawling wonder that will show you why he, his villains, and his cast of supporting characters are second to none.

I should point out this is NOT a top 10 list, in that these are not ranked in any particular order, nor are they the 10 BEST Spider-Man stories, or my absolute favorite 10. These are just 10 cool stories that maybe slipped your radar or were out before you were reading Spider-Man and/or were born. I imagine I will revisit this topic, because it was hard to narrow it to just 10 for this article.

So, if you haven’t read these, do yourself a favor and check them out, and if you have read them, well… good.


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Top 100 Villains 5-1

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Everyone knows nothing makes a good hero like a great villain. Sherlock Holmes needed Moriarty, G.I. Joe needed Cobra, the rebels needed Darth Vader, etc. Nothing makes a story better quite like an interesting, intriguing, and yet hated adversary. Readers tend to flock to the villains they love to hate. The best villains bring something out of the hero that nobody else does or force the hero to push themselves further than before to find a way to win.

We wanted to make a top 10 list, but that’s impossible. There are just too many good choices, and we couldn’t agree on any of it. So we increased the list, and increased it, and increased it (honestly, we probably could have kept going, too). So, before it gets too out of hand, here are our choices for the 100 best villains in comics.

(Click here for our Top 100 Heroes List!)

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