Saving The World Boxed Set II: The Continuing Saga of the Greatest Superheroes Ever

Set in a world that runs on rigidly structured rules of alchemy, two brothers who've attempted to resurrect their mother — an unforgivable overstepping of those immutable laws — must seek the philosopher's stone to undo the ensuing damage, which cost one brother an arm and the other brother His soul gets bound to an armored chest plate; he's good. Dense, soaringly imaginative and — fitting for a tale that features the philosopher's stone — weirdly philosophical, Fullmetal Alchemist has a lot to say about the costs of war and human greed and the central importance of family. You might think your life stinks but give thanks that you're not Punpun, the kid at the center of Inio Asano's surreal, cinematic manga.

Well, we say kid, but Punpun and his abusive parents are actually crudely drawn, wordless cartoon birds, in contrast to the realistic world around him. The comic follows Punpun from childhood to early 20s, from quotidian silliness to dark, cynical violence — and while you could, if you had to, sum it up as a coming-of-age story, Goodnight Punpun is unlike pretty much anything else out there.

Marjane Satrapi's curvaceous but spare black-and-white artwork is the perfect complement to this lyrical, mournful tale of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution of Ten-year-old Marji struggles with wearing the veil, yet wants to be a prophet when she grows up.

Books by Dean King

But as revolution and war turn her world upside down, she becomes increasingly rebellious a chapter about new high-tops and a contraband Kim Wilde tape is a particular standout. Satrapi uses her own story as a backbone to tell the larger story of her family and of Iran itself, its rich culture and oppressive politics. Alison Bechdel's painfully funny — and frequently just painful — memoir of growing up with her closeted father has been made into a hit musical.

But no stage show can capture the intricate, non-linear nature of Fun Home , which loops in and out of Bechdel's childhood, incorporating pop culture references, literary references, family photos and letters all rendered in her dense, textured line work. Like all great graphic novels, Fun Home 's art demands to be read with as much care as its text. Lewis is the last person alive to have spoken at the March on Washington, and he offers a ground-level view of the civil rights struggle, packed with sympathetic but unsparing portraits of the movement's movers and shakers.

Modeled on a comic that inspired Lewis himself — 's Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story — this is required reading for everyone who has only seen those years in old news footage. And everyone else, too. Ben Passmore's slim, page mini-comic is an open letter, written in the second person, consisting of a litany of gentle admonitions for well-meaning but racially tone-deaf white people: He feels like you're mocking him, but knows that you are totally unaware of this Your black friend wishes you would play more than Beyonce. There are more black performers than Beyonce and he's worried you don't know that.

Your Black Friend is by far the shortest comic to make this list, but there is nothing slight about it. Beneath its sardonic tone lies a truth that is urgent, sincere and deeply affecting. Scott McCloud's masterpiece is perhaps the nerdiest, most joyous, most enthusiastic treatise ever written.

McCloud wants you to understand that the medium of comics is wholly unique, and it deserves respect. So McCloud's cartoony avatar walks the reader through the sundry techniques and theories, the craft of comics — or in his words, sequential art. There are moments of excess here — McCloud's passion for defining systems causes him to make the occasional distinction without a difference — but it is a worthy passion and produces a book that remains a comprehensive, authoritative and hugely useful tool for getting newbies to give comics a shot.

Ed Piskor's multivolume history of hip hop is rigorously researched, but lovingly so, and his devotion to the music radiates from every page. When panel judge Etelka Lehoczky reviewed Volume 3 for NPR in , she praised Piskor's exuberant and narratively innovative art in particular: He varies figures' sizes, adds and subtracts different gradations of color and moves from realism to cartoony exaggeration.

KRS-One's graffiti bounces off the page. The Fat Boys alternately lumber, loom and swell. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' sci-fi-fantasy-romance-war-adventure epic has taken the comics world by storm, and for good reason. Our heroes — she has wings, he has horns — are star-crossed lovers from opposing sides of an endless war, on the run across the galaxy with their infant daughter. There is magic, profanity, television-headed robots, intergalactic bounty hunters, ghostly baby-sitters and spaceship trees, all beautifully realized in Staples' distinctive digitally painted style.

Saga will punch you right in the feels, and you will love every minute of it. Writer Peter Milligan and artist Chris Bachalo hauled an old Steve Ditko character out of mothballs to lend him a defiantly weird, transgressive edge. Milligan set visiting alien Rac Shade on a cross-country quest to defeat the American Scream, a creature of raw, elemental chaos that manifested as the decaying corpse of Uncle Sam.

Neither was the violence a serial killer figured largely — welcome to the '90s nor Bachalo's trippy, swirling psychedelic images, in retina-sizzling colors. But then, the whole point of the series was to shake things up, to challenge and interrogate the rapidly calcifying tropes of superhero storytelling. It probably won't come as any surprise to fans of filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky that he would write a soaring space opera set in a dystopian future filled with birdlike aliens, bounty hunters, flying cars, powerful crystals and "technopriests.

You might expect Jodorowsky's world of techno-tyranny to resemble the dank gloom of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. You would be wrong — Moebius' line work is crisp and clean and often comical, and Yves Chaland's bright, bold colors so many yellows! It's a combination of writer and artist that works in surprising, revelatory ways, opening up this world and inviting us to stay.

Elfquest is kind of a legend in the comics industry — it is one of the first creator-owned comics, and it has been running in one form or another since Also, the adventures of Cutter, Skywise and the Wolfriders and their amazing hairdos are absurdly addictive; Wendy Pini's Tom of Finland-meets-Margaret Keane art and the fervid, earnest scripts she wrote with her husband, Richard, will keep you pinned to the page, far into the night. Neil Gaiman is America's favorite nerd these days, but back in the late '80s, he was mostly known for fringe titles like Black Orchid and, well, writing a quickie biography of Duran Duran.

And then he pitched DC Comics the idea of reviving an old character, the Sandman, and making him something completely new: A pale, tormented, goth-tacular Lord of the Dreaming who is rebuilding his kingdom after 70 years of occult captivity. Soapy, dramatic, mythic, gorgeous and sometimes terrifying, Sandman is the comic that fluttered the hearts of a million baby fans. Plus, Death is adorable. Frank Miller's magnum opus, the gold standard against which all Batman stories will forever be judged, for better or worse. Miller's tale of an aged Caped Crusader coming out of retirement to fight a new breed of criminal was deliberately set outside DC's continuity, which gave Miller lots of room to play.

The result is big and operatic think Rambo meets Wagner's Ring Cycle. But it's also grim and gritty and helped usher in an era of dark, brooding heroes that remains the default superhero mode. It became such a hit both in and outside comics circles that readers of in-continuity Batman hungered to bring the book's dark vision of future Batman an in-canon reality, voting by phone to kill off Robin in The announcement that Marvel contracted Ta-Nehisi Coates to write a Black Panther series was cause for excitement in and out of comics circles. The fact that he was to be paired with veteran artist Brian Stelfreeze didn't hurt — although that excitement may not have spread beyond comics nerds.

The task Coates set for himself was a tough one: He had to pick up the pieces following Marvel's latest Secret Wars crossover event, establish a new status quo and then go on to tell a compelling story. Coates is a longtime comics fan, but this was his debut effort in the medium. The result is dense — prose writers who come to comics tend to load up their word balloons to the bursting point — but offers a fresh take: He explores Black Panther the king, not the hero, forced to make a series of unpopular choices that turn his people against him.

Obviously, our judge G. Willow Wilson recused herself from this part of the debate. But there's no question about it: Readers and the rest of the judges love Wilson's version of Ms. Kamala Khan was an ordinary Muslim teenager in Jersey City — and a Captain Marvel fangirl — when an alien mist turned her into a shape-shifting superhero. Now, she has to balance school, friends and her loving-but-overprotective family, while saving the world. And like any kid, she doesn't always get it right. Marvel is a marvel — sensitively written, gorgeously drawn and, for a part-alien superhero, always achingly real.

Writer Tom King carved himself an out-of-the-way patch of Marvel Universe real estate — a seemingly bucolic DC suburb — and deposited everyone's favorite android-created-for-evil-who-turned-out-to-be-a-good-guy, The Vision, squarely inside it. King also doubled down on Vision's long-established hunger to be human by having him create a domestic life for himself — robowife, robokids, robodog, robo-white picket fence. And then, beset by the forces of intolerance lurking in the community, everything proceeds to go to hell. Gabriel Hernandez Walta's art creates a golden-hued, Eisenhower-era suburban paradise poisoned by fear and hate, and King's command of this tight, issue story is masterful.

It's a sad and haunting read that will stay with you. Wonder Woman's much-buzzed-about movie may have granted her a bit of a popular-vote groundswell, but there wasn't much agreement on which run of comics from her long and storied life should make the final cut. Arguments were made for her debut comics, which remain bracingly weird; George Perez's mid-'80s reboot; Greg Rucka's tenure, when he turned her into a kind of superpowered diplomat; and Brian Azzarello's recent turn, in which he recast the Olympian gods as rival crime families.

Ultimately, it was Gail Simone's run on the character especially her four-issue launch tale, The Circle , with art by Terry and Rachel Dodson that best managed to nail Diana's iconography by depicting her as powerful as we know her to be and as compassionate as we need her to be. At once a sprawling adventure anthology and a witty metariff on the long, whimsical history of the superhero genre, Astro City offers a bracingly bright rejoinder to "grim-and-gritty" superhero storytelling.

Writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson — with Alex Ross supplying character designs and painted covers — don't merely people their fictional metropolis with analogues of notable heroes, though there are plenty of those on hand. The universe they've created pays loving homage to familiar characters and storylines even as it digs deep to continually invent new stories and feature new perspectives.

Astro City is a hopeful place that dares to believe in heroes, sincerely and unabashedly; reading it, you will too. Bissette and John Totleben. But Alan Moore's tenure on the character, beginning in , redefined the character in a fundamental and groundbreaking way, turning him into arguably the most powerful hero in the DC Universe, albeit one shot through with the darkest elements of gothic horror. Penciler Stephen Bissette and inker John Totleben's images seemed to float in that darkness, imbuing Moore's literally epic tale Swampy visits both Hell and outer space with a sense of dread and foreboding, even when that tale involved Swamp Thing communing with Evil itself Yeah, look, you really have to read it.

This sadly short-lived cult hit should have been a mainstream one. Gotham Central's ingenious conceit: What is life like for the men and women of Gotham City's police force — and the citizens they protect? Writer Greg Rucka told tales of the day shift, Ed Brubaker the night, and both were penciled originally, anyway by Michael Lark, whose hatchy line work imbued America's most dangerous municipality with a grubby, lived-in feel.

Batman and his rogues gallery showed up around the edges — the GCPD dealt with the sometimes horrific aftermath of their clashes — but this was a gripping, character-oriented police procedural, a nuanced look at life beyond the cape. Given the enduring power of writer Chris Claremont's long and hugely influential run on the X-Men series, it was inevitable that some of that work would end up on this list.

But frankly, the judging panel expected people to nominate one of his go-to X-Men story arcs — Days of Future Past, say, or The Dark Phoenix Saga, which is what most people think of when they think "X-Men. This is a story, after all, in which much of the X-Men's subtext becomes text. Xavier teams up with Magneto to defeat not a supervillain, but a preacher who is whipping up a hate campaign against mutants. It became the basis, albeit a freely adapted one, for Bryan Singer's second X-Men film.

But with lots more punching! But with lots more crushing! This is Warren Ellis at his silliest and most joyful, complemented by Stuart Immonen's gorgeously angular line work. It's an over-the-top parody of the Marvel universe, the antidote to grim 'n' gritty and the perfect book to press into the hands of anyone who says they hate superheroes. The late Darwyn Cooke's bright, gorgeous love letter to DC Comics' superheroes is a marvel of raw logistics as much as storytelling.

Cooke crams just about every DC character, including some real deep-benchers The Challengers of the Unknown, anyone? Every page bristles with color and action — and crisp midcentury design — but there's more to it than crew cuts and car fins. Amid all this shiny, Silver Age hopefulness, Cooke finds time to linger over the less-than-glossy elements of the time: He also plumbs new emotional depths in characters who have never gotten their time in the spotlight, like J'onn J'onzz, the haunted, sensitive Manhunter from Mars.

Plus, there are dinosaurs. Ryan North and Erica Henderson's revival of an obscure '90s Marvel comic relief character is pure joy on paper. Computer science student Doreen Green has a secret superpower: She can talk to squirrels. Also, she has a tail. With college roommate Nancy and sidekicks Koi Boi and Chipmunk Hunk, Doreen uses a combination of tail tricks, computer savvy and irrepressible cheer to beat up pretty much every baddie who comes her way. Also, you'll have to squint, but North's jokey footnotes are not to be missed. There is no one like Mike Mignola — his thick, angular, shadowy lines are instantly recognizable, almost like a silent movie in comic form.

And Hellboy is a singular creation, a good-natured demon who smells like roasted peanuts brought to Earth as a baby by Nazi occultists during World War II and then raised as a normal boy by a kindly professor. So, just an everyday kid, then. Mignola's dry humor plays beautifully against Hellboy's fantastical adventures, and there is a LOT to explore in the universe he has created over decades of writing and drawing.

On the book's much-admired opening page, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely distill Superman's origin into four images and eight words: Quitely's Superman doesn't look like any you've seen before which is a neat trick, given Supes' longevity. He is a towering, barrel-chested galoot who manages to radiate kindness and compassion, exactly the way he should. Quitely's super-suit wrinkles at the armpits and bags a bit at the knees, which turns this familiar object of pop culture iconography back into what it originally was: Matt Fraction and David Aja's run on Hawkeye turned a Marvel also-ran into a real superstar okay, the Avengers movie probably helped, but still.

This version of Clint Barton has no secret identity — Fraction's idea was to make him just an everyday dude, dealing with aging and divorce and everything that happens while he is not being an Avenger. Aja's artwork is dramatic but unglamorous, and Matt Hollingsworth's muted, retro colors drive home Hawkeye 's workaday charm. Plus Kate Bishop and Pizza Dog. Need we say more? Krazy Kat was never popular the way some of its contemporaries were. It was too weird, too aimless, too surreal and, frankly, too utterly fabulous. Luckily, it had one very important fan: Herriman's gender-fluid cat, his brick-hurling mouse, his looping, unique vernacular and his graphic imagination make Krazy Kat one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

A kat, a mouse, a brick — a timeless love story. Sometimes called "the last great newspaper comic," Calvin and Hobbes barely needs an introduction. But we'll try anyhow: There's an imaginative little boy, his snarky stuffed tiger, his dubious parents and a lovingly warped universe of cardboard box spaceships, art, philosophy rule-bending ballgames, noir adventures and horrifying snowmen. Walt Kelly's lushly illustrated comic strip contained multitudes. On the surface, a bunch of funny-animal swamp denizens traded quips in a thick Southern patois for 27 years.

But every panel was packed with visual — and often quite literal — poetry. Groanworthy puns jostled alongside more sophisticated, allusive wordplay, all informed by the beating heart of a wry humanist who often couched stinging political allegory within the lazy antics of a philosophical opossum and his friends.

Kelly's characters managed to broadly parody humanity's manifold ills — our greed, our self-importance, our disregard for the natural world — even as they celebrated what this hugely influential cartoonist saw as our essential good-heartedness. This is the strip that gave the world "The Bechdel Test. Over more than 20 years, Mo, Sydney, Lois, Toni and Clarice and the rest of the gang grow and change, pair up and split up, argue about politics, culture and gender and pretty much everything else, honestly until they seem more real and rooted than a lot of people who aren't made up of lines on paper.

Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts! The original run of Berke Breathed's '80s strip is one of the most quotable comics of all time. A mix of pointed political and cultural satire and gentle, meadows-and-dandelions sentiment, Bloom County began with a bunch of misfits in a Midwestern boardinghouse but expanded to poke fun at everything from presidential politics to penguin lust. And with the introduction of Bill the Cat in , discerning comics fans got an epic riposte to that other orange feline cartoon titan, Garfield. Our panelist Maggie Thompson particularly wanted to include this charming s comic about life backstage on Broadway.

Other postwar soap opera strips are still running — think Mary Worth or Judge Parker — but Leonard Starr's Mary Perkins won critical acclaim for its finely drawn panels and memorable characters. What we learn in his first story: He puts on his makeup for daily life; for his horror roles, he takes it off. What's not to love? If you tend to lump the late Charles Schulz's long-running series alongside its fellow funny-page denizens — all those bright, breezy kiddie-fare strips — then hoo boy, it has been a long time since you read it.

Peanuts characters worry about their lot in life, they cling to coping mechanisms, they get depressed, they develop unrequited crushes, and, again and again, they get duped into trusting that they'll be able to kick a football Spoiler: Yet sometimes — only sometimes, and only if they're Snoopy, the one Peanuts character who is completely comfortable in his skin — they dance. In Peanuts , as in life, that kind of joy descends only in fitful bursts, but descend it does, and it's enough.

Created in by cartoonist Marjorie Henderson Buell for The Saturday Evening Post , Little Lulu — a tough, resourceful girl with her hair in ringlets — went on to a long life as a newspaper strip and in comic books written and drawn, at least initially by John Stanley. Television, toys, films and international fame followed, keying off the strength and charm of Stanley's take, in which she was transformed from a typical comics-page irascible scamp into a scrappy young girl who always had her friends' backs well, mostly.

For decades, Little Lulu's presence on the comics page meant that millions habitually read the adventures of a young girl who consistently bested — outsmarted, outplayed and outmaneuvered — boys. It may not have been the sole reason for her runaway popularity. Lynda Barry remembers what it's like to be a kid with a vividness and emotionality that the rest of us have irrevocably lost. All the confusion and logical leaps and frustrations of not being heard, all the hormonal hoops that puberty forces us to jump through — it's all still so richly available to her, and for years, in the syndicated strip Ernie Pook's Comeek , which appeared in alt-weeklies across the nation, she laid it all out on the page.

To read her characters' adventures — many of which read like breathlessly confessional diary entries — is to feel the shock of recognition, again and again: Their family life is hard — Barry never turns away from pain and heartbreak — but they find joy in music, and in creating something, even if it's just a daisy-chain tiara or a rubber-band ball. Did you know that Olive Oyl was created years before Popeye?

Elzie Crisler Segar had been drawing Thimble Theatre for 10 years when he came up with the character of Popeye the Sailor Man; originally it was about Olive, her brother Castor and her boyfriend Ham Gravy. But one day, Castor needed someone take him out to an island — and there on the docks was Popeye. He was only supposed to be a minor character, but readers loved him so much, Segar brought him back. The rest is history and rather a large quantity of spinach. John Allison just announced that he's bringing an end to his Tackleford strips — the series of stories that began as Bobbins back in the internet Dark Ages think and morphed into Scary Go Round and eventually became Bad Machinery , a kid detective strip featuring the younger siblings of the original cast.

But luckily for you, they'll all stay up online and you can discover for yourself the magic Allison makes out of a humdrum fictional British town and a bunch of aimless somethings. His art is constantly changing and evolving — but one thing stays the same: The rhythms of his dialogue are entirely his own, and they'll stick in your head until after a few pages you're thinking in the same cadences as the characters.

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After some discussion, the judging panel nixed the idea of singling out specific comics on thenib. The Nib offers a bracing reminder, to those who need it, that comics as a medium can tell urgent, controversial, hugely vital stories in ways no other medium can. If your local newspaper's editorial cartoons strike you as fusty and predictable, click over to The Nib and poke around. Yes, that exclamation is supposed to be there — he considers it an honorific like "Ph. Just watch out for Mr. Meanscary, the alien disguised as a puppy butt.

Ever wanted to go dude-watchin' with the Brontes? Had an unhealthy fascination with obscure Canadian history? Really been annoyed at physically impossible female superhero costumes? Have we got a comic for you! Kate Beaton's deliriously silly when it isn't giving you all the feels Hark! A Vagrant is one of those comics that makes you feel smarter for having read it — and then makes you head to the bookshelf to catch up with her universe of literary and historical references.

Her beady-eyed characters smirk and caper, her rubbery lines dance all over the screen, and she can use a word like "velocipedestrienne" and make you love it. Readers loved this story, which starts with a kid in his bedroom, playing a beta copy of an unreleased video game — and then a meteor shower hits his house. He and his friends soon learn that by playing the game they've accidentally triggered the end of the universe — and what's more, they have to use the same game to play a new universe into existence. And did we mention that in the world of Homestuck , internet trolls are actually trolls?

Melanie Gillman's gentle colored pencils belie the seriousness of their story about Charlie, a black teenager who's questioning her sexuality — and whose parents send her to a pretty dangerous place: An all-white Christian summer camp. Charlie bonds with Sydney, a trans girl, as the campers hike toward a mysterious mountaintop ceremony, and Gillman uses their growing friendship to illustrate, in a beautifully organic way, the challenges gay and trans kids face on a daily basis.

Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan's charmingly NSFW Web comic began as a review of sex toys starting, of course, with the legendary Hitachi Magic Wand but has branched out into a friendly and accessible clearinghouse of information on everything from consent to polycystic ovary syndrome — often illustrated by well-known guest artists like Lucy Knisley and Trudy Cooper. Our judge Spike Trotman also points out that Oh Joy is an invaluable resource for teens growing up in areas where accurate sex education is not on the curriculum. In possibly one of the most beautiful comics ever created, for web or otherwise, Minna Sundberg sets her story in a post-apocalyptic Scandinavia, 90 years after a plague turns most of Northern Europe into "The Silent World," teeming with monsters and magic.

No one wants to venture outside the few safe spaces Sundberg's art, tinged with Nordic mythology, helps fill out a frozen world with elaborate, loving detail — check out this language tree she created to help set the stage for her story. This is possibly the cutest, sweetest thing you'll read all year — and we absolutely mean that as a compliment. Ngozi Ukazu writes and draws this Web comic about Eric "Bitty" Bittle, a former figure skating champion and avid baker who joins his college hockey team and finds love with his handsome team captain — and loving acceptance from his fellow players.

She has also created a world of ephemera, from social media accounts for her characters to an ongoing supplementary series explaining hockey jargon. You might have thought a comic about a gay, pie-baking college hockey player would be too obscure, too specific. You would be wrong. Tom Siddell's Gunnerkrigg Court is one of the grand old dames of the Web comic world, so if you're into magic, mythology and goth-tinged boarding school hijinks Harry Potter fans, I'm looking at you , there are years' worth of strips to dig into.

Young Antimony Carver arrives at her new boarding school, Gunnerkrigg Court, and almost immediately stumbles into a mystery involving a second shadow, mysterious woods and a possessed robot. Self-possessed Annie and her best friend, tech genius Katerina, play well off each other as they explore the Court's secrets, and Siddell's art evolves along with their friendship. Cartoonist Tom Parkinson-Morgan sometimes goes by Abbadon, which is a pretty good name for the creator of this popular Web comic about an ordinary barista who — in the middle of an awkward encounter with her boyfriend — is suddenly transported to the ancient, chaotic city of Throne, built of god-corpses, center of the omniverse, and apparently, the place she's destined to rule.

Once she finds her boyfriend Layered with myth, fantasy and religion, every page of KSBD is an offering, but to which god, no one knows. Alastair Sterling, robotics pioneer, has been dead for 16 years. And now he is somehow alive again, in a synthetic replica of his original body, in a world where robots have advanced in a way he never dreamed of — and where his old partner and lover has made yet another version of him Blue Delliquanti's warm, organic lines and frequently wordless panels blur the same boundaries between machine and human that her characters are carefully, painfully trying to work out.

This road trip romance gets off to an explosive start: In one day, Amal calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his disapproving parents, blacks out drunk and wakes up the next morning to find TJ making eggs in his kitchen. Amal has to get from Berkeley to Providence for his sister's college graduation — so he and TJ make a deal: TJ pays, Amal drives.

As they get further across the country and closer to Amal's family, what began as random circumstance deepens into friendship — and then something significantly more intimate. One of the few comics our readers chose that doesn't have an ongoing story, SMBC is your one one-stop shop for daily jokes about science, politics, relationships, deconstructing The Wizard of Oz and pretty much anything else creator Zach Weinersmith sets his pen to.

Plus, you can click the big red button underneath each strip for an extra joke! Evan Dahm's mesmerizing tale of a nomadic tribe — Those Marked in White — whose unchanging existence is turned upside down by the arrival of a colonizing empire. Imperial soldiers take a young tribal girl, Vattu, as tribute; back in their capital city, she learns there's far more to the world than endless marches through the grasslands after game.

The comic moves slowly; some panels are completely wordless, but you'll be drawn in by its story of culture clash and colonization, and Dahm's wildly imaginative world building. Ancient Rome with strange dog-snake centurions? Our judges had a hard time picking just one Raina Telgemeier book, but eventually we settled on the gorgeous, heart-tugging Ghosts. Cat and her family move to the beach town of Bahia de la Luna in the hopes that the air there will be better for her little sister Maya, who has cystic fibrosis.

The town turns out to be full of gentle ghosts, and Maya wants nothing more than to meet one — but Cat can't face even the idea of death. What happens when Sleeping Beauty wakes up and rides into the sunset with her magically appointed prince? She leaves behind a castle full of faithful retainers with no idea what to do without her. Linda Medley's lovely Castle Waiting picks up from there, with a band of ragtag refugees from assorted fairy tales making a new life for themselves in the titular castle.

Medley's graceful black-and-white art will transport you to a world of bearded ladies, bouncy demons, noble-horse-men and strange little creatures chittering in the corner — plus Beauty's forgotten handmaidens, now elderly and comically querulous. Castle Waiting is a quest well worth going on. Gene Luen Yang's much-praised book contains three stories — a retelling of the legend of the Chinese Monkey King, a tale of a second-generation child of Chinese immigrants attempting to navigate a white suburban school and a story about a white boy embarrassed by his visiting Chinese cousin.

The disparate narratives link up in surprising, revelatory ways, and along the way, Yang interrogates the sundry many Asian stereotypes that Western culture has absorbed and tracks how his characters confront them. The result is an intriguing mashup that borrows from sources as disparate as Fu Manchu stories, political cartoons, John Hughes movies, Marvel comics and cheesy sitcoms to show characters pushing through self-hatred to craft their own identities.

In the early days of Disney, artists weren't allowed to sign their names to comics — everything just said "Walt Disney. Barks' elastic lines and expressive faces seem to almost bounce out of the panels on his pages; his scripts were complex and sensitive and marvelously silly. And if you're a fan of the cartoon DuckTales , you have much to thank Barks for — he is the guy that invented Scrooge McDuck.

Our readers really loved Ben Hatke's charming story of a young girl who ends up on a strange planet after trying to rescue her best friend from an alien cult that might have come to Earth because Zita found a big red mystery button, pressed it and created a rift in space. Torn away in a moment from everything she knows on earth, Zita becomes an interstellar adventurer, saving planets, battling aliens the Star Hearts only sound nice Hatke's cute-but-not-cloying art stretches from realistic to truly weird, creating a delightful backdrop for Zita's heroics.

Also, one of Batman's earliest enemies, from the s, was Dr. Hugo Strange no relation. An alien symbiote with a thirst for violence and flesh, Venom started out as a living costume for Spider-Man, who thought the black-and-white threads were just that: When Spidey rejected Venom's attempts for control, he latched onto the Daily Bugle's Eddie Brock, spawning a decades-long quest for vengeance.

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Arguably Spider-Man's biggest nemesis, Venom is the comic-book equivalent of a movie boogeyman like Freddy Krueger — he's meant to be terrifying and villainous, but readers thought he was so cool that eventually the symbiote became less obviously evil he always tries never to hurt bystanders , appearing in his own title. In fact, he was so neutered that not only did he occasionally team up with Spider-Man, but Marvel created an even more evil symbiote, the mass murderer, Carnage, in order to mitigate Venom's crimes.

Currently, the symbiote is not bonded with Brock, but that remains his most famous persona. Black, organic fabric with shapeshifting capacity and all of Spider-Man's abilities. Spider-Man 3 has many flaws, and the casting of Topher Grace as Venom was one.

Age the role 20 years, cast Kurt Russell, job's a good 'un.

Spider-Man happened upon the alien costume during Marvel's classic cross-over, Secret Wars ; after his red-and-blue costume was destroyed, an alien gizmo rustled up the black version. And, even though it flowed over his skin like oil, Spidey never questioned where it came from. When you're as strong, fast, invulnerable and flat-out powerful as Superman, it's hard to find a nemesis of sufficient menace to actually provide you with a workout.

Enter Lex Luthor, the bad guy's bad guy. He doesn't usually have superpowers, but then he doesn't need them, even against the Man of Steel.

Let's Get Graphic: 100 Favorite Comics And Graphic Novels

No prison can hold him, it seems, no setback is too great to overcome, and there's pretty much no scheme too outlandish for his considerable brain power to cook up. Since Superman remains reluctant to just break Luthor's neck, there's always tomorrow for this perpetual rebounder. Talk about try, try and try again — Robert the Bruce's Spider had nothing on Luthor. Usually bald, smartest human on Earth, Machiavellian planning ability and a frequent prison escapee. The Smallville incarnation has been one of the most interesting, if also the most inconsistent, although Jesse Eisenberg 's Lex Luthor has added a intriguing tech genius streak to the usual Luther pathology.

But unlike those green-backed heroes in a half-shell, the ronin rabbit has kept to his adult-orientated roots with a saga that comprises all manner of murder, mayhem and the odd sexy scene in an anthropomorphic version of feudal Japan. This iconic bunny with a blade was originally conceived as a human and based upon historical Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. However, inspired by a doodle of rabbit ears atop his hero's head, Sakai was inspired to create a more unique and ultimately enduring comic book icon.

The noble leporine's longevity can be put down to an intriguing mix of historical and cinematic influence, cute fluffy bunniness and an ability to slice and dice with stunning efficiency. Highly skilled swords-rabbit with a deep-seated sense of justice and a bit of a mischievous streak.

Usagi popped up on several occasions in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series in which he was voiced by Townsend Coleman, AKA the guy who gave voice to the title character in The Tick — incidentally he'd be a good fit for the role if a cartoon feature ever gets off the ground. Usagi is Japanese for rabbit.

Bad girls in comics are always so useful that they tend to reform and become at least semi-goodies cf: Emma Frost was introduced as an exceptionally nasty — and explicitly perverse — villainess, running a school for evil mutants in competition with Professor Xavier and high in the councils of the nefarious Hellfire Club in homage to the famous 'Touch of Brimstone' episode of The Avengers. Marvel made her a qualified goodie in the X-Men spin-off Generation X , and writer Grant Morrison reinvented the character when he took over New X-Men and wasn't allowed to use his original choice, Storm.

Now an actual X-Man, Emma remained the manipulative character fans loved to hate — and caused a minor kerfuffle when she began a 'telepathic' affair with Cyclops, long-term partner of Jean Grey. Despite strong competition, Emma has consistently worn the most striking lingerie and little else in comics — the covers for her brief solo series Emma Frost are basically porn star poses. Extremely revealing white fetish gear, icy personality, enormous mental abilities, psychic ability, is a qualified sex therapist always useful and can now turn to diamond and be her own best friend.

January Jones takes on the, um, frosty mantle in X-Men: When Singer was thinking about making X-Men: The Last Stand , he wanted Sigourney Weaver for the role. Scientist Holland gets splashed with a 'bio-restorative formula' when baddies attack his Louisiana swampland laboratory, and is transmuted into a big monster — who has a certain similarity with earlier comics creatures the Heap and Man-Thing. The first run of the comic featured marvellously grotesque Wrightson art, but it wasn't until writer Alan Moore took up the book — which was relaunched to tie in with the Wes Craven film — that ST really became a major player, even if he had to play straight man to Moore's John Constantine.

It turns out that ST isn't a transformed human, but animated swamp with the consciousness of the late Holland. He has had a long-term relationship with a human woman, which some have criticised as perverted or icky. A big shambling, roughly man-shaped hunk of muck and vegetation with a distinctive nose, ST is the only superhero capable of producing halluconogenic fruit from his body.

Matthew the Raven, a key character in Sandman , first appeared and died as a human being in the Swamp Thing comic. Ben Edlund was just 18 — the bastard — when he came up with The Tick , a character that may be, quite simply, the funniest superhero spoof of all time. Blessed with a fantastic supporting cast of outlandishly-named nemeses — Chairface Chippendale, take a bow — and self-involved allies, from Die Fledermaus in the comics to Batmanuel in the tragically short-lived live-action TV show, The Tick is a lovable lunk, given to overly dramatic declarations on behalf of justice.

He doesn't know his own strength, which is prodigious and, indeed, fails to grasp even the most rudimentary basics of social interaction. Edlund's The Tick — his involvement runs through the comics, the animated series and the TV show — is characterised by sharply observed gags and a gift for hilarious hyperbole. A blue costume with giant movable antennae, The Tick is, to quote the TV show, "the sterling silver ladle of justice, pouring his creamy foam over the freshly-picked strawberries of crime".

His strength is mighty, his IQ is double figures. In the animated series, he's voiced by Townsend Coleman. In Fox's utterly brilliant live-action show nine episodes! Next up, it's Peter Serafinowicz 's turn in Amazon Prime's new series. That's Batmanuel — in a Batman movie. The second most iconic AD character after Judge Dredd himself, Johnny Alpha was the poster child for Strontium Dog, an extremely popular series about a group of mutant bounty hunters. Alpha himself was, of course, a mercenary but despite working largely for greenbacks he was possessed of a strong sense of duty and honour.

Equally, though, Alpha demonstrated a stubbornly unforgiving streak, brooking no slight or double-cross and punishing transgressions harshly — as the vampiric Durham Red discovered to her great regret. In Alpha was killed off in a story that martyred him in order to saves all mutants from extermination. Ezquerra was so mortified by the decision that he refused outright to draw the story and replacements were brought in to carry out the deed. Wagner later admitted that Ezquerra was right and that killing Alpha had been a huge mistake. The character was subsequently revived by both of his creators for a brief resurgence in Glowing eyes, granite jaw, distinctive metal headpiece, trademark variable cartridge blaster handgun and electroknux.

One of Alpha's landmark achievements was tracking and capturing Adolf Hitler back in the past and subsequently returning him to the future to stand trial for his crimes. When Frank Miller began Sin City — his series of ultra-noir set in the eponymous hotbed of crime — he needed archetypes that were almost Olympian in their grandeur. Marv is his grade-A patsy, the fall guy, the hapless hero at the centre of a conspiracy that he can't even begin to understand — but with a traditional Miller tweak.

This dumb brute can more than take care of himself, and fully embraces the self-destructive path he starts down when he vows to avenge the brutal murder of Goldie, a prostitute who showed him kindness, despite his face. Marv is a force of nature, cutting a path through the corrupt power-brokers of the city, until his pound of flesh and more has been exacted.

His death scene — he's juiced repeatedly in the electric chair, obstinately refusing to die right away — sums him up: Miller killed him, but brought him back for several Sin City prequels. Not even he could stand to see the big lug truly die. A face only criss-crossed with ugly scars, a pancaked nose and a chin that could open cans of tuna — Marv is the archetypal hard man with a heart of gold, a bruiser who's a sucker for a dame.

Miller, when creating the character, wanted Marv to be like "Conan in a trench coat". There's a lot of Dr. Doom in Darth Vader, and pretty much every Bond villain of the last 40 years.

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6. 49. CAPTAIN HADDOCK (Tintin)?
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Of all Marvel's villains, Doom has appeared most, across countless titles. Where most villains stick to their designated hero, Doom, nominally the arch-enemy of the Fantastic Four, will go toe-to-toe or, more likely, he'll send a Doombot to go toe-to-toe; he doesn't like to get his hands dirty with mere serfs with anyone. A truly brilliant scientist, Doom likes to combine his unquenchable thirst for ultimate power he once stole the energy of the near-omnipotent Beyonder with a bizarre double life, as the altruistic leader of the European country of Latveria.

Which makes arresting him on American soil doubly difficult, due to that pesky diplomatic immunity. He has a noble side, like many of the best bad guys, but he's as disfigured psychologically as he is physically. And then there's that surname, which is pretty hard to get around. How life might have been different if he'd been born Victor Von Awesome.

Arguably the most famous of all Marvel's villains, Doctor Doom is certainly the most visually striking — a snub-nosed metal mask housing a badly disfigured face and a black heart, topped off with a regal green cloak which covers weaponised body armour to make Iron Man's heart weep with envy. The spectacularly badly-cast Julian McMahon mangled scenery and didn't even attempt a Latverian accent in either Fantastic Four movies. Toby Kebbell played him in the reboot, but the less about that one the better. Powers is a police drama — loosely modelled on Homicide: Life On The Street — set in a world with superheroes and villains, and Deena is the rookie partner of former immortal hero turned homicide cop Christian Walker.

Formerly partnered with crooked Captain Adlard, Deena is now tagging along with the upright Walker but gets in deep with Internal Affairs for her frequent recourse to violence to get information from suspects and is keeping very quiet about the way her abusive former boyfriend got mysteriously electrocuted during an argument. Powers is currently the coolest comic that only comic book readers have heard of. Midriff-baring shirt, cute pixie-ish haircut, slight prejudice against super-powered beings and secretive about recently-acquired electrical abilities.

We'd probably go with Natalie Portman — if she was willing to have the V For Vendetta haircut, she'd be happy to have the Deena bob. Writer Bendis and artist Oeming base Deena on a combination of their wives His inability to look beyond the moment — he leaves such ponderings to Asterix or his smart, tree-obsessed dog Dogmatix — and tendency to fall in love with unattainable women make him one of the cutest characters on the list.

Even if he could beat up your whole family without breaking a sweat. Pleasantly plump don't call him fat , red moustache and beard, often carries a menhir, invincible and super-strong with a perchant for beating up Romans. In a very successful series of European productions, Depardieu has donned a fat suit to play him. In cartoon form, he's been voiced by Brad Garrett among others. We recommend the Menhir Express. The original and best in Matt Wagner's long-running series of masked anti-heroes, Hunter Rose was a young genius gifted with extraordinary physical and mental prowess and just a little too much time to spare.

Finding that excellence breeds boredom if not channelled correctly, Rose set about becoming a crime kingpin, hired killer and all-round roguish gadabout before dying at the age of 21 by the hands of his lycanthropic nemesis, Argent. More Grendels have followed in Hunter Rose's footsteps but few have done the job with such an innate sense of style. Effete novelist by day, criminal mastermind and world-class assassin by night. Wagner's nefarious creation hasn't worried the big screen as of yet. If an actor were to make Hunter Rose come alive, we'd put our money on Jamie Bell providing the right amount of romantic menace.

Thanks to the super-soldier serum, Captain America is the best that a human being can be — super-strong, super-fast, super-agile, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and has a Nintendo DS Brain Training age of Not bad for a guy who's technically in his eighties now. He was shot by a sniper at the end of 's massive Civil War cross-over and unusually for a comic book icon, is still dead.

But let's take this opportunity to briefly remember the hero that he was: For that reason, it can't be too long before the old super-soldier serum flows through Steve Rogers' veins once more. Or, rather, he is the American flag.

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Clad in red, white and blue chainmail, with a red, white and blue invincible shield demarcated by a giant star and initialed, wing-tipped head piece. Matt Salinger — son of J. Stephen Colbert is a huge Cap fan. When Rogers was killed, Colbert eulogised him on his show — and he has one of two replica metal Cap shields, commissioned by Marvel to mark the event, hanging in his studio.

This feminist icon is the most important woman in comics. Naturally, that means she's often been given short shrift, frequently demoted to menial status she was a founder member of the Justice Society, but only as secretary and depowered and repowered more often than all the X-Men combined.

But on form, she's almost as powerful as Superman, looks better in hotpants and has the additional superpower of reducing fanboys to putty. Over the years, Gloria Steinem has extolled her role as a strong female role model — she was the first cover girl on Ms. Beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Hermes, and stronger than Hercules. Can fly and wields the lasso of truth and magic bracelets.

Lynda Carter wowed a generation in the '70s TV show, while a animated film saw her voiced by Keri Russell. After years stuck in limbo, the live-action film version is finally coming with Gal Gadot starring and Patty Jenkins directing. Wonder Woman was the best thing in Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice and the trailer looks suitably juicy. Controversy over comic books in the '50s saw Wonder Woman accused of being a lesbian. Yet another Marvel character who started off as a villain — notably a Spider-Man villain although he was more of a goon when he first cameoed in Amazing Spider-Man — before graduating to his own title and anti-hero status.

The Punisher is now one of the most iconic characters in the entire Marvel stable. A 'Nam vet driven by his family's murder to punish all criminals by death, it's perhaps not unsurprising that the dark, disillusioned '70s was the decade that saw a brutal, uncompromising psychopath for that's what Castle is, no debate become a fan favourite. Although, truth be told, operating within the confines of the toothless main Marvel titles never sat well with The Punisher — in recent years, with the move to the MAX label, and Garth Ennis' soon-to-finish installation as Punisher guru, the dark heart and psychology of Frank Castle has been fully explored, giving a new insight into this grimmest and most compelling of characters.

A giant white skull on his black-shirted chest. An eternal desire for revenge. Three Punisher movies, three different Punishers. For all the apparent simplicity of the character, Frank Castle has proved a hard nut to crack. Ray Stevenson , star of The Punisher: Jon Bernthal could be the first to nail that gruff demeanour, violent tendencies and wounded humanity in Netflix's spin-off from the MCU. Unlike other Marvel characters, who seem to age at a rate of one year for every five years of comics at least , The Punisher ages — at least in the MAX line — in real time. Which currently makes him a year-old kicking ass, as he was born on February 16, Writers Moore and Gibson thought that AD could do with a female-led strip to counterpoint the comic's generally testosterone-heavy violence fests, and co-created 50th century everygirl Halo Jones, who just tries to get by in a dangerous future where going to the shops is a major trial.

The original intent was to chronicle the heroine's whole life but only three serials were completed before the strip was curtailed by the usual who's-got-the-rights argument. The three stories find Halo as a teenager on that shopping trip, working as a stewardess on a spaceship and grimly fighting a Starship Troopers -type war in an all-female army. Halo is exponentially cooler than knock-offs like Tank Girl, mostly because she remains a fed-up real person amid the wild space opera of her universe. Pout, white '80s-look hair yes, we know it was a black and white strip and she got blonded in the horrible US colourised reprints — but her hair was white on the original AD colour covers , loyalty to doomed friends, robot dog sidekick, catchphrase: That mouth could only be Billie Piper — though she'd have to dye the hair.

There was an Edinburgh fringe stage production in , with Claire Fairley as Halo. Created as a Cold War-based, commie-bashing triumph of American technology over conniving, inefficient Russians, Iron Man has proved as durable as his rust-proof armour over the years. This is partly because he's a very adaptable character — not just in terms of power levels — and partly because, let's face it, he looks damned cool.

But it's the man inside the suit who has arguably been more fascinating. Tony Stark, billionaire playboy, has been by turns a reckless maverick, a hopeless drunk, dead not one of Marvel's brightest ideas , teenaged again? Iron Man is relatively simple — point and shoot — but Stark is as complex as they come. As long as that remains the case, Iron Man will remain one to watch.

Shiny red-and-gold armour mostly — he's been known to go all-grey, all-gold and red-and-silver , super-strength, supersonic flight jets, an array of incredible weapons and the recently developed ability to interface with pretty much any OS on the planet.

50. SPAWN (Spawn)

Oh, and he's a genius, too. Played, triumphantly, by Robert Downey Jr. Civil War , with the actor's flamboyant, indelible, charismatic turn a chief factor in their huge success. But from a purely iconic point of view, it had to be Rorschach. Who was in the first picture released from Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie? Who dominated online casting debates? Like The Punisher, Rorschach can be easily dismissed as a fascist whose belief in moral absolutes — there are no shades of grey; only black, white, good and evil — drives him to take the law into his own hands.

But in the hands of Moore, the freckled, ginger Walter Kovacs is a taut, tortured, complex creation who, as well as being at the centre of some of Watchmen's most memorable sequences the prison riot, for one , ends up being perhaps the most pure out of the graphic novel's characters, the only one who — SPOILER WARNING — isn't interested in compromising himself for the greater good. Clad in a trenchcoat and a spotted mask which appears to constantly change configuration, much like a Rorschach test, this unyielding vigilante dishes out punishment to evildoers any way he sees fit.

He's played — with all the requisite dark charisma — by Jackie Earle Haley in Snyder's polarising Watchmen. Like most Watchmen characters, Rorschach was based on a couple of old superheroes from the Charlton Comics era — in this case, two heroes, The Question and Mr. It's a strange one, this; mystifying, on the face of it. Death's own comic is just good, not brilliant; she doesn't appear much in Sandman , and she's not nearly as nuanced a character as Sandman himself, or their younger sister Delirium formerly Delight.

But from the moment she appeared, she's been wildly popular with fans, won over by this bright, cheery figure in place of the traditional skeletal Reaper. Perhaps it's because Death duties make such cheerfulness double-edged, and because she has an air of mystery about her that gives her incalculable depth. What's more, she's the wise elder sister that everyone wishes they had, far more pulled together and at peace than any of the other Endless except, perhaps, Destiny , and she gets to tie the whole series together come its final act.

A perfect demonstration that the best characters needn't be overworked, and that the grim reaper doesn't have to be grim. Cute Goth girl, tends to wear all black except for a silver Ankh necklace and a design like the Eye of Horus around the corner of her eye. No screen version yet, but Christina Ricci in Penelope mode would do it, or Jennifer Garner if you like to think outside the box.

Death has an extensive collection of floppy hats, and two goldfish, called Slim and Wandsworth. Instantly recognisable the world over — it's hard to stay incognito when you're ten feet tall and bright green — The Hulk has sometimes been a simplistic character, simply punching things again and again the recent story arc, World War Hulk , was particularly guilty of this.

But when writers like Peter David — the definitive Hulk scribe, as far as we're concerned — get hold of him, Hulk and Banner become a psychologically complex, nuanced being with an incredibly complicated history involving Banner's battle for control, which has led to Hulks green and grey. Long may Hulk continue to be a smash. Sometimes smart, sometimes savage, sometimes somewhere inbetween. Oh, and incredibly, incredibly strong — in fact, the madder he gets, the stronger he gets. Lou Ferrigno was famously the first to play The Hulk, donning green bodypaint to do so. Norton, surprisingly at the time, handed over the rage baton to Mark Ruffalo , who has since become a fan favourite in the MCU.

The Hulk has a healing factor that's even faster than Wolverine's. He's believed to be able to survive a near-direct hit from a nuclear missile. A real-life hero who survived insurmountable odds and devastating adversity to create a new life with his family in a new world, Vladek Spiegelman's life bursts out of the pages of his son's seminal series to heartbreaking effect. Depicted as a mouse, his concentration camp incarceration under the yoke of Nazi felines and subsequent escape to a new world populated by dogs, frogs and fish is overflowing with a humanity that has yet to be equalled in comic book lore.

That Art Spiegelman was able to recount such a harrowing chapter in history in comic book form and in such a stylised manner is impressive enough, but through a rodentised image of his father he embodied the fear, desperation and hope of the Holocaust in one person. Even the subsequent change in character, as Vladek morphs from idealistic young adult to embittered old codger, cannot lessen the impact he makes upon the reader.

Tenacity in the face of adversity as a young man, a grumpy old sod in his later years. If George Orwell's Animal Farm can be made into a decent animated flick, Spiegelman's tale would be phenomenal — no word on a big-screen adaptation yet, though. Maus won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in — it missed out on the main gong because the voting board members found the cartoonist's depiction of Nazi Germany hard to classify. Like Preacher , Transmetropolitan had a short life — but for 60 brilliant, dazzlingly inventive issues, writer Warren Ellis and artist Darick Robertson brought their A-game.

And the creation of Spider Jerusalem, gonzo journalist, imbiber of enough drugs to floor a struggling musician, and seeker of truth, was at the centre of it all. A foul-mouthed tribute to, most obviously, Hunter S. Thompson, Jerusalem is known as the God-King of journalists, who devotes his life to delivering the truth to his readers one article simply repeated the word "fuck" times - we have to try that sometime , no matter how unpalatable it may be for the establishment which, incidentally, he's trying to bring down.

Not averse to taking the odd life in his quest mostly in self-defence , Spider is a true one-off, a character so fearless and vibrant and nonchalantly cool that Patrick Stewart is his biggest fan. And if that's not a recommendation, we don't know what is.

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Virtually hairless after an encounter with a faulty cleaner , foul-mouthed and dogged about rooting out the truth. He's festooned with tattoos, including — yes! Much to his publicly expressed chagrin, Patrick Stewart is too old to play Spider in anything other than an animated flick. Colin Farrell's got the right edge of mania and earnestness. We can just see his mad eyes twinkling behind a pair of glasses, one lens green and rectangular, the other red and round Spider's middle names are Django Heraclitus. You know that old saying, men want to be him and women want to bed him?

Usually it's applied to James Bond, but it really should refer exclusively to Jesse Custer, the anchor of Garth Ennis' masterpiece, Preacher. In a comic filled with extraordinary supporting characters, Ennis and the artist Steve Dillon had to work some to make sure that the title character stood out. Jesse is at once a throwback to the good ol' days of the Wild West, a rootin', tootin', ready-with-his-fists guy, ready to do what's right and stand up for what he believes in.

He communes with the ghost of John Wayne and looks like Jim Morrison took to the church. But he's also - and this is the clever part - one of the most noble, romantic characters in modern comics, with almost everything he does motivated by love, friendship and self-sacrifice: Almost everything else, like his desire to find God and punish him, is driven by dismay at the state of the modern world.

Oh, and he even looks great with an eyepatch. For a man of God, Jesse Custer has something of the devil in him — he's a drinkin', smokin', cussin' ex-preacher with a taste for pleasures of the flesh. He also happens to be possessed by Genesis, the enormously powerful offspring of an angel and a demon that gives him the ability to make anyone do what he says. There was talk of a Preacher movie for more than a decade now — Sam Mendes was one of the filmmakers attached — but it's finally burst to life on Amazon Prime with Dominic Cooper donning the cloth as the classic comic book antihero.

Season 2 is already on its way. Jesse turns against the hypocrisy of the church after a chance encounter with comedian Bill Hicks. One of the most beloved characters in comics, The Thing is the heart of the Fantastic Four — a wisecracking trier, with a heart the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. Despite the disparity in their strength levels, The Thing has never shied away from the fight. Yet, despite the sense of humour, there's a tragic element to The Thing, as well. Trapped — for the most part — in a body he loathes he was mutated in the cosmic ray storm that created the FF , Ben Grimm can be prone to bouts of depression in a nod to classic stories like Frankenstein and Beauty And The Beast his blind girlfriend, Alicia Masters, providing the beauty.

But hey, the ultimate message is the sort you normally find in a DreamWorks Animation film: A large creature with incredible levels of endurance and strength, this gruff, irascible but lovable New Yorker — catchphrase: Michael Chiklis beat off the likes of Bobby Cannavale to wear the orange prosthetic suit for the first two Fantastic Four films.

For Josh Trank's earthier reboot, it was Jamie Bell who rocked out in an ultimately ill-fated adaptation.