Joker8417, nice thread.
Im a rabid reader and while I read a lot of books, I still get occasional comics. Years ago I was a massive comic book fan and I dont know if Marvel and DC just started to suck or if I "woke up", because I think Marvel and DC comics are absolutely dreadful. It's funny I saw this thread, because I came across an old Fantastic Four comic this morning. It was issue 49 and it was where that cosmic character, Abraxas, was killing Galactus' in other realities (this is obviously going back some years now). I read through it and I thought "the script and dialogue for this is just terrible" so yeah, I think I might have just grown out of it. But back then, I thought this stuff was great. Great artwork, Salvador Larroca was always good, but terrible writing. I think the last good Marvel writing were the early "Ultimate" titles. And of course, The Punisher by Garth Ennis.
Comics I do read at the moment are The Boys and Crossed: Badlands. As you might see, im a huge Garth Ennis fan. At one point I thought Preacher was the best thing ever, but Ennis work on The Punisher changed everything. Frank is the only Marvel character I like. Punisher MAX ending genuinely got me bummed out but it's the only way it was going to end for him, and to be fair, Jason Aaron did a fair job after Ennis left the series. That said
I HIGHLY recommend picking up the tpb's of The Slavers and Long, Cold, Dark. Possibly the two greatest story arcs i've ever read. So gritty and dark.
Other worthy mentions, Alan Moore. Never really read much of his stuff, but I picked up Neonomican recently. I got it mostly because Jacen Burrows is a great artist, but I can see why Moore is very highly praised. I'm very much a fan of British comic writers over American ones. Pat Mills was brilliant, the stuff he did in 2000 AD was epic. Judge Dread, Nemesis, Slaine, Rogue Trooper, The ABC Warriors. The stories and characters were so good. Other comics I loved as a kid was the UK version of Transformers and ZOIDS. ZOIDS was great. It was about a group of humans looking for other worlds and they find what they think is a derelict world, only to find it's full of androids that pilot these massive war machines that resemble dinosaurs, animals and insects. It's a huge civil war between the Blue and Red zoids with the humans struggling to survive. The characters of Namer and Silverman were really good and well writen. If you want to see how good ZOIDS were, go here where you can someone has kindly uploaded all the comics and annuals online:
http://www.zoidstar.com/comics.html (very old school stuff, but well worth an hour or two of reading with some nice old school artwork by various artists)
The only comics i'll really read today are the adult themed ones. Anything by Ennis or Moore is usually a winner (Neil Gaiman is also very good), but I still enjoy reading old 2000 AD stories, ZOIDS, transformers, which is strange considering how I find Marvel Comics now, and back then, such awful, awful writing.
The Boys issue 65 was one of the best comics i'd read in awhile. A dark satire on Marvel and DC super hero comics, this issue could easily have been The Boys finale! What Ennis has in store for another 6 issues, I have no idea.
I only colored the Maul one.
