- Joined
- Sep 3, 2018
There is a good goddamn reason why the best regarded comics in history have all been self contained limited series only tangentially connected to the wider canon (i.e. Killing Joke and Dark Knight and such) or just straight up divorced entirely from it (i.e. Watchmen....until recently because DC is fucking shameless) and all have had the same writer/writing team create them.
The problem with citing Killing Joke, Dark Knight and Watchmen is that they're all metatextual and wouldn't make a lick of sense without the tens of thousands of sincere comics that preceded them. That said, you're right to a degree, but I'd throw entire runs up there. Claremont's X-Men. Byrne's Fantastic Four. Denny O'Neil and later Chuck Dixon's Batman. Wolfman and Perez's Teen Titans. They're not easy to recommend to newbies in the "oh you wanna get into comics, read this!" sense, but they're highly regarded, highly reference, and highly copied runs that lasted, and have endured, for decades. And the one thing all those runs have in common? The writers/artists weren't the creators of the characters, but built upon the legacy of those who came before them. Not everything has to be one-and-done like manga, but I think you have to build up what made the comics good and not just tear shit down because you don't like the status quo.










