Comic book series I used to read

Secret Wars led me to start paying full attention to superhero comics. I was given part of the series as a gift from my parents, and since it involved every member of the Marvel Universe I got to know a bit about everybody. Since I'd already watched the 70s/80s Spider-Man and Hulk TV shows, those were the first two superheroes I gravitated toward and I already knew more or less who they were. Meeting Wolverine for the first time, however, really got me excited and I soon sought him out elsewhere.

This series also introduced Spidey's black costume, which would of course later lead to the creation of one of my favorite villains: Venom.

As a child, I loved the Transformers TV series, so I started reading the comics too once I noticed them. So technically this was the first comic book I read regularly.

As mentioned above, Secret Wars led me to start reading Spidey's comics. I started out with The Amazing Spider-Man and this storyline. Somehow I'd missed the storyline between Secret Wars and this (in which Spider-Man eventually rejected his black costume after discovering it was alive and trying to drain his life), but fortunately they provided a re-cap. Todd McFarlane drew the best Spider-Man I'd ever seen, and when he later started up the Spider-Man series as both writer and artist I read it too.

I started reading Uncanny X-Men via the "Dark Phoenix Saga" graphic novel, then started reading the individual comics regularly about a year or so before the "Extinction Agenda" storyline. I soon grew to love most of the characters, and appreciated their rogues gallery almost as much as the X-Men themselves. Wolvie was easily my favorite of the bunch.

Eventually all the mutant teams were revamped, which led to a second X-Men title (simply X-Men) so of course I read that for a while too.

Thanks to the "Dark Phoenix Saga", I already knew the principals here. Archangel was immediately my favorite once I started reading it...dude's got metal wings that can kill you, that's Amazing...though Beast was a close second. After "Xtinction Agenda" the whole team was revamped and Strong Guy and Multiple Man brought a humorous side to it that was excellent.

Wolvie's solo comic was really well-written at the time I read it, a little darker than the X-Men books. And really since he always seemed like a loner anyway, it made sense that he'd have adventures on the side.

The "Weapon X" storyline exploring his shadowed past was by far my favorite.

I started out with the later issues of New Mutants, which soon morphed into X-Force. The New Mutants team wasn't as cool as the X-Men, but the stories were really well put together. "Xtinction Agenda" also completely revamped the team's lineup for the better, and they changed their team (and comic) name to reflect the new direction. X-Force was better all around.

What If was highly entertaining for the ways it would look at other ways existing storylines could have gone like Peter Parker & Mary Jane not getting married, or for exploring alternate universes to have Conan the Barbarian fight Wolverine. But by far my favorite aspect of the series was the one or two comedic what-ifs they'd put at the end...

In 1990 Marvel launched a new Ghost Rider series, and the first issue grabbed my attention and demanded I keep reading. Texeira's artwork was beautifully dark, and the tone of the stories matched it perfectly.

You know, for as simple as the Punisher's story is it's pretty pathetic every attempt to turn it into a movie has been an utter failure. Anyway, Punisher War Journal was a favorite of mine for several years, because it was dark and violent and compelling.

Despite the fact that I never consistently read The Incredible Hulk, I did frequently get hooked on the longer-running storylines over the years. Also back then I tended to gravitate toward certain artists, so when Todd McFarlane or Sam Keith were involved I kept picking it up.

The grey Hulk was my favorite.

Quite possibly my all-time favorite comic book character, Lobo was everything an angst-ridden teenager could hope for. He was ultraviolent, witty, foul-mouthed (inasmuch as he could be anyway...most of the time his expletives were hybrids like "bastich"), and a complete badass...all put together in parody of characters like Wolverine and the Punisher. Alan Grant and Keith Giffen sent him forth to wreak havoc, which was rendered beautifully by Simon Bisley at first, and together they (and others) turned out miniseries after miniseries before finally getting around to giving him a full-time comic book.

By far my favorite Lobo comic was the one-shot Lobo's Paramilitary Christmas Special, in which the Easter Bunny hires him to murder Santa Claus.

I think this was my introduction to Batman in the written & illustrated form. Before it I'd only been exposed to the TV series with Adam West as the caped crusader. One of my best friends let me read it, and it encouraged me to start picking up issues of Batman and Detective Comics, which I read for the most part up through the "Knightfall" storyline where Bane broke Batman's back and put him out of commission for a while.

As I recall, Robin was given a miniseries to provide a back-story for the 3rd Robin aka Tim Drake. It was so popular it led to a second miniseries before making the jump to a full-time series. I picked up the first one out of curiosity (I suppose brand loyalty too, since he was also present in Batman at the time) and got hooked on it.

In 1990, DC launched a new series called The Demon. I can't remember if I'd seen the character elsewhere first or if the cover simply caught my eye, but I remember it being dark and hilarious (no doubt thanks to writer Alan Grant, who'd worked on the Lobo and Batman comics) so I read it for a few years.

Like many other comics readers in the '90s, when a group of popular Marvel employees quit to form their own company called Image I made sure to pick up the first issues of most of their titles. McFarlane's Spawn was excellent from the start. Great characters, great powers, compelling stories, and it consistently came out on time (a problem with most of the Image titles at the start). One thing I especially enjoyed was the 4 issue run with guest contributors that occurred early on. Bringing in Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller to pen the stories took Spawn in some interesting and entertaining directions.

The thing that made Savage Dragon interesting was that the main character had no idea who he really was. He came to engulfed in flames with no memory of anything before waking up. Nobody else stepped forward to tell him who he was either, so he had to create his own identity while searching for clues to his old self. Good stuff.

Spawn and Savage Dragon may have outlasted The Maxx, but of the all the Image comics The Maxx was my favorite. It was smart, dark, funny, surreal, and best of all unpredictable. I loved the way it existed in two realities at once, and over time it proved to be less of a superhero comic than an exploration of the characters' minds.

I really need to get the collected works so I can read the whole thing, as it was the one comic that was hardest for me to walk away from when I gave them up.

The superhero team in Youngblood worked for the U.S. government, and Liefeld chose to ground them in the real world somewhat. Thus in addition to being government-employed superheroes, they were also famous and had to deal with the trappings of fame. What I remember most though was the long delays between issues that helped me not care about it pretty quickly.

Jim Lee left X-Men to start this one, and it wasn't a big change from his previous work. He created a superhero team of aliens with interesting powers and gave them supervillain alien rivals to wage an ongoing war against. It was good, but not great.

I barely remember Shadowhawk now honestly. I remember it being very violent, that he was a vigilante that broke people's spines, and that he'd been injected with HIV. I think I maybe read the first 3 or 4 issues before walking away from it. So really it's just thrown in here to round out the list to 25 titles (I could just have easily gone with Cyberforce, which I also barely remember). :P

After obsessively watching the TMNT cartoon and loving every minute of the first movie, I finally picked up this graphic novel and started reading the series that started it all. I was surprised how much darker it was at first, but that helped distinguish it in my mind from its other incarnations.

The Unity series brought all 9 of Valiant Comics' titles together for an 18-issue storyline (2 books per title), and served as my introduction to the Valiant universe. Eternal Warrior, Archer & Armstrong, Shadowman, Solar, Man of the Atom, and Turok Dinosaur Hunter were my favorites, so I continued reading them after the Unity series ended.

Seeing the above makes me feel ill. Anyway, Dark Horse Presents was originally an anthology series, which usually showcased 3 separate stories in a single comic. Most of the time the stories would run through multiple issues of the series, and the more successful ones would jump off into their own comic series.

I first noticed an issue of it because it had an Aliens story in it, then I saw one with a Predator story in it, and those encouraged me to pick them up based on my love for the movies. It wound up being a good way to get a taste of their other titles, though I didn't always pick it up to do so. The best thing it introduced me to was Sin City when it ran the story that became known as "The Hard Goodbye" for 13 issues.