Lower Decks

Incredibly (hey, at least for me), we’re completing a second month of the column this week, and now is as good as any moment to revisit comic books. I previously wrote a column exclusively devoted to them, so it’s still weird for me, whether or not the theoretical readers cared what I had to say about the current landscape. Last time I talked comics, I told you what my ten favorites were. This time, I’ve going to indulge a bit more, with my ten favorite creators, a list that includes runs past and present, so you’ll begin to see where my promised year-end awards are headed.

As you might have guessed last time, my interests as far as comic books go tend toward the superhero, so the creators and the works I know them best from all dance around the head of that pin. Because I notice writing first as a lasting contribution to the genre, there’s only two creators associated on the artistic side. This is not to say I weigh artists as less influential. If I’d gotten a chance to read more Jack Kirby during the course of my comics experience to date, he would no doubt be included. He’s just the first of a long line of writer-artists who’ve struggled to find their place in comics (Phil Hester and Stuart Immonen are among his present-day successors; you may have also heard of John Byrne). As it is, all of the creators on the list have been active only during the last twenty years. I make no bones about being a reader first and foremost, not a historian or a collector. If you want immediately hallowed names or some of the more popular ones (i.e. names from Marvel or Image), you’re once again barking up the wrong tree. But I still contend these are better. It’s the reason I continue to support them.

1. Grant Morrison – It’s hard to say where to start with him. He’s almost the Walt Whitman of comics, the innovator people knew to greet at the start of his career, but they could hardly know where he would go with it. Grant started out where a lot of today’s hottest creators have since become convinced is the only place to do what they want, on the fringe. He did more and bigger things than his descendents can dream of, busting the fourth wall with ‘Animal Man’ and then launching ‘The Invisibles,’ both under the Vertigo imprint from DC. Then he tackled the mainstream in relaunching ‘JLA,’ which became a bigger phenomenon than any incarnation of the Justice League before or since. He created ‘Aztek,’ which ran for about a year, the only book to be inspired by ‘Kingdom Come’ and provide a true alternative perspective on heroes and grim realities, a vision of the future no one else has glimpsed. Marvel took him to do a few things with, a short-lived, film-inspired ‘New X-Men’ the company is still trying to realize as more seminal than anything else its mutant creators have done since Claremont and Byrne. He came back to DC, orchestrated the epic ‘Seven Soldiers of Victory,’ began work on ‘Batman,’ tackled ‘All Star Superman,’ and is currently in the midst of the mythic-sized ‘Final Crisis.’ He was also one of four writers to work on the historic ‘52,’ and is said to have had his hand in much of the current landscape of DC. Out of the titles I’ve mentioned, I haven’t read any ‘New X-Men’ yet, and there are plenty other projects that I haven’t mentioned, much less read, but Grant is without a doubt the most kinetic mind in comics today, so far ahead of other creators he doesn’t have any trouble integrating each and every random thought that pops into his head. To some, this may sound like Grant’s loony, and maybe he is. He discards, whether by necessity or for some other scheme, better ideas every few years than most creators have in a lifetime.

2. Geoff Johns – Truth be told, as much as it shames me now the first time I remember hearing the name Geoff Johns I was convinced he was what had gone wrong with the new generation of writers, fools too wrapped up in the need to be ‘cool.’ It was during the early years of the new millennium and he was, of course, working for Marvel at the time (discrimination rightly earned in my view). Then he ventured to DC and took on ‘The Flash,’ a series made famous for me by Mark Waid. I wasn’t reading comics at the time, so I missed his early issues, but had the chance to read an arc where Wally West had asked to lead an anonymous life, which didn’t go quite as planned. In the greater perspective, the arc doesn’t really represent Geoff’s work during the run, but I liked what I read and still didn’t end up becoming a fan of his. He soldiered on, tackling ‘JSA’ in the meantime, and then he seemed to have some sort of revelation. ‘Green Lantern: Rebirth’ demonstrated that DC had some faith in him to handle epic matters, and then he penned ‘Infinite Crisis,’ the launching point for a rebirth of the whole line. From there, he relaunched ‘Justice Society of America,’ collaborated on ‘52,’ and eventually started work on ‘Action Comics,’ and has become an essential element of the DC landscape ever since. He’s the yin to Grant Morrison’s yang, the bold to Grant’s brave. Grant blows things apart, Geoff puts them back together. If DC needs someone like Grant to pull the carpet from under the fans, Geoff is there as the one making sure they have somewhere to land.

3. Mark Waid – Strictly speaking, neither one could be doing what they are now if it hadn’t been for Mark Waid, who redefined what it meant for someone to single-handedly write a corner of the DC franchise. Before Waid, The Flash was certainly a memorable element of the mythos and member of the Justice League. No character before him had so deftly united different eras when Jay Garrick and Barry Allen met for the first time. Wally West had already succeeded Barry by the time Mark arrived, but it was Mark who realized the potential of legacies (James Robinson’s ‘Starman’ would never have been possible if it weren’t for Mark Waid). He created Impulse and spun him off to his own series, which in the time Mark was writing both rivaled if not surpassed the standard that had already been set. Mark’s the first creator on the list to have truly made an impact at both DC and Marvel, and if anything it’s been his inability to stick with either company that has kept him from sustaining the presence he ought to have in the industry. At the House of Ideas, I know him best with a short-lived return collaboration with Humberto Ramos on ‘X-Nation 2099.’ Between intermittent runs on ‘The Flash,’ Mark established a new standard for alternate futures with ‘Kingdom Come’ (which he would later revisit with ‘The Kingdom,’ which has become lost to Hypertime since the reintroduction of the multiverse), worked on ‘52,’ and set a new standard for exploring the DC landscape in ‘The Brave and the Bold.’ As with Grant, there’s a lot of stuff I could mention but have no direct experience with, such as the innovative ‘Empire’ or his ‘Captain America’ and ‘Fantastic Four.’ He’s also a champion of all star creators working for companies other than DC, Marvel, or Image, and that’s taken much of his time as well.

4. Ron Marz – I’ve never been able to follow him elsewhere, just through the first experience I had with him, but it’s such an important one to me that it elevates him far past where his relevance seems to take him. Ron went where Geoff later followed, revamping Green Lantern lore (and is another main reason why it took me so long to get into Geoff’s work, let alone his Green Lantern). Accepting the challenge to end the saga of Hal Jordan (at the time), Ron turned in “Emerald Twilight,” spun off from the events of “Reign of the Supermen,” which effectively left Jordan mad as a hatter with grief over the destruction of his beloved Coast City, charging off through space and his fellow Corpsmen toward Oa for a final confrontation with the Guardians of the Universe. He destroys everything in sight, absorbs the Central Power Battery, and becomes Parallax. A Guardian named Ganthet survives, however, and fashions a new power ring for wayward artist Kyle Rayner, and thus Ron refashions Green Lantern lore to more closely resemble the work Mark Waid has been doing with The Flash. I’ve since come to peace with what eventually happened to Kyle and that Hal returned to duty, and how what Ron did was integral to several stories larger than the simple directive given to him, but it doesn’t diminish the impact of the work that essentially defined for me the birth of a new hero.

5. Karl Kesel – Karl’s an unsung hero of the previous decade, a major reason why Superman enjoyed such a long, rich creative period during that era. From ‘Adventures of Superman’ to launching and eventually returning to ‘Superboy’ and the appropriately undiscovered brilliance of the spin-off ‘Superboy and the Ravers,’ Karl had a keen understanding of what was going on at DC at the time and exploited the opportunity to play in the sandbox, even fashioning ‘Final Night,’ one of the simplest yet most affecting event comics to this day. Maybe it’s because he was so easy to overlook, easy to take for granted, that Karl still hasn’t gotten his due. Just one of many 1990s DC talents currently working for Marvel.

6. Chuck Dixon/Devin K. Grayson – I’m cheating with this entry, but it’s my prerogative. Dixon and Grayson tie for the project they traded off on, ‘Nightwing,’ the long-awaited ongoing series for the original Robin, Dick Grayson. Chuck launched the series, inventing the city of Blüdhaven to have place Nightwing could call his own, and the Blockbuster saga he began Devin Grayson ended, somehow controversially completing the character arc by pushing Dick as far as he could go. I had been a fan of the character for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t think it was an exaggeration to believe this series was elevating him to the same status I had always heard attributed to Frank Miller’s Daredevil, a backbone hero with an epic narrative. Sometimes people seemed to agree, sometimes they most definitely didn’t. But it’s a testament to Chuck and Devin that every creator since has tried and failed to live up to their work.

7. Ed Brubaker – He’s become known for his work on a number of other series, from ‘Daredevil’ to ‘Uncanny X-Men’ to ‘Immortal Iron Fist’ to ‘Criminal’ but to my mind Ed has done nothing to compare with ‘Captain America,’ the series he relaunched four years ago and immediately set on an arc no one could have known ‘Civil War’ was playing right into, the transition of Steve Rogers to Bucky Barnes as the bearer of the mantle. With apologies to every creator above Ed on the list, no one else in comics history has been able to sustain such a story for so long, and he’s still working on it. Not all of it has been readable, but it’s been indispensable from the start.

8. Frank Miller – The first name on the list every reader will be able to identify, Frank’s best known at this point for Sin City, but he made his name with ‘The Dark Knight Returns,’ a project he’s since returned to with ‘The Dark Knight Strikes Again’ and ‘All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder.’ Grant Morrison is writing the essential ongoing Batman tales, but no one has been able to capture the essence of Bruce Wayne’s career in hind- and foresight quite like Frank.

9. Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale – A modern pairing that has become so famous it has since transitioned to the mainstream with ‘Heroes,’ Loeb and Sale have done things separately and together for Marvel, but they’re at their indisputable best when working on DC projects like ‘Batman: The Long Halloween,’ ‘Batman: Dark Victory,’ and ‘Superman: For All Seasons.’ They’re currently in the midst of unleashing ‘Captain America: White,’ which may be the Marvel project to finally rival the importance of their DC work.

10. Dan Jurgens – I can think of no creator who made a bigger impact and then lost all of his cache more quickly than Dan Jurgens. Though he worked and created Booster Gold for DC years previously, it was his ‘Justice League America’ and ‘Superman’ that led to comics’ most famous moment of the last twenty years, “Doomsday,” the death of Superman. He followed that up with ‘Zero Hour,’ a Crisis in Time that ought to rival any other famous DC Crisis, and created his own incarnation of Teen Titans, but seemed to become lost to his own diminished (or, never realized) role until launching ‘Tangent: Superman’s Reign’ earlier this year, an secondary event comic that has quietly revamped the potential of alternate realities to build their own credible worlds, building on a series of one-shots from a decade earlier. And hey, he has since gotten to revisit Booster, too. Worked for Marvel, briefly, during the Clone Saga. Didn’t stick. He came back home.