90s Cult Hits DC Needs To Reprint
Last night, ComicBook.com wrote up some of the best comics of the last 30 years that we'd like to [...]
HOURMAN By TOM PEYER And RAGS MORALES
Tom Peyer's Hourman was one of those comics that spawned fierce loyalty on the part of its relatively small base of readers. The people who were into it -- such as Mark Waid, who reportedly bought about a thousand copies of one issue to give away at a convention in the hopes of saving the perpetually-on-the-bubble series -- were passionate.
While this series has never been reprinted, the event miniseries that spawned the character -- DC One Million -- recently got an anthology hardcover from the publisher.
Of course, years of great word-of-mouth and declining audience sizes in comics could make this a pretty easy sell in spite of its relatively small readership
prevnextAQUAMAN By DAN JURGENS And STEVE EPTING
Both Dan Jurgens and Steve Epting are so reliably good, and sell so consistently, that almost nothing either of them worked on for any length of time remains uncollected.
But Jurgens did an excellent run on Aquaman in the '90s, on which Epting was the artist for nearly the whole time, that deserves another look.
Like Erik Larsen's run (also probably worth collecting), it was kind of caught in the wake of the Peter David run and the Zero Hour changes, so it's often overlooked, but it's a worthwhile look at the character particularly because of the way Atlantis and its characters was dealt with -- something that's pretty consistent with how the current thinking views the culture.
prevnextGUY GARDNER: WARRIOR By BEAU SMITH
With Wynonna Earp on the air and getting a ton of year-end acclaim from around the internet, creator Beau Smith's foray into mainstream DC superhero storytelling deserves a second look.
With its radical departure from the look and feel of its lead character's previous adventures, Guy Gardner: Warrior was divisive and somewhat baffling when it came out -- but it was an incredibly well-done series.
prevnextH-E-R-O By WILL PFEIFER
A spin on the recently-respun Dial H for Hero concept, Pfeifer took the H-dial out of the hands of a single, heroic individual and handed it off to a parade of seemingly random folks who all dealt with having powers in a slightly different way.
It was a fun, clever and often heartbreaking book that started out with one of the most poignant and unexpected first issues I can remember in superhero comics. As the series wore on and began to tie into the history of the property, it lagged somewhat but there were still moments of true brilliance in there and it's hard not to imagine that reconnecting Robby with the H-Dial and bringing all of the "heroes" together was something done mostly to bring down the curtain on the series, and not because Pfeifer was looking to create a superteam out of it.
So far only the first arc (arguably Pfeifer and Kano's best work) has ever been available in collected editions.
prevnextTEEN TITANS By DAN JURGENS And GEORGE PEREZ
After the death and rebirth of Superman, and the reinventions of Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman, somebody decided it was the Teen Titans's turn.
Longtime The New Teen Titans artist George Perez teamed with veteran writer/artist Dan Jurgens to create a whole new generation of teen heroes, led by a then-teenaged-because-of-a-time-anomaly Ray Palmer.
This series has its fans -- and we're among them -- but the biggest reason this ought to be reprinted (aside from its impressive pedigree) is the fact that it signaled the start of a major period of change in the way the Teen Titans as a property were handled, and there's really no document of that period in the franchise's history at this point.
prevnextGREEN LANTERN: MOSAIC
For 18 issues, Gerard Jones, Cully Hamner, and a handful of other creators gave Green Lantern John Stewart his own ongoing title, set in the "Mosaic" of Oa.
At the time, a villain had kidnapped a number of cities from around the universe and forced their inhabitants to live on one world and coexist. A shorthanded Green Lantern Corps could basically only spare Stewart to hel keep the peace, and what came as a result was both a good superhero comic, and a smart rumination on race and culture.
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