Some comics from DC that I think are…

Breach was a miniseries from the mid-2000s drawn by Marcos Martin and it has some of the best artwork and storytelling form his career. And it’s something a little bit different than what he usually does since he gets to draw these big fights between with heavyweights like Superman or Martian Manhunter. If you’re a fan of his (or even if you just enjoy his art) you owe it to yourself to check that out if you can. The story itself is so-and-so.

H.E.R.O. was a series from the early 2000s by Will Pfeifer and, for about half of the run, by Kano. Reinventing the Dial H for Hero concept almost a decade before China Mieville, the comic hit a sweet spot of intersecting superheroes with real-life drama to tell powerful, inspiring stories through metaphor. The Kano issues were great looking and have great, clear storytelling in the same vein of David Aja’s(only a bit less formalistic than it got during the Hawkeye run).

In the late 90s there were a couple of comics coming off the trails of Morrison’s JLA and Hourman by Tom Peyer and Rags Morales is one of them. It “stars” the Matthew Tayler Hourman introduced in Rock of Ages and it takes him on an existential time-and-space sprawling journey. It does a lot of the weirder things that run of JLA did, but with slightly better art. Which shouldn’t surprise since Peyer was Morrison’s editor on Doom Patrol, on a few JLA issues and the fourth co-author of that Superman manifesto that Morrison, Waid and Millar co-signed.

Thriller was a miniseries from the early ‘80s written, at first, by Robert Loren Fleming and penciled by the way too often overlooked Trevor Von Eeden about a team of superpowered mercenaries in a near-future sci-fi that hasn’t yet crystallized into cyberpunk. Von Eeden was doing stuff up there with Miller, Chaykin and Simonson in expanding genre comic book storytelling. In the end, the comic isn’t as great as American Flagg or Ronin but for how close it was to getting there it’s a shame it’s not discussed more often. Especially since the artist isn’t a white dude.

Manhunter by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson is better known, but it’s still a gem too little discussed or at least to little presented to the broader public. A little bit spy-book, a little bit sci-fi, it was a back-up feature in Detective Comics and the low page-count forced the team to do some of the best storytelling of that time. Simonson was employing tricks he took from Steranko, from Eisner and I’m curious if he has already gotten his hands on European comics because some of the stuff in there is very Druillet and Toppi (who he recognized as an influence).