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What areyour favorite things about 80's comics?
- daveroswell
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The other thing that sticks in my head were the ElfQuest graphic novels. I still remember that shit pretty well, and haven't seen those in fifteen years.
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Early '80s Marvel was great, with Byrne and Claremont doing their best work ever on X-Men, while Frank Miller was doing great with Daredevil, and even David Michelinie and Bob Layton impressed me with their work on Daredevil. The Avengers and Fantastic Four were still good titles.
Then Shooter started driving off the talent. He shoved some very arbitrary changes on many of the titles, and seemed to be trying hard to replace Captain America, Iron Man and Thor with younger replacements, which made zero sense with respect to an immortal like Thor. I've read interviews where writers have complained that Shooter was planning to replace the Marvel Universe with the New Universe. Anyway, around the time of Secret Wars II, I dropped almost every Marvel title.
Before Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC was practically on life support. They had just one popular title, Teen Titans. But Shooter kept driving talented creators to jump ship from Marvel to DC, so DC started getting some really good people on board.
Then Crisis on Infinite Earths came along and changed everything. The story itself was an ambitious mess, and the basic concept seemed to be swiped from The Courts of Chaos, by Roger Zelazny. But it was an exciting event, and the resulting unified setting unleashed an amazing wave of creativity from DC writers. Unfortunately, it also inspired dozens of imitation crossover events at both DC and Marvel, to the point where you can barely read a comic from either company that isn't locked into whatever current crossover mess is going on.
Finally, towards the end of the '80s, DC launced their Vertigo line, focusing on horror and other mature themes. Vertigo is still around, and still gives DC a significant edge in terms of telling intelligent and challenging stories.
So, early '80s:
1. Uncanny X-Men, at least up through #144.
2. Daredevil by Frank Miller
3. New Teen Titans, by Wolfman/Perez
The rest of the '80s:
1. The Watchmen, by Alan Moore
2. Doom Patrol, by Grant Morrison
3. Crisis on Infinite Earths
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- southernman
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I stopped buying and reading around the mid/late 80s as life had me moving all over the country and then the world. But when I finally settled down (on the other side of the world) around 2000 (...hmmmmm, coincidence) I started looking around for graphic novels of classic characters, and once I discovered eBay a year or so later then I was on my way buying up 'ABC Warriors', 'Nemesis', 'Slaine', 'Rogue Trooper', 'Judge Dredd', 'Strontium Dog', 'RoboHunter', ....
I feel privileged that I was able to read these brilliant groundbreaker comics that 'set the bar' when they came out - reading the graphic novels is great, but it's just not the same feeling.
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- Michael Barnes
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- Mountebank
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1) Alan Moore
2) Frank Miller
'Nuff said.
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There was some good at Marvel though,like the Kravens Last Hunt Story Line ,Millers Daredevil Born Again,Claremonts X-Men (before it got so damn convoluted) The Punisher and G.I. Joe..the later two being guilty pleasures.
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- metalface13
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The only other comics of my youth that I used to read were Wormy (yeah the Dave Trampier comic) and Phil and Dixie out of The Dragon mag.
--Mike L.
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Looking back on it, there seems to me to be a real respect for the characters during that time ... along with a respect for continuity and the fact that these characters were supposed to be sharing a "universe." With very few exceptions, all of that is missing (for me, anyway) from today's Marvel, especially with regards to continuity. That corn-holer Joe Quesada has practically come right out and said he doesn't give a shit about continuity.
In terms of specific books, I really enjoyed most of Marvel's "big" titles of the time, especially Avengers, Thor, Daredevil, X-Men, and Fantastic Four. I also read all of the team-up titles. Oddly, I was never that into Spider-Man ... I read it every month, but it didn't rock my world.
I got out of comics for many, many years later in the '80s ... too many X-Books, too many gimmicks, too much else going on (**cough**girls**cough**).
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The early 80s X-Men stuff is also really quality.
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