Galleries

Alan Moore is known as one of the most famous and inventive comics writers of all time. His major works are often cited not just as the best comics, but as some of the best moments of storytelling in literature. In fact, Watchmen was one of the few comics listed on Time's 100 Best Novels in 2005. Over the many years that he's been writing comics, Moore has produced multiple works that are rightly regarded as classics. In this list of ten essentials, I've tried to cover works that fit into the three periods of Moore's work as I see them.

Superman is the most iconic superhero in the world, and he's loved by millions --- but he's not necessarily the easiest character to get to grips with if you haven't been exposed to the right material. Even as a massive Superman fan, I'll admit that it can be a bit hard for some readers to wrap their heads around exactly why he's so great and why he matters so much. We've put together a list of the ten essential Superman stories for any reader looking to dive into Superman fandom.

One is a kind, caring and sweet person who wants to make a difference. The other is brash and feels isolated from a world that would paint it as an outsider. Somehow, they find a common bond and fall in love, which makes both of their lives a little bit more complete. The archetypes behind the classic fairy tale "The Beauty and the Beast" are ones you can spot again and again in stories dating back centuries. We've assembled some of our favorite examples of "beauty and beast" romances in comics.

Some monsters are surprisingly small, no bigger than a person or smaller still. They intimidate psychologically or with supernatural powers, not with size and strength. But then there are monsters that are big. Giant monsters are easy to understand. They are to humans what we are to ants, and we all know all too well how many ants we've stepped on. With Monsters Unleashed going on at Marvel, and Kong: Skull Island currently in theaters, this feels like a great time to pay tribute to the various giant beasts and kaiju that have graced the covers of comic books for about as long as comics have existed.

For as long as there have been comic books full of men and women dressed in bright colors performing heroic deeds, there have been comic books involving giant mutant gorillas standing in their way. It was established in the Silver Age that if you put a gorilla on the cover, you would sell more copies of that comic, so there's a wealth of amazing covers with noble apes front-and-center. This gallery collects some of the best.

Marie Severin was a woman in comics in an era when a woman in comics wasn't even considered a thing to be. She got her start as a colorist at EC Comics in 1949, and worked there until they were largely driven out of business by the Comics Code in 1955. Severin wouldn't return to comics until the '60s, where she found a new home at Marvel. For this tribute gallery, I've focused on her pencilling work at Marvel. As a penciler, she's probably best remembered for working on Dr. Strange in Strange Tales, Incredible Hulk, and Namor the Sub-Mariner, but she drew fill-in issues and covers for many, many books.

For as much as I love the madness that was the comics of the 1990s, I cannot even imagine how incredible it must have been to be a comic-loving kid (or weird comic loving adult) in the 1950/60s period known as The Silver Age. Within this gallery, I've put together only the smallest of fractions of some of the entertaining, out-of-context fun that The Flash's Silver Age adventures have made possible. Try your best to make sense of them.

While the Golden Age established comics as a medium, the Silver Age was when comic book art really came into its own. And it's worth noting that comics' Silver Age corresponded with a wider cultural fascination with science fiction. The actual Space Race was in full swing, and everybody was thinking about rocket ships, alien monsters, and the wonders of science. This gallery collects some of the best sci-fi comic book covers of the Silver Age, featuring strange invaders, curious tech, and multiple threats to life as we know it.

Bad superhero games rise above the rabble of other bad games because they take such potential, such easily-obtained greatness and squander it so, so very badly, creating a product which infuriates comic book fans and video game fans. With that in mind, now that we've celebrated the best the world of superhero games has to offer, let's check out the dirty underside of this world and plunge ourselves into the muck and filth of the 10 Worst Superhero Games.

Since romance comics had gone out of style well before I was born, I had no idea just how popular and prolific the genre had been. I had always assumed it was some kind of short-lived craze that fizzled out like other comic fads, but then I started noticing how high the issue numbers were on so many of the covers I selected. Turns out romance comics enjoyed an incredibly successful three-decade run from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. I also learned that the comic that launched the genre, 1947’s Young Romance, was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby! You know, the guys that created Captain America a few years earlier. This was without question the easiest one of these galleries I’ve ever had to pull together, because almost every single cover I came across was a home run. They’re all just amazing! There was no sorting and sifting and really trying to get through all the underwhelming garbage to get to the good stuff. It’s all good stuff.