10. Brian Bendis

New Avengers, Daredevil, and ALIAS (and so much more)



I know his work can be quite divisive but I just dont get why. His dialogue makes his books like no other to me.
As someone else wrote he seems like our version of Quentin Tarantino and Im real fine with that. Give me lots of snappy patter any day.
As for the works themselves I loved his Avengers work, taking a book that had floundered for years and turning it on its head. Other than some of Busieks output the Avengers were far from Mighty(IMO).
Im good with Spidey being there, and liked the street level characters getting a chance to strut their stuff. Theyre way more interesting than the overpowered originals anyway.
Ive just finished rereading his Daredevil run(through the average Brubaker afterwards) and was again blown away. Dire straits, Inhumanity, depths plumbed and Kingpin kingpinning, I loved it all, certainly the best 'devil since Frank went Batty.

I never even thought of Stanley.  Maybe because I was under the, apparently false, belief that he drew most of the books he wrote.  I really do love his work on Lulu, Tubby, Nancy, etc.  Shame on me. 

10. Robert Kanigher
DC war comics
Metal Men
Tomahawk
And many others

Yeah, I know, I know. Formulaic. Repetitive. (Flashes are "white-hot." Bullets are "poured into every opening on the panzer." "Nothin's ever easy in Easy."))Leans so much on irony that it’s ironic when he doesn’t employ it. A touch of hyperbole hear and there: ”The most explosive battle tale ever to rip the war apart!” All true. Guilty as charged. 

But give the guy a break. He wrote nearly 3,000 stories and edited over a thousand issues. He had to repeat himself or his remaining creative cells would have been cinders. But hey… he co-created the Silver Age Flash, wrote hundreds of war stories, whipped up the Metal Men over a weekend, broke the mold with Enemy Ace, and even edited and wrote Wonder Woman, a thankless task which must have been the payoff of some bad karma he engendered in a former life.

However….

When I was young and untutored in the ways of comics and combat, DC war comics hit me like a .45 slug spangin’ off my helmet.

To me, it was a surprise when the new guy in Easy who was scared to begin with turned out to be the guy who died saving Bulldozer’s life on the last page.

I hadn’t been with Sgt. Rock the dozen other times a dead man’s finger had pulled the trigger on the bazooka to destroy a Panzer and save the combat-happy Joes of Easy.

Or the 20 times that Easy had thought that without Rock, they’d collapse, but then, when they thought that Rock had been killed, didn’t collapse after all. And then they found Rock right after they hadn’t collapsed.

Or the innumerable times that the whole company was going to be wiped out, when we were told that “Easy’s Had It (OAAW 103) or it was “The End of Easy (OAAW 101), or there was “No Exit for Easy” (OAAW 100), or in case you hadn’t heard, it was “The End of Easy Company (OAAW 126).

None of that mattered, just as continuity didn’t matter in the world of Robert Kanigher. What you had to do as you started to read more and more of these tales of Rock, the Haunted Tank, Gunner and Sarge, Johnny Cloud, Mlle. Marie and even Hans Von Hammer, was that these were really one-offs. Different characters given the same names from story to story.

Nobody could have survived the steady dose of privation, injury, and hand-to-hand combat that Rock and his guys did. Which is probably why Kanigher always told the fans that Rock was killed with the last bullet fired in the war. Rock didn‘t exist outside the confines of the hellish world in which he lived.

Kanigher had a flair for snappy dialogue that melded the simplicity of a Hemingway and the purply flourishes of Mickey Spillane. His stories moved the way a lot of them don’t. You were on a gritty, dirty, violent E-ticket ride when you signed up for a Kanigher Enemy Ace or Sgt. Rock. And yes, of course the brilliant Kubert or Heath art was a huge part of the appeal. But the story itself wasn’t saved by the art, but enhanced.

And more often than you might think, Kanigher hit the narrative nail on the head. Here’s Rock telling us how it looked as he watched Jackie Johnson land a powerhouse left on the jaw of the Nazi champ in the classic “What’s the Color of Your Blood?” (OAAW 160).

Or this, as Rock and Easy take cover in a graveyard: “I didn’t know whether I was asleep…or dreamin’ with one eye open… as a whinin’ breeze tugged a hole in the fog…”

“A scream tore from deep inside the Nazi champion’s throat as Jackie hit him with a fist that must have felt as if it was wrapped around with all the iron chains that had tortured oppressed people all over the world…”

And here's a typical Kanigher page that perfectly captures the feel of Rock's toughness and concern for his men.



Kanigher was a story-machine, which is why even if the story of how he created and wrote the first Metal Men story over a weekend isn’t true, it doesn’t matter, because it definitely could have been.

Just as all the stories he told in the war comics could have been at least a little true because Kanigher made them feel so real.

(I never read Wonder Woman, and I’m sorry he apparently made such a spectacle of it. But I can only say that, judging by the covers, WW looked like it was a hoot under Kanigher’s guidance.)

BTW, try the first dozen or so of the old Metal Men if you want to see how much fun a super-team can be. Kanigher just had pure, plain fun with that series, and it was irresistible. No surprise that for a few years there, it was among DC’s biggest sellers.

And I will always speak up on behalf of Kanigher’s late 60’s-early 70s run on Tomahawk and Son of. Enlightened, hard-edged stories in a comic that was off in its own little corner of the DC Universe.

Here's a great Kanigher moment that might as well have been a page from James Jones or Erich-Maria Remarque...

David V. Reed

There is an age old question when it comes to writing: what comes first, plot or character? The answer of course is: whatever works for you. If the subject is an art form, any art form, there is no one way. As a reader I prefer a healthy dose of both, leaning slightly towards character. But the presence of both is not a requirement. If the characters are credible, I can enjoy plot-based stories just fine. That was where David V. Reed lived.

I am unfamiliar with his golden age work and truth-to-tell have no interest in reading it. But when he returned comics in the mid-70s, that’s the work I love. Reed was an A to Z writer. He would set up a problem and then go from point to point until everything was explained. Sometimes there was ingenuity involved, as in “Hang the Batman” (not surprisingly as involved a deceased mystery writer), but for the most part the plot twists were more plot points than major reveals.

His greatest work is “Where Were You on the Night Batman Was Killed.” Back 2014 when we did individual issues I picked Part 4 (how could I not pick the solution, being a lifelong mystery fan) and someone else picked the set-up (equally as valid, plus a great Jim Aparo cover). Reed turned the Bat-World upside down. The villains convened a court of crime in order to prove who was NOT guilty of killing the Batman. And the conclusion had an important emotional moment which is not out of character (which often happens with Batman) and was poignant. I hadn’t remembered it when I wrote about it six years ago. I’ve since reread that 4-parter.

My other favorite beside the two discussed above is “Enter the Ragman.” In fact, Batman and Ragman’s dead-of-night meeting, as rendered by Michael Golden, is one of the most spectacular pieces of sequential art ever produced. Maybe not as a standalone but easily within the context of Reed’s script.

It’s why David V. Reed regularly ended up at the top of my comic stack.

10. Len Wein

For Swamp Thing and good runs on Hulk & Spider-Man.