Random thought on Day 4.  We're already getting a lot of repeats. 

Tom Tully - The Driver comes up with his second name that means nothing to me.  I begin to suspect a conspiracy. 

Ed Brubaker - Brubaker will show up again.  

Nancy A. Collins - I think that the only comic by Collins that I've read was her run on Swamp Thing.  I have no memory of it whatsoever.  

Robert Kanigher - I will definitely agree that there is good Kanigher and bad Kanigher.  Enemy Ace definitely is good.  Most of the rest of his war work is pretty okay, as long as you read it in dribs and drabs.  But if you read big chunks it becomes obvious the guy reused plots...frequently.  

Chris Claremont - I haven't read anything by Claremont in a long time.  But the last time I did I found it nearly unreadable.  So many words used to so little purpose. 

Jeff Parker - Parker is one of those guys who I could see making my list in ten or twenty years.  I really like a lot that he's done.  But at this point I think all he's written that I've read that qualifies is Agents of Atlas.  And while I really liked it, it's not enough to sniff the top 12. 

Dean Motter - I liked Mr. X and Terminal City.  But I didn't like them as much as I felt like I should.  But it's nice to see him here. 

Frank Giroud - I got nothin'. 

Dave Michelinie - David Michelinie is interesting.  I know his name.  I remember when he wrote funnybooks.  I know I've read funnybooks he wrote.  I could not, to save my life, name one of those funnybooks.  He literally made the least impression of almost any writer I can name. 

Brian Wood - I gave Wood a bit of consideration.  I loved Northlanders.  I really liked Rebels.  DMZ, on the other hand, completely failed for me.  I absolutely could not suspend my belief enough to reconcile a dozen or so things that were utter nonsense in the couple of issues I read.  

Paul Levitz - I haven't read anything by Levitz in eons.  He did write Legion at the only point I read it or cared.  So that's good. 

John Ostrander - He'll be back.  

Yeah--I briefly considered Kanigher for Enemy Ace, but i couldn't get past (as I've said before) his seeming contempt for the character and fans of Wonder Woman, despite staying on the book for years.

On Lee/Starstruck, yeah, I've so far only read the original graphic novel, and like you initially, I could never make sense of it. It seemed like I was reading the middle chapter of a much longer, intricately-plotted book. It is intriguing though, and I'd really like to read the whole story (the Epic series, and the more recent IDW series).

David Michelinie

David Michelinie started out as an adventure writer, appropriately enough as one of his early assignments was Adventure Comics. But even then you could see his unique approach to character work. He put his heroes interesting situation, nothing dramatic, at least initially. It was as if we were dropping in on their lives. We believed what we saw. We believed Donovan Flint on the Sunrider or Gravedigger’s unlikely path through a World War. So when the dramatic happens it doesn’t jar, but rather seems like the natural result of what came before. We knew Tony Stark was going to hit an alcoholic rockbottom. And we felt it. When Aquababy was murdered, we didn’t feel shock; we felt loss.

He seemed to know what his characters needed. Sometimes it was a friend. So he gave Jim Rhodes to Tony Stark. And when a letter hack suggested an arch enemy for Stark (as opposed to Iron Man), he answered, “Let me think about it.” The result was Justin Hammer. Another success and not at all surprising because he excelled at villains. He gave Taskmaster to The Avengers. He gave Venom and Carnage to Spider-Man. He arguably gave comics more characters that are still around today than any other writer of his era.

Unfortunately his heroes didn’t stick as well. Don’t get me started on Scott Lang. I dropped Lang’s appearance in Marvel Premiere in the last round of cuts when we did individual comics back in 2014.

In the interest of full discloser, Michelinie is the only writer on my list that has two runs I actively dislike. I feel justified in ignoring them. The first is his return to Iron Man. I found Michelinie/Layton to be a different experience than Michelinie. I know Bob Layton contributed to the plotting in the first run but that was tweaking and adding to what Michelinie already had planned. The other is The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones, ironic as he otherwise excels at adventure. He paced it like a movie, not a comic. In the end, though, there’s no shame in only a couple of missteps considering that his career began in 1975.

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

9. Roy Thomas

When I began to thnk about who I would include in this year's 12, Roy Thomas wasn't one of the names that immediately came to mind. And even after I was reminded of it by seeing him appear on a few other members' lists, I still didn't consider him a serious contender for mine at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that in all honesty he would have to be in there somewhere. Looking back, Thomas was responsible for at least three series or runs that are up there with my all-time most enjoyable comics-reading memories: The Avengers; Conan the Barbarian/Savage Sword of Conan; and the Ragnarok/Celestials saga in around Thor #275-300.

The Roy Thomas Avengers was one of my earliest comics-readng memories: Thomas was the writer for the series by the time I was old enough to read, or rather begin to learn read, so the earlier Stan Lee Avengers was something I knew only from reprints in Giant-Size Annuals and the like, even back then. And to ths day I would count stories such as "Even an Android ..." and the first Arkon two-parter amongst the best ever done in the superhero genre - granted, in part for the Buscema/Klein and Buscema/Palmer artwork, but Roy's writing was just as important.

With Conan he showed that he could write something other than superhero comics, because though still in the over-the-top adventure mode, this sword and sorcery stuff was a very different thing in many respects. The soap-opera melodrama was entirely missing, as was the sharply defined moral landscape: compared to superheroes, even Marvel superheoes, always (except for Captain America) less puritanical and morally perfect than DC's, Conan was a morally ambiguous anti-hero - a thief, a mercenary, a pirate, you name it. And the whole tone was different: in the 2nd issue, the main supporting character dies heroically, but tragically - and I mean tragically, with no ironic undertones intended. As the series continued and he became one of Mrvel's most popular characters, I think Conan did sometimes become a little too unbeatable and superheroic, but Thomas never allowed it to get completely away from its rots.

And the Thor/Celestials epic, though I think it works best as a sort of "What If?" story and shouldn't have been a launching pad for the Eternals as permanent Marvel Universe characters, is, even from that perspective, probably the only time they've been successfully used in a MU story. From the Thor perspective, it and the preceding Ragnarok issues brought that series back to its glory days, or as near as you could get without the Kirby artwork.

Anyway, I'd say those are the highlights, but there's lots of other good to very good stuff as well - the under-rated Ring of the Nibelung miniseries with Gil Kane, his run on Daredevil (which looks especially good compared to what came afterwards), .... but what confirms Roy Thomas's inclusion on my list of 12 is that not only do I remember his comics as some of the most fun I've had with the medium, they're also among the ones I most look forward to re-reading in the future.
Anyway,

9. MAD movie parodies Larry Siegel
“Fantastecch Voyage”
“Hokum’s Heroes”
“Hood!”
“The Sinpiper”
“MAD Looks at a Typical Kiddie TV Show”
“Valley of the Dollars”
Many “A MAD Peek Behind the Scenes…”
And many others…

Much has been said about the influence of MAD on dinosaurs like me who came of age in the 60s, and it’s all true.

MAD gave us all the skinny about the real facts of life: sanctimony, hypocrisy, phonies, con artists, grifters, hucksters, and liars. The truth is always a threat to the established order.

Larry Siegel was my favorite among the stable of great MAD writers, with his trenchant movie and TV parodies the crème de la crème as far as I was concerned. I can still see in my mind’s eye so many of the panels (almost always because of the Mort Drucker art), but I can hear the dialogue as well, because a buddy and I would buy the latest copy and immediately go to the parody and begin a brilliant reading out loud in the appropriate voices… with ample time between gags for our laugh track of giggling and chortling.

Man, did we love those parodies, which were so spot-on in following the plot that we could hold our own discussing them with kids who’d already seen them. Siegel’s dialogue crackled; I’m convinced that his timing, gain helped immensely by the ability of Drucker and other artists to lay out each panel so that we had no choice but to read the lines as they were meant to be heard.

Read any of Siegel’s best parodies and relish the skewering of blessed bovines that occurs on every page. His most notorious is probably “Hokum’s Heroes,” which was a wake-up call to all of us kids who just accepted that of course everybody would love a comedy set in a Nazi POW camp.





   

Siegel gave us kids a peek behind the curtains of pomposity, greed, meretriciousness, and venality that were the stock in trade of most of the adult world and we were all the better for it. You could always tell the kids who’d read MAD; they were never easy to fool, suspicious of anything too good to be true, and leery of a free lunch.

PS: I’ve been hunting unsuccessfully for the last page of the brilliant “Fantastecch Voyage,” but have come up short, as that’s the final line that has most stuck with me all these years and left me ROFLMAO when I was a kid and, I’m unashamed to admit, still does. (It’s in MAD 110, April, 1967.) Seek it out and enjoy the laugh…