100 Favorite Comic Book Characters

100 FAVORITE COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS

For the most nerdiest list I have yet to compile, it is my "100 Favorite Comic Book Characters"; "characters" meaning heroes, villains, norms, and anyone in between that I am particularly fond of.  There have been many a "Greatest Superheroes" or "Greatest Supervillains" list out there as any quick google search will prove.  Yet separating the two fields and coming up with a hundred for each would not only call for some extreme padding just to make the numbers, but would honestly be pretty boring since it would include pretty much every name character that you ever heard of, deserving or not.   It would also prove difficult in defining "hero" or "villain" so clearly.  Is Catwoman really a bad guy, (or girl I should say), or just a self-serving burglar with a soft spot for Batman and therefor, a soft spot for his more noble ways?  Magneto is hardly an undeniable villain either, since he has joined and worked with the X-Men on numerous occasions, being just as passionate for his own race as pacifist Professor Charles Xavier is.  So yes, it gets complicated.

This is a break from films and music for me, the only topics thus far that have made up anything that I have blogged about.  Comics are certainly the next obsession with my nerdom and naturally, the next avenue to explore here.  I want to do a "Favorite Comic Book Titles" list one day too, but alas, that is another story and requires far more reading on my part.  Speaking of which, there are a number of very well-respected books out there that I have yet to read.  100 Bullets, Doom Patrol, Astro City, Marvel's Conan the Barbarian, and Maus per example, all of which I shall eventually get to.  Then there are others that I have barely read, (Sin City, Hellboy, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), so sadly that means that there are few if any entries here from any of these books.  Ten years or so down the road I am sure that a re-vitalized version of this list shall therefor be in order.  Yet at that point, there will still be a never ending list of books that I need to get to, such as these things go.

For the record, if you do not know who both of these gentlemen are, then you should not be reading this in the first place.

It shall become apparent very quickly that I am a Marvel guy.  Always have been really.  I can trace it back to my cousin probably who collects 70s comics.  70s Marvel in particular was always the stuff that he exposed to us most.  Captain America, Thor, Doctor Doom, Spider-Man, Galactus, the Red Skull and mountains of others I have seemingly always been aware and a fan of.  Along with Marvel, the Batman-verse equally shares a preference.  Batman anything does it for me and Gotham City is just loaded with memorable characters, nearly twenty of them I think making this list here.

As far as the rest of DC goes, with a few notable exceptions, I pretty much leave well enough alone.  There is a whole other essay's worth of reasons, but it mostly comes down to the fact that DC back in the early days simply bought out a plethora of other company's characters, most of which pre-dated the introduction of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creative team that essentially turned comic book making on its ass.  At that point and for the first time really, comics were not just written for kids anymore.  Therefor a huge chunk of DC's most iconic roster are simply out-dated and silly, try as many a writer has over the decades to gritty them up.  Alas, a history lesson in the comic book medium this here is bit, so we will just leave it at "Marvel rules, DC, eh, much less so".

Oh, and let us of course not forget a handful of Vertigo imprints and independent titles out there from some of comic book's best writers, which make up another fifteen or so percent here.  Again, I wish that I have read more non-strictly-superhero stuffs, but after all, costumed crime-fighters and meglomaniacal, would-be world conquerors are what most people think of when they think of comic books in the first place.  All this stuff is goddamn awesome.  Hail Hydra!