The 80's was one of the best times for comic books in my opinion. The X-Men were at their best during this time, and the "grim and gritty" trend turned out a lot of good stories. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a parody of the grim and gritty comics, but they ended up finding much mainstream success.

Some of my favorite stories from the 80's are:

1)Watchmen-one of the best comics ever. Very complex story that breaks the stereotype of comics being kids stuff.

2)Batman Year One: A more detailed retelling of the Batman origin, which coincides with Gordon's first year as a cop in Gotham.

3)Daredevil:Born Again: A very interesting story that shows what happens if a superhero's secret identity is discovered. Daredevil gets his life ruined and has to fight to get it back.

4)X-Men: God Loves Man Kills- the X-Men have often been used to tell stories about prejudice, and this one is one of the best.

5)X-Men Mutant Massacre: The first big X-Men crossover storyline that left a big impact on the X-Men. The X-Men try to save the Morlocks but many of them end up badly injured.

4)X-Men: God Loves Man Kills- the X-Men have often been used to tell stories about prejudice, and this one is one of the best.


That is probably the greatest X-Men story right there........nothing about evil villians wanted to take over and cause chaos...but the reality of prejudice....


But on a lighter note on of my favorite stories was the great crossover, The X-ecutioner's song.

One of my favourite crossover events was in '91, but it was pretty 80s in its style and content. "The Infinity Gauntlet", where Thanos gets his hands on all of the Infinity Gems and becomes the ultimate power in the universe.

It was awesome because it featured kick-ass characters like Warlock, Mephisto, and the Silver Surfer, and was written by Jim Starlin (possibly my favourite comics writer).

The storylines that affected me the most are ones I experienced as they were happening, but since I was 7 at the turn of the decade most of those are from the 90s.

God Loves, Man Kills is a great story; but what was up with GLMK2? That sucked so bad.

Crisis On Infinite Earths is pretty cool, and Secret Wars.

Marvel Team-Up # 136 is one affects me greatly. The feelings I get reading that are unlike anything else, it's a real crazy nostalgiac experience.

I love the early issues of West Coast Avegers as well.

And the ads in 80s Marvel comics! I tend to remember those a lot more clearly the stories sometimes.

Vintage comic book ads are awesome. I have a scanned collection of ads from pretty much every month during the 80s and early 90s. I'm planning to write some articles on comic ads soon, probably starting with M&Ms ads, followed by one on Nintendo ads. Keep a look out!

I haven't read Secret Wars yet. Some people dismiss it as being mindless action and an exuse to have a whole bunch of Marvel Super Heroes in the same book, but that's what makes it sound interesting.

I've read some of Crisis On Infinite Earths. It's a good story, but it gets confusing at times if you don't know a lot about DC's alternate universes.

This seems like as good a place as any to post this:

http://www.wcl.govt.nz/teens/comichistory.html

It's personal history of comics that wrote a couple of years ago for my work.


Secret Wars is pretty much just mindless violence, I mean it's a toy advert, but it's still enjoyable. And I agree that COIE is kinda hard to get into continuity wise, but I used to be so hard out into comics that I can pretty much get into anything that I read and understand who most people are.

Is anyone reading Infinite Crisis at the moment?
This is the first time in my life that I've been more into DC than Marvel, it's so great that they're doing something that's really exciting.
House Of M was okay, especially the last four issues, but the aftermath is a bit too X-Men-centric for my tastes.

I'm actually totally against DC right now. I hated Identity Crisis, and I hated Countdown to Infinite Crisis, so I just decided to stop buying the DC event books. I skipped the four Countdown books, and now I'm skipping Infinite Crisis.

I just really hate the way they're treating the characters from the Justice League International series. I mean, if you were a fan of that (like I was), how can you possibly enjoy the destruction of everything that made that fun? I mean, the way they've treated Ralph and Sue Dibny, Blue Beetle and Maxwell Lord just turned my stomach. It's all so incredibly out of character. Ugh. I'll stick to Marvel from now on (they have better monthlies anyway). At least I'll have DC books until that ridiculous "ONE YEAR LATER" stunt.

Does anyone remember Marvel's Contest of Champions?
It was a mini-series, from 1982.
I still read it on occasion.

i think it was early 90s, but i really liked the Dark Hawk series...

My friends go on about how good Infinite Crisis has been and how it is way better than Marvel but I don't really like the sound of it. I think Crisis was unnecessary in the first place anyway. If you don't want alternate universes, just stop writing about them. If you want to retell the character's origins, go ahead. But Crisis made a lot of problems as well as fixing them. I still like that Crisis is a huge crossover though.

Countdown to Infinite Crisis was a bummer in my opinion. They finally build up Blue Beetle, only to have that ending.

Some DC stuff that I've liked lately are the Batman/Superman stories, like Public Enemies and Supergirl, which was an awesome way to bring back the original Supergirl.

Since I am a big fan of gi joe I'll hav eto say the joe comic was really good then. I didn't read it all the time but I really liked it.

I actually haven't read that yet, it's one of the few big Marvel events that I haven't. I got an issue of COC2 a few ago, only because the Deadpool appearance though.


I've never read much of the JLI, so what they're doing to the characters doesn't matter as much to me as does it other people, but I definitely think that if they'd written Blue Beetle the way they did in Countdown earlier then they wouldn't have had to kill him off. Still it is kinda looking like they're setting up the remainder of the JLI to become the new Justice League. I guess I just find Infinite Crisis so exciting because stuff is actually happening, we're being taken on an adventure and we don't know where we're going to end up. I think that that's what comics should be about anyway.

I still think Marvel has the best characters though, I just don't find their stories as interesting lately.