Best Comics?

I chose DC slightly over Marvel because Preacher provided me some of my fondest reading in my teenage years. Spider-Man has to be my favorite hero comic though. Image and IDW have been putting out top notch stuff in recent years (Locke and Key, Saga). Its a tough call.

Each one has published great things in the all their decades, at the moment DC is slightly better than Marvel in my opinion since those are the ones that get read on my pile first. That said I hated the New 52 and didn't read a DC for years after it.

I have a favorite but I'm not even going to vote on this. I can only see the become a typical "This vs. That" argument.

@isslander: I'd consider it more of a discussion than an argument. I like stuff from all of them.

Who knows, maybe the chat here can rise above it. I will wait a bit and see.

Now I have to say Image

Image has Black Science, Saga, Tokyo Ghost (the run just ended), Deadly Class, Monstress and Black Monday Murders (which is just out and bloody brilliant)

But to be fair DC and Marvel have some titles I like as well - Unfollow, All Star Batman, Suicide Squad

Dr. Strange, Black Widow and Moon Knight for Marvel

Stay away from any events if you can - Civil War II is a hot garbage fire

Image has the most unique collection. Also no ads in the single issues.

I'm not a superhero guy so I chose other

Image and IDW both do a lot of fantastic stuff. IDW's GI Joe is just tremendous honestly. And Southern Bastards is maybe the best comic I've read since Preacher.

Also Oni publishes The Sixth Gun which admittedly I've fallen off of, but that's due to my distractions and not the quality of the book. Fantastic supernatural western storytelling.

I just think Marvel and DC just do some really safe, samey stuff. Plus their constant reboots and retcons are just exhausting. Comics are just inherently better outside of the bubble of the big two (not that DC and Marvel can't have good books, the absolutely can, it's just the ecosystem they exist in drowns those stories. The giant crossover/event style storytelling is just *bad* for the individual stories. Blackest Night and Civil War were too far reaching and killed a lot of books for me. Those large scale events drove me away from DC and Marvel because I couldn't get invested in a book because I knew next summer something was going to come around to fuck it all up)

be nice if there were a site devoted to these kind of discussions...

never been into either dc or marvel standard stuff really, though i've read a few batman things so i guess DC? i like more one-offish and original things. read some of Saga and it was fantastic, i REALLY need to get to buying the volume one set one of these days.

i feel i'm into comics in the same way i'm into anime. not really fan of the whole medium but theres stuff i'm really into that i pick and choose.

Berserk

To be honest, while I am interested in comics, I never really read them, and the one I am most interested in I have not even read a single issue of, but would like to, though I still know a lot about it just by reading about it elsewhere, which is Judge Dredd, so 2000 AD. Dredd is probably my favorite, otherwise it's DC's Batman and Top Cow's The Darkness, which seems like a cliche mainstream answer with Batman, but I like what Batman stands for, and his abilities to get the job done without having super powers. Another one, which I wouldn't mind reading, and because I liked the games, is as I mentioned, The Darkness, so Image Comics/Top Cow Productions, alongside perhaps another mainstream answer, which is The Walking Dead I guess, though I don't really consider that alongside the other ones.

I also find it interesting and love that Batman has been in a cross over with both Dredd and The Darkness. I find it fascinating because Batman is on a different spectrum of how he takes foes down, where he's more about scaring them and though brutal, he never kills, where Dredd is following a law, but in the process he's 'executioner' if need be, while Jackie Estacado is a part of the mafia, and even though follows some kind of moral code, he's still a ruthless killer. Something I also find interesting is that Batman had a huge effect on Jackie Estacado's life and the story, because if it wasn't for Batman, Jennie (Jackie's deceased girlfriend I'm sure everyone remembers if they played the game) wouldn't have died.

So, to sum it up, simply due to one comic from each, DC (Batman), 2000 AD (Judge Dredd), and Top Cow Productions/Image Comics (The Darkness). I do like others, but those are the ones I'm most interested in. Something that also attracts me to these comics is that they have sadistic looking and acting characters, from the well know Joker, to Judge Death and the Dark Judges, as well as Jackie Estacado's The Darkness. The look of Carnage from Spider-Man as well as Spawn's Violator has always caught my attention as well, though I'm just not into either of those comics that much. One last thing, I like Superman, but I wanted to mention, Jackie Estacado once punched him in his 'man of steel' face and made him bleed after one strike, so that's pretty cool :P.

Not a superhero guy so Other, I guess.

I think this is a weird comparison because of the Vertigo line. Marvel, to my knowledge, doesn't really produce any comics that exist outside of their marvel universe of super heroes. DC on the other hand has Vertigo which has a lot of original non-super hero works like 100 bullets, Preacher, Fables etc. Because of this DC just has more going on and is more original.

I decided to read through the major beats of DC continuity from Crisis on Infinite Earths through today, and it turns out that that was a bad idea. I like DC lore's reliance on the supernatural over Marvel's 'scientific' (read: genes) stuff (since both are equally stupid and I'd rather not pretend there's a scientific explanation for any of it), and I've been happy with the jobs that the best writers in the industry get with DC versus those they get with Marvel. Additionally, X-Men, a core book in Marvel canon, doesn't appeal to me no matter who I read. Overall, though, Marvel's characters are cooler to me than DC's, but I prefer reading DC.

However, like I said, it was a bad idea to read DC's entire continuity: most of it relies on Green Lantern, and Green Lantern is the most superheroey-ass superhero to read. The GL Corps are always shouting shit like "TRUST YOURSELF!" and "NO FEAR!" to channel their energies into their rings, and it's like watching a Saturday morning cartoon from the 50's. If all their big crisis shit wasn't always tied into the Green Lantern comics, they'd be way better off.

Having said all that, creator-owned books are almost universally better than licensed superhero books, and as such I voted Other. Writers aren't allowed to break from established rules when they tell their superhero stories when they use licensed characters, so some of the best and wildest superhero stories have to be told outside of DC/Marvel canon. Imagine if Moore wrote Miracleman using Superman characters. That would be insane for a variety of reasons, but it would, of course, never fuckin happen.

It's not even a question. Image is the best publisher today by far. I'd say 80% of the books I buy are from Image, and they're usually great.

Image, but any non-DC/Marvel publisher is usually better. The big two are just getting really lazy (Marvel's worse, imo) and keep fucking the pooch on diversity. Honestly, at this point the only big two books I buy are The Hellblazer and the Star Wars stuff.