Five Faves

When asked about my favorite arc in an ongoing comic, the one that immediately came to mind is the "Dark Jem" arc (Volume 3) of Jem & the Holograms (IDW). You can read my full review here. It is a beautifully dark and gothic twist on the usually happy-and-pink rock band. The art is hands-down my favorite from any Jem arc. The use of a virus in Synergy is a great plot-device. And, let's not fail to mention how this arc handles Blaze coming out as trans to her new bandmates, The Misfits.

My Little Pony: Legends of Magic Vol. 1 from IDW (read my review here) also makes the list. It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of MLP as a whole, but the comics are sometimes hit-or-miss for me. Legends of Magic, however, stands out as exceptionally well-written, tackling pony mythology / fables while using some of the second-tier characters to tell them. This comic doesn't just expand on the characters introduced in the cartoon, but it gives them an actual story that stands alone. I also love that Princess Luna is in two stories, with an interesting twist on her Nightmare Moon history ... and that it builds on the canon image of Princess Celestia as being mean and bratty by showing her being that way when she was younger.

QuinRose's Alice in the Country of series (Seven Seas) is one of my favorites (and I'm still upset that the rest won't get translated). One of my favorite arcs is Alice in the Country of Clover: Bloody Twins (read my review here). It's a steamy volume that introduces us to Dee and Dum's ability to suddenly become sexy adults (which, of course, makes the romance angle possible). And it combines the new romance angle with the only real polyamorous relationship in this series -- Alice with both twins!

I've been a fan of Saga (Image) since the beginning. Saga Volume 8 (read my review here) is my favorite to-date. As an "arc" it handles the strange new powers in the wake of Alana's miscarriage and their quest to find a way to abort the miscarried fetus before it kills her. It also uses the kids (Hazel and Squire) to deal with some pretty heavy topics: fear from being different and valuing life in the face of death.

As much as I love the original Van Helsing arc (Zenescope Entertainment) that introduces us to Liesel, my love of the Van Helsing vs. Dracula arc outweighs it just a touch, partially because of the role Hades plays -- the supportive significant other, who, despite his god-powers, doesn't overshadow or steal from Liesel's strengths. You can read my reviews here. This is also an interesting arc because it functions as a sequel to wrap up the first arc (against Dracula) while also beginning the new set of "vs" arcs against classic monsters (Frankenstein, Mummy, and Werewolf follow, in that order).

Because narrowing down my favourite storylines to just five was hard enough, I'm not going to rank them. Here they are in chronological order:

1963: "The Death of Lightning Lad" in Adventure Comics #304 to #312 (DC Comics). I read this story arc as a reprint. I'm not sure if it was the first Legion of Super-heroes story I ever read, but it left a huge impression. First, the team had a badass female leader, Saturn Girl. Second, she was flawed . Third, a major character dies, and not just any major character: it was Saturn Girl's boyfriend, Lightning Lad! Granted, his death was possibly due to Saturn Girl's wrong-headed decisions, which, in retrospect, could be interpreted as falling into the sexist trope that female bosses are strident and bad at their jobs. However, at the time, I didn't think it was weird for a woman to lead a team (I hadn't read enough comics to know different), so Saturn Girl came off as being an interestingly flawed and ultimately heroic character. And how permanent was the legionnaire's death? It was permanant (shocking!), but there is a huge and crazy twist ending, nicely recapped by the Silver Age Comics blog, that meant good news for Saturn Girl.

1975: "Where on Earth Am I?" in Justice League of America, Vol. 1 #123 and "Avenging Ghosts of the Justice Society" in Justice League of America, Vol. 1 #124 (DC Comics). Somewhere between these comics and 1971's The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover, I developed a love for metanarrative stories. While Grover doesn't realize he's in the story (or that he actually is the story!) until the end of the book, at the beginning of the JLA book, writers Elliot S! Maggin and Cary Bates fool around with a replica of the Flash's Cosmic Treadmill from the comics and find themselves transported to Earth-2. There, not only do they discover that the characters they've been writing are real, but one of the writers becomes a supervillain and the other becomes a hero after teaming up with the Justice League and the Justice Society to save the day. Back in 1975, I had no idea what comic-book writers looked like. There wasn't the kind of comics convention scene that we have now, and there was no social media. So the glimpse "behind the curtain" was novel, and showed one way it was possible for writers to put themselves into the story.

1989: "The Five-Year Gap" in Legion of Super-heroes Vol. 4, #1 to #6 or so (DC Comics). Honestly, I had to resist posting five LSH story arcs as my top five favourite storylines. The LSH run from "The Death of Lightning Lad" to "Legion Lost" was an almost singular gem, even though it contained a few soft reboots and a couple of hard reboots. I was a sobbing mess by the end of "Legion Lost". Again, a member of the LSH died; it so happened to be one of my favourites, Element Lad. And what about the whole "Who Is Sensor Girl" story arc? I spent months debating the possibilities with my best comic-reading buddy! However, "The Five Year Gap" imagined an adult future for our heroes after decades of being depicted as teens or young adults, but with few reboots (or pocket universe revelations) to explain how 18-year-olds had 35 years of experiences. The adult legionnaires get to marry; to come out of the closet; to run space agencies. The classic LSH characters aged while new characters gave readers a glimpse of second generation intergalactic superheroics (or multiple generations when you factored in the speedster decedents of Barry Allen). The characters were multifaceted, the aesthetic was gorgeous (Keith Giffen and nine-panel grids!), and the battles, both political and personal, were epic.

1999: The Authority issues #1 to #12 (Wildstorm / DC Comics). More than any other comic, The Authority is why I'm writing this article in Sequential Tart. I'd collected comics and talked about them with friends and retailers for decades, but it wasn't until The Authority came along that I joined online fandom. The comic itself was great: 12 breathtaking chapters that were too epic to contain in my little circle of comic-reading friends. I found other fans on the DC message boards, the Warren Ellis Forum, and the message boards of a fanzine called Sequential Tart. We loved the diverse characters (a no-nonsense Brit, Jenny Sparks, led a team that included a gay couple, a Latina, a Dutchman, an Asian woman, and an alien), their audacious missions (they killed God!), the glamourous artwork (by Bryan Hitch), and the metanarrative questioning of the superteam concept. Almost 20 years after The Authority debuted, the "widescreen" aesthetic that it pioneered has been realized in scores of blockbuster superhero movies -- none of which are The Authority. One day, Hollywood will catch up.

2014: "Love Bunglers" in Love And Rockets: New Stories #3 and #4 (Fantagraphics). Love And Rockets is one of the greatest on-going comics in North America, and it's also truly continuous. Since debuting in 1982, it has experienced relatively short hiatuses and has run continuous storylines, one of which, known as Palomar, is written and drawn by Gilbert Hernandez. The other, Locas, by Jaime Hernandez, features a character named Maggie Chascarrillo. I'm about the same age as Maggie, so it's been amazing to age along with a comic book character. Maggie is the protagonist of "Love Bunglers", a beautifully executed a masterpiece in the use of story, art, and time. No prior reading is required: the arc will resonate with anyone interested in family stories However, if you've been following these characters for 30 years, you might react to the revelation of their family secrets as if they were your family secrets.

Thinking of "story arcs" is a toughie -- I tend to think in terms of overall series, or specific issues, or writer runs, or even character arcs, instead of story arcs. Let's see ….

There's the original, 20-issue arc of ElfQuest (WaRP Graphics), in which we got to know Cutter and his band of Wolfriders, as well as the Sun Villagers, then follow Cutter and his bestie, Skywise (my fave), as they began their quest for others of their kind, only to meet up with the rest of the Wolfriders later and end up in a war with trolls. I know that seems like a lot, but there were many series after that covered different arcs. If we want to break it down further, my fave part of the Original Quest was Cutter and Skywise being on their own.

There's the initial run of Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness on Spiderman / Deadpool (Marvel Comics), which was intermittently interrupted by other teams with other arcs. It brought back the best Deadpool creative team (if this were a Fave Six, their original run on Deadpool's solo series would be on my list), it's hilarious, and made me into a Spideypool shipper.

There's Kieron Gillen's 40-issue run on Journey into Mystery (Marvel Comics), where we follow the adventures of a child Loki as he struggles to be loved. The end was a heart-shredder, but that series is still near and dear to my heart. If you want a fave sub-arc of that run … it's really hard to choose between Loki trying to help Thor against the God of Fear, and the Manchester Gods arc. But the Mephisto arc was really good too. And the big crossover event was fun. Honestly, all the arcs of this run could probably account for the entire "fave five" list on its own.

Then there's Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's run on Young Avengers (Marvel Comics), where the subsequent Loki (SPOILER!!), who killed the previous Loki and took over his body (it's complicated), was part of the team and eventually became a good person.

And then there's the subsequent, 18-issue series, Loki: Agent of Asgard (Marvel Comics), done by Alan Ewing and Lee Garbet, in which that same Loki, now grown up (kind of), fights against a future, evil version of himself. The ending was absolutely perfect, but I wish the series had gone on for years and years.