Amazing Spider-Man (Silver Age)

Due to strong sales on the character’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man was given his own ongoing series in March 1963. The initial years of the series, under Lee and Ditko, chronicled Spider-Man’s nascent career with his civilian life as hard-luck yet perpetually good-humored teenager Peter Parker. Peter balanced his career as Spider-Man with his job as a freelance photographer for The Daily Bugle under the bombastic editor-publisher J. Jonah Jameson to support himself and his frail Aunt May. At the same time, Peter dealt with public hostility towards Spider-Man and the antagonism of his classmates Flash Thompson and Liz Allan at Midtown High School, while embarking on a tentative, ill-fated romance with Jameson’s secretary, Betty Brant.

By focusing on Parker’s everyday problems, Lee and Ditko created a groundbreakingly flawed, self-doubting superhero, and the first major teenaged superhero to be a protagonist and not a sidekick. Ditko’s quirky art provided a stark contrast to the more cleanly dynamic stylings of Marvel’s most prominent artist, Jack Kirby, and combined with the humor and pathos of Lee’s writing to lay the foundation for what became an enduring mythos.

Youngblood V3 (1998)

Moore created a new, teenaged Youngblood group that was financed independently by millionaire Waxey Doyle, formerly the WWII superhero Waxman. The team was led by Shaft and was augmented by new members Big Brother, Doc Rocket, Twilight, Suprema, and Johnny Panic. Moore said he wanted Youngblood to be a “less sprawling, more dynamic team” and that “if you have more characters than [six], the action gets cluttered and it becomes increasingly difficult to establish each character as a real and solid person in their own right”. All of the new team members and most of the villains featured in this series, including Jack-A-Dandy, were Moore’s creations.

The Nice House on the Lake (2021)

Everyone who was invited to the house knows Walter—well, they know him a little, anyway. Some met him in childhood; some met him months ago. And Walter’s always been a little…off. But after the hardest year of their lives, nobody was going to turn down Walter’s invitation to an astonishingly beautiful house in the woods, overlooking an enormous sylvan lake. It’s beautiful, it’s opulent, it’s private—so a week of putting up with Walter’s weird little schemes and nicknames in exchange for the vacation of a lifetime? Why not? All of them were at that moment in their lives when they could feel themselves pulling away from their other friends; wouldn’t a chance to reconnect be…nice?

Marc Spector: Moon Knight V1 (1989)

Moon Knight was created by Doug Moench and Don Perlin. He first appeared in Werewolf by Night #32 (August 1975).

 In 1989, a third Moon Knight volume, titled Marc Spector: Moon Knight was published. It was the longest-running series, lasting sixty issues. This volume introduces Moon Knight’s teenage sidekick Jeff Wilde, also known as “Midnight,” the son of Midnight Man, a villain from the first volume of the series. At this time, Moon Knight first encounters the Black Cat. Turned into a cyborg by the Secret Empire, Midnight is seemingly killed in the “Round Robin” story arc of Amazing Spider-Man, spanning issues #353-#358.

 The series was canceled with issue #60 (March 1994), with four of the last six issues drawn by Stephen Platt, who was hired by Image Comics based on the strength of his work on the series.

Batman and Robin V1 (2009)

Batman and Robin is an ongoing series, created by Grant Morrison and featuring Batman and Robin. The debut of the series followed the events of “Batman R.I.P.“, Final Crisis, and “Battle for the Cowl” in which the original Batman, Bruce Wayneapparently died at the hands of DC Comics villain Darkseid and features the winner of the “Battle for the Cowl” as the new Batman. The conclusion of Battle for the Cowl shows Dick Grayson ascending to the role of Batman, while Damian Wayne becomes the new Robin.

Thanos Quest (1990)

Recently resurrected by Death in order to wipe out half of the population of the universe, the Titan Thanos discovers the true nature of the six Infinity Gems after gazing into Death’s Infinity Well. Convincing Death that possession of the gems will aid him tremendously in his quest, he gains her permission to seek them out from the cosmic entities that currently possess them.

Concrete (1987)

The series focuses on the life of Concrete, formerly Ron Lithgow, whose brain was involuntarily transplanted by aliens into a hulking artificial body which is made up of a substance that closely resembles concrete.

As part of the back-story, he eventually escaped and made contact with the US Senator he worked for as a speechwriter. After a prolonged period of scientific tests and examinations, he was allowed to live on his own with the cover story that he was a cyborg constructed by the government.

Batman and Robin V2 (2011)

The relaunched DC Universe features several notable differences from its previous incarnation, making all of the established heroes roughly five years younger than their previous versions before the relaunch. While much of Batman’s history from the previous DC Universe remains intact, Bruce Wayne is again the only hero serving as Batman and as such, he has replaced Dick Grayson in this title. Volume 2 features the exploits of Bruce and Damian, father and son, as Batman and Robin.

Invincible Iron Man V4 (2016)

As part of a broader trend by Marvel Comics to substitute its main characters with a diverse cast of original characters in the 2010s, Iron Man was temporarily replaced by Ironheart, a teenaged African-American girl who reverse-engineered the Iron Man armor, in 2016. At the same time, the series Infamous Iron Man began publication with Doctor Doom as Iron Man.

Love and Rockets (1981)

The Hernandez brothers self-published the first issue of Love and Rockets in 1981, but since 1982 it has been published by Fantagraphics Books. The magazine temporarily ceased publication in 1996 after the release of issue #50, while Gilbert and Jaime went on to do separate series involving many of the same characters. However, in 2001 Los Bros revived the series as Love and Rockets Volume 2.

Love and Rockets contains several ongoing serial narratives, the most prominent being Gilbert’s Palomar stories and Jaime’s Hoppers 13(aka Locas) stories. It also contains one-offs, shorter stories, surrealist jokes, and more.

Palomar tells the story of a fictional village in Latin America and its inhabitants. Its vibrant characters and sometimes-fantastic events are sometimes compared to the magical realism literary style of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez. The series is also sometimes referred to as Heartbreak Soup, after the first story set in Palomar.

Hoppers 13 follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily chicano characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the California punk scene to the present day. (Hoppers, or Huerta, is a fictional city based on the Hernandezes’s home town of Oxnard, California.) The series is also often called Locas (Spanish for “crazy women”) because of the many quirky female characters depicted.