It’s a special edition this week as, a week or so behind the rest of the internet, we take up the Hembeck Challenge and each list fifty things we love about comics…
We’re pretty cutting edge here at Comics Daily. So when a new meme hits the internet comics fraternity, courtesy of popular LiveJournal comics discussion community seebelow, naturally we’re quick to catch on. And by “quick”, I of course mean “two weeks late”. Nevertheless, the Hembeck Challenge – in which, inspired by Fred Hembeck the normally cynical and pessimistic comics-buying public are asked to list fifty things they actually love about comics – was a pretty appealing prospect, and so we figured that rather than spend the week trawling CBR and Newsarama for worthy stories upon which to pass comment, we’d offer you an insight into the comics-reading brains of two-thirds of the site’s team (Julian passed on the idea). James and I have both been reading comics from a young age, and there’s a hell of a lot of titles, issues, writers, artists, quirks, industry drama and general unique comicsness that have gone into our respective experiences over that time. The lists are, of course, fairly spur-of-the-moment – ask us again in a year and they’d probably look quite different – but nevertheless I think all of the top fifties people have posted have provided an intriguing insight into the scope of comics fandom. Without further wotsit, then, here are our lists… (SP)

Seb’s list

1. Animal Man #26
2. Giffen and deMatteis’ Justice League
3. The Shade
4. Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?
5. “My parents are DEAD!”
6. Frank Quitely drawing dogs, cats, Superman, and just about anything else, in fact
7. Miracleman #15
8. Non-glossy paper stock
9. Wolfman and Perez’s New Teen Titans
10. John Constantine
11. Hob Gadling
12. An original Shelton sketch of Fat Freddy’s Cat hanging on my wall
13. Early ’90s DC crossovers
14. 20 comics for a pound at Bristol
15. London’s “square mile” of comic shops on a Thursday lunchtime
16. Superman drawn by Curt Swan
17. Superman drawn by John Byrne (in the eighties)
18. John Romita Jr defying his dad and drawing Spider-Man and Peter Parker as grown-up versions of Ditko’s original characters
19. Roy of the Rovers
20. Hot Shot Hamish
21. Olympic Sales Club adverts. “Ask for Sally. She or another Captain “O” operator is waiting to give another pre-teen the chance to sell crap stationary for the sake of a cheap digital watch!” But the “prizes” all looked incredibly exciting when I was nine.
22. Marvel’s character-specific sound-effects, most notably “SNIKT!”, “BAMF!” and “THWIPP!”
23. Discovering Sandman as an angsty teenage dreamer
24. Discovering V For Vendetta as an angry left-wing student
25. Discovering Scott Pilgrim as a nerdy bass-playing mid-20s slacker
26. “Alan Moore knows the score”
27. Knowing that Johnny Alpha is better than Judge Dredd
28. Comics’ unique method of progressing, and manipulating, time and narrative
29. Alias
30. “The Death of Superman” (the Silver Age one)
31. “The Kid Who Collected Spider-Man”
32. The rare occasions when someone remembers how to tell a complete, satisfying story in 22 pages. Or in 10 pages, come to that.
33. The Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational And Utterly Mindboggling Comic Relief Comic
34. Ultimate Spider-Man
35. When people remember to call Scott Summers “Slim”
36. Planetary, for the first ten issues or so before it did an X-Files and sacrified wonderful individual stories for getting too wrapped up in its main plot
37. The Twilight of the Superheroes proposal
38. The symmetry of Watchmen issue #5
39. George Perez’s ability to shrink massive, epic imagery into teeny tiny panels meaning that you get approximately 10x as much story in any issue he draws
40. The Ben Reilly Spider-Man costume
41. Jim Mahfood
42. Two binders’ worth of Who’s Who in the DC Universe
43. “So! They laugh at my boner, will they? I’ll show them! I’ll show them how many boners the Joker can make!”
44. Superdickery
45. Longboxes
46. Samuel L Jackson being cast as Nick Fury in a movie because he’d already played him in The Ultimates. See also Patrick Stewart in Marvels (shame Timothy Dalton was too old for Tony Stark)
47. The UK Sonic the Comic, home to some of Mark Millar’s earliest work and the best Sonic origin story
48. Scott McCloud, comics’ foremost professor
49. Jamie McKelvie’s use of facial expression. And of hot punk girls.
50. “We just don’t like to make a fuss.”

James’ list
1. The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix
2. The Age of Apocalypse
3. Peter David’s last few years on Hulk
4. Discovering Channel Zero as an angry left-wing teenager.

5. When people call Scott Summers “Cyke”
6. Paul Pope
7. Absolute Editions
8. Marvel Omnibuses
9. Busiek and Perez’s Avengers run
10. Maximum Carnage on the SNES
11. References to late-90s X-Men continuity
12. Buffy, Season 8
13. Wolverine with bone claws
14. Being the right age to think that the Onslaught crossover was awesome.
15. Explaining obscure references in comic movies to my friends
16. Discovering Johnny the Homicidal Maniac as an angsty student slacker.
17. A cinema one-tenth full of geeks cheering at Nick Fury in Iron Man
18. Kevin Smith’s Daredevil
19. Art imitating life (Phonogram #1)
20. Seeing a Monkey Island reference in the first volume of Scott Pilgrim and knowing I was hooked for the duration.
21. X-Men Vs. Street Fighter on the PSX
22. Choosing a “New Avengers” team in Ultimate Alliance and getting a stat boost for being nerdy enough to do so.
23. Scott & Emma
24. Logan & Jean
25. Wolverine being a sickly blouse-wearing rich boy when he was a kid
26. “I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”
27. The fact that there are people out there de-slabbing comics
28. Neil Gaiman’s Journal
29. Getting the Complete Sam & Max hardcover after over 10 years of waiting.
30. Thunderbolts
31. Everyone looking bleary and fragile on Sundays at the Bristol Comic Con
32. Feeling justified in liking Frank Miller because Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore agree with me.
33. “Are you retarded? I’M THE GODDAMN BATMAN”
34. Kill Your Boyfriend
35. All-Star Superman
36. The way Jeffrey Brown draws himself as a child
37. The fact that the American comics industry is dominated by Brits
38. When indie comics artists mock their own artwork in the margins
39. “I… I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…Miracleman”
40. The mind-boggling detail in an Alan Moore script
41. The 3 seconds of my life where I forgot Captain America was fictional
42. Scouring longboxes for that one gem of an issue you need, which no-one else cares about
43. The Simpsons comics being funnier than the cartoon is now
44. Finding anatomical impossibilities in Rob Liefeld’s art
45. Genshiken
46. The Perry Bible Fellowship proving that not all webcomics are creatively desolate.
47. When Jim Mahfood crams about 25 tiny panels onto one page
48. The fact that the Matrix comics were the best of all the Matrix spin-offs, adaptations and sequels.
49. The Beano and Dandy
50. Den Ketch but not Johnny Blaze