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as "sword and sorcery" in comics. With a script by Roy Thomas and art by Barry Smith, this was the beginning of along-running series featuring the barbarian hero created by Robert E. Howard in the pages of Weird Tales back in the 1930s.

8. New Gods #1 (1971), Mister Miracle #1 (1971), Forever People #1 (1971), and Jimmy Olsen #133: Jack Kirby was one of the main talents behind the incredible success of Marvel Comics. Responsible for more creative ideas than virtually anyone else on the planet, Kirby was the McCartney to Lee's Lennon. It was unthinkable that Kirby might ever leave the hallowed halls of Marveldom, but leave he did, defecting to rival DC, where he began his Fourth World saga with these these fur books. many consider this to be some of the best, most personal work of Kirby's career, and the concepts and characters he introduced here are still and important part of the DC Universe.

9. Giant-Size X-Men #1 (1975): Although created in Marvel's earliest days - X-Men #1 is cover-dated September 1963 - this book never really connected with readers and suffered cancellation after cancellation. By the mid-1970s, the title was simply offering reprints of earlier stories, and was, no doubt, headed for another cancellation. However, in the pages of this special one-shot, writer Len Wein and artist Dave Cockrum introduced a new team of mutants, this one international in scope, that took the comic-reading public by storm. Within a few years, X-Men had risen to the top of the sales chart and would quickly become the foundation upon which Marvel would build a new empire.

10. Cerebus #1 (1977) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (1984): The origins of the self-publishing craze in comics. Dave Sim, of Cerebus, and Eastman and Laird of TMNT, proved that comics didn't have to depend on the "Big Two" of Marvel and DC to reach a wide audience and achieve significant success. Truly groundbreaking, these two blazed a trail that is still being followed to this day.

10. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1986): These two landmark "graphic novels" revitalized an increasingly moribund comics industry, and once again made comics "cool" for adults. Frank Miller's reinterpretation of Batman in Dark Knight, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's deconstruction of the superhero ethos in Watchmen broke new ground, and spawned a host of imitators who decided that "grim and gritty" was the way of the future in comics. Dark Knight and Watchmen were about far more than darkness and violence, however; they were about a new ways to look, not only at superheroes, but at the medium as a whole. In many respects, these books can be seen as having as much influence on current trends as Action #1 did when it introduced comic book readers to the concept of costumed superheroes in 1938.

Of course, this is only a brief list and necessarily excludes many worthy titles. It should, however, give intertested readers an overview of a vast and fascinating field, as, fortunately, many of the books listed here have been reprinted over the years in affordable editions.

Learn more about this author, John Petty.
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