You voted, and now, after over 1,000 ballots were cast, here are the results of your votes for your favorite comic book storylines of all-time (this is the third time we’ve done this countdown. We’re on an every four year schedule)! We started with ten storylines a day, and now we’re down to three storylines a day. You can click on the Top 100 Comic Book Storylines tag either here or at the end of the post to see the other entries, in case you missed one.
To recap, you all sent in ballots ranking your favorite storylines from #1 (10 points) to #10 (1 point). I added up all of the points and here we are!
9. “Crisis on Infinite Earths” by Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Dick Giordano and Jerry Ordway (Crisis on Infinite Earths #1-12, plus a bunch of tie-ins) – 867 points (19 first place votes)
Crisis on Infinite Earths was both a love letter to the past of DC Universe while also the formation of a “new” DC Universe.
Marv Wolfman and George Perez put the DC Universe into a position where worlds were dying and realities were shattering. This allowed the pair to use a cast of literally thousands as they explored the vast realms of DC’s comic history in a sprawling epic with more than one “Ultimate Battle Between Good and Evil.”
The devices pushing this plot forward are the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor, one a benevolent being who was studying the DC Universe – the other a madman who wants to destroy the Multiverse, the backbone of DC’s multiple Earths set-up (which allowed DC to separate their Golden Age creation from their Silver Age counterparts, but also allowed them to integrate comics they bought from other publishers without having to splice them together with their existing heroes).
In a battle this epic, deaths were bound to happen, and this story was SO big that two very big names saw their end – Superman’s cousin, Supergirl, and Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash.
Initially, other titles were hesitant to tie into Crisis, but by the time the series ended, it was such a big hit that books were falling over themselves to tie into the event!
Wolfman and Perez ended the series with more than one magnificently diverse epic slugfests, until the dust settled and the DC Universe was never the same.
What a way to spend a Golden Anniversary!!
8. “The Long Halloween” by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale (The Long Halloween #1-13) – 894 points (16 first place votes)
Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale had already produced three great annual specials spotlighting Batman during Halloween. So they decided to do one better by doing this epic year-long mini-series where they had us follow Batman from one Halloween to the next by following Batman trying to hunt down the mysterious villain Holiday, who murders people on holidays, one a month. Here’s an example from Valentine’s Day…
The comic is set in Frank Miller’s Year One timeline, with the backdrop of the murders being the crime war between the Maroni and Falcone crime families. In addition, the comic deals with District Attorney Harvey Dent becoming Two-Face for the first time. This comic was a major influence on Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy of films.
An undercurrent throughout the work is that this is the small period in Batman’s life where he thinks that he might actually be able to pull off a war on crime.
Check out this sequence to see what I mean (while also getting a glimpse of how amazing Tim Sale’s art is in this story)…
Go to the next page for #7…