50 Best DC Characters (10-1)

All right. Onto the home stretch here. My picks for the 10 best DC characters as demanded by the Great Curve.

#10. Swamp Thing (Alec Holland. Sometimes.)

Swampy's had the advantage of having a pretty damn impressive group of writers tackling him. Aside from the most recent (now-cancelled) run, which was really a little dippy, he tends to attract some pretty impressive writing talents. Even Veitch, whose stuff I usually have a very hard time with, does a really nice job with Swamp Thing. Like his fellow swamp-mate Grundy, he's got enough of a blank canvas about him to allow for pretty easy reinvention as each writer takes over. In fact, the whole premise (particularly since, in my mind, Swamp Thing is occuring in the same sort of dream-logic world as Fulci's The Beyond) is incredibly flexible and just unreal enough (and disconnected from DC continuity) that retconning Swamp Thing doesn't really faze me at all. That flexibility, combined with the always dramatically fertile man-becomes-monster-but-still-in-love premise, makes him a character I'm always happy to read about.

#9. The Shade (Richard Swift)

I get the feeling that Robinson's rewrite of the Shade is the most popular retcon ever among comic writers. Since Starman ended, I feel like the Shade has been cropping up all over the place. He's a fun character - I can certainly see why other writers want to use him. The combination of extremely good manners and fluid morality is always fun to write.


#8. Ambush Bug (Irwin Schwab)

Ah, Ambush Bug. While not my first favorite character, he was the first character I liked enough to take note of who was writing. Granted the first series is filled with jokes I don't get to this day (maybe because I still haven't read Thriller or finished Ronin), but I still loved the absurdity of it. He led to me reading pretty much everything by Giffen I could find - at least until 90% of it involved Lobo, which prompted me to reevaluate things. Still, I think the DC universe could use a little more absurdity in it. Maybe they could have him come back from his post-Crisis exile and appoint himself Superman's sidekick again. Now that I think of it, "Rise of the Supermen" would have been so much better if Ambush Bug had decided to take up the mantle of self-appointed heir-apparent. A lost opportunity.

#7. Elongated Man (Ralph Dibny)

I still haven't seen enough of Ralph without Sue to see how he holds up on his own, but DC needs a top-shelf detective who isn't moody, grouchy, brooding, etc. Even though he was created as a Plastic Man analogue, the decision to make him a fun version of Batman always seemed like a very useful character to have around. Granted, it made him a little superfluous in the satellite-era JLA, but he still made a nice counterpoint. I read a lot of descriptions of him and Sue as the "Nick and Nora" of the DC universe, which sort of describes them - Sue seems more openly loving/less tolerating than Nora, and Ralph is certainly less of a drunkard/rake than Nick, but it still captures a lot of the appeal. Anyway, a fun-loving Batman around is certainly a good idea - though I'm not sure how he's going to turn out after the amount of misery they're heaping on him lately.

#6. Zatanna (Zatanna Zatara)

This list is showing that I seem to like mystically-themed characters more than I realized. Zatanna was my favorite JLA member as a kid, and, going back to read the Conway-era, she actually ends up getting more solid characterization than most of her teammates. As I mentioned a while back in a thread on comics' trend to punish women (particularly sexually active women), Zatanna seems to have escaped a lot of that. She manages to date her coworkers with no real ill-effects. Granted, Morrison gave her a bit of a daddy complex in her Seven Soldiers series, but she still seems refreshingly normal. Plus, she's got a fair helping of the legacy issues that I'm always a sucker for.

#5. The Spectre (Jim Corrigan)

Again with the mystical characters! Still, the Spectre gets points for the brutal origin story (pistol-whipped and drowned!) as well as his brutal responses to criminals. The short-lived 70's run, in particular, featured some completely insane stories. Part of this is probably the frustration of writers who are trying to write a story featuring, effectively, God, but it certainly allows for a quality writer to come up with some truly weird stories. Skeates, in particular, seemed to really understand the possibilities of the character.

#4. Superman (Clark Kent)

My feelings on Superman are probably too complex for a single paragraph. I mean, being effectively omnipotent makes him kind of hard to deal with from a story perspective (especially when he's not willing to eat criminals like Corrigan was), but his humanity - or more his desire for humanity - really makes him a much more interesting character than he has any right to be.



#3. Crazy Jane (Kay Challis)

Doom Patrol #63 makes me tear up a little bit every time I read it. I'm actually getting a bit misty-eyed just thinking about it.







#2. Sandman (Wesley Dodds)

Sandman's always been a pretty great character, but in the past 10 years or so, it seems like he's really taken off. He makes a great supporting character in Starman, and the retroactive story with Sandy as a monster adds a nice degree of simmering self-torture to the character. What really moved up into top 5 territory, though, was picking up the first few Sandman Mystery Theater trades the other day. I know I'm about 10 years behind the curve on these, but, man, are they good. And make me really like Wesley more than I thought I could.

#1. Starman (Jack Knight)

The single best character DC has published. No, he's not really reusable anywhere else, but, after spending a weekend reading every issue of Starman, I really feel like I know Jack as well as I do many of my friends. It's a rare accomplishment for any medium, but especially so in comics.