Based on the pedigree of this guild, most of you likely already know who Spider Jerusalem "really" is and have a pretty decent knowledge of Vertigo if not indy comics. Thus instead I make my case for the best work within the superhero paradigm, of which there is plenty.

The Doom Patrol After Grant Morrison was introduced to American audiences with Arkham Asylum, he settled into himself and delivered what is at once the most bizarre and meticulously structured superhero comic I've ever read. The Doom Patrol were always the strange outsiders in the DCU who had powers that seemed to be a hindrance to them as much as they were a boon and fought exceptionally strange enemies like Mallah and the Brain; a disembodied brain in a jar and his talking french Gorilla sidekick/paramour. Morrison steeped them in art theory and criticism along with a healthy dose of the then nascent Morrison paradigm and the rest became history.

Morrison's Doom Patrol is still in the process of being traded with five volumes currently available, starting with Crawling from the Wreckage.

Animal Man Around the same time as The Doom Patrol, Morrison was also given a spin at Buddy Baker, a third string superhero who could take on the powers of any animal near him. The comic tackled the incredibly topical and controversial issues surrounding animal rights and the kind of activism being perpetrated on it's behalf, plunging Buddy into what eventually spun out of control and into terrorism. Besides that, Animal Man is most famous for it's climax in which Buddy scales up into the real world to talk to Morrison himself. In addition to being the first place where Morrison laid out his scathing criticism of the wrongheadedness of the deconstructionist era, that scene radically redefined postmodernism and metafiction in comics as well as setting the tone for the rest of Morrison's career.

Morrison's Animal Man is available in three trade paperbacks.

Planetary Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's series is an archeological dig through the collective unconsious of the twentieth century, gliding through every genre and period of fiction across the century in a battle against a vast and hideous conspiracy. The more you know about superhero comics going in, the better as Ellis draws on many lesser known characters and events, as well as hiding well known ones in new packaging for ostensibly legal reasons. One of the standouts of the series is the issue To Be in England in the Spring which encapsulates Ellis' thoughts on the influential comics of the 80s. Cameos include John Constantine, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Miracle Man, and yours truly.

Planetary is currently available in three trade paperbacks with a fourth on the way.

Promethea When Alan Moore turned forty he decided that he wanted to be a magician but he wasn't interested in top hats or rabbits coming out of thereof, he wanted to study the occult, more specifically the Hermetic tradition.

A few years later he began producing Promethea with JH Williams III (inarguably the most talented living comic book artist) on his private imprint of Jim Lee's Wildstorm. The comic began with an American college student from the near future named Sophie Bangs doing a project on a reoccuring character in history called Promethea, whom she quickly discovers manifests in reality through acts of creativity. She becomes Promethea by writing a poem about her and picks up the mantle as the current era's Promethea. Shortly before the halfway mark in the series, Sophie begins training in magic theory and the series makes a controversial (controversial in that many people dropped the series, having no interest in the esoteric direction it was going) but planned switch into being a lyrical and lavishly illustrated journey through the western esoteric tradition.

The most inspired and dense issue of the series is an interpretation of the major arcana of the tarot deck as the stages in human history accompanied by a famous joke by Aleister Crowley about the nature of magic.

From there on in the comic is thick with references to Crowley, Spare, and Kabbalah, but it's breathtakingly illustrated and makes a brilliant argument for the recapturing and reconstruction of mythology.

Promethea is available in five volumes in either paperback or hardcover. The hardcovers are more expensive but are ******** beautiful.

Birds of Prey In Alan Moore's infamous The Killing Joke, Barbara Gordon, alias Batgirl, was shot and crippled by the Joker, which went on to be the impetus for Gail Simone's nearly as infamous Women in the Refrigerator website. While much of her criticism is apt, not long after The Killing Joke, John Ostrander took pains to reintegrate the character into the comics as the wheelchair bound Oracle, as whom she did a stint in the Suicide Squad. Following that, Chuck Dixon picked up Oracle and started a new title in which she stars to this day, Birds of Prey.

Using her cosiderable hacking skills and contacts within the superhero community she developed as Batgirl, Barbara uses a rotating team of superheroes (who are unaware of her real identity) to go on politically sensitive missions that mostly involve foreign dictators and criminals in situations roughly analagous to ones at the time of it's publishing (the mid 1990s). However events conspire to put her in a situation where she has to blow her cover to her main operative, Black Canary who becomes Babs' partner in crime from then on. Gail Simone's run following Dixon's until now is good, but in my mind nowhere near as good.

Dixon's run is available in trade paperback, as is Gail Simone's.

Stormwatch: Team Achilles Taking place in Wildstorm's proprietary universe, Team Achilles starts out as the United Nations' task force for dealing with superheroes that get out of line, and in a universe with The Authority running around, there's alot of them. The series started out slowly and with terrible art but quickly picked up speed to be hilarious, harrowing, politically charged, and bitingly satirical. To give an example of what sets the comic apart, one of the team members is a Finnish metahuman whose superpower is pain empathy; he feels the pain of the people around him. However it isn't treated like a gimmick, but in a real and human sense. One of the highlights of the series was him telling his backstory to The Authority's Midnighter over a beer.

What was published of the series before it's cancellation is available in trade paperback.

I'll revisit this as needed, but if you ask me why The Watchmen isn't on here, I'll slap you.