Just read the Waid FF run from way back. Damn.

[Desaad]

Waid's work will always rank ( for me, )

1) His First Wally West Flash run. Second run did not live up to expectations.
2) His first Captain America run w/ Ron Garney. See #1 re: second stint.
3) Kingdom Come
4) His FF run. Wieringo was great.
5) His Ruse/Empire work. Altogether too short-lived.

See, I've never been able to connect with his Captain America and Flash work. To be fair I didn't give Captain America much of a chance and I don't really care for the character in the first place, but I read his ENTIRE Flash run and it never reached above 'meh' for me. I don't understand why that is, but for whatever reason the character work never seemed that interesting or insightful. Waid ALWAYS has a problem with Antagonists, and you can see that even in his FF run, you can see it in his Daredevil run, and you could certainly see it in his Flash run, as well.

Anyway, he's a very hit and miss writer. He does character work very well, he's quite creative in terms of big concepts when he wants to be, but I can't say much for his plots and his villains, on the whole. His second generation run of work at DC - Legion of Superheroes, Flash, Brave and the Bold, Birthright - never really reached above middling to me. I loved his first two issues of Brave and the Bold -- but that's because I love Hal Jordan as a character, and I think he did some fun stuff with him for the first time in a decade. As soon as we moved on to other characters, I lost interest pretty quickly.

So for me, it's really...

1.Kingdom Come
2. Fantastic Four
3. The Kingdom
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.


.




.





.






.





4. Legion of Super-Heroes v5


Still too early to tell where Daredevil will rank!

[Desaad]

I wonder how Waid has done it. His run on Daredevil is giving him a new lease on life as far as new readers go. Where was he the last 15 years?

For what it's worth, I've known and followed Waid for a decade, I just never picked up this run as I'm not really a Fantastic Four reader.

[Nomads1]

For me, JLA Year One is the best thing I've ever read by Waid. And one of the best things I've read period. Loved his Brave and the Bold run. His Flash is better than Johns, the Return of Barry Allen is also another of my favorite stories ever, but I think Messener-Loebs is better than his. His firts shot at Cap with Garney, is, IMHO, the definite take on what the character is supposed to be, and although not my favorite Superman origin, I also found Birthright awsome, even seriously disliking Yu's art. Liked his reboot work on the Legion more then the Threeboot one. Of course I adored Kingdom Come, but didn't like the Kingdom so much. So, Mark Waid is definitly among my 10 all-time favorites writers. Other then JLA Year One at first, I'm not sure how I'd rate the rest.

Peace

[Desaad]

Yeah, there is another one. I found Year One to be bland! I know, I know...!

Cooke's "New Frontier" was "Year One" done right, for me.

I'm surprised to hear your praise for the Reboot Legion. That era was characterized by bland soap opera, for me.

[MonteMike72]

[QUOTE=Desaad;15245272]That was...excellent. Lots of great, big ideas, but everything underscores the central conceit of the team, and of the individual members, and the book is SO full of heart.[QUOTE=Desaad;15245272]


Glad you liked it. Not one of my favorites.

[Corey W]

Waid is on the short list of creators who can at least guarantee that I will look at anything they write (among current Marvel writers, he and Stern are the only two). His FF run is a big part of that (although I object to the OP referring to it as a run from "way back").

Some of the best FF stories from recent years are in that run and love or hate his work with Doom, it was memorable. The Doom/Valeria story is probably in the top 10 of memorable Doom stories.

[vh4ever]

See, I've never been able to connect with his Captain America and Flash work. To be fair I didn't give Captain America much of a chance and I don't really care for the character in the first place, but I read his ENTIRE Flash run and it never reached above 'meh' for me. I don't understand why that is, but for whatever reason the character work never seemed that interesting or insightful. Waid ALWAYS has a problem with Antagonists, and you can see that even in his FF run, you can see it in his Daredevil run, and you could certainly see it in his Flash run, as well.

Anyway, he's a very hit and miss writer. He does character work very well, he's quite creative in terms of big concepts when he wants to be, but I can't say much for his plots and his villains, on the whole. His second generation run of work at DC - Legion of Superheroes, Flash, Brave and the Bold, Birthright - never really reached above middling to me. I loved his first two issues of Brave and the Bold -- but that's because I love Hal Jordan as a character, and I think he did some fun stuff with him for the first time in a decade. As soon as we moved on to other characters, I lost interest pretty quickly.

So for me, it's really...

1.Kingdom Come
2. Fantastic Four
3. The Kingdom
.


.



.


.




.





.






.





4. Legion of Super-Heroes v5


Still too early to tell where Daredevil will rank!

And that's our tomato/ to-mah-to moment. I've read Cap since the Tales of Suspense days, along with the Hulk, Iron Man, FF, and Avengers. (Spiderman used to be in that lot but I've not picked up an issue since #400. Avengers bit the dust with the onset of BMB.) The above listed have been in my collection through thick and thin.

Anyway. I felt at that time that what Waid/Garney did was bring out that Steranko flavor that Brubaker is currently crushing with in the current book as well as the Winter Soldier title. It was dashed by the editorial edict of Heroes Reborn, and wasn't ever recaptured during the 'Return' era.

SHIELD
Sharon Carter
Hydra
Zemo
The Skull
AIM
Nick Fury etc. etc.

Waid's initial run had that vibe. Way better than the silliness that Gruenwald's 'Cap-Wolf' brought to the title,(as an example), and I was a HUGE Gruenwald fan too. But to each their own.

[Righty]

Yeah, that was refreshing to see. And paired with the late Wieringo's art, this was an excellent writer/artist duo.

Somebody please detail Waid's refreshing developments regarding Johnny. I bought the trades of this run through Kirby as God and was disappointed at the childish regressions of Johnny's character. I must have overlooked something, but I do remember buying a couple dozen of the 9 cent issues to use with an elementary school class, and then returning them because Johnny tells Ben that he had to "drain the weasel".

[josh straightedge]

1: Stan/Jack
2: Byrne
3: Hickman
4: Waid

[Nomads1]

Yeah, there is another one. I found Year One to be bland! I know, I know...!

Cooke's "New Frontier" was "Year One" done right, for me.

I'm surprised to hear your praise for the Reboot Legion. That era was characterized by bland soap opera, for me.

I found the first couple of years of the reboot Legion (up until they get the president kicked out) truly great, exploring the full potential of a modern day approach to the Legion without bogging it down with years of confusing continuity (and I've been a true fan of the Legion since the mid-seventies). IMHO, what damaged a bit the reboot was the lack of hot artists working on the titles. Moderr was OK and I liked the simple style of Moy, but both seemed to be ion the books to pay homage to john Forte and neither was setting the world on fire, as I believe they needed to do. Anyway, the scripts were enough to garner my loyality and love for that incarnation (especially once Stern came aboard) up until the DnA years, when Coipel, Batista, Jurgens and others came in, and the art really started to stand out. However, by then, it was too late, and Dc had already green-lighted the Threeboot, which really bugged me with the forced generational conflicts and the return of the Boy, Girl, Lass, Lad, Kid code-names.
Cooke's New Frontier is also fantastic, but I found JLA Year ONe, a pitch-perfect character piece with loads of great action, exactly how I like my comicbooks.
Another more recent work by Waid that I also found amazing was Captain America, Man Out of Time. Such a great insight into the mind of the character. That's my beef with Marvel nowadays. They do so little of tales like theses.

Peace

[Bad Wolf]

I really liked what I read of Waid's FF (the large Vol. 1 hardcover) though I'm not too fond of the artwork. It was particularly not suited to [what should have been] the very dark "Unthinkable."

[Bone2pick]

See, I've never been able to connect with his Captain America and Flash work. To be fair I didn't give Captain America much of a chance and I don't really care for the character in the first place,

Waid's Cap work imo is some of the best stuff in print for Steve. It's character defining and brilliantly handles some of Steve's internal conflicts.

[Bone2pick]

Reading through volume one today and I’m enjoying the lighthearted stories and the playful comedy. Ben and Johnny are battling in the streets of Manhattan over a string of pranks (nice), and then it cuts to Mr. Fantastic singing:

“Oh, the genome’s connected to the…protonomic spectrolyzer, the protonomic spectrolyzer’s connected to the…intracytoplasmic injector grid, the intracytoplasmic injector grid’s connected to the…meson collider current supply…”

And that got me laughing out loud. I’m a fan so far.

[Desaad]

What I liked was that there was a real heart to that type of stuff, too. Yeah, Ben and Johnny are hialriously arguing...but damn, Ben is HURT by those things, and Johnny feels horrible about having genuinely hurt his friend that way.

In one regard it's lighthearted, but there is a serious depth to the characters here that I think has been missing in almost every subsequent run.

[Iron Maiden]

What I liked was that there was a real heart to that type of stuff, too. Yeah, Ben and Johnny are hialriously arguing...but damn, Ben is HURT by those things, and Johnny feels horrible about having genuinely hurt his friend that way.

In one regard it's lighthearted, but there is a serious depth to the characters here that I think has been missing in almost every subsequent run.

Just a side note to all this. Totally disagreed with Waid implying that there is no Yancy Street Gang and it was Johnny all along doing the pranks. Heck, we've seen the gang many times over the years either lurking in the shadows or in the Thing series Byrne wrote. Most likely this was totally Jack Kirby since he worked on similar series back in the 1940's and its inspiration probably was the Dead End Kids from films (who later had their own series as the Bowery Boys)