Similar to Marvels (Kurt Busiek)

[WinterSoldier76]

I'll echo the love for Busiek's Marvels, and recommend Brubaker's The Marvels Project for more awesome updates on classic origin stories. For another standalone cool fun story that's totally contained I'd highly recommend David Liss's / Patrick Zircher's Mystery Men mini (2010?) which features Marvels newly created WWI heroes.

[T Hedge Coke]

You misspelled "The complete antithesis in every conceivable way" there.

It's not entirely. They're both painted. Both use Marvel characters. Both feature the same protagonist. And the tone and voice of the writing is actually nicely similar, though reacting to overwhelmingly bad things.

By showing everything going wrong, as Ruins does, it makes you appreciate more how they went right in the normal continuity. Marvels, by showing the MU from a slightly different and more reverential perspective, similarly, makes you appreciate more how things were in the normative Marvel Comics.

[Spike-X]

I guess that's one way of looking at it.