PAUL KUPPERBERG: 13 Favorite Comic Book Characters – RANKED
From the halls of DC, Charlton, Marvel… — UPDATED 11/21/24: Time to dig deep into the cavernous 13th Dimension vaults! Every so often I like to reprint a story that was popular the first time around, just for the hell of it. This is one of those, from November 2020. Dig it! — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG Yes, I know there are no characters on this list created much after about 1966, but that just proves my theory: “The Golden Age of Comics is whatever you read when you were 11 years old.” And, yes, I know the majority of my picks are DC characters. Marvel Comics didn’t exist when I first became conscious of comic books, and by the time I was old enough to start to appreciate them, I had pretty much gone all-in on DC. I would become a reader and a fan, but few Marvel characters would have the same impact on me as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the DCU. (By the way, of the 13 characters that made this list, I would get to write 11 of them in one form or another in my professional career. Cool, right?) But, ultimately, when you start trying to rank your nostalgia, 13 slots are never going to be enough… — 13. The Hulk, Marvel. “Hulk smash!” Yeah, smash ‘em, Hulk! For reasons that we need not get into, I carried around a lot of anger as a kid, and unlike me, the great green monster created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1962 didn’t have to keep his rage bottled up inside him. The Hulk could just let it all out and pity the poor Army battalion that got in his way! My introduction to the Hulk came in Fantastic Four #24-26 (April–May 1964) in an epic slugfest between him and the Thing… and the FF… and the Avengers. Yeah, this one, as Stan would have said, had it all. He got his own strip a little while later in Tales to Astonish, sharing the book first with Giant-Man, then the Sub-Mariner, and featuring an amazing string of talent: Steve Ditko, Kirby, Gil Kane, Bill Everett, Marie Severin, and later on, of course, Herb Trimpe. But it was the original six-issue run of The Incredible Hulk (May 1962–March 1963), which I furtively...
Read more
