Marvels

I cut my comics teeth on the Marvel comics of the early 90s, right in the middle of a lot of nostalgia for 60s Marvel due to all of the characters experiencing their 30th anniversaries - as a result, the stories contained in Marvels are all ones that I'm very familiar with, and they're all stories that have been told several times since then as well. Busiek and Ross start with the debut of the Human Torch, Jim Hammond, in 1938, and continue through until the death of Grew Stacy around 25 years after that, which definitely does seem like a turning point in the history of the Marvel Universe.

What makes Marvels unique is the perspective that it takes on - our protagonist isn't a hero, but instead a regular, middle-class, suburban husband and father. Busiek's use of Sheldon as protagonist changes this story from being one about superheroes to one about what heroism means to us as individuals and a society.

Alex Ross' fully-painted art throughout the series is amazing as well. It's a tricky medium for superhero stuff - if done right, it adds a great sense of scale to the material, but at the same time it's easy for painted figures to appear. His paintings during the Galactus scene, for example, with the alternating of full-page pictures of heroes fighting Galactus with multi-panel pages of people reacting on the street tells a story just through page layout. Amazing attention to detail.