When IDW ran that reprint series a couple years back it was definitely all European reprints.... Italian mostly I think?  (Shax probably remembers).    I have a goood friend that was raised in Portugual that mentioned one time that they were popular there too.

Some of the popularity definitely has to do with Duck Tales, which I think is one of the best cartoons ever, but Barks and Rosa are both amazing.  He may be on my list a little later (I was definitely not very original this year apparently)

8. West Coast Avengers

y



When I first got into comics in the early 90s, I was annoyed the Avengers didn't have the character I expected in it.... like with alot of things at the time, I ended up buying as many back issues from 8-10 years before as I did current stuff. It also was referenced a couple times in the next book on my list, that I WAS buying at the time. (I miss those little editorial references the editors used to use.. those were so great!)

Very high on that list was West Coast Avengers. While I initially picked it up because it was the one I could afford that Iron Man was in, what really made those early issues was Hawkeye and Mockingbird. Between their relationship issues and Hawkeye trying so hard to prove himself and recruit there was all sort of fun stuff simmering in the background while the superheroing happened.

I just really loved Lost in Space-Time especially... for a long time I specifically avoided Byrne because of what he did to Vision and Scarlet Witch (though clearly others must have liked it more than I did).

Fantastic selection. Didn't even dawn me that it's a spin-off. Gordon. Bullock. Montana... all used multiple times. 

I love that series so much. 

I haven't read enough by Rosa to make an assessment either way, but I have to emphatically agree with this characterization of Barks' stories, and its not just the Scrooge stories, as the same applies to many of his Donald Duck stories as well.

Day Five (#6)
Red Sonja (Marvel Feature and Red Sonja series)

Unlike my fellow baseball lover@mrpsmissives, whose entry focuses primarily on later series, I didn’t follow Red Sonja at all after the end of her Marvel series, which I enjoyed quite a bit and are the reason she made my list. I had known her first from the Barry Smith-Roy Thomas version inConan 24 and a year or so later read Robert E. Howard’s 16th century historical adventure, “The Shadow of the Vulture,” in which Red Sonya of Rogatino is a minor character.

I was a more active fan of sword and sorcery and of Howard in particular back then, and to read more adventures set in the Hyborian Age made me happy. A big selling point for me was the artwork of Frank Thorne, whom I had first followed on DC’s Tomahawk. Thorne’s work combined the best of Kubert and Toth, resulting in comics with an almost European look that was very different from the house-style comics that were still the norm at Marvel and DC. Active, emotional, exotic, beautifully laid out and designed, deceptively loose-looking and with a great eye for expressive faces and imaginative detail, Thorne’s pages brought to life a Hyborian Age quite unlike John Buscema’s. More than the stories, I bought Red Sonja for Thorne's art.



Buscema’s Hyborian Age was more grounded in classic adventure-fantasy like Hal Foster’s, and I enjoyed that, too, but Thorne also took from Arabic and Indian influences with wizards bedecked in strings of pearls, draped in chains, wearing elaborate earrings and bejeweled costumes. (FWIW, I think that Frank Miller’s designs for the Persians and Xerxes in 300 were influenced by Thorne’s Red Sonja and later similar titles he worked on.)



I loved the Red Sonja series for giving us a bit more of a balanced view of Hyborian Age culture, and specifically for being the stories of a strong woman in a decidedly male world. But, as is so often true of characters in popular culture, they don’t really get a chance to grow or change much, and so Red Sonja eventually became like much of the Conan title: monster/wizard/enemy of the month. Thus, when Thorne was gone (#11), I was too.

Plus, I have to admit that I really preferred her in her original Barry Smith garb; the chainmail bikini was ridiculous to begin with and was purely stereotypical fan service (before the term was coined). And when Sonja came down with Power Girl Syndrome, you wondered just how she could swing that sword of hers without causing herself serious upper body injury.

Fun while it lasted, though. And I’ll never know why Thorne was considered an acquired taste.