Five For Friday #148

I missed the deadline for this week's Five for Friday feature over at the Comics Reporter, but since it was an especially good topic, I wanted to post my responses here. The category was: "Name Your Five Favorite Marvel or DC Comics Single Issues, Nothing From The Same Series Twice."

1) House of Secrets #7 by Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen - "Blueprint: Elevation A" is an underrated masterpiece, and one of the best single issues of any Vertigo comic. It's also sort of a prelude to one of the stories in Kristiansen's issue of Solo.

2) Sandman #18 - by Neil Gaiman, Kelley Jones and Malcolm Jones III - "The Dream of a Thousand Cats" is my favorite single issue of the Sandman, and this is also one of McKean's five best covers.

3) The Uncanny X-Men #190 - This was my favorite X-Men story as a kid. Plus, it features some great, early John Romita Jr. art and the best X-Men cover ever! It just just barely beat out Barry Windsor Smith's Wolverine solo story in #205, which is also a classic.

4) Wonder Woman #19 - My favorite single issue from George Perez's awesome run, and actually, one of the best single issue superhero stories of all time. This is the done-in-one "Who Killed Mindy Mayer" story, told in a series of newspaper articles with some of Perez's best art.

5) Marvel Fanfare #40 - David Mazzuchelli's Angel story makes this issue a must, but the fact that the backup story is a Claremont penned solo Storm story illustrated by Craig Hamilton (he of the amazing pinups) makes this one of my personal favorites comics of all time.

And because I'm not bound by Comics Reporter rules, here are five more favorites:

6) Fantastic Four #285 -My favorite story from John Byrne's run (although I still haven't read the first half). By the way, here's a great in-depth appreciation of this issue that I came across while searching for covers.

7) Batman: Black and White #4 - by Brian Bolland, Kevin Nowlan (written by Jan Strnad), Gary Gianni (written by Archie Goodwin), Brian Stelfreeze (written by Denny O'Neil) and Katsuhiro Otomo. Plus, if that weren't enough, awesome cover by Alex Toth.

8) Animal Man #5 - By Grant Morrison, Chas Truog and Doug Hazelwood - Probably Grant Morrison's best single issue story ever, and definitely the starting point for all that was to come in Animal Man.

9) Marvel Tales #118 - This Gerry Conway/Ross Andru issue reprints the story from ASM #141 in which Mysterio tricks Spider-Man into thinking he's fighting all of his main villains at once. This was another one of my favorite stories as a kid (I blogged about it here). Plus, it features the Spider-mobile!

10) Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe - The funniest single issue Marvel has ever published. Haven't read it in years.

Honorable Mentions:

11) Daredevil #227 - The start of "Born Again," still the single best DD story ever told.
12) Justice League #1 - Giffen and DeMatteis's humorous take on the League is one of my favorite series of all time.
13) Spider-Man versus Wolverine - the landmark 64-page special issue from 1987 still holds up after all these years.
14) Detective Comics Annual #2 - Features a seriously underrated story by Mark Waid.
15) Superman #400 - The best of DC's many anniversary all-star anthology issues.
16) Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules #1 - Probably the best mini-series Marvel has published in the last decade.