Will E Worm
Conspiracy...
Strength In Numbers: The Top 10 Superhero Teams of All-Time
If you like superhero teams, it's a great time to be you. Just this week, DC Comics debuted a brand-new Justice League of America series, from the high-profile creative team of Geoff Johns and David Finch. That's in addition the already ongoing Justice League book, plus Teen Titans, Justice League Dark, Stormwatch and more -- all groups of superpowered individuals joining forces for the not-so common good.
Marvel more your speed? Well, right now they're publishing an unprecedented number of Avengers books: Avengers. New Avengers. Uncanny Avengers. Young Avengers. Secret Avengers. Avengers Assemble. Avengers Arena. Not to mention the X-Men family of titles, Fantastic Four, FF, Guardians of the Galaxy and Fearless Defenders.
So, yeah, it's a good time to be a fan of superteams. But who are the best of the best? Here's our list of the top 10 superhero teams of all time.
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10. TIE: GEN 13/X-FORCE
We thought long and hard about including a now utterly defunct (well, maybe) superteam book on a countdown of the top 10, but is there another team book that epitomized an entire era better than the original J. Scott Campbell Wildstorm series Gen 13?
Well, maybe Rob Liefeld's X-Force, so that's why they're tied for 10th place in our list.
While X-Force is/was of course a Marvel series, it helped usher in the Image Comics era by launching Liefeld into superstardon -- along with his Marvel peers like Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri -- and helped establish the Image house style. The title's influence lives on today, with Cable and X-Force and Uncanny X-Force both simultaneously ongoing under the "Marvel NOW!" umbrella.
If X-Force helped established the Image era, Gen 13 serves as one of its most recognizable historical markers. An even closer of a play off the '90s X-Men (the Image breeding ground) than any of its Image contemporaries (Cyberforce, Youngblood, WildC.A.T.S.) the series featured a young, outcast superpowered team of the grunge era (including a character actually named "Grunge"), with a heavy leaning towards racy "good girl art," metric tons of variant and promotional covers (13 in total for issue #1) -- and of course, as the series went on, the requisite shipping irregularities.
It even launched its young artist in superstardom and onto his own creator-owned work (Danger Girl) in a fitting bit of history repeating itself.
Whether the series remains a relic of the decade remains to be seen, though Fairchild has played a role in The New 52's Superboy.
9. LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN
Much like how the Justice League gathered the most popular superheroes in the DC Universe, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took the, ahem, novel approach of uniting some of the greatest fictional characters of the Victoria era into a superhero team of sorts.
From the unique mind of legendary writer Alan Moore, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stars Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines, Mina Harker from Dracula, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the Invisible Man, brought together by the grandfather of James Bond. The unconventional concept caught on, and even inspired a "better if we don't mention it" 2003 film.
8. JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Justice Society of America are the originals. They're the first team of superheroes to gather on the comic book page in history, pre-dating even the much more famous "Justice League of America."
The team debuted in 1940 -- dubbed the "Golden Age" of comics -- and included characters like the early versions of Green Lantern, the Flash, Atom and the Sandman. Following the team's original run, it was two notable revivals that really cemented the Justice Society's place in history -- first in 1961's The Flash #123, which established DC's Earth-2, and then in 1999, when a relaunched series reunited some of the original characters and introduced new blood to the roster.
That series went on to be one of DC's most popular books both with critics and fans, leading to some distress when the book wasn't part of the publisher's initial The New 52 plans. But you can't keep the JSA down, and a version of the team stars in DC's current Earth 2series.
7. LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES
Many people won't realize this, but the Legion of Super-Heroes actually existed before most of the other groups on this list. What most people do know, however, is that there have been many conflicting continuities for the team, making this group of teen heroes from the future one of the most confusing and complicated groups of characters ever in comics.
Originally from the 30th (now 31st) century, the Legion of Super-Heroes was inspired by tales of Earth's heroes from the 20th and 21st Centuries, particularly Superman. What was originally a one-off guest star spot in Adventure Comics in 1958 turned into frequent guest spots, and several ongoing series of their own over the next 50 odd years.
The team is perhaps best known for their adventures under the guidance of writer Paul Levitz. He has written the Legion several times, including industry-defining stories like The Great Darkness Saga. In fact, Levitz has been writing the team's stories again in recent years, and has written the relaunched Legion of Super-Heroes since the inception of The New 52 in September 2011.
The Legion is a bastion of hope, they're a sign that superheroic ideals can survive for millennia, and they allow us to peek far into the future. And of course, who wouldn't want one of those awesomely helpful Legion flight rings for themselves?
6. WATCHMEN
Yes, yes, in the time of Watchmen, these people weren't a team anymore, but the characters in arguably the most revered comic book story ever were once a team called the Minutemen, and are definitely an ensemble cast.
This is not your classic superhero squadron. These individuals are as dysfunctional as they come. We have rapists, murderers, egomaniacal madmen, borderline schizophrenics, and a mad scientist. These aren't people to look up to, these aren't people to idolize, and they might not even be people that can really leave the world a better place than it was when they got there.
And that's what people love about their story. It's a group of actual people with actual problems doing extraordinary things. They also helped to usher in the idea that you could tell superhero stories primarily for adults, which are how most superhero comics are written today. The book's popularity inspired a 2009 film and last year's highly controversial series of prequel miniseries, Before Watchmen.
5. TEEN TITANS
Comic books have a long tradition of the teen superhero, dating back to the introduction of Batman's famous sidekick Robin back in 1940.
So it made sense when the most famous teen superhero team of all -- Teen Titans -- debuted in 1964 with a lineup including Robin, along with Kid Flash, Aqualad and Wonder Girl. Following many incarnations and a roster expansion including not just sidekicks, but independent teen heroes like Beast Boy, Cyborg and Raven, the comic is essentially a permanent fixture in DC's plans, with a Teen Titans relaunch part of the initial New 52, and still ongoing.
Teen Titans has been the archetypal teen superhero book for generations, inspiring everything from Gen 13 (the No. 10 book on this list) to Rick Veitch's Bratpack, to even other DC Comics, like Young Justice and Titans, starring now-grown versions of the original membership.
Like many of the teams on this list, the Teen Titans have been represented in other forms of media -- most notably a mid-2000s anime-esque Cartoon Network series.
4. FANTASTIC FOUR
Strictly speaking, the Fantastic Four aren't so much a superhero team as they are a family of super-powered adventurers. And it's that unique nature that's made them stand out for 50 years.
Sure, they've saved the world dozens of times and amassed an impressive roster of supervillain foes, but the Fantastic Four has always been more about the spirit of exploration than meting out justice, and the power of intelligence over brute force. And though there have been many temporary lineup changes over the year, the Fantastic Four's core of Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and the Thing has remained one of the most beloved dynamics in all of fiction.
Debuting in 1961, the Fantastic Four kickstarted the Marvel Age of comics, leading the way for the Avengers, Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men and a revived Captain America. The team has been adapted into a variety of media --from cartoons to three live-action movies, two that made it into theaters and one that will never (legally) see the light of day -- and stayed a consistent presence in Marvel's publishing line. (Another movie is in development for 2015.)
In 2011, the death of the Human Torch and subsequent rebranding of the book as simply "FF" was one of the biggest comic book news stories of that year, proving that a concept that's five decades old can still get people talking. Fantastic Four and FF were each relaunched in the Marvel NOW! era, both written by Matt Fraction.
3. X-MEN
When the Children of the Atom were first created in 1963, at the height of Marvel's character creation boom, they had a bit of trouble getting a foothold on the comic reading audience. After 66 issues, the book went into reprints for years. Then along came Len Wein and Dave Cockrum with an all-new, all-different cast in 1975, and the team became a top seller for the next several decades.
After that first revival, John Byrne and Chris Claremont took the book to the top, with stories like "The Dark Phoenix Saga." In the early 1990s, Claremont teamed with artist Jim Lee for another fresh relaunch, and the team received an incredibly popular animated television series.
The X-Men line (because it's far from just one book nowadays) has continued to relaunch fairly regularly, always able to be reinvented for a new time, telling the tales of extraordinary individuals who protect a world that hates and fears them. They have a successful film franchise (which underwent a reinvention of its own in 2011), rarely go more than a couple of years without an animated series, a steady flow of video games... This is the franchise that brought in one if not two full generations of readers, and that's why it's our number three.
Marvel recently relaunched Uncanny X-Men, with a team headed by Cyclops; and last fall debuted All-New X-Men, which features Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Original Five -- Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Angel and Beast -- transported from the past into the present.
2. JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA
So, the hard part wasn't picking the #1 and #2 superteams in comic book history, it was picking which was #1 and which was #2.
The Justice League has a lot going for it. It's the team almost all modern-day superteams are modeled after or were inspired by, which almost got it the top spot by default. It traditionally stars no less than three (Superman, Batman, Wonder Women) of arguably the five most iconic superheroes on the planet (Spider-Man and the Hulk are the other two, in case you're wondering). And it's been a consistent seller since the dawn of The New 52.
Up until a certain 2012 movie, it was probably even more of a household name than any other team or title in this countdown, so at the end of the Justice League only finished #2 because of who finished #1...
1. AVENGERS
...and that's Earth's Mightiest Heroes, of course.
From a purely comic book standpoint Justice League likely beats out Marvel's now-flagship The Avengers by hair or two. Despite being the biggest franchise in the world of published comics since Brian Bendis' 2004-2005 Disassembled/New Avengers one-two-revamp/relaunch, the title still doesn't quite have the historical pedigree of DC's preeminent team.
Being the first, being the prototype, and having a broad pop cultural reach due to its '70s and '80s Saturday morning Superfriends cartoon off-shoot gives Justice League that edge.
But by virtue of beating their DC counterparts to the big screen in a series of coordinated feature films leading to Joss Whedon's incredibly successful ($1.5 billion worldwide doesn't lie) 2012 live-action The Avengers, in the big picture it's hard to overlook the literal billion-dollar Marvel property as being the biggest comics' team going at the moment -- just look at the number of Avengers books Marvel is putting out.
With DC's reboot, the JSA is messed up.
Time for DC to retcon the entire "new 52" garbage. Fantastic Four relaunch, reboot? I thought Marvel Now was not a reboot?
