British Nervoso wrote:
any Vol 1 from the New 52 is a good place to start with for DC.
Be careful here, the New 52 is mostly utter, utter shite. There's a couple of series that are decent* and some that much later on became okay** but there's so much jaw-droppingly bad shit in there I honestly don't know what the fuck they're doing.
*The Batman stuff mostly, and Brian Azzarello's weird mythical take on Wonder Woman continues to be very good.
**Jeff Lemire has pretty much quietly rebooted Green Arrow all over again to make it into something that's not completely embarrassing to read and the current Swamp Thing run's not bad.My recommendation would be not to necessarily look at certain characters/teams because the quality is incredibly variable depending on who's doing the writing at any given time. I think your best bet is to look at the best writers and see what they've done you might fancy. A couple of picks for writers to look for be
Warren Ellis and
Keiron Gillen; there's very little the two of them have done that isn't well worth reading.
If you're willing to go back a bit, Warren Ellis'
Transmetropolitan series is completely stand alone and is just brilliant stuff from start to finish, but most of his own stuff is well worth reading. Super-hero wise he's done acclaimed runs on Iron Man, Thunderbolts (the issue where Norman Osborn finally completes his slow backslide from hero-of-the-hour to violent psychopath is honestly one of the funniest things I've ever read), and his original run on The Authority is top stuff.
Keiron Gillen started out with his own series Phonogram, a very British melding of magic and music that's well worth checking out. Since then he's done very good stuff with S.W.O.R.D., X-Men, Iron Man and Young Avengers. The best thing though is definitely his long run on Journey Into Mystery, which is a sort of Thor spin-off that he used to rehabilitate the character of Loki. It's funny and touching and just excellent all round.
Thanks Bamba. The only problem I have is the same as Curio, the whole dropping into the middle of an established series, which I imagine will only be worse if I cherry pick particular writers unless I look at their standalone stuff?