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GV10: [Results] Best Comic Book TV Show
DJ Eebs
Moderator, Administrator admin
Moderator, Administrator admin
Our next category is Best Comic Book TV Show.
This category is for your favorite Comic Book TV Show of the past 10 years. This is for any show that aired a majority of its episodes within the last 10 years, so if a show debuted, in say, 2002, but ran until 2012, it'd qualify. Also: this poll
Rules
1) Nominate as many shows as you want! There's no limit
2) If you see one of your favorites has already been nominated, feel free to second or third or fourth that nomination!
3) Please talk about why you think your favorite shows deserve to be in this poll. Simply posting a show name won't disqualify your nomination, but...
4) ...this thread is also for you to state your case for your favorite show! I won't be making a seperate voting thread, so here's where you make your case
5) And above all: keep it civil. This is supposed to be fun. I don't want to see people slagging on each other or their choices, try and keep it positive, alright?
Alright, and nominations are open...NOW
Put your nominations in BOLD TEXT. You don't need to all caps them, though
This category is for your favorite Comic Book TV Show of the past 10 years. This is for any show that aired a majority of its episodes within the last 10 years, so if a show debuted, in say, 2002, but ran until 2012, it'd qualify. Also: this poll
Rules
1) Nominate as many shows as you want! There's no limit
2) If you see one of your favorites has already been nominated, feel free to second or third or fourth that nomination!
3) Please talk about why you think your favorite shows deserve to be in this poll. Simply posting a show name won't disqualify your nomination, but...
4) ...this thread is also for you to state your case for your favorite show! I won't be making a seperate voting thread, so here's where you make your case
5) And above all: keep it civil. This is supposed to be fun. I don't want to see people slagging on each other or their choices, try and keep it positive, alright?
Alright, and nominations are open...NOW
Put your nominations in BOLD TEXT. You don't need to all caps them, though
DJ Eebs on
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Right from the start, this show knew exactly what it wanted to be and what it was about. It helps that Hayley Atwell is tremendous as Peggy Carter, and they built a pretty solid supporting cast. The action was great, the setting was super unique, and it was unabashedly feminist. I don't know how well the series stuck the landing in the finale, but I'm hoping they'll get a chance to do more.
It also gave us my favorite version of The Question.
Since then the show's pretty much been firing on all cylinders, and has been darn good this season.
If there is ever a more perfect adaptation of Spider-Man to film or television, I eagerly anticipate it. This show gets Spidey in a way that none of the movies or other cartoons have even come close to, not to mention the villains and supporting cast. He starts off fighting the Enforcers, multiple incarnations of the Sinister Six, brilliant homages to classic Spider-Man covers and moments, Gwen doesn't die, they don't start with the origin story that everyone and their mother knows, and most importantly we get the certain amount of quippage we expect in every battle.
Plus that theme song.
Steam Switch FC: 2799-7909-4852
Boondocks - memorable characters, smartly written, and not afraid to pull any punches.
Agents of SHIELD - It went from treading water, to blowing up with the events of Winter Soldier, and now it is without a doubt introducing elements that are going to be key for the Marvel Universe in the years to come. I think the first half of the first season might hurt this one in the voting, but it truly does deserve its place.
Flash - This show goes balls to the wall with comic book stuff that NO ONE said could work in live action, much less on TV, and makes it WORK. The cast clicked in an incredibly short time and it feels like we are in the 2nd or 3rd season of a show in its prime, not in the first.
Arrow - Flash wouldnt be here if it weren't for Arrow. Tested the waters for what would work with audiences, and managed to make a CW show that was not only watchable but awesome as hell. Plus, SLADE.
Nominating Young Justice - in just two seasons the show created a huge, well developed universe. The second season, especially, focused on a diverse cast of lesser known (to non-comic fans) characters. The team (and show) had a great balance of teenage personalities, and really showed how younger characters can work in a more "mainstream" setting.
The show also featured some of the best costume redesigns. Also it should win because we didn't get a season 3 after that goddamn tease in the series finale
It was a show I didn't watch/pay attention to at all until the middle of the second season, assuming "it's on the CW, they made Smallville, it's gotta be shit". Then I started reading up on it and saw that they litter the show with comics references, which I'm all about, and upon watching it (caught up on the whole thing in about two weeks), finding out that they follow up with most of those references you assumed were just easter eggs.
The show has also grown more confident in itself as its gone on, originally starting out as "Batman Begins starring Green Arrow" and becoming, well, pretty much still a Batman show starring Green Arrow, but in a fantastic way. Arrow and Flash are DC's TV versions of Batman and Superman, respectively, and they both show that with enough care, respect for the source material, and just the right amount of switching things up, comics can transfer to live action really well.
They also prove just how butts DC's movie output is
Edit:
Time to present supporting detail:
Or maybe you prefer Waffles:
Or finally, maybe you don't like either but just like money:
It really is the best representation of Spidey outside of comics. It did so many things perfectly and the way it took all the different parts from his appearances in other mediums and mashed them in the series worked really well. The evolution of the black suit was genius.
Also the fighting coreography was fantastic. That sinister six vs. Black suit is still one of my favorites.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
And then I am going to nominate Batman: Brave and the Bold and ask why no one else has yet.
I'd say that it was, at least in a sense, connected to the superhero concept. A team of people with extraordinary powers, who use them to protect others.
What made Alphas so great was how intelligent it was. Alphas had a point to it, a reason to exist. It was an exploration of how being a superhuman might make you neurologically atypical, your behaviour, your feelings, your emotions, they might all shift in response to the development of a superhuman power. It was a cool and flashy show at times, but mostly was about character interaction between a cast of very interesting and complex characters.
Alphas also had a scene which made me realise how most people, myself included, saw the mentally ill. When they came across a Flag cell, and it included a very autistic woman who could communicate superhumanly well in code, they assumed she was basically a victim, used as a human phone by the Cell. I assumed this as well, because society trains us to strip autistic people of their own agency.
It hit me like a bolt of lightning, their surprise, encoded into them by society, mirrored by own. I had automatically assumed that this person could not possibly be there of their own accord, never mind in a position of command. And yet she was!
Alphas made me change the way I see people with such atypical ways of thinking. For that, and for being a well written and clever show which had a lot of life to it but was sadly cut short, it gets my nomination.
Seconding Batman: Brave and the Bold for the Music Meister Episode and Aquaman alone.
It was a fundamentally crass take on the superhero genre, not unlike, say, anything written by Mark Millar. However, it backed up it's nearly useless powers and excesses of vulgarity with strong character development, and then managed to go into full on comic book mode by the second season. It eventually went a bit too far off the rails, in my opinion, but the first three seasons of it are still pretty great superhero TV, even if nobody on the show really wanted to be a superhero in the first place.
Does that mean I can nominate The Cape?
Or like, is there going to be a "Worst Comic Book TV Show" thread I should save that for?
Agent Carter
Arrow
Flash
iZombie
Alphas
Constantine
Would Teen Wolf count?
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The TV Show Penny Dreadful
But oh my God did I love Young Justice. It was a kids show that wasn't one, animation that was top quality and pretty much defined the DC animated house style, and compared to other shows had some balls in not really having a theme song or opening credits. It was just kind of bam! only because it seemed mandated. Especially for a cartoon, that shows a confidence that the series never lacked. I think there were only one or two "eh" episodes, but even then they were good and original, and they did so much in such a short amount of time that felt so natural, almost like the DC Comics heyday of 1998-2003 in actually doing real change to characters.
I'll also second Justice League Unlimited. Not Justice League, that was alright, but when they expanded to Unlimited, it was so much fun. And Batman/WW OTP.
like
those are just genre shows
Alphas and Misfits and Heroes are explicitly about metahumans and reference the superhero origins of their plot
Well, now I need to fire ye old PS4 and give that a shot.
That show was one-of-a-kind. It managed to mesh together Wacky Silver Age Hijinx with Modern characters and surprisingly smart plots to form a whole stronger than any of its parts. It's biggest strength, though, were the characters. From fan favorite modern hits like Jaime Reyes and Damian Wayne to DC mainstays like Aquaman and Green Arrow to obscure characters most fans had never heard of like B'Wana Beast or the Creature Commandos, BatB wrote each of its characters with strong, clear voices that resonated instantly and led to the show creating fans for characters they either didn't know existed or didn't care about before, all backed by some of the most consistently excellent voice casting in cartoon history. And while the show would run the gamut between wacky adventures to surprisingly serious episodes (Chill of the Night most notably) it never lost its core vision of presenting Batman as the world's most capable hero, who can rely and be improved by his friends and allies.
Plus it has what is probably the most insane series finale of all time with 2 4th-wall breaking interdimensional mischief makers fighting with each other over the cancellation of the show, culiminating in the entire cast over the series uniting for a farewell to all of its fans and a reminder to always be good.
Man I love that show
Can we have a section of the poll where we vote on the worst comic book show then?
G.I. Joe and Transformers are definitely an edge case. The toys existed first, but 9/10 of what people think of as the Transformers/G.I. Joe story were actually written by the folks at Marvel Comics. The G.I. Joe comics link is more direct, in that Larry Hama invented Cobra and the mythology from whole cloth while writing the comic, while Hasbro actually directly hired Dennis O'Neil and Jim Shooter as consultants to write the Transformers story a year later because of how good a job Marvel did on Joe.
Fun fact - G.I. Joe was original going to be a S.H.I.E.L.D. spinoff that fought Hydra. Hasbro got cold feet about tying their property so closely to the Marvel Universe, so Hama filed the numbers off Hydra and borrowed a bunch of John Birch Society quotes to fill in the Cobra ideology.
There's no shortage of X-Men cartoons out there, but this one has my vote for the best. The show managed to do for the X-Men what Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes did for the Avengers, package the classic stories with decent animation and writing to make them feel fresh. And just like A:EMH, it was a cancelled way too early. One more season, and we'd have gotten the show's take on Age of Apocalypse.
Random fun fact - This show is in the same continuity as Avengers:EMH.