"A sex virus. Oh, Overman."

DKR and Year One
Frank Miller in general.
Mike Baron's FLASH
Tim Truman's HAWKWORLD
Howard Chaykin's BLACKHAWK
Grant Morrison's DARE

...and so on.

DKR might be the only thing from this subgenre, tone, whatever, that I genuinely love, although there's a soft spot in my heart for the first Sin City volume. I got into the Beats around the time GnG became really popular in my circles of friends and acquaintances, and I think somehow Kerouac fed the same thing Wolverine would have.

Although a lot of the early Vertigo-when-it-had-just-become-Vertigo stuff is at least related to GnG.

Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters
Matt Wagner's Demon mini
Paul Kupperberg's Phantom Stranger mini

Actually, thinking about it - is the Alan Moore Marvel/Miracleman the daddy of this whole thread?

(That's a double-use reaction shot: I'd never call Swamp Thing either gritty -- except in the "the swamps have dirt in them" sense -- or plotless.)

xpost

Well, every issue I ever read just seemed like he was hanging around, making out with Abby and growing cucumbers on his forearms.

Grim N Gritty = Watchmen but with real actual characters.

Wings Of Meat = Miracleman Book 3 (plus a dash of Constantine) (plus a dash of technobabble)

Weirdness For Weirdness Sake = this is post-Moore actually.

xpost - "wings of meat" makes me think of what happened to Angel in _X-Factor_. Clearly I need to read more stuff w/out pictures.

Swamp Thing tended to operate along very long-running arcs that weren't divided into episodes, per se (for most of them you can't say "this issue is part 7 of the 30 part Acceptance Of His Role In The Universe arc"), and rarely used cliffhangers or things like that -- but you had more change to characters and their situations than any other DCU book, easily. (Excepting maybe Suicide Squad's death toll.)

Anyhow... Green Lantern boozes was GOOD at the time but I was only small. Ditto Challs-get-all-grown-uppy.
DKR - kind of dated, to be honest. I've a feeling that when I get around to buying DKSB I'll like it a lot more.
Ennis' Punisher started off as black humour - now more grim and gritty but well told enough to avoid sinking in the mire of the genre.
DARE - a friend of mine was horrified that Dan Dare got bum-raped by gadgets in the Mekon's chair. I'd overlooked this when I read it.

We're getting a return of all this now, of course, with 'retro' coming to an end and Brad Mertrzler/Kevin Smith/Ron Zimmerman rapezines shooting into prominence as the new talked-about thing. Diggle's doing a 'reworked' Adam Strange and walking a fine line between grim and gritty nonsense and Battle-Of-The-Planets sci-fi madness - given that Rann is allgedly BLOWN UP in the first ish, it could go either way.

That aside, expect more boring little creeps like the above trio to wade in with their 'grown-uppy' versions of the Inferior Five - ANAL in more ways than one.

American Freak, I think, is one of the early Vertigo titles I have in mind for the "Vertigo version of GnG" stuff, the sort of Cronenbergian "look, it isn't spandex!" stuff. (Scarab, Enigma, Kid E, and on and on.)

Vic F - you must read something called NYX by the way, or at least the first issue, it is The Reader's "SNOOOORRRT" nightmare come true plus loads of very dodgy teenage upskirt drawings.

Railing on Ron Zimmerman seems so 2002. You'd be better off replacing his name w/ Geoff Johns' if you want your "get your grit out of my spandex!" campaign to have any heft.

Worst sign of the "grit" - A DRAMATIC SPACE GHOST MINI-SERIES! Kudos for flying in the face of all the wild wacky greatness offered by Space Ghost: Coast to Coast (& The Brak Show), but otherwise WTF?!?!?!?

I thought it was very funny that it was written by the editor in chief. I think a new Down With The Kids subcategory has been identified.

I've gotta read more attentively! (And not for the reasons you're thinking, Dan...)

I guess Zimmerman is kind of passe, but jesus, he was so smugly horrible and he'd have done alright if he'd stuck to the telly. ACTION was a fine show at first - one I never missed. It's ruined now. I couldn't watch it without seeing all the characters he shifted over to that godawful Kraven thing.

I was talking about Mike Baron's FLASH, i.e. the first issues of the current ongoing title where Wally West SLEEPS WITH A MARRIED WOMAN. And some other women. Maybe. Anyway there was a minor outcry over this in the letters page including one all-time great letter where the fan writes "I hope that Wally soon meets the one foe he cannot outrun...THE SPECTRE OF AIDS".

*great writer, deserves his own thread.

I suck at remembering Flash history. That era (the WM-L one) was my first exposure to Jackson Guice I think though, whose art I really like. Quick googling shows Mark Waid followed Bill Loebs, and wrote nearly 100 straight issues (only missing about 15). How could I have got it that wrong?

Kapitalist Kouriers and Chunk were my faves, I have to admit.

The only Waid Flash I read was the Barry Allen bit, which was GREAT!, & the stuff just after that, which was pretty good. How can you hate on THE SPEED FORMULA!?! (Was that Waid's invention?)

The current _Flash_ has been the same since _Legends_ - Baron on for 14 issues, WM-L for 30-40, then Waid for about 90+ (w/ Morisson & Millar taking over for a year), sometimes joined by Brian Augustyn (sic?), and then Johns from issue #160 on.

I just realized I miss the less-heroic, speed-eating, philandering, Chunk-loving Wally West.

I'm not sure if this has any place in this discussion, but thinking about The Flash brought it to mind, so here it shall go.

Matt Murdock is on the selfish jerk side, thankfully.