Comic-Con Special: Top 5 Superheroes

Yes please.

San Diego Comic-Con 2011 is in full swing. I, on the other hand, am by posting a story about it to to my blogger account from behind a desk in Ohio.

Go ahead. Be jealous.

For many industry types, Comic-Con has become a mega event for entertainment, from movies to genre TV and video games, almost every facet of pop-culture is covered.

I on the other hand have not been entirely impressed with the convention (at heart, I'm a bigger fan of the Chicago Comic Con put on by Wizard). For me, comics are the main event, and since I’ve followed the events of the show over the past few years, I’ve looked to it for major reveals about what’s coming in the year for those who prefer to wear their underpants outside of their tights.

Regardless, I recognize that the next few days are to be devoted to San Diego, the mecca for all things nerdy. And to mark the occasion, I’m going to look at the five favorite superheroes (or teams) of 7-year-old me.

5 - Plastic Man
Like many things as a child, I got into Plastic Man through the TV show, which was in frequent re-run during the early days of Cartoon Network. Honestly, I remember very little about the series, with the exception of the introduction of Plastic Baby in some shorts and other episodes, but I could not list an actual occurrence on the show. Regardless, I remember sitting down to watch it regularly and looking forward to it during day care after kindergarten. As a comic reader today, I still rather enjoy Plastic Man because he’s so campy and ridiculous. And I also have a weird love of the goofy crooks who are completely oblivious that everything he turns himself into looks exactly like him. He was wonderfully fun.

4 - The Fantastic Four (I swear, this was only a coincidence)
I also caught the Fantastic Four on TV, but my love for the team was mostly through not knowing who they were. As well as having a 1970s Hanna-Barbara ‘toon, the FF were featured prominently in the Spider-Man and (to a lesser extent) the X-Men cartoons and I always wanted to know more about them, why they had their weird powers and how they connected into the larger superhero universe. This all could have been answered had I caught the very short lived series also debuted in the 1990s (which I of course bought when it was released on DVD). Today the Fantastic Four are my favorite superhero group, but I probably would have relegated them to the back of the list had it not been for 7-year-old me for introducing us.

3 - Darkwing Duck
One of my favorite TV series during the 1990s was Darkwing Duck, the “DuckTails” spin-off which went on to become one of the more popular Disney cartoons of the time. There were a number of reasons I enjoyed Darkwing, including his family dynamic behind the mask, the odd assortment of villains and side characters and not the least of which was his very real resemblance to Batman, which was enough to get me on board. I especially enjoyed that as a viewer I got to see more of Gizmo Duck, probably my favorite of the characters from DuckTails even though he only appeared in the later seasons. Luckily the Masked Mallard’s adventures are being published in comic book form today by BOOM! Studios, something I started to check out when I get the chance.

2 - War Machine

My first real comic book is War Machine issue 2, passed onto me by my cousins. In many ways it started it all, even if I didn’t collect another issue until well into the 2000s. War Machine, like Winston from the Ghostbusters and the Family Matters, was one of the first black characters I had come across as a white kid from rural Ohio. Looking back, these characters helped to give me a positive image of diversity, although as a 7 year old I was much more interested in the guns and explosions of the series. I may not have followed him on a regular basis as a child, but War Machine left an indelible mark on my childhood.

1 - Batman

For any 7-year-old boy there was only one superhero who mattered in the 1990s: Batman. He was the star of a crazy successful and well done cartoon series, a line of hugely popular movies and there were more action figures of him than any other character in the toy aisle. As I already mentioned before, I even watched other shows with the hope that Batman would eventually show up. Although I had not read a single comic book featuring the Dark Knight until much later, he was the superhero I most admired in my youth. Today he is maybe just as popular as he was then, if not more thanks to the brilliant Christopher Nolan-directed Batman-pics, the next of which I very well may be camped out to see when it opens midnight July 20, 2012.

And I'd be remiss if we didn't have an honorable mention, if only because it had the coolest opening theme for any superhero cartoon: The X-Men.

Comic-Con is going on throughout the next couple of days. If you are like me and stuck in Ohio (or Arkansas, honestly this site doesn't give me a good depiction of where people are reading this from) and want some inside scoop as to what is going on this weekend, I highly suggest you check out the coverage on G4, iFanboy and Bleeding Cool News for the latest in nerdom.