10 Best Comic Book Characters NOT From Marvel Or DC

When talking about the best - or at least the most influential - comic book characters outside of the big two, Spawn is going to come up at some point or another. And if you know even the tiniest amount about what Image Comics was up to in the early to mid-90s, you know exactly why.

At the top of his game, Spawn wasn't just famous, he was an institution. The breakout star of Image Comics, and the golden boy of the comic book indie scene. Sure his would be the groundwork upon which all of the problems with 90's era comics would be laid, but no one working on him at the time could've foreseen that.

For those not in the know, Spawn was once a hired assassin named Al Simmons. Like all hired guns, at some point he pissed off his employers and got a lovely kerosene makeover as a result. However, because the main theme of Spawn is that the universe just kinda hates our buddy Al, he's roped into a supernatural bargain by an eldritch demon. Allowing him to return to earth, only to find his enemies in power, his wife remarried, and him barely remembering anything from his previous life.

Spawn may have succumbed to the very speculator boom his creators helped to blow up, but in his prime, the hype was real. Spawn was precisely what the comic reading public needed at the time, and his best stories still hold up. Which is more than we can say for Youngblood.