4. Sensational Spider-Man
Marvel ComicsMark Millar's a writer that we have...some issues with. But he's certainly not all bad - after all, even a blind squirrel finds nuts sometimes. Millar's eventual bountiful harvest came in the form of this miniseries from a few years ago, with some bold artwork by Terry Dodson, which takes the Sinister Six concept and inflates it to a truly epic level, raising the personal stakes for Peter Parker at the same time. It also sets ups a lot of the changes that the character, and a large portion of his rogues gallery, went through in recent times, if you wanna really be brought up to speed. Beginning with the Green Goblin locked up and supposedly with his life on track for the first time ever, Spider-Man nonetheless ends up having to face one of the greatest challenges of his career. His beloved Aunt May is missing, and to find out what happened to her he has to fight every single one of his big enemies, including a handful who've had a recent upgrade. Sensational Spider-Man delivers on the sort of street level heroism we saw in Unscheduled Stop, the personal stakes and insurmountable odds of The Sinister Six, plus a decent helping of ridiculous comic book action sequences and a rather impressive raft of those quips that our hero is so infamous for delivering in the heat of battle. Which makes it all the more dramatic when he has to drop the jokes and get down to business.
Where to read it: The Spider-Man by Mark Millar Ultimate Collection has it all