10 People Who Changed The Comic Book Industry Forever

9. Dennis O'Neil

DC Comics/Neal Adams

Dennis O'Neil honestly doesn't receive nearly enough the praise he deserves, and that's a shame. The writer, a DC staple in the seventies, eighties and nineties, is responsible for so much of what comics fans have come to love about the industry in its current form, especially in respect to some of its most beloved characters.

No disrespect to the sixties Batman TV show - it was amazing, in its own way - but O'Neil must surely be credited with having made the Batman we know today. Taking over the book alongside frequent artistic collaborator Neal Adams, O'Neil returned the character to the original Bill Finger concept, adding his own creations with characters like R'as Al Ghul too. It set the precedent for the definitive Dark Knight, and is the run all subsequent Batman comics - and films - are built upon.

It would be a disservice to the writer to mention only one of his runs however, and with one certainly more influential than any other, it has to be said that the writer's stint on Green Lantern/Green Arrow was the one that not only reiterated his own credentials, but the one that reinvigorated the superhero genre's salience top to bottom.

Politically scathing, refreshingly honest and revolutionary to its core, O'Neil and Adams' comic is one of the most important of all time, and a definite turning point in the genre's ascension to mainstream recognition.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.