11 Essential Storylines To Read If You're Just Getting Into Comics

4. All-Star Superman

All-Star Superman is drop-dead gorgeous, both in its prose and in its art.

Serving as a deconstruction of the character, and an attempt to bring the Man of Steel back to his essence, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's opus remains the best text to have featured America's most famous alien. Like The Long Halloween before it, All-Star also stands on its own as a timeless classic of the DC library, complete with the kind of emotional gravity and social commentary that made the character of Kal-El so fascinating in the first place.

All-Star is great for plenty of reasons, but its chief achievement has to be its approach to the Superman mythos. Quitely's pencils and Jamie Grant's colours create a specific kind of warmth on the page, one that's indicative of the book's narrative and its tone too. Indeed, Morrison takes the most compelling aspects of Clark Kent and Superman and places them right at the novel's spine, departing from some of the more action-heavy titles to have featured the character in mainstream DC Continuity.

As a singular event in the Superman mythos, All-Star is simply unmissable. Its 2011 animated adaptation, too, was so close to being its equal; so if you somehow struggle to track down the book, the film is only a quick click away.