3. Frank Miller's Daredevil
Imagine a world where sales of the Daredevil comic book are so low that it isnt popular enough to support being published monthly and where former Marvel editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, is daily told by Marvels financial officer/circulation VP daily that the book ought to be canceled. Imagine a world where Daredevil never seems like more than a Batman knock-off and where the heaviest hitters in his rogues gallery other than Bullseye, are the likes of The Owl, The Jester, and Stilt-Man. As for the Kingpin, hes nothing more than a third-tier Spiderman villain. Lastly, imagine a comic book world without a character like Elektra, an anti-hero who was so far out on the dark side of the force she paid her rent by killing people. Lets see Wolverine and the Punisher out-badass that. Thats how things were for Daredevil before Frank Miller came along and changed all that. Miller not only turned Daredevil from a Marvel second-stringer to a character so popular that his sales rivaled that of the seemingly eternally popular X-Men, but I posit that his work on the character was the actual birth of the grim and gritty style of storytelling that would become so popular a few years later. Sure, Millers own Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moores Watchmen get all the credit for popularizing the dark overtones comics would come to take, and both series certainly turned the dials of nastiness up to 11, but it was Millers run on Daredevil where New York City and its streets first became such a relentlessly scuzzy Bernie Goetz painting, villains became so sadistically homicidal, and even heroes entered a moral gray zone where they questioned what did and didnt constitute justice.