100 Greatest Superhero Stories Ever
By Steve Lam
Image Created by Steve Lam for Bam Smack Pow Article: “100 Greatest Superhero Stories Ever”
Bam Smack Pow ranks and counts down 100 of the greatest superhero stories ever!
Welcome, readers! It’s the holidays and everyone is gathering for family dinners and spending time with each other. Even though that’s great and all, it can sometimes get overwhelming and stressful. Especially when you don’t have your own Fortress of Solitude.
To help you in your escape, Bam Smack Pow has assembled a list of 100 Greatest Superhero Stories Ever. This isn’t a “worst to best” list. It’s a “great to greatest” list of every superhero story to-date. We cover all mediums—comic books (the obvious one), films, television series, novels, and even video games and more!
How We Define “Story”
A story is not necessarily defined by a constraint on time, page count, or an episode break. We see stories as complete narrative arcs—and sometimes those arcs go beyond the bounds set by a movie, standalone television episode, or single-issue comic book.
For example, even though Marvel’s Daredevil Season 1 has thirteen episodes, it’s not thirteen stories. Since the show is so serialized, each season is considered a large narrative arc—one complete beginning to end 13-hour story!
We did our best to provide a ranking of 100 complete stories. If this differs from your concept of a story, definitely give us your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you and see how we vary in our definitions.
Ranking Methodology
We identified nine categories: Live-Action Feature Films, Live-Action Television Series, Animated Feature Films, Animated Television Series, Live-Action Short Films, Animated Short Films, Comic Books, Novels, and Video Games.
We listed the best each category has to offer in terms of the superhero genre. We then ranked them within their own categories. The ranked stories then went up against each other in a cross-category competition. From there, we extrapolated our list of the 100 Greatest Superhero Stories Ever.
We know it’s not on Brainiac-level rigor, but there’s still a method to our Joker-like madness. Let me tell you—we were torn in some instances, but we had to make the cut-off somewhere. The superhero genre has so many great stories, and new ones are constantly being added. These are the greatest for the time being. The landscape is sure to change in the future!
Now, with every ranking, there’s going to be a bit of controversy. Hey, you can’t make everyone happy, and we don’t expect to. If you feel there was a story that should’ve been ranked higher, lower, or had no business being on this list—let us know! We’d love to hear from you. Debating about any “greatest list” is always fun. Throw superheroes into the mix and you have a party like no other. So let’s get this shindig started! …