Top 10 Male Comic Book Characters

When its comes to comic books, one of the rules I have come to know is that YOU don't pick your favorite character.  You don't look at a character and think, "Ohhh, I like that person.  They're going to be my fav."  If you do, your reading experience will be extremely dull.  Maybe that character is boring.  Maybe they're not as "cool" they look.  Maybe they're a character that gets pushed into the background.  Maybe they're absolutely nothing like you and you have conflicting opinions.  Whatever the case, its always best to let your favorite character PICK YOU.  How does that happen exactly?  Simple.  Read whatever type of story that seems like it might be interesting to you.  Space, street, mystics, hi-tech, aliens, etc.  Read it and you'll find yourself gravitating towards at least one character for any number of reasons.  Without further ado, here are my top 10 favorite male characters.

10. Deadpool


What?? Deadpool number 10?  Hey, it's a tough list to crack.  He was lucky to even get on this.  While I'm not a fan of crude characters, Deadpool is the exception simply because he's different with every writer.  In the beginning (when I became a fan of the character in 1991), he was a violent assassin.  He was 70% serious, 30% funny and his sense of humor was kind of a snarky one.  I always looked forward to seeing what he'd do or what he'd say in the pages of X-Force.  Even though people are just becoming familiar with him now with his movie recently being released, he became very popular very quickly back in the 90's within comic book circles and quickly got his own title just a few years after his debut.  Today, his character is the reverse with his humor being more crude and/or goofy.  Still a great character and gets me to laugh pretty often.  Pop culture references and 4th wall breaking make him unique and fun.  Plus, he's wearing my favorite colors.

9. Doctor Doom
People that don't even read comics, know of Doctor Doom.  His name is a classic comic book villain name.  For me however, he really didn't become an awesome character until recently.  In a F4 story titled, "Doom's Master", you begin to see him in an entirely different light.  Its a story that really ramps up his credibility as a bad ass.  Later on, he joins the new Future Foundation (formerly the F4) and for a short while get to enjoy seeing him work alongside Reed Richards as they take on even greater threats than each other.  Doom would eventually go on to become God.  Well, God of the Marvel multiverse anyways, but nevertheless an omnipotent being in charge of all creation.  In the past 5 years or so, Doom has from being a cliche super villain to becoming one of the most complex, powerful and scary characters in the Marvel universe.

8. Venom
As a big Spider-man fan (blog post spoiler!), I've read my fair share of Spidey comics.  However, none of them pique my interest as much as the ones with Venom.  The black alien symbiote, hell bent on ruining Peter Parker's life, made for a great villain for a number of years.  People would go crazy anytime Venom appeared on the cover of any comic and during the 90's was simply a character that people could not get enough of.  I always believed that, in addition to looking awesome, people loved Venom because he was a legitimate threat to Spider-man.  Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Electro, Hobgoblin, Sandman, Vulture, Shocker, Mysterio... none of those characters really instilled any kind of fear.  Spidey would beat them, as he has so so many times before and nobody really took them seriously.  Venom on the other hand, had Spider-man's powers and then some.  Maybe it was just the way Todd McFarlane drew him, but Venom caused real fear in the reader and made people fear for the lives of Spidey and his family and friends.  He's also the character that keeps on giving... Spidey new villains.  Thanks to the symbiote we have Carnage, Hybrid, Anti-Venom and Scream.  In recent years, Venom has undergone numerous changes, from new hosts to new missions to new looks and honestly, they're all great.  There isn't any iteration of Venom that didn't love.



7. Reed Richards (Marvel)
If there's one character that father's should look up to in the world of comic books, its Reed Richards aka Mister Fantastic.  The faithful, loving husband and father of two is also the leader of the adventurous Fantastic Four.  As a fan of science fiction, Reed Richards is the perfect tour guide to take you on a trip throughout time and space.  While his super powers are kind of lame (stretchy-ness, really?), he more than makes up for it with his superior intellect.  When things start to get crazy on Earth and sometimes beyond, everyone turns to Reed.  He'll figure it out.  Either he'll have a plan or an idea or an invention that can bail out everyone.  The things that he's interested in, are the same things that I, the reader, am interested in.  Parallel universes, time traveling, space missions.  I agree with pretty much everything he says and can relate to a lot of little things that he goes through with his family.   Everything Reed Richards has wanted to do, I'm like "Ohhh yeah, that sounds good!"  He is without a doubt, the most interesting man in the MARVEL universe.  Notice, I capitalized Marvel.  We're not quite done yet with Mr Richards.


6. Adam Warlock

After the original Captain Marvel died, the universe needed a new savior.  Someone that every other hero looked to when the universe was in danger.  That someone was Adam Warlock.  I began my comic book reading career in the summer of 1991 and it was during that season that the first installment of the Infinity trilogy was being wrapped up.  In the Infinity Gauntlet event, pretty much every superhero and super villain was killed with the exception of Adam Warlock, of course.  He managed to get possession of the Gauntlet, resurrect all the dead and set everything right... until next summer when the next chapter continued with the Infinity War and then the Infinity Crusade the year after that.  While every other hero went back to their daily lives during the rest of the year, Warlock was planting the seeds and getting prepared for the next big universal conflict.  THIS is one of the reasons he became one of my all time favorites.  There was never anything going on in the universe that was more important or more impactful than what Adam Warlock was doing.  As a Catholic, another aspect of his character that I love are the parallels he draws to Jesus Christ.  In the 70's, there was a story in which he was sent to an artificial parallel Earth to save the people that lived there and he was crucified and resurrected from the dead.  As I mentioned earlier, he possessed the Infinity Gauntlet, which basically meant he was God of the Marvel universe.  When he was forced to split up the gems, he would seek out the less fortunate aliens throughout the universe, kind of how like Jesus would seek out the sinners.  I could go on, but you get the idea.


5. Cable (Nathan Summers)
The tough bad ass leader of X-Force, Cable was Jack Bauer before being compared to Jack Bauer was cool.  He was born as an Omega Level mutant and was supposed to be one of the most powerful mutants of all time.  However, thanks to his nemesis, Apocalypse, he was injected with a techno organic virus as a toddler and left for dead.  With no way to cure him, Scott Summers was forced to give up his son, Nathan, to a time traveling future relative that said if he has any chance to live, he'll have to go to the future but will be unable to return.  He leaves as Nathan the sick boy and returns a couple years later as Cable the cybernetic soldier from the future.  Unfortunately, they were unable to cure him of the virus and is forced to use all of his mutant powers to hold it at bay and prevent it from taking over his entire body.  If that sounds like a tough life, you haven't heard the half of it.  His other toughest villain is Stryfe, a cloned version of himself, that has no trace of the techno organic virus and is in full control of his mutant abilities.  Because he looks just like Cable, Stryfe sets him up and frames him for crimes that causes everyone from the X-Men to SHIELD to go hunting for him and his team.  This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Cable gets put into so many unbelievably difficult situations, involving alternate timelines, clones, and saving the mutant race, yet he'll push through and find ways to survive and accomplish his goal.  Its really actually kind of inspiring.  The man simply never EVER gives up, making him probably the biggest bad ass in comics.

4. Spider-man
Spider-man, Spider-man, does whatever a spider can!  Seriously though, Spider-man and his many incarnations have done it all.  I couldn't pick just one as I love so many of them, so I'm picking them all.  I could write a top 10 blog post on my favorite Spider people easily.   They're all the same, yet different and they're all really awesome.  Just in this picture alone we have Scarlet Spider, Superior Spider-man, Manga-verse Spidey, Captain Universe Spidey, Iron Spider, Spider-man 2099, Spider-Gwen, Spider-man Noir, Spider-woman, and Spider-girl.  Believe it or not, there's even more than that and they're all pretty awesome in their own way.  Spidey is the ultimate good guy.  He teaches us with great power, comes great responsibility.   This is the one character that you can't ever really outgrow.  I loved Spidey when I was 4 years old, I loved him as a teenager and I love him now.  Peter Parker is such a good guy and very relatable.  He's fumbly, embarrassing, awkward, sometimes makes bad decisions, but he's still one of the greatest heroes the world has ever known.  He teaches us that we don't have to be perfect all the time and that's okay.  Just try your best and always do the right thing, even when it's the hardest thing.  As for the stories, he's had some all time classics from the death of Gwen Stacy, to the Clone Saga, Venom, Superior Spider-man, Spider Island, and recently Spider-verse, which is one of the greatest stories I have ever read in my life. Even if you just like Spider-man a little bit, Spider-verse will blow you away in both story and art.  He's an all time classic character that I'll probably be reading about even when I'm in my 70's.

3. Captain Marvel (Mar-vell)


Normal people look up to superheroes, but who do superheroes look up to?  Well if you're in the Marvel universe, the answer was Captain Marvel.  The former champion of the Kree, former protector of the universe, the original Captain Marvel or Mar-vell.  He was sent to Earth to spy on humans and prepare for an invasion, but he defected to Earth and sided with the Avengers after he fell in love with the current day Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers.  His love for her not only saved the planet but resulted in Carol getting his powers.  After he used his own body to shield her from an energy blast that resulted in her DNA changing to his, it gave her the same powers as him and became Ms Marvel.  Unfortunately, later on, during a fight with the villain Nitro, he protected innocents from a deadly gas which resulted in him getting cancer.  Despite trying magic, technology, medicines, etc, no one could help the man that had helped all of them so many times in the past and he died in the first ever Marvel graphic novel "The Death of Captain Marvel".  Now in comic books, death just means they won't be around for a few months, maybe years, but they'll be back for sure.  For whatever reason though, with Marv, the writers will simply not bring him back... well at least not on a permanent basis.  He made cameos during a storyline where Silver Surfer entered the realm of the dead.  He returned in Chaos War, a storyline where everything living died and the dead were returned to life.  It looked as though Marv was going to be a permanent return around Civil War when he suddenly and inexplicably returned to Earth, however, it was later revealed he was a Skrull-imposter that really believed he was the real Captain Marvel.  Marv returned, for real one, last time during AvX, hooked up with Carol Danvers one last time, and sacrificed himself to save Hala, the Kree homeworld from the Phoenix.  Never wanting her lovers' memory to be forgotten, Danvers changed her name and costume to Captain Marvel.  He's shown up a number of times in parallel universe and timelines, but he's always either killed off or erased.  Seeing as how he's my number 3 favorite male comic book character, I would LOVE to see Mar-vell return in a full time capacity again.  The first time I ever read his story was in a "What if...?" which was entitled "What if Captain Marvel had not died?".  Ever since that one comic, I've been a big fan of his, always wanting more and getting super excited anytime he appears in any comic in any capacity.  After death, he was able to father two children (long story), Genis-vell and Phyla-vell.  Both took over the mantle of Captain Marvel for a short time, but neither could really capture the awesomeness of the original and both are currently in superhero heaven with their Dad.

2. Reed Richards (Ultimate)

Remember at the top of this blog post, I wrote, you can't pick your favorites, they pick you.  This character was the one I was thinking of when I wrote that.  After a long hiatus from comics, I got back into reading them and started off by reading about the other Marvel universe, the Ultimate universe.  I was intrigued by the re-imagining and modernization of old classic characters and was  glad to see Mar-vell or Mahr-Vehl in Ultimate was alive.  So I picked up the series Ultimate Secret, which was the first appearence of Mahr-Vehl, and began reading it for him.  However, by the end of it, I was a becoming a big Ultimate Reed Richards fan.  Unlike the Marvel version, Ultimate Reed is much younger (early 20's), was pursuing Susan Storm and not already married to her, and craved a family environment like Marvel Reed but for different reasons.  Marvel Reed's father was a very good and loving man and taught Reed the value of a family.  Ultimate Reed was abused by his father and eventually turned to Susan's father, Franklin Storm at the Baxter Building, as a father figure, which led to him craving the family he didn't have at home.  Like Marvel Reed, an experiment gone wrong, led to him and his friends becoming super powered beings and formed the Fantastic Four. What really drew me to this character is that he would think his way out of every terrible situation and Ultimate Reed was faced with a ton of them.  The Ultimate universe is more science and less fantasy, so when Reed had to come up with a plan to save everyone, it required real thought and real ideas.  I really enjoyed watching Reed come up with plans to get them out of seemingly impossible situations.  Attacked by a swarm of techno-organic bugs that eat planets?  No problem, Reed has a plan.  Trapped in a universe where all the superheroes got turned into zombies and eat people?  Reed's got this.  A madman possesses power beyond imagination that can transform the universe?  Don't worry, Reed's plan is already in motion.  However, unlike Marvel Reed, Ultimate Reed took a bit of a turn to the darkside after Franklin Storm was killed, the Fantastic Four broke up, and Susan, the love of his life, rejected his marriage proposal. He became known as The Maker (pictured) and began using his genius to cause chaos throughout the world and kill millions upon millions. While it appeared as though Reed went crazy from all his misfortune, it turned out that his turn to the dark side was part of some plan to save the universe.  In a flashback, it shows that shortly after being rejected by Sue, a time traveler from the future named Kang, needed his help the save the universe.  Kang told him that an event would destroy the space time continuum if he didn't act quickly.  In order to do this, Reed would need to initiate the creation of Infinity Gems, which are created by the  Earth every time something catastrophic happens to the planet.  Reed didn't believe it until Kang removed the helmet and was revealed to be Susan, sent from the future by his future self to prevent this from happening.  The plan was simple, kill all these people, create all these gems forming two Infinity Gauntlets, advert the crisis, use the gems to resurrect all the dead and repair all the damage.  Unfortunately, Kang and Reed couldn't agree on who possessed this power, the Ultimates (aka Ultimate Avengers)  took the gems themselves, the space time continuum shattered just as they got them.  The infinity gems shattered as well and Reed was now the murderer of countless millions with no way to repair the damage.  Ultimate Reed did manage to redeem himself however when the Marvel Galactus crossed over to the Ultimate universe and came to Ultimate Earth looking to feed on the planet.  Despite everything that had happened in the past, the Ultimate characters had to come terms with the reality that they NEEDED Reed Richards.  Once again Reed came up with the plan that saved everyone and he began secretly working with Nick Fury and SHIELD to protect the world from these catastrophic threats.  Ultimate Reed is a gray character.  He's as gray as they come.  He's always trying to do the right thing but will sometimes go about it the wrong way which can at times make him look evil.  Good or evil, Ultimate Reed is a tremendous character, always involved in something fun or interesting and always at the forefront of every major event.

1. Cyclops (Scott Summers)

So out of all the male comic book characters in all the different comic book universes out there, my favorite of all time is Scott Summers aka Cyclops.  Why?  Well because he's me in comic book form... or at least that's what my son thinks.  It's like "Once Upon a Time..." when Henry's telling Mary Margaret she's Snow White and she's like "What???  You're crazy kid, get outta here."  In all honesty though, I DO have a lot in common with the leader of the X-Men which is probably why I can relate to him so well and enjoy his character so much.

- He is (or at least was) tall and thin (a little more muscular now) with brown hair and blue eyes (in those rare occasions when you can see them).
-  His signature color is red.
-  His current costume is red and black, my favorite color combination and it looks like something out of the movie TRON, which is one of my favorite movies of all time.
-  He's ridiculously in love with one woman (Jean Grey).
-  Loves her so much that he ended up marrying her twice without a divorce being involved.
-  Usually calm and calculating, unless something bad happens to the woman he loves, then he loses his cool.
-  Has two sons and a daughter.  One of his sons goes by the name "Cable" (my son is Caleb).
-  Apparently we have the exact same taste in women.  In a "Which x-men character are you?" quiz, Jean Grey was described as "a spark of something special", "flirtatious", "friendly", "life of any party you attend", "brave" and "always looking to take advantage of life's next big adventure".  Yeah, that's pretty much my wife to a tee right there.  When Jean dies, Scott says he'll never be with another woman, however, Jean telepathically nudges him from beyond the grave, towards Emma Frost (the same Emma Frost that I had a huge crush on as a teenager) because she loves him so much and just wants him to be happy.  Plus, if Scott and Emma don't get together, the X-Men get destroyed and the future is a war torn wasteland, but that's besides the point.  
-  Connection to the letter "X".  He was the leader of the X-Men and X-Factor.  My username and fantasy teams are called "Xtreme Machine", my sports blog was called X-Factor, the name of his blog is called X-Pression.
-  In the Marvel universe, Scott likes all the same characters I like and hates all the same characters I hate.
-  I've never disagreed with any course of action Scott has ever taken, it's always the same as what I would do and he will eerily say exactly what I'm thinking as I read through a story.

Honestly, there's probably more similarities/weird connections I have with this character that I've forgotten, but you get the idea.  One of the traits of this character that I WISH I had is that he's ALWAYS right.  His belief may not be popular to other characters, but he's always right and will stick by his guns, stand up for what he believes in, no matter what.  Even if Xavier or Jean or Emma or Magneto or even Captain America have conflicting ideas, he'll stick with what he believes and he's been right pretty much every time.  This personality trait kind of rubs people the wrong way, but so what?  Scott Summers is the hero that will make the tough calls that other heroes are afraid to make.