These ranking listicles are hard

So I was going to do a list of “every comic book ever ranked in order of quality” because I figured nerds would totally get into that and there would be fistfights over whether Tomb of Dracula #7 should be ranked one higher than New Teen Titans (vol. 2) #21 and nerds fighting each other in the streets would make for some excellent slapstick comedy before they all collapsed from exhaustion (because your average person who would get into a fistfight over that sort of thing needs it to be a really, really short fistfight). But it’s harder than it looks.

I mean, obviously Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! #14 has to be the number one comic of all time because it is where the Zoo Crew teams up with the Just’a Lotta Animals and there will never, ever again be a comic as important as that one. (It is well-known that Alan Moore stole all of his ideas from unused Zoo Crew plots Scott Shaw! threw out in the trash. Well, either that or Moore rolled them up and smoked them. Both are equally possible.) But after you select the #1, it turns out selecting the #2 comic book of all time is actually much harder because it’s easy to figure out the best of all things, but what’s the second-best? The second-best is harder to decide, is my point.

Like, is Action Comics #1 the second-best comic of all time because it is the first appearance of Superman and sets the stage for essentially all superhero comics over the next 75 years? Or, on the other hand, is the second-best comic of all time Jughead’s Diner #4 because it has Jughead fighting an evil blob monster to save his future-restaurant? These are the questions that you have to grapple with when you are writing a quality listicle. People think it is just slapping numbers on things and they are so wrong because it is, in fact, a process.

You guys make fun of Buzzfeed all the time, but hunting down all those individual GIFs that express how they superficially feel about any given issue is, in fact, an act of curation and that is hard work, just ask anybody who works at a museum. Well, anybody who is not Ben Stiller in that museum where the exhibits come to life, that’s probably not typical of museums. Or is it? I don’t know, I don’t spend my nights in museums where ghosts or whatever make all the thingies come to life.

Anyway, my point is that Jughead’s Diner #4 is probably the second-best comic of all-time, and then Action Comics #1 is third obviously, but then what is fourth? Amazing Fantasy #15, the debut of Spider-Man? Or Cherry #5, where Cherry gets involved in an orgy? (Well she gets in an orgy in most issues really so maybe Spider-Man wins this round.) Man, this is going to take longer than I thought, and that’s before you factor in the time it’s going to take me to go looking for GIFs.

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