America’s Best Comics

America’s Best Comics, American comic book imprint launched in 1999 by comic creator Alan Moore.

An imprint of WildStorm, an independent publisher founded by artist Jim Lee, America’s Best Comics (ABC) was intended to provide Moore with a creative avenue that was separate from mainstream publishers. Moore had had negative experiences with both Marvel and DC Comics, and he had sworn that he would never again work for either company. Ironically, DC acquired WildStorm while ABC was in its infancy, and Lee hastily assured Moore that a “firewall” would be maintained between Moore and the editorial edicts of DC. DC, understanding the prestige that Moore’s presence conferred, allowed him a relatively free hand with ABC, a relationship that benefited creators, publishers, and readers alike.

With characteristic ambition, Moore imagined not just isolated adventure comics but a shared universe that spanned several titles. The line debuted with the unlikely runaway hit The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (with artist Kevin O’Neill), in which a gamut of literary characters—from Dracula’s Mina Harker to the Invisible Man—inhabit an alternate Victorian age. The book sparked interest in the steampunk genre (a variation of cyberpunk that looked to the past instead of the future), and later volumes traced the adventures of Harker and Orlando, the gender-swapping title character of Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, as the two face threats through the ages. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was adapted as a Hollywood film in 2003, but the story deviated so wildly from its source material that Moore disavowed it and all future efforts to bring his stories to the screen.

Though ostensibly unconnected to ABC’s other books, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen set the tone for the rest of the line: Moore drew on heroic archetypes for his models, basing the new characters on pulp adventures, classical literature, and even mythology. The main single-character series were Tom Strong (with artist Chris Sprouse) and Promethea (with artist J.H. Williams III). Tom Strong is a benevolent warrior–wise man in the Doc Savage mold from which Superman himself was cast; Promethea, a kind of self-made muse, is a spirit of creativity, with roots in personified patron saints from pagan myth (Athena) to pre-World War II patriotic mascots (Britannia, Columbia).

Moore offered an irreverent and creative take on the police-procedural story with Top 10 (with artists Zander Cannon and Gene Ha), a series that imagined life in a city where everyone has superpowers. The book’s sprawling cast, clever stories, and meticulously executed art made it a hit with critics, although it failed to achieve the readership of mainstream superhero titles. Greyshirt (with artist Rick Veitch) featured a mysterious detective whose stories paid homage to Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Other ABC titles included Cobweb (with artist Melinda Gebbie), Jack B. Quick, Boy Inventor (with artist Kevin Nowlan), The First American (with artist Jim Baikie), and Splash Brannigan (with artist Hilary Barta).

The ABC line earned just about every award available in the medium (including multiple Eisners). Many of the industry’s most-celebrated artists made cameo contributions; whole worlds were created (as befitted Moore’s status as a major practitioner of setting-as-character, from Greyshirt’s natural-gas-powered modern metropolis to Top 10’s citywide retirement community for surplus superheroes); and plentiful new possibilities for the medium were glimpsed. Moore announced his semiretirement in 2003, and ABC’s output dropped sharply. A notable exception was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a property owned by Moore and O’Neill; Moore’s later work on that title was printed by Top Shelf Comics. The shuttering of WildStorm in 2010 spelled the end of ABC, and reprints of ABC titles were published under DC’s Vertigo imprint.