Marvel Comics

Mark Waid and Chris Samnee are one of the defining creative partnerships of modern Marvel comics, celebrated for their run on Daredevil. When they reunited to tackle Black Widow, they brought the same kinetic confidence — and then extended their collaboration to Captain America, creating a cohesive spy-action epic across two iconic characters.

Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo's Fantastic Four run is the definitive 21st-century reinvention of the team — a run that understood the Fantastic Four worked best when treated as a family of explorers rather than a superhero team, and built their biggest storyline (Unthinkable) by systematically stripping the team of every advantage before a conclusive battle with Doctor Doom. Wieringo's art was among the most joyful and expressive in contemporary Marvel, and his death at 44 in 2007 deprived the industry of a generational talent.

No Surrender was Marvel's 2018 weekly Avengers event — a 16-part storyline published weekly across four months with rotating creative teams coordinating to tell a single continuous story. The Grandmaster and the Challenger wager on an Avengers-related game using Earth as the board and the Avengers as unwitting pieces, with the team simultaneously dealing with an escalating global crisis while their members fall one by one. No Road Home followed as a direct sequel, a nine-issue weekly series sending the Avengers into a mythological realm to recover a cosmic object stolen from Nyx, goddess of night.

Daredevil by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee Omnibus Vol. 2 takes Matt Murdock to San Francisco without losing the run's central trick: brightness on the surface, pain underneath. Samnee's storytelling becomes cleaner and more playful while Waid keeps pushing Matt toward honesty about trauma. It is the graceful end of a rare optimistic Daredevil era.

Mark Waid reinvents Daredevil by doing the opposite of everything that came before: instead of darkness and suffering, he writes Matt Murdock with genuine joy, humour, and resilience. The insight is simple and brilliant — a man who has survived everything Daredevil has survived would either break entirely or find a way to laugh. Paolo Rivera and Chris Samnee create a unique visual aesthetic that won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series. 720 pages of Daredevil at his most purely enjoyable.

Spider-Man Brand New Day Omnibus Vol. 2 is where the rotating post-One More Day era starts to find its rhythm. Dan Slott becomes the dominant voice, John Romita Jr. brings muscular Spider-Man energy and Peter Parker's rebuilt life gains momentum through new villains and supporting-cast pressure. The volume is useful because it shows Brand New Day becoming less a reset shock and more a working Spider-Man engine, moving Peter toward Big Time and the later Slott era.

Closing of the rotating phase before the start of Dan Slott's Big Time. The writers close their individual arcs and prepare the ground for the next phase: Horizon Labs, Spider-Island and the preparation of Superior Spider-Man. The end of Marvel's most ambitious editorial experiment with the character in decades.