When There's Only One Team That Makes It Work

Question for the day: What is a character or team where you own only one particular run of their comics? There have been lots of creative teams for this particular character, but there's just the one that brought you in, or that you cared enough about to hold onto for your collection (if you have one).

This would have to be a character or team who have enough series or a long enough running series to have multiple writer/artist teams. Anarky had a mini-series and an ongoing, but Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle did both of them. There isn't an Option B for him. That ruled out North and Henderson on Squirrel Girl as well, unless she's had a lot more books than I know about. Also Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary, and Garth Ennis/John McCrea's Hitman. And Paul Grist's Jack Staff work.

I thought this would be fairly easy, but then I realized I was thinking in terms of writers. Even on books where I own one writer's work, there's usually more than one artist. I'm not counting the occasional fill-in issue, but something like GrimJack, where John Ostrander wrote it, but there's a run with Tim Truman as artist, another long stretch with Tom Mandrake, and the last third with Flint Henry. I own all three, so that book couldn't count. That cropped up a lot. Put the kibosh on Steve Engelhart's Silver Surfer, the Kim Yale Manhunter series, the '80s Suicide Squad, Garth Ennis' Punisher work. I have Joe Casey's WildCATS 2.0 and 3.0 work. One's mostly drawn by Sean Phillips, the other by Dustin Nguyen. I'm lumping them together as "WildCATS", which would disqualify them, but I don't know if that's the way to go. I'm doing the same thing with all the Spider-Man and X-Men stuff, not that it matters. It seemed dumb to pretend Amazing Spider-Man was entirely separate from Spectacular Spider-Man, or Web of Spider-Man.

Then I started wondering what percentage of what I owned of series about a character or team needed to be by a particular creative team. If you add in Landridge and Samnee's Thor: The Mighty Avenger, I have about 50 issues of Thor comics. 20 of those are from something other than Walt Simonson's run, which of course, Simonson didn't draw all of. Sal Buscema did quite a bit of the back half of the series. So I didn't think I could count that.

So this is what I came up with, in no particular order:

1. John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's Martian Manhunter
2. Ostrander and Mandrake's Martian Manhunter
3. Dennis O'Neill and Denys Cowan's The Question.
4. Brian K. Vaughn and Adrian Alphona's Runaways
5. Alan Davis' Excalibur (there are some fill-in artists, but it's still mostly Davis)
6. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley's Ultimate Spider-Man
7. John Byrne's Namor the Sub-Mariner (I don't have any issues after Pat Lee took over art duties).

Maybes:
A) Amanda Conner, Justin Gray, and Jimmy Palmiotti's Power Girl. Not sure Power Girl's had enough issues of her own series to count, unless you throw in that New 52 World's Finest, which was a Power Girl/Huntress team-up book.
B) Garth Ennis and John McCrea's The Demon. But I bought the issues I have because they involved Tommy Monaghan. With what I'm looking for, it's less about the Demon, more Hitman: Year Zero. Well, that might make Ennis throw up. Let's call it Hitman: Gratuitous Batman Reference.
C) Kathryn Immonen and Valerio Schiti's Journey into Mystery. The Sif-centric run. But it's the only time Sif's had her own book, and should Journey Into Mystery be lumped in with Thor, since I think they're sharing numbering?