What're DC's best pre-crisis runs and stories?

[SiegePerilous02]

Moore's Swamp Thing (most of which took place pre-COIE) is probably my favorite pre-Crisis run.

Others:
Wolfman/Perez on NTT- melodramatic and dated, but still the best ensemble writing the title has seen, and the stretch from the first Blackfire arc until Perez's first departure hold up better than the rest of it.
Levitz on Legion of Superheroes
Alan Moore's Superman stories
Kirby's Fourth World stuff
Englehart/Rogers on Detective Comics.

[DrNewGod]

Denny O'Neil's Batman run
Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans
Levitz/Giffen Legion of Super Heroes

I'd second these recommendations, but add three more. (as others have said) All-Star Squadron was wonderful, if maybe a bit too nostalgic about WWII. I'd also suggest All-Star Comics #58-72, it's very Silver Age, but a fun picture of what happened next. Finally, the first couple of years of Infinity, Inc. were pretty good.

[LifeIsILL]

Aquaman starting from #35, this is when the comic becomes almost too serious and does away with the silly silver age stuff. Nothing but grief and death every issue it seems.

Batman Nocturna Saga, not sure when it starts or ends but one of the best Batman runs out there.

[Falcon16]

SILVER AGE SUPERMAN

and I guess Tales of the New Teen Titans #1 solely for it being the origin of this Cyborg meme face:
Screen Shot 2019-06-08 at 8.45.29 AM.jpg

[Stick Figure]

I clicked on this thread out of curiosity. I’m open to reading some older stories but traditionally, pre-2000 is tough for me. A friend loaned me his Crisis trade and I couldn’t finish the first issue. I skimmed it and it was really convoluted. More plot focused than people focused I guess so it just did nothing for me. The only other older material I’ve read is some 70’s stuff and that was absolutely brutal. I finally read Dark Knight and get why it’s one of the best stories from that era. Maybe if I don’t go before the 80’s I’ll be ok.

[LifeIsILL]

I clicked on this thread out of curiosity. I’m open to reading some older stories but traditionally, pre-2000 is tough for me. A friend loaned me his Crisis trade and I couldn’t finish the first issue. I skimmed it and it was really convoluted. More plot focused than people focused I guess so it just did nothing for me. The only other older material I’ve read is some 70’s stuff and that was absolutely brutal. I finally read Dark Knight and get why it’s one of the best stories from that era. Maybe if I don’t go before the 80’s I’ll be ok.

Try Jonah Hex, Weird Western Tales, Enemy Ace or Unknown Soldier....those feel more like modern comics

The notion that old DC stuff is silly not all true, there's stuff that feels very modern, such as Green Lantern #40 from 1965, which was pretty ahead of its time in terms of cosmic storytelling.

[Jim Kelly]

In terms of panel progression, old comics and new comics are the same. They follow the same rules--it's probably all the other little business, like captions and dialogue in old comcs, that is tripping up new readers. I'd suggest "reading" old comics the way I did when I first looked at comics as a toddler. Just look at the pictures.

Even though DC doesn't have the rights to Tarzan anymore, for me one of the greatest runs was when Joe Kubert was doing all the art on TARZAN OF THE APES, as well as being editor and writer. That got me into reading the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and Kubert's versions of the first and second novel are favourites (although, in the 1970s, Burne Hogarth also adapted half of the first novel plus some JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN and Hogarth is legendary).

Since Kubert as a kid was a fan of Hal Foster's Tarzan, which influenced his style somewhat, I imagine that Joe was beside himself with joy to finally get to do the apeman. His work on those stories is a master class in comic art story telling. It's a little thing, but I always loved how he drew the toes. And in a Kubert comic blood was black--he used black ink to show the blood pouring out of wounds and that was much more effective than if it had been coloured red. Nowadays, the colourist would force that black ink to be red, because they just can't let black ink be black. But I think comic book characters do bleed black, because they are creatures of india ink and that's what gives them life.

When Dark Horse got the rights to Tarzan, they reprinted the Joe Kubert work in Archives--so that's probably the easiest way to get his Tarzan, if the books are still available. However, I bought the Dark Horse reprints of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian and those had terrible colouring. I've never looked into what they did with Kubert's Tarzan--the colour could be good or gruesome. No problem for me, because I've got all the original DC issues--plus the tabloids--to keep me warm.

[DrNewGod]

Another one to look to was the 1970s Manhunter backup from Detective Comics. It reads a lot less like the other comics of the time, and a lot more like the globe-trotting martial arts thrillers of the time.

[Anthony Shaw]

Paul Levitz's Legion of Superheroes run (issues 281-313 of volume 1 followed by the relaunch with issues 1-18 are all pre-crisis). It was one of DC's flagship titles at the time and the writing was just a little more modern that what was going on with other titles.

A big chunk of it has been collected in trades:

The Legion of Superheroes: The Great Darkness Saga - issues 284-296 Annual 1
The Legion of Superheroes: The Curse - issues 297-313 Annuals 2 and 3
The Legion of Superheroes: An Eye for and Eye - issues 1-6
The Legion of Superheroes: The More Things Change - issues 7-13

I recently read all those issues, and I highly recommend.

[CTTT]

How about More Fun Comics # 73? Introductions of Ollie Green Arrow and Roy Harper Speedy!

[Anthony Shaw]

Batman Nocturna Saga, not sure when it starts or ends but one of the best Batman runs out there.

I thought about tracking that run of stories, plus the return of Hugo Strange after the great Strange Apparitions story.

[ducklord]

I clicked on this thread out of curiosity. I’m open to reading some older stories but traditionally, pre-2000 is tough for me. A friend loaned me his Crisis trade and I couldn’t finish the first issue. I skimmed it and it was really convoluted. More plot focused than people focused I guess so it just did nothing for me. The only other older material I’ve read is some 70’s stuff and that was absolutely brutal. I finally read Dark Knight and get why it’s one of the best stories from that era. Maybe if I don’t go before the 80’s I’ll be ok.

Yeah, Crisis is pretty, but it HEAVILY depends on the reader being invested in the Pre-Crisis mythology to pack any oomph. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone coming into the Bronze Age cold.

The immediate pre-Crisis era had a number of good-to-great runs, which others have mentioned:

Alan Moore's Swamp Thing - It's early Moore, so it's a bit on the wordy side, but it does a fair amount of romping through the DCU.
Wolfman/Perez Titans - I recently went through a re-read of these. Wolfman's dialogue hasn't aged well (a problem with Crisis, as well), but the book remains a masterpiece of plotting, and you can't beat the Perez art.
Levitz/Giffen (and others) Legion - Speaking of plotting masterpieces, you could do far worse than to simply start at the Legion Annual #1 and read every Legion story up through the end of the Baxter series.
Thomas/Ordway All-Star Squadron - Heck, I'd even throw in Young All-Stars.
DC Comics Presents (various) - Superrman's team-up book, like most team up books, was always hit an miss, but the good ones (like Starlin's Martian Manhunter/Supergirl/Spectre trilogy) were great.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

I think one of the biggest, if not the biggest, obstacles for modern readers with Bronze Age (to say nothing of previous ages) comics is the dialogue. While these comics have much stronger characterization than Silver and Golden Age comics and are clearly aimed at older, more sophisticated audiences than the Silver Age (though, for the same reason, aren't anywhere near as imaginative overall), the expository, clunky, often just plain awful dialogue can be a lot to swallow. There are certainly outliers like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck but most older comics feature dialogue so embarrassingly inept that I would argue it singlehandedly kept mainstream superhero comics (and, for most people, comics in general) from being seen as anything but a juvenile and clumsy little brother to proper storytelling media like film or novels. It doesn't matter how great the art was, how deep the themes were or how expertly plotted the stories were, comics were never going to gain true credibility until you could read a dialogue balloon without cringing. Hold up your average comic from the '70s against your average films or novels from the same period and the difference could not be starker.

I would even argue that Bronze age dialogue was worse than Silver Age dialogue because at least the latter fit the same pop-art aesthetic that became especially prominent with the rise of Stan Lee. Bronze Age comics, however, were usually undermined by how they read on a purely verbal level. This varied a lot from title to title. However dated and silly the dialogue in Green Lantern/ Green Arrow reads today, it fits the general earnestness of the time pretty well, and adds to rather than detracts from Adams' spectacular artwork and O'Neill's earnest stories. On the other hand, Claremont's X-Men is so unbearably wordy that it totally distracts from the brilliant character work and stories being told. And then there is Kirby's Fourth World stuff. Some of the most inventive and spectacularly illustrated comics ever are rendered nearly impossible to read by Kirby's tin ear for dialogue - anyone who undervalues Lee's importance in the Lee/ Kirby dynamic, has clearly never read anything scripted by Kirby alone. He's called the King of Comics for a reason but his unparalleled creativity and visual brilliance never translated into his being a great, or even adequate, wordsmith.

All of this is just to say that anyone looking to get into pre-Crisis comics would do well to keep in mind that if dialogue is a big issue for them, they are going to struggle a lot with the vast majority of older superhero comics. It is an issue for me. There's plenty to appreciate in Bronze Age, even sometimes Silver Age comics but your actual enjoyment of them will depend heavily on how much you're able to get past this persistent flaw (or at least feature) of comics from these particular periods.

[RBerman]

Moore: Swamp Thing. (Reading Wein and Pasko's issues leading up to Moore is a good idea though.)
Levitz: Legion of Super-Heroes
Wolfman: New Teen Titans
O'Neil/Adams: Batman
Kirby's Fourth World is pretty much mandatory reading due to (1) a few A+ issues like "The Pact" and (2) the way modern DC mythology depends so heavily on Kirby's concepts. Especially Morrison. Reading "Final Crisis" without having read the Fourth World is an exercise in "Huh?" Trust me, I've been there.

As said above, Crisis on Infinite Earths is a terrible jumping-on point unless you were totally ignorant that were hundreds of heroes up to that point, and you can just enjoy the pretty colors and wonder who these people are, and why they are acting this way. But again, so much has been built on COIE in the last thirty years that once you're familiar with pre-1985 DC comics, the whole Monitor mythology becomes essential DC reading.

[Pinsir]

William Moulton Marston's Golden Age Wonder Woman is kino, as is Robert Kanigher's later work on the character during Silver Age (starting with issue WW vol 1 #105).