In this special anniversary episode of Waiting on the Trade, we’re looking back at the (roughly) 50 comics we’ve read so far and finally doing what the fans have demanded: Ranking all the stories against each other. This episode has arguments, updates, discussions of artistic merit, and yes, a “completely objective” ranking of every comic from every regular episode of the show, from best to worst.

The Ranking Scale

Because Pat and I are us, we actually thought fairly hard about what our ranking scale should look like. Pat wanted a tier-based system, to be able to divide comics between tiers of quality more quickly, and I argued for an odd number of tiers, so completely average comics could land squarely in the middle tier.

When the dust settled, our ranking scale looked like this:

• A: A perfect or near-perfect comic. Go read this now!
• B: A good comic. You should read this.
• C: An average comic. It’s decent; you’ll enjoy it.
• D: A bad comic. You probably shouldn’t read this.
• F: A very bad comic. Don’t read this.

Pre-episode, we’d actually gone back and forth a couple times about whether to rank comics from best to worst within each tier. Day of, we decided that if we were going to go for it, we should go for it. So we ranked every comic from best to worst; the first comic in our A tier is the “best” comic we’ve read, and the last comic in our F tier is the “worst” comic we’ve read.

(In case the sarcasm hasn’t come through by now, we both feel that ranking these was tough and that our rankings are absolutely colored by our individual perceptions. Your rankings and feelings may vary, and we of course recognize that making any piece of art is hard! We’re not here to trash any comics or creators; we just wanted to have a bit of fun. Even in the comics in our F tier have their good bits.)

The Finalized Rankings

With that explanation of our system out of the way, here are the final rankings:

You can also view the rankings in spreadsheet form by clicking here. Do I feel slightly bad about pushing Pat into making DIE our top-ranked comic? No, I don’t. It’s that good.

A Special Thank You

As we mentioned in the episode, doing this podcast has been a blast, and we’re very grateful to all of our guest hosts, who have come on to discuss these now-ranked stories with us. The rankings have nothing to do with the quality of our cohosts; all the people we have been lucky enough to have on the show are fantastic. (And we thank them for putting up with us.)

I’d also like to thank anyone who has listened to even one episode of the show. Hopefully, we discussed one of your favorite books, and you enjoyed the discussion. Making Waiting on the Trade is something I look forward to each month, and I hope you look forward to receiving it in your podcast feed.

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New to the show? Waiting on the Trade is a comics book club podcast, run by two gents who don’t have time for monthly comics. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email us at [email protected].

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As always, thanks for listening!