Thread needs more New Frontier.
http://www.dccomics.com/graphic_novels/?gn=5886
The $75 I spent on the Ultimate hardcover boxed edition was the best $75 I've ever spent in comics. If I were going to recommend one single comic to anyone, even people who don't read a lot of tights and powers books, this would be it.
The book is set in the gap between Golden Age DC characters and Silver Age. Senator McCarthy and the Korean War feature big in this. A number of comics are grappling with "how do we do capes at this point in history" but none of them have nailed it like this. It really handles deftly but strongly the mythic elements of superheroes and the political landscape of today, but in an incredibly tightly-coordinated aesthetic package centered around the Silver Age.
I tried to get into random hipster sullen B&W comics after I drifted out of reading Vertigo years ago, but those were what finally broke my comics reading. I saw the animated version of this at a friend's house (also strongly recommended) and went and bought this hardbound the next day, and I've never been a big DC guy.
If I were going to recommend two comics to someone, the other would be Godland, absolutely worth the hardbound edition:
http://www.imagecomics.com/
Likewise, I was never really a Jack Kirby guy, but this is the quirkiest yet most earnest Jack Kirby homage I've ever seen. They nail his "cosmic" style, but then play it light and sarcastic with the dialogue. Trippy characters like the drug-addled skull floating in a glass head on a robotic body, a playboy aristrocrat Destro-type, a giant space dog, astronauts, the history of the universe in issue #7, you name it. If you like hallucinogens, this comic is all you.