My Top Ten Comics of 2019

Today, I hit something of a landmark. With this year’s countdown, I’ve now been ranking my Top 10 Comics for 10 years. That’s a decade of great comics! The first list featured Scalped (crazy to think that was so long ago now!), which is now a solid contender for my all-time favourite comic. Are there any comics in this year’s lineup that could have the same staying power? It was certainly another fantastic year for comics. There are a couple of Marvel and DC entries in my list, and a variety of indie publishers are represented, along with some small press, too. Let’s take a look at my final top comics list of the 2010s!

 

 

10. BATMAN UNIVERSE

 

Tom King’s epic run on Batman reached its finale at the end of this year, and we had the usual wealth of Batman-related ongoings, minis and graphic novels alongside it. But my favourite Batman comic of the year was certainly Batman Universe. I knew instantly that I’d love this mini-series as soon as I saw that Nick Derington was on art duties. Anyone who follows the acclaimed Doom Patrol artist on Twitter will already have been well aware that he draws a killer Batman, and would have been clamouring to see him get a chance to tell a full story with the Caped Crusader. And paired with legendary colorist Dave Stewart, Derington gifted us with one of the best looking comics of the year. And then there’s the writing of Brian Michael Bendis, further demonstrating that the move across to DC has rejuvenated him and led to some of his best work in years. His time-and-space-hopping adventure showed that you can tell a Batman story that’s fun and light-hearted (and even letting Batman himself be charming and funny rather than brooding and sinister) while still feeling compelling and authentic.

 

 

9. SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN

 

I did not realise quite how much I’d missed Matt Fraction’s presence in comics until he returned to the limelight with this maxi-series about the Daily Planet’s beloved hotshot reporter Jimmy Olsen, reminding us all of what a fantastic storyteller he can be. This series seems to avidly follow the philosophy set out by Grant Morrison when developing his take on Jimmy for All Star Superman: rather than being a loser or a bore as so often portrayed, it would stand to reason that in order to stand as Superman’s pal, Jimmy Olsen would have to be pretty cool in his own right. And so here we get Jimmy Olsen: daredevil adventurer, master of disguise and endlessly resourceful investigative journalist, who also happens to be a goofball… but in an endearing way. The sprawling narrative is filled with tangents and strange asides, with us getting the sense it’s all coming together as one massive mystery (or story, in the journalistic lingo) taking shape. But the intricate plotting never comes at the expense of being consistently laugh-out-loud funny. And all of this isn’t even noting how beautiful it all looks with Steve Lieber drawing it! Not only is his Jimmy design spot-on, but the playing around he does with form on the page in certain standout sequences is jaw-dropping in its invention.

 

 

8. GIANT DAYS

 

Last year, Giant Days made its debut on the list, and I said the only reason it didn’t rank higher is because I was reading it in trade form, and so I was too far behind to give a fair summation of the actual content from 2018. Well, that applies once again in 2019, and given how the release of collections seems to have become more sporadic and I’m thus further behind on the series than I was at this time last year, it applies even moreso now, reflected in the book’s lower placement on the list. It’s certainly not a reflection on the book’s quality, which remains peerless. It’s still as funny, but the longer I read the series, the more its big strength is revealed to be the deepening attachment to the core ensemble of supremely likeable characters, heightened by the bittersweet knowledge that their time at university is approaching its close. Of course, for current readers, that close has arrived, with the series coming to an end. I look forward to seeing how the story ends in 2020, while part of me is also dreading having to say goodbye to Susan, Esther, Daisy, Ed, McGraw and co.

 

 

7. EAST OF WEST

 

Here’s another case of me repeating myself! Last year, I made a joke that, on the previous year’s list, I had remarked that East of West was coming to an end and would be finished by the following year, and yet due to delays it was still ongoing. And here I am, another year later, and even more delays have meant that East of West has still to reach its conclusion! Though with the last issue due out next New Comic Book Day, this will at last be the final time East of West appears on the list. Looking back at my #1 comics throughout the past decade, I feel quite sad that East of West never reached that #1 spot, with its highest ever placement being at #2. Because, by this point, East of West has featured on the majority of those lists, ranking more consistently than any other comic, and perhaps standing the test of time better than other, higher-ranking books from over the years. Once it’s over, Jonathan Hickman, Nick Dragotta and Frank Martin’s breathlessly ambitious apocalyptic sci-fi Western will surely enter the canon of all time great stories of the medium.

 

 

6. THE IMMORTAL HULK

 

Last year’s winner has dropped a bit in the standings in 2019, and yet that is no reflection on the comic’s quality, instead demonstrative of just how fantastic the five titles in the top half of the list are. The Immortal Hulk remains as great as ever. In its first year, Al Ewing and Joe Bennett (along with the occasional guest artist), subverted the superhero elements of The Hulk and gave us a series that leaned much more into horror. This year, they got even more ambitious, expanding the scope of the story into a cataclysmic, cosmic scale and engaging in some fascinating narrative experimentation. Some of the long-running storylines that had been in play since the beginning came to a dramatic conclusion around issue #24, and since then the comic has entered a new phase, with Bruce Banner and The Hulk newly liberated and empowered to enact their plan for the world, picking up an unlikely following among the angry and disenfranchised of the world, in a story rich in relevant socio-political allegory.

 

 

5. HOUSE OF SWEETS

 

I’ve loved House of Sweets since before it was even a comic. I first encountered the comic when it was just a script from Fraser Campbell, and it instantly established itself as one of the best scripts I’ve ever read, dense with heady, nightmarish terror. And it only got better when Iain Laurie, Dave Cooper and Colin Bell – the UK Comics Dream Team – came onboard to turn that brilliant script into a singular vision of horror and madness in comic book form. Playing like Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf spiked with a dash of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, this dread-laced tale of grown-up siblings revisiting their childhood holiday cabin in the woods, unaware that something dark and unnatural is waiting for them, is the only entry on the list not released by a major US publisher. At the time of writing, it’s crowdfunding on Kickstarter, and if you haven’t already, I couldn’t recommend jumping onboard enough.

 

 

4. ROAD OF BONES

 

One might consider me biased here, considering the artist on this project is none other than my Sink mucker Alex Cormack, and publisher IDW released this as part of a horror one-two punch followed up by my own Mountainhead. But whoever made this comic and whatever publisher released it, I’d have been singing its praises, considering that writer Rich Douek gave us one of the most powerhouse concepts of any story in any medium this year. It starts off rooted in very real historical horror, telling the story of desperate people imprisoned in the gulags of Stalinist Russia for dubious slights against the glorious leader. But once a trio of protagonists escape in the early going, the story curdles into something different, something even darker, a story of cannibalism, shifting allegiances, and dark forces lurking out in the cold and dark. And – much as it pains me to say it! – Alex Cormack does some of his career-best work bringing this grim, snow-swept world to life.

 

 

3. FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN

 

It’s not been long since I sang the praises of Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man at great length, so I won’t go too redundant in repeating myself here. But in what has been a vintage year for Spider-Man comics, with us gifted with an array of quality titles – Amazing Spider-Man, Miles Morales: Spider-Man, Superior Spider-Man, Ghost-Spider, Spider-Man: Life Story, Spider-Man: Full Circle and more – this one stood out as the very best. The best issues were the ones with the excellent Juann Cabal on art duties, but the consistent thread running through the entirety of the series was writer Tom Taylor, who injected Spider-Man with a warmth, kindness and relatable likeability better than just about anyone I can think of in recent years. The limited duration of this finished-too-soon gem of a series makes me think that it’ll surely soon be getting released as a big deluxe single volume. When it does, if you let this book go under your radar, I’d highly recommend correcting that error.

 

 

2. THESE SAVAGE SHORES

 

There was very little to separate the top two entries in my countdown, with both absolutely blowing me away and, in their own way, serving as stunning showcases of what comics are capable of. Here, we get an innovative twist on the vampire story, set against the backdrop of the East India Trading Company attempting to assert its influence over India in the 18th Century, with clashing cultures and ways of life juxtaposed with supernatural beings of different cultural lineages colliding. Vault Comics have been putting out quality titles since their formation, but These Savage Shores feels like the breakout publisher’s “killer app,” a potential flagship book that could be viewed as a pivotal comics text of the era, populated with indelible characters who feel instantly iconic, bolstered by the lush visuals and impeccable character design of Sumit Kumar. The plot that feels big and cinematic and yet also dense and literary in a way comics don’t always manage or even aspire to. Ram V blew me away last year with Grafitty’s Wall, and this is even better, Ram cementing his status as one of the best comic writers active today. He’s one marquee superhero run away from becoming an A-list superstar, if he’s even interested in such a thing: I’ve loved his dalliances in that terrain and would be keen to see more, but would be just as happy to see him continue to do distinctive original works like this.

 

 

1. HOUSE OF X / POWERS OF X
   

 

I’ve been part of comics online discourse for many years now, currently most prominently manifested in Comics Twitter. And one topic of conversation I’ve brought up plenty of times before is that, while in these online circles you’ll find heated discussion about the latest contentious comics topic, or the latest iteration of the soul-crushing artist VS writer debate, it’s rare for an actual comic itself to tap into the conversation zeitgeist, capturing that “appointment TV” vibe of bringing people together with each new instalment, buzzing over new developments and speculating over where it’s all going. But then Jonathan Hickman’s dizzyingly ambitious reinvention of the X-Men, realised in two overlapping minis in House of X and Powers of X, did just that. With the first issue, the concept of what the X-Men are is exploded, mutants re-established as the future of the world and the X-Men re-positioned less as superheroes than emissaries of a new world order. The second issue is a dizzying tour through a thousand years of history from the first moment Xavier conceived of his dream for mutantkind to the last dying embers of Earth where machines rule over what little remains. The third issue uses a simple but genius retcon to transform stalwart supporting player Moira MacTaggart into the most fascinating, vital figure in the whole X-mythos. And so the series continued, each week offering new shocks and revelations. House of X / Powers of X actually reminded me a lot of Watchmen, in both its structural intricacy and its deconstruction of longstanding genre tropes: in this case less superheroes in general than the well-worn tropes that have accumulated around the X-Men in particular. But where this stands apart from Watchmen is that, rather than being intended as a last word, this is a new beginning, establishing a blueprint that has launched a whole new line of X-Men comics and could shape the direction of the books for years to come. All while also acting as a complete, rewarding read and powerful statement on the X-Men.

 

As always, here’s the annual tally of the best-of-the-year winners, from 2011 through to now…

• 2010: Scalped
• 2011: Scalped
• 2012: The Underwater Welder
• 2013: The Manhattan Projects
• 2014: Southern Bastards
• 2015: Southern Bastards                                                                                               
• 2016: The Sheriff of Babylon
• 2017: Batman
• 2018: The Immortal Hulk
• 2019: House of X / Powers of X

And that’s a wrap on the year in comics, the decade in comics! Here’s to the next decade being just as filled with great books!

My Top Ten Comics of 2018

Of all the years I’ve been doing this best-of-the-year comics countdown, this was perhaps the hardest time I’ve had deciding on my final top 10. The quality has been insanely high this year. To demonstrate just how high, the top two entries of last year – Batman and Mister Miracle – both continued in this year and both maintained a strong standard, yet neither made the list this time round! The trend in this year’s list was “different.” Different in the number of new books on the list, but also in the variation in format and genre represented. Before jumping into the list proper, I want to bring up two honourable mentions, comics I loved that very nearly made the cut. One was Thanos by Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw, which was a worthy showcase for one of Marvel’s greatest villains, with the “Thanos Wins” storyline surely destined to become a canon classic perennial seller as a collected graphic novel. It’s mainly its placement on the calendar, with half the series coming at the end of 2017 and the rest early 2018, that made it hard to nail it down as a definitive entry for either year. The other was Infidel, a scarily topical twist on haunted house horror from Pornsak Pichetshote and Aaron Campbell. This was great, but I only read it this past week, meaning the list was already about finalised. Given the dizzying pedigree of the books you now know are not in the list, I’m sure you’re keen to see what did make it. So let’s get right down to it!

 

10. CRIMINY!

 

In an era of Brexit and Trump, the creative team of writer Ryan Ferrier (no stranger to emotionally wrecking us with animal allegory stories, as evidenced by 2016’s Kennel Block Blues) and artist Roger Langridge hit us with a powerful parable about the immigrant experience, told through the lens of Daggum Criminy and his family of adorable cartoon creatures. Forced to flee when their idyllic homeland is turned into a war-zone by tyrannical bandits, our band of travellers go from place to place, struggling to find acceptance, instead met only with scorn and exploitation, until they take it upon themselves to change hearts and minds. Langridge is a bottomless well of visual innovation in his realisation of these fantasy landscapes, offering resplendent imagery and distinctive characters. And the story wears its heart on its sleeve, managing to be surprisingly moving despite the children’s book pastiche presentation. In some ways, it feels like a companion to the Paddington films, other stories which package up a call for compassion for those coming to us seeking refuge in talking animals. But Criminy! has more teeth, throwing us off with some moments which are actually surprisingly harrowing and disturbing.

 

9. GRAFITY’S WALL

 

Ram V is a writer that has broken out a fair bit this year, garnering praise for various projects, chiefly Vault’s These Savage Shores. But perhaps his best work so far is this collaboration with Anand Radhakrishnan, a coming-of-age tale about 4 kids growing up in Mumbai, India. The book is broken up into 4 parts, each one focusing particularly on the perspective of one of the kids, giving us deep insight into each of their struggles and heartbreaks. Between them, they each have a unifying theme of having creative ambitions that they struggle to nurture against an environment that tells them at every turn that their hopes and aspirations are worthless. One wants to be an artist, another a rapper, another a writer, another an actress. All of them are other things in the story too, including criminals, but our focus is placed on what they want to be, what they could be if given the chance. Despite the far-off setting, so evocatively brought to life through Radhakrishnan’s art, it’s a story with sentiments that feel universal and deeply relatable

 

8. THE COMIC BOOK STORY OF PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING

 

As a lifelong wrestling fan, this book was just sheer joy from start to finish. It was always going to be impossible to cover everything in such a wide-ranging topic in the space they have, but Aubrey Sitterson and Chris Moreno manage to tell what feels like a comprehensive narrative of the history of professional wrestling. I think it’s the kind of book that you could give to someone baffled by the appeal of pro wrestling, the kind of person who says, “Don’t you know it’s all fake?”, and sell them on what makes it such a magical artform. But even for someone like me, who already knew much of the content covered in the book (particularly the more modern stuff), I found immense value in not only the nostalgic return visits to moments and characters I recalled fondly, but in the evocative cartooning and wry wit of Chris Moreno’s renditions of these iconic characters. The most I’ve enjoyed a non-fiction comic (albeit one that revolves around ideas of artifice) in ages.

 

7. EAST OF WEST

 

I’m at the point now with East of West on this yearly list, that I’ve not only run out of ways to talk about how brilliant this comic is, I’ve also run out of ways to remark on me running out of ways to talk about it! I’d have to take a look back to confirm, but at this stage I’m reasonably confident that East of West has been in my annual Top 10 Comics list for more consecutive years than any other comic. And deservedly so, as each issue continues to be a consistently excellent package of comics craft, a book I sorely wish got more credit as being one of the best on shelves. Last year at this time I remarked about how this year would likely be East of West‘s last year, as the series is drawing to a close, but due to some scheduling delays that end-point has been extended into 2019. So once again I find myself anticipating this modern classic going out with a bang!

 

6. ETERNAL

 

Above all else, Eternal is a triumph of format. That isn’t intended to sell short the emotionally charged writing of Ryan K Lindsay, deftly weaving a tale of Viking shieldmaidens that stands as a parable on the devastation wrought by violence, with more than one shocking, harrowing twist in the plot. Nor is it intended to downplay the stunning visuals of Eric Zawadzski, taking another quantum leap after his previous game-raising turn in The Dregs to deliver a career-best showcase packed with breathtakingly ornate layouts and vistas and bruising fight choreography, all exquisitely coloured be Dee Cunniffe. But the most striking thing about Eternal for me is it demonstrates that there are different ways of telling a story in comics in the American direct market than what is so often utilised. It would have been so easy for Ryan and Eric to expand this narrative out (there was certainly scope to do it with the world they created) and do a standard 4-issue mini. Instead, they went for an original graphic novel, done in oversized, European-style graphic album format, and the result is a book that is like nothing else in my collection. Even in this age of digital comics, this is one you owe it to yourself to own as a physical artefact. Everything right down to the paper stock is a sensory delight. This opened my eyes to new avenues what is possible in comics. I think the main reason you don’t see this placing in more end-of-year lists is that it landed so early some have maybe forgotten it, but I made sure to note it down as soon as it came out, indeed it was the first entry with a bullet in my “Best of 2018 contenders” doc, and even after a quality year of comics that followed, this stands above most of them.

 

5. PETER PARKER: THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #310

 

Okay, this one is going against my usual rules. I normally wouldn’t include a single issue of an ongoing run. Usually I judge the quality of the run as a whole in a given year. But in this particular case, I hadn’t been reading the run of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man as a whole, and only picked up this last issue, “Finale,” on a whim based on strong word of mouth. It essentially is a self-contained oneshot standing apart from the run as a whole. And hey, it’s my list, I can change the rules if I want! If this list was judged purely on how often I’ve reread a comic, then Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #310 would be #1. I have it sat at my work desk next to my laptop, and over the months since buying it I’ve just periodically picked it up and pored over it. Written and drawn by Chip Zdarsky, it is a consciously low-key tale, built around the framing device of various citizens of New York City asked for their opinions on Spider-Man for a documentary project. What follows are a series of anecdotes by turns silly (like you’d maybe expect from a Zdarsky comic), sweet, and ultimately surprisingly moving and heartbreaking. Before all the buzz around the PS4 game, and before Into the Spider-Verse blew my mind, this comic relit that spark of  my love for Spider-Man, and honed right in on what makes the character so appealing at his best: that he’s a Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man, a hero with relatable humanity who is a hero in small ways as well as big. “Spider-Man saves people. He does his best, expects nothing back. I think… I think we should all be more like Spider-Man.”

 

4. GIANT DAYS

 

It’s unbearably obnoxious to call Giant Days “my comic book discovery of 2018” when it’s been around for years and rightly getting acclaimed all this time, and I’ve heard this praise for ages and been meaning to give it a try, but only got round to it this year. That’s some Christopher Columbus shit. And yet that’s how I feel. I inhaled the first 6 volumes that were available in early 2018, and have eagerly picked up every edition that’s come out since. And I feel like my comics-reading life has been poorer for not having Giant Days in it all this time. The story of a group of friends as they navigate university life in Sheffield, John Allison and Max Sarin’s series might seem simple in concept, but in the execution it is a wonder, reliably laugh-out-loud funny in a way few comedy comics can manage. The sitcom-like episodic format makes each issue an accessible read in a way so many long-running comics fail to do, and yet it also excels in long-term storytelling and character development. Just in terms of sheer craft and characterisation, Giant Days may be better at what it does than anyone else in comics right now. Indeed, perhaps the only reason Giant Days isn’t higher or even top of this year’s list is because I’m reading it in trade format, and so am the better part of a year behind and not read enough of the 2018 output to fairly judge it.

 

3. GIDEON FALLS

 

Jeff Lemire has had a dynamite year. His Black Hammer franchise has continued to grow in popularity and acclaim, and news broke recently that he has signed a massive film/TV development deal for it, ensuring it’s going to become an even more widely recognised flagship title in the Lemire library. But as good as it is, my favourite Jeff Lemire series of the year is this other, less heralded Image Comics entry. Anyone who follows Lemire on social media or has read interviews with him is likely aware that he is an avid devotee of David Lynch, and a massive Twin Peaks fan. And Gideon Falls is perhaps his most overt ode to Twin Peaks yet, while still offering up its own distinctly sinister identity. The narrative of the series thus far plays out in two threads, with a priest with a chequered past settling in the small town of Gideon Falls and uncovering shady goings on in the town related to his doomed predecessor, and a haunted young man in an unspecified city elsewhere obsessively hunting for junk. The two threads are connected by the mysterious Black Barn, a structure not of this earth, within which dwells a truly ghoulish, terrifying entity. Lemire weaves a narrative that is enigmatic but also thick with suspense, while artist Andrea Sorrentino is melting faces with his stunning layouts, vistas you want to tear out of your comic and hang up on your wall.

 

2. CROWDED

 

Crowded was optioned for film before the first issue was even released, and if you were to hear that news nugget, you might be nonplussed. But it all makes sense when you read that first issue. How could you not read that and instantly see the dollar signs of the kind of dynamite, sure-fire hit idea that doesn’t come round too often? Right from the opening pages, we are thrown into a world that feels fully-realised, one of the most evocative, credible portraits of dystopian future in recent memory. The future hellscape is not created by nuclear war or invading aliens. It’s rooted in what we see already in the present, the grinding cruelty of the gig economy and apps and social media as a substitute for human connection, only heightened to proportions that are nightmarish and yet scarily not incomprehensible. What if you could crowdfund murder? And worse, what if society not only let it happen, but we got a whole parasitic culture of celebrity and fandom branching out of it? The art team of Ro Stein, Ted Brandt and Triona Farrell make this one of the slickest looking books on the stands, with a combination of hilarious visual comedy and masterfully choreographed action, not to mention all the little details that help make this world feel all the more lived-in and immersive. But beyond the high concepts and big ideas, what really helps this soar are the character dynamics at its heart. Christopher Sebela makes both beleaguered bodyguard-for-hire Vita and bounty target/walking disaster Charlie Ellison feel like real people, flawed but with human cores that make us care about them.

 

1. THE IMMORTAL HULK

 

I’ve been a fan of The Hulk my whole life. Some of my earliest memories are of the old TV series, and of my Gran telling Hulk-related bedtime stories at my request, mixed in with the likes of Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk. He’s one of my favourite characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And yet, I’ve never really found a comic run that’s truly resonated with me, despite several attempts, and despite some big names I admire giving it a shot. Then The Immortal Hulk came along, and it couldn’t be any more my jam. A take on The Hulk that goes back to the basics of the character – The Hulk as a monster that comes out at night, a terror to be feared rather than a superhero – then pushes deeper into those dynamics than perhaps ever before? A Hulk comic that reads like a horror series, pushing the genre bounds steadily further and further into this dark realm as it progresses? Yes, sign me up! Writer Al Ewing and artist Joe Bennett (along with a couple of other guests) have given us a fresh, invigorating take on The Hulk, giving him his own sadistic personality with a frightening take on justice. The genius of the series thus far has been that, in the early going, it was very episodic, monster-of-the-week style one-and-done tales of this scary new Hulk. But then weaved through it were connecting threads, chilling references to a mysterious Green Door, hints that not only all the events of the series, but aspects of The Hulk going right back to his origins, were all part of a horrifying larger tapestry that was only now beginning to reveal itself. The cliffhanger we were left on as 2018 drew to a close, bringing all these seeds to harvest, was a heart-stopper. Up there with the best of superhero comics, and comics as a whole, this year. And I’m also ready now to suggest The Immortal Hulk might be the best Hulk comic ever.

 

 

…

 

Here’s the annual tally of best-of-the-year winners, and how it looks now…

• 2010: Scalped
• 2011: Scalped
• 2012: The Underwater Welder
• 2013: The Manhattan Projects
• 2014: Southern Bastards
• 2015: Southern Bastards                                                                                               
• 2016: The Sheriff of Babylon
• 2017: Batman
• 2018: The Immortal Hulk

Like I said, this year was tough! There was drafts of this list where all of the top 4 entries were at #1, there was barely anything between them. And, as always, we end the year with me excited about a bunch of stuff that has just started or is coming up, primed to make a big splash in 2019.

My Top Ten Comics of 2016

Hello!  It’s that time of year again… already!  It’s time for my 7th annual countdown of my favourite comics of the year.  And what a year it’s been.  If we look past the flaming trash fire much of 2016 has been in general, we have got some great comics out of it.  DC has found much success this year with its Rebirth relaunch, and I found myself jumping on a whole bunch of titles.  Though none of those biweekly books made this year’s Top 10, there are some standouts which I’ve been enjoying a great deal: Batman, Detective Comics, Aquaman, Wonder Woman.  On the flipside, I feel like my Marvel reading has almost entirely tapered off.  Most of the Marvel books I was reading, I either dropped or they ended.  I tested out a few of the new launches and relaunches but generally didn’t stick with them… but I’m hopeful about some of the promising creative teams lined up for upcoming books!  Several indie books continued to make a strong impression, though I seem to have jumped on less new Image titles this year than I have in past years, for the most part falling back on titles I was already reading.  However, I’ve heard great things about The Black Monday Murders and intend on catching up on that when the trade hits early next year.  The indie publisher that really jumped out for me this year was Dark Horse.  Negative Space and Harrow County continued to excel, and new creator-owned projects that launched this year also managed to grab my attention.  Between all the books I read from various publishers, I could probably make a top 20 list quite easily if I had the time.  Doom Patrol, Wonder Woman: Earth One, Civil War: Kingpin, Rumble, Chum, Dark Night: A True Batman Story, Black Hammer, A.D.: After Death, as well as the titles mentioned above, all jump into my head as books that came close to making the list.  But I had to narrow it down to 10, and here’s my final list…

10. KENNEL BLOCK BLUES

 

Kennel Block Blues was a book that really took me by surprise this year.  Not with how good it was.  When you put a creative team like Ryan Ferrier and Daniel Bayliss on a comic of course you’re going to get quality.  But I was expecting a fun, quirky “musical” about talking animals in prison.  What I actually got was a harrowing exploration of loneliness and casual cruelty, and a deeply moving ode to unlikely friendships and triumph over adversity.  Few comics this year did such an effective job of making me care about the characters within than I came to care for those singing talking animals featured here.  I was genuinely devastated by the grim ends some characters meet, and this also served to create an oppressive atmosphere of no character being truly safe, which ramped up the tension and made your heart soar for those who were able to emerge in triumph.  I think many might forget to include Kennel Block Blues in their year-end rankings because it landed so early in the year, or perhaps because Ryan Ferrier’s other creator-owned book, D4VE (also fab), seems to be more widely acclaimed.  But if you want an emotional roller-coaster of a read, both funny and moving, Kennel Block Blues is certainly worth your consideration.

9. CHEW

Chew is a comic which has appeared on my top 10 lists in previous years, though not for a while.  But I had to include it this year, as the series reached the end of its 60-issue run.  While Chew has had its share of acclaim, part of me feels like it doesn’t get enough love as a crucial book in the ascension of Image.  Maybe I’m letting my own subjective perspective inform things a bit, as it was one of the first non Marvel/DC titles that I jumped onboard and bought monthly, but even beyond that Chew seemed like an early example of the “new Image” ongoing: not a superhero remix or a 90s revival, or a product of the Top Cow imprint, but an unusual, original concept from an exciting upstart creative team, the kind of series you might have expected from Vertigo in years past.  And while Chew is most famous as a comedy series, it had its share of heart-rending emotional gut punches.  And here, in its final year, those gut-punches came thick and fast as the world inched ever closer to its chicken-related apocalypse.  While even I was guilty of letting the book fly under my radar – always reading, but maybe not rushing to grab it first on my read pile – it was once Chew was approaching its end and I had to start saying goodbye to this rich cast of oddball characters that I realised just how fond I had grown of them over the years, and how nuanced and lived-in John Layman and Rob Guillory had made them.  Farewell, Chew, you will be missed!

8. DC UNIVERSE REBIRTH

As I mentioned above, DC have been on a real upward swing this year with their Rebirth initiative.  All their titles relaunching, most with fresh creative teams, many of them as biweekly books, it’s been an ambitious undertaking which has proven largely successful.  And DC Universe Rebirth, by Geoff Johns and an array of talented artists, was the oversized oneshot that started it all.  But in reading the comic, which I’ve done several times now, in a lot of ways it reads less like a beginning than an ending.  It’s Geoff Johns’ goodbye to comics.  At the very least, goodbye to actively writing monthly comics, for the time being at least, as he moves up the ladder to focus on overseeing DC’s adaptations in the world of film and television as their Chief Creative Officer.  And in that context, DC Universe Rebirth takes on an added poignant quality of Johns checking in on various characters he’s had a hand in shaping over the years, giving us one last look at where he’s leaving them before giving them a fond farewell.  And the character viewed most fondly of all is Wally West, the protagonist of the run on The Flash where Johns first made his reputation.  Viewed for years as one of the great casualties of the New 52, not just as a popular character in himself but in the DC legacy tradition he  personified, seeing him roam this new world, struggling to find a tether in it feels metatextual.  And when Barry reaches through the fabric of reality and embraces him, sobbing, “How could I ever forget you?”, it’s like they’re grabbing a hold of us, the readers.  It’s a moment that brought me close to tears when I first read.  But beyond nostalgia and resolution, so much for the future is set up here.  Setting up Dr. Manhattan of Watchmen as the DC Universe’s biggest Big Bad was a controversial move, to be sure, and yet the Watchmen are surely the perfect antithesis of the light and hope and classic heroism this issue establishes the DCU as being all about.  A bold mission statement on the DC Universe going forward, and a hugely rewarding, cathartic read in itself.

7. ALL STAR BATMAN

I have mentioned already that it has been a stellar year for Batman comics.  Both Batman and Detective Comics are on fire right now, and with each running on an alternate bi-weekly schedule that means we have a quality new Batman comic just about every week.  We even got Dark Night: A True Batman Story, an autobiographical comic from Paul Dini and Eduardo Risso that is set in the real world of Dini’s life story but still manages to totally be about Batman.  But still, Scott Snyder has once again shown himself to be the current king of Batman comics with his new series.  While his long-running art partner Greg Capullo is off working with Mark Millar, Snyder has taken to working with a rotating cast of different artists for this series, with the stated intention of showcasing Batman’s iconic rogues gallery.  In 2016, we got the first of these villain spotlights in the form of a 5-part saga focused on Two-Face, one of my absolute all-time favourite villains.  And it really is a hell of a Two-Face story, Snyder revealing whole new dimensions to the character both in his personal connection to Bruce Wayne and in just how formidable a threat he can be.  That is paired with art from John Romita Jr which is some of the legendary artist’s best in many years, perhaps his best since Daredevil: The Man Without Fear.  The pacing and staging of action here is just breathtaking.  And as bonus content we’ve also been treated to backup stories illustrated by Declan Shalvey.  Each issue is a densely-packed, immensely enjoyable read, top of the pile even at a time when we’re spoiled with top-tier Batman tales.

6. EAST OF WEST

I’m sure I’ve said similar things about East of West before that I’m going to say now.  Because the book has been running a few years now, it doesn’t always get its due.  People are always looking ahead to the next Image #1 to start buzzing about.  But though it might not get the acknowledgement it deserves, and it even flies under my radar from time to time, whenever I read the latest issue of East of West, its masterpiece status is reaffirmed in my mind.  While the sprawling ensemble and dizzying scope continue to grow and grow, this apocalyptic sci-fi pseudo-Western has been patiently moving forward, aligning the players on the board for some epic conflicts and bringing long-separated characters together.  As Year Two drew to a close it felt like all the extensive groundwork and world-building is starting to pay off.  Nick Dragotta and Frank Martin do astounding, superstar work on art and colours every issue, and it might just be Jonathan Hickman’s finest work, too.  There might be other comics I rush to read quicker on new comics day, but of all the comics titles currently running, East of West may be the one that, when it’s all said and done, is best primed to join the canon of the all-time comics classics.

5. SOUTHERN BASTARDS

What!?!?!  After a couple of successive years at the top of the list, Southern Bastards slips off the #1 spot in 2016!  That’s not to say there’s been any decline in quality.  If anything, the issues we’ve had this year have been among the best the series has ever put out, as now Roberta Tubb has finally arrived in Craw County and a reckoning seems set to be underway.  Southern Bastards remains the best comic on the shelves, whenever it comes out.  The problem is more that whenever it comes out isn’t as often as I’d like.  Don’t get me wrong, I know you can’t rush greatness, and I’m willing to wait for issues when what we get when they do arrive is such quality.  But it’s just a simple fact that the more sporadic release schedule allowed for other, more regularly-released titles to slip in and take more prominent standing in my consciousness this particular year.  Still, Southern Bastards remains as gripping as ever, with Jason Aaron and Jason Latour bringing us a masterfully realised, believably wretched world with a bruised, twisted heart pumping under all the ugliness.  It has every chance of climbing back up to #1 in future years.  I can only hope that in 2017 I get a larger dose of Southern Bastards to enjoy.

4. HOUSE OF PENANCE

In a year that boasted a fair share of quality horror, House of Penance stood out as a horror not quite like any other.  Eschewing the usual creature feature or body horror fare, or (for the most part) any real exterior menace, this was almost entirely a horror of the interior, its dread built up from am unbearably oppressive sense of “ill feeling.”  While credit must also be given to the astute characterisation of Pete Tomasi in portraying the loneliness, grief and mania of Sarah Winchester as she obsesses over endlessly building her ghost-trap house, it is through the feverish artwork of Ian Bertram that this sense of grinding dread is hammered home.  This is achieved through the blood-soaked tendrils depicted weaving through the house, growing in density as scenes reach emotional high-points.  But beyond that, it is portrayed in near every frame, with the uneasy close-ups on gaunt, wild-eyed faces, pitching everything at just a degree or two shy of hysteria, ready to bubble over at any moment.  It was a superstar showcase for Bertram, elevating him from an artist I was already aware of and a fan of into making him one of my favourite artists working today.  But everyone on the creative team excels, this whole comic is a triumph, and a shining example of how much untapped potential for horror still lies within the comics medium.

3. THE VISION

Easily Marvel’s best comic over the past year, and a solid contender for the best ongoing title anyone put out in 2016, The Vision was actually a comic I wasn’t initially interested in, reading the concept.  “The Vision makes a family for himself and goes to live in suburbia?”  Seemed to me like a poor way to capitalise on renewed interest in the android superhero following his Avengers: Age of Ultron appearance.  How wrong I was.  Right from the opening pages of the first issue, a foreboding sense of impending doom is built up to such a fever pitch it’s almost like reading a psychological horror.  Tom King and Gabriel Walta managed to give us a take on  The Vision that felt utterly true to the core spirit of the character while at the same time taking us on shocking, unpredictable new directions.  In an era of short-run volumes and relaunches where story arcs can feel expendable, that format here is used to the book’s advantage, giving us a story which, while set in the wider Marvel Universe and its history for sure, nonetheless feels like an almost self-contained parable of what it is to be human as told from the perspective of those who aren’t, one which will have an enduring life in collected form many years from now, long after the next few crossover events have run their course.  A modern masterpiece.

2. CLEAN ROOM

Speaking of masterpieces, it’s a rare joy to get to experience an all-time benchmark work unfolding in real time.  But that’s just the sense I get from Clean Room, a title which in future years and generations I’m sure will be held up as part of the all-time canon of essential comics horror.  It started promisingly enough last year, with a Going Clear style premise of an investigation into a sinister, Scientology-style cult and the spate of deaths surrounding it.  But from there the series took a sharp left turn into blood-curdling cosmic/demonic flesh-mangling horror, a Lovecraft meets Cronenberg assault of wickedness.  It’s Gail Simone at the nastiest she’s ever been, and in the process probably the best she’s been since at least her epic Secret Six run.  Kudos also to Jon Davis-Hunt for crafting some truly nightmarish, viscerally disgusting imagery which left me wary of turning each page in public.  And beyond the scares, over its run of slightly over a year, Clean Room has been building up a rich, enigmatic mythology which it feels we’ve only thus far scratched the surface of, and populated it with both likeable and despicable characters.  I’m sad to see Davis-Hunt depart as artist, but this is a series which could be poised to just get better and better as the plot thickens.

1. THE SHERIFF OF BABYLON

At this time last year, while writing my 2015 Top 10 list, I’m sure that I remarked on the astounding first issue of The Sheriff of Babylon.  At the time, I remember thinking that if the series kept up anywhere near that standard, it would surely be in serious contention for the top spot in 2016.  And here we are.  The Sheriff of Babylon is a searing, angry comic.  Mitch Gerads may bring a subtle, understated quality in his visualisation of the US occupation of Iraq in the early 2000s, but this plain, detached approach veils tumultuous emotions bubbling under the surface, and makes the outrages and tragedies contained within the story all the more harrowing in contrast.  As a narrative on its own merits, The Sheriff of Babylon works extremely well.  In the first issue, immediately, we are introduced to three immediately compelling characters, each with their secrets and demons, and watch as their paths are set on a course that will bring them all together, looking into the appearance of a dead Iraqi soldier.  Any one of these figures would make for a readable protagonist, but watching all three play off one another against such an evocative backdrop makes for compulsive reading.  But on a level beyond the core narrative, The Sheriff of Babylon is a condemnation of the Iraq War.  A recurring theme throughout is the denial of responsibility, how decisions are made by disinterested people, and they get fed down the chain through winding degrees of separation until they cause devastation to lives on the ground.  It’s a damning indictment on the ways we can have our humanity taken from us, or (knowingly or otherwise) take that humanity from ourselves.  And the big payoffs of the series come when that winding chain is severed and characters are forced to make decisions which will have immediate, violent consequences.  Not just the definitive Iraq War story of any piece of fiction I’ve seen, in any medium, but one of the best war stories in recent years too.  An absolutely essential read.

And that’s the 2016 list!  Here’s the annual standings as they now read:

• 2010: Scalped
• 2011: Scalped
• 2012: The Underwater Welder
• 2013: The Manhattan Projects
• 2014: Southern Bastards
• 2015: Southern Bastards                                                                                               
• 2016: The Sheriff of Babylon

Sorry it was late this year, but I hope you still enjoyed reading it.  I already have stuff I’m looking forward to in 2017, from seeing the DC Rebirth titles continue their progress, to seeing perennial favourites that had quiet years hopefully make big comebacks, to comics which have just started at year’s end (this year’s top 2 – both Vertigo comics, funnily enough – were both books which were brand new with not enough issues to allow for inclusion when I was compiling last year’s list), to enticing new creator-owned titles on the way.  Come back next December to see what makes the cut as best of the best!

My Top Ten Comics of 2014

Hello and welcome once more to my annual countdown of the Top 10 comics of the year. You’ll notice that, after last year’s inflated Top 20 list, I’m back down to 10 for 2014. That’s not to suggest that the quality of titles being released is in decline, but rather that I’ve probably been buying a little less comics this year, having to make some ruthless cuts to my pull list as having less and less free time to read through my comics has left a larger and larger pile of unread books to try to get to. That, and the fact that it took me ages to write that Top 20 list last year! 2014 has been another year of change for me, as while last year I talked a bit about how the number of Image titles I was reading had skyrocketed, this year I’ve had to drop a few of those. And while last year I said that I’d all but stopped reading Marvel and DC’s output, Marvel at least has made a big comeback for me, with an array of quality launches this year. Also noteworthy is the ascendancy of BOOM! Studios, with such quality output as The Woods, Memetic, Curse, Black Market and The Empty Man, and I’ve really been enjoying Oni Press output like The Life After and The Bunker. As ever, there are plenty of great comics I couldn’t fit into my top 10. Aforementioned indie offerings The Life After and The Woods, and other cracking indie titles like MonkeyBrain breakouts D4VE and Headspace, not to mention Image debuts like Spread, Wytches, Roche Limit and Deadly Class. Even some previous Top 10 mainstays like Batman, Saga and Sex Criminals, while maintaining a consistent quality, didn’t make the cut. Charles Soule wrote stellar comics for both Marvel and DC that came close to qualifying in She-Hulk and Swamp Thing respectively. Coming agonisingly close and actually being present in the list in an earlier draft was the delightful, charming, funny, surprisingly tender and emotional Dungeon Fun, by breakout genius Scottish creators Colin Bell and Neil Slorance. But what we’re left with is a collection of truly superb comics, some you may already be reading, others you should seek out. Let’s get right into it…
10. LEGENDARY STAR-LORD

I figured out numbers 1-9 on this list pretty quickly, but there was a real fight for this final spot on the list. Just take a look at that vast “Honourable Mentions” list above to show how many quality comics were in contention. But I think the main two that got closest were this year’s Guardians of the Galaxy expansions, Legendary Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon. Both were fun, action-packed titles, and I have a hard time deciding which one I loved more. Rocket Raccoon is just fantastic, Skottie Young is doing stellar work on that title, and it was perhaps the title that had the bigger immediate “WOW!” reaction of the two. But it’s Legendary Star-Lord that has grown on me even more over the course of their respective runs. Star-Lord is my favourite Guardian, and Sam Humphries has, in this series, crafted a version of Peter Quill that does justice to all iterations of his character. The surface level that immediately grabs you as the series begins is how spot-on a pastiche of Chris Pratt’s excellent cinematic portrayal it is, right down to the dude-speak and man-child party lifestyle. But as the series has progressed, Humphries has skilfully weaved what might have seemed like a soft character retcon to make it feel like an appropriate character evolution that stays faithful to the haunted, guilt-ridden moral pragmatist that starred in the definitive Abnett & Lanning Guardians of the Galaxy run. There’s even the inclusion of an updated version of transport/confidante Ship from the very earliest Star-Lord appearances from the 1970s. The bombastic artwork of Paco Medina is a revelation, and it’s his bright, energetic visuals that really hammer home the glorious comedy beats: from Kitty Pryde dancing in a giant banana suit to Quill on an awkward date dressed in a bad ’80s prom tux. Straddling a line between rewarding single-issue stories and steadily building up an intriguing overarching narrative, Legendary Star-Lord is a gem of a comic that makes a great case for why Star-Lord is a hero deserving of his own solo title.
9. EAST OF WEST

East of West has slipped a little from its #2 ranking last year. Don’t get me wrong, Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta’s sci-fi/Western opus still ranks up there with Image’s best titles and is always a book that gets read very soon after I get home from buying it at the local comic shop. If anything, the lower placement is reflective of not poorer storytelling, but more subtle storytelling, with Hickman and Dragotta carefully expanding the world and often replacing the more sweeping scope of the initial arc with a series of one-shots exploring the various nations of this alternate America. All were interesting to varying degrees, though at times this approach left me missing some of my favourite characters and wondering when certain plot beats would be followed up on. But when the various threads start to weave together and the individually-defined forces start to clash, you really feel a sense of culmination, and the sheer scale feels even more epic and breathtaking for the build-up that set it up. With what has been set up as of the latest issue I read, Hickman seems primed to take this world into even darker places as the narrative enters its next phase. But it’s the team of Nick Dragotta and colourist Frank Martin that continue to steal the show with each passing chapter. There’s not an issue that goes by where I don’t have to stop at least once and just marvel over the construction of a page. Still arguably the most visually stunning art team in comics.
8. ANDRE THE GIANT: LIFE AND LEGEND

I’ll get this out of the way: you don’t have to be a wrestling fan to love Andre the Giant: Life and Legend. All you have to be is a fan of fascinating life stories, realised with wonderful comics storytelling by Box Brown. But I’ve been a wrestling fan going back to when I was a little kid, albeit not so much lately. And the first person I can remember being a favourite wrestler of mine was Andre the Giant. The 7-foot-plus tall athlete was, pun intended, a larger-than-life presence, and this graphic biography does a great job of conveying that, with various interviewees sharing accounts of the sheer size of the man and the unique life he led as a result of it that range from the charming to the breathtaking. But his size, which gave him incredible fame and a livelihood, was also an incredible burden. Most obviously, it was a medical condition, one that was slowly killing him. But, as Brown astutely depicts, it also negatively impacted his life in a whole series of constant little inconveniences and humiliations that wore him down, the cold fact that in one context, he was “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” but in another he was just a freak. The biography is more a highlight reel than an exhaustive analysis, but we do get some excellent snapshots of his life. We see how he used to get lifts to school from Samuel Beckett as a boy in France, and we get a look at his time on the set of The Princess Bride. But most effectively of all, Box Brown paints a portrait of an era of American history that holds endless fascination for me: the 1980s wrestling circuit and all the eccentricities contained within. Informative, poignant, and often laugh-out-loud funny, when I read Andre the Giant: Life and Legend back near the start of the year, it became probably the first definite fixture on this list and its place has stayed secure ever since.
7. STRAY BULLETS: KILLERS

What a fantastic year 2014 has been for fans of David Lapham’s seminal crime epic, Stray Bullets. With no new chapters published in some time, and the series arguably never getting the widespread acclaim and recognition it deserved, it seemed in danger of being consigned to history as an unfairly forgotten comics classic. But then Image Comics signed a new deal to revive Stray Bullets last year, prompting the series to be posted up on ComiXology. Then, this year, the original run was finally brought to a conclusion with Stray Bullets #41, followed by the whole series being released in a deluxe omnibus called “The Uber Alles Edition,” allowing a whole new generation of readers to get absorbed into this dark, ruthlessly bleak saga. And then we got Stray Bullets: Killers. David Lapham has slipped effortlessly back into this seedy world and its inhabitants, like slipping into an old pair of comfy slippers, not missing a beat. As always with Stray Bullets, Killers seems to operate on the fringes of the crime genre, looking at how regular people on the fringes are impacted, or how their moral decisions can have a ripple effect. The backbone of Killers has been the blossoming and ultimately wilting romance between recurring protagonist Virginia and Eli, two flawed characters who make mistakes, but who we come to deeply care about, and whose happiness we become highly emotionally invested in. A happiness which, if Stray Bullets has taught us anything, shouldn’t be expected to last. Killers is often a low-key series, and as such even now is still to some degree being overlooked, not always getting mentioned amongst the other great Image titles of the past year. But Stray Bullets: Killers is actually better than most of them, and has produced some of the best single issues of any comic in 2014.
6. THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS

Last year’s #1 didn’t quite reach the same heights on this year’s list, in fact slipping to the ranking it held back in the 2012 list. But that’s hardly to suggest that writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Nick Pitarra’s bonkers revisionist history tale of mad science gone wild is in decline. This is a series that continues to fire on all cylinders with big, crazed ideas. Talking dog Laika got her own standalone adventure in space. The original Albert Einstein from our Earth came back to our reality to confront his evil parallel Earth doppleganger, and we got to see the mad journey across countless realms he had to brave to return home. William Westmoreland joined the cast as a hardcase with an ear necklace who took on an elite alien killing machine and won. We discovered that Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had their brains replaced by evil Communist aliens. And it all built up to a take on the assassination of JFK (magic bullet and all) that was about as bonkers as we’ve come to expect. The visuals of this book from Pitarra and colorist Jordie Bellaire continue to be an absolute delight, packed with detail and character quirks that had so much to the fabric of the story and make it what it is. The cast and the scope of this series continues to get bigger and bigger, and so the year ended with The Manhattan Projects going on hiatus, with a promise to come back in 2015 with more character-driven arcs focusing on the various narrative strands one at a time. Whatever format The Manhattan Projects takes going forward, you can be certain that I’ll be onboard!
5. THOR: GOD OF THUNDER

For the sake of clarity, it’s Thor: God of Thunder – the 25-issue series drawn largely by Esad Ribic, which ended a few months back – which is my included entry on this list, rather than the newly relaunched Thor, also written by Jason Aaron. Not that the new series, isn’t really great – honestly, save for the new issue #1, it’s pretty much a continuance of the narrative from God of Thunder and part of the same overarching saga – but it’s just getting started, really, so if I must pick one title for inclusion on this list I’ll go for Thor: God of Thunder. This title was excellent right from its beginning, and during the “God Butcher” storyline quickly established itself as one of the crown jewels in Marvel’s lineup. But it was with Esad Ribic’s return to the series in “Last Days of Midgard” that the title reached its greatest heights, and Jason Aaron cemented his status as best Thor writer since Simonson. This storyline told two tales. One narrative was of an Earth in the future that had been left as little more than a ravaged husk, old King Thor left to defend it against Galactus come finally to claim the remains of the planet that had thwarted him for so long. Here we saw Ribic at his finest, depicting a Galactus that truly inspired awe and terror, underlining the impossible odds Thor faced in fighting him. The other tale was in a present that eerily foreshadowed the desolation of the future, with evil corporation Roxxon embarking on dangerous, morally repellent initiatives that bring them into conflict with Thor. Now, Jason Aaron has already made major contributions to the villains in Thor’s mythos without even using arch foe Loki: from introducing the terrifying Gor to giving real teeth and wickedness to Malekith in a portrayal that put his cinematic appearance to shame. So it’s not a statement I make likely when I say that Roxxon figurehead Dario Agger was the most vile, repellent villain Thor faced in the whole series. He was a great opponent for Thor, because he was not someone Thor could just hit with his hammer. He was a very Earthly evil, hiding behind lawyers and dirty corporate tricks and playing on a level even a heavy-hitter superhero like Thor struggled to keep up with. From beginning to end, Thor: God of Thunder was a delight: dramatic, scary, and often surprisingly funny. It seems like we should expect more of the same from the new Thor.
4. THE MULTIVERSITY

As a huge Grant Morrison fan, The Multiversity has long seemed like one of those dream projects, long discussed, that I’d forever been looking forward to, but felt was never going to actually come to pass. It’s literally been years that Morrison has been talking about this, so even when it appeared in solicitations, I still don’t think I quite believed it was finally happening. I don’t think I believed it until I held that first issue in my hands. But now that it’s launched and the first few issues have been released, I can gladly confirm that it has met and even exceeded expectations. This is Morrison’s trip through the Multiverse, at once a medley of returning characters and recurring motifs from his past work, and trailblazing into new terrain. The first issue was dizzying in scope, giving us a sense of a vast, mad DCU filled with depth and intricacies to a degree we haven’t really seen since the New 52 began back in 2011, and also giving us the return of CAPTAIN CARROT! After that we got a glorious, pulp-inspired rendition of the JSA, with great portrayals of the likes of Doctor Fate. Next up was a universe populated with the various legacy heroes following on from their iconic predecessors, like Morrison doing Jupiter’s Legacy better than Millar. But best of all was “Pax Americana,” drawn by art legend and frequent Morrison collaborator Frank Quitely, which saw the pair tackle the original Charlton heroes like Blue Beetle, Captain Atom and The Question that served as the basis for Watchmen. And, never one to shirk from ambition, and being quite bold as brass in the face of Moore’s criticisms about Morrison copying his work, Morrison and Quitely tackle head-on the very ideas of comics structure that Moore and Gibbons were exploring with Watchmen, and arguably pushes the envelope even further. Frank Quitely is possibly my favourite comic artist ever, so it’s not lightly that I say this could be some of his finest work to date, with the assured colour palette of Nathan Fairbairn acting as the perfect compliment to his style.  What I’ve loved about every issue so far, though I can also see it being a bit infuriating, is that rather than just creating a bunch of one-and-dones, Morrison has written a collection of fantastic issue #1s, all of which end having introduced us to an immersive world and leaving us desperate for an issue #2 that will never come. Such amazing craft and world-building throughout. This is a barmy celebration of DC’s Multiverse, and of superhero comics in general, done in a way only Grant Morrison can. Fantastic.
3. DAREDEVIL

Daredevil, as written by Mark Waid and over the past couple of years mostly drawn by Chris Samnee, is a comic that has existed on the periphery of my perception for quite some time. I’ve always been aware of the popularity and critical acclaim behind the title, and I’d read an issue here or there, but 2014 was finally the year I dove in, thanks to the Marvel NOW relaunch that relocated Matt Murdock to San Francisco, but largely kept the tone, cast and overarching storylines consistent from the previous volume. I used this opportunity to give Daredevil a try, and at last I was hooked. I went back and bought the whole of Volume 3 in the three deluxe hardcover editions, stormed through it, and was left kicking myself for taking so long to jump on the bandwagon. When looking at how influential this title has been – you could argue it has inspired a whole line of creative thought in Marvel’s publishing output, from a shift to shorter story arcs, to an increased spotlight on more stylised, cartoony artwork over more glossy, cookie-cutter fare – it’s easy to overlook just how brilliant Daredevil remains, and how it’s still setting the bar. So, let’s take a closer look at this year in Daredevil, in particular the title since it was relaunched as Volume 4. As stated above, while the locations are fresh, much of the themes are carrying on from what came before. And, in particular, this underlying notion that Daredevil’s bright, upbeat “new beginning” where he’d make a conscious decision to be happier was perhaps less secure than it first seemed that has been niggling away since Waid’s tenure began has really been scrutinised and drawn into the open. We got the first allusions to it in the two-part Original Sin tie-in (surely one of the best tie-ins that event produced) where we explored Matt’s mother, and discovered she suffered from post-partum depression when Matt was an infant. This exploration of mental illness built up to the high-point of the volume: the recently-completed “Purple Children” storyline, where longtime Daredevil foe The Purple Man sets loose a group of his illegitimate children whose more primal version of his mind-controlling powers may be even more potent than his own. On one level, this worked as a thrilling superhero story, with The Purple Man as scary and nasty as ever. But it also served as an excellent study of depression, and the continued stigmas surrounding mental illness that prevent people seeking help. Daredevil has long been one of the best developed superheroes in comics, and Waid manages to add a new dimension to his personality in an utterly believable, relatable way. And Chris Samnee’s artwork! Every page is a joy to behold, with clean lines packed with vibrant, kinetic energy, bolstered by the crisp colours of Javier Rodriguez and, more recently, Matthew Wilson. Even as a character who has had some rather definitive, iconic artists draw him, Samnee may have emerged as my ultimate Daredevil artist. Believe the hype. Daredevil by Waid and Samnee is simply the most perfectly-realised superhero comic on the shelves today.
2. THROUGH THE WOODS

While the marketing may have been focused on Original Sin and Future’s End, for me, right from when I first heard about it late last year, I knew that Through the Woods by Emily Carroll would be my “event comic” of 2014. The immensely talented Emily Carroll first came to my attention with “His Face All Red,” a chilling webcomic that to this day is one of the creepiest, most perfectly-structured horror comics ever. And so I was highly excited by the prospect of this graphic novel anthology, collecting “His Face All Red” in print for the first time alongside a collection of original short horror tales. After spending half the year breathlessly anticipating Through the Woods, I was very pleased when the final product lived up to expectations. Emily Carroll has a distinctive approach to horror, a lyrical quality that makes them feel like old fables, or forgotten children’s tales with a sinister underbelly. And like those children’s tales, her stories play with primal, universal fears: the loss of loved ones, or that those you care about are not all that they appear to be. Her artwork complements this vibe by being quite simple and childlike, but deceptively detailed and still capable of repellent, horrific imagery. Every story in the collection is strong, there’s not one dud here, but if I had to pick my favourites, in addition to the previously mentioned “His Face All Red,” I’d pick out “The Nesting Place” – a bloodcurdling mix of Cronenbergian body horror and Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt – and “In Conclusion,” the epilogue which deftly plays with the imagery of Little Red Riding Hood to bring the book to a simple but unsettling close that will linger in the memory and induce shudders long after reading. This year, we’ve been spoiled with a treasure trove of quality horror comics, so much so that I even wrote about it on my blog. But standing above them all is Through the Woods, and with this collection, Emily Carroll has cemented her status as the Queen of Comics Horror, second only to the legendary Junji Ito when it comes to using the comics medium to craft fear. And speaking of Junji Ito, I’ve learned that he has a new collection getting translated into English, due for a 2015 release. Now I know what my “event comic” of 2015 will be, then…
1. SOUTHERN BASTARDS

There are certain books that you know right away you’re going to love. Southern Bastards was one of those books, where as soon as it got announced at Image Expo, I knew it was going to be a must-read. Anyone familiar with my previous annual top 10 comics lists or with my blog in general will know that I absolutely adore Scalped, Jason Aaron’s masterpiece. It attained the #1 spot on this list on multiple previous years during its run, and I wrote some very detailed, lengthy blogs dissecting some of the stuff I love about the gritty crime saga. It’s the series that established Jason Aaron as one of my favourite writers, and has led to be following him onto his work with Marvel, which I’ve enjoyed. But with Southern Bastards, drawn by his recurring collaborator Jason Latour, Aaron seemed to be setting up a book primed to fill the void left in my comics-reading life by Scalped when it ended. And in 6 issues, the book has done just that. Hell, you could argue it had done that by issue #1. Given that you could suggest Scalped took a story arc or so before it really got going, you might even argue that Southern Bastards has launched itself out of the starting block even faster than that classic. Immediately, you could tell this was two masters at work, with a sweaty, sun-scorched atmosphere that immersed you in the Deep South. Craw County is simultaneously depicted as a tangibly awful place that no one would want to go near, but also so well-realised in its scenery and its diners selling fried pie that I kinda want to go there. Latour’s red-hewn colour palette helps a great deal with this distinctive atmosphere, as does his hard-bitten character design. This is a tough world, and one laced with pain and tragedy. At first, we think we’re getting one kind of story, and we imagine we’re seeing the well-worn story tracks laid out before us. But then that train is derailed in the most gut-punching, upsetting of fashions. “Upsetting” is something this book does well. I think I’ve had my heart broken reading this comic half a dozen times in as many issues. It feels like we’re still in the opening salvos of a much larger narrative, so the bigger picture of the plot may not yet be clear, but what truly elevates this comic are the characters. They feel nuanced, like real people (though maybe people you’d never want to actually meet), with Aaron once again displaying real skill for finding the bruised humanity in even the most seemingly awful of people. Six issues in, and already Southern Bastards feels like appointment reading, the book I know I’ll rush to read immediately as soon as I get it home, its cast of characters already nestling their way into my brain and into my heart. One thing that somewhat sets it apart from Scalped is acclaim. Scalped was one of the best comics ever, but it always felt a bit like an underrated gem, beloved by those who discovered it but overlooked by wider audiences. I would put it at #1 on my lists while beseeching people to give it a try. On the other hand, I write this knowing that Southern Bastards is almost a boring choice to top my list with, as everyone seems to be putting it in their lists. But sometimes a choice is obvious because it is absolutely deserved. And I for one am glad that the rise of Image Comics and creator-owned comics means that a comic as excellent as Southern Bastards can get the recognition and respect it deserves. Roll on year two!
And that’s that! What will next year’s list bring? Will Southern Bastards be the first comic since Scalped to take the #1 spot more than once? Or will one of the books currently slated for a 2015 release that I’m eagerly looking forward to, like Junji Ito’s Fragments of Horror or Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor, nab the top spot? We’ll have to wait until next December to know for sure. In the meantime, as ever, I’ll end with an overview of the annual standings, and what comics have made the #1 spot each year I’ve ran this feature on my blog….

2010: Scalped
2011: Scalped
2012: The Underwater Welder
2013: The Manhattan Projects
2014: Southern Bastards

Thanks for reading, everyone. Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

My Top Twenty Comics of 2013

Welcome back once again to my annual countdown of my favourite comics from the year that was.  You might have noticed that while on the previous three occasions I’ve ran this countdown on my blog the list has been a Top 10, this time round it’s been expanded to a Top 20.  And that is testament to how much of a truly spectacular year 2013 has been for comics.  There has been a wealth of fantastic new titles launched over the past 12 months, while established books have gone from strength to strength, and we’ve even seen a few comics that had been on the decline finding a new lease of life to blast them back onto the radar.  There were so many quality comics that it didn’t feel fair to just put a spotlight on the best 10 this year.  Indeed, it proved to be a struggle narrowing the list down to a top 20, even!  2013 has been a banner year for comics.  At this point I tend to talk a little about how my own reading habits have shifted in the intervening year.  Last year I talked about Image being on the rise, and that trend has continued in 2013, with Marvel and DC all but dropping off the map in my weekly comics haul while more and more Image titles get added to the point where they now utterly dominate my monthly reading.  A reminder of my rules for eligibility: the comic has to either be a graphic novel/oneshot released in 2013, or an ongoing/miniseries that has had 3 or more issues released in 2013 at the time of writing.  This means that while the likes of Velvet, Pretty Deadly, Drumhellar and The Sandman: Overture had stellar first issues, none of them have had enough issues for them to qualify.  Perhaps they’ll show up on next year’s list!  Finally, I should point out this is the first year I’ve done the list that Scalped wasn’t in contention, having finished last year, so that top spot is WIDE OPEN!  Who’ll be #1 of 2013?  Read on and see…

 

20. SWAMP THING

Swamp Thing is a title that suffered from something of a steep fall from grace.  I remember way back when issue #1 hit as part of DC’s New 52 launch, written by Scott Snyder and drawn by Yanick Paquette, I declared it the best of all DC’s new #1s.  But going into the “Rotworld” storyline I felt the quality slip a little, and so I had resigned myself to likely dropping the title after Snyder’s departure, only deciding to give incoming writer Charles Soule a go for an issue to confirm my decision.  Boy was I wrong!  Charles Soule, working mostly with artists Kano and Jesus Saiz on rotation, has knocked this title out of the park since coming onboard, utterly reinvigorating the series and giving it a bold new direction and sense of forward momentum.  Rather than trying to ape Snyder’s style, Soule is doing his own thing here, returning Swamp Thing to more of a pulpy superhero aesthetic, and letting Swamp Thing make some cool, inventive uses of his plant powers.  Every month, Soule does something new to impress me.  First, he’s gifting Alec Holland with a natural, relatable voice through his narration.  Then, he’s finding fresh wrinkles in the history of The Green to expand and enrichen Swamp Thing’s mythology.  Then he utterly leaves the rest of the Villain’s Month oneshots in the dust with a tale that succeeds in making Anton Arcane skin-crawlingly scary again.  Now, with this current story featuring Swamp Thing battling Jason Woodrue over The Green’s avatar mantle, he’s hitting us with some of the most nail-biting cliffhangers and shock reversals of Big Two comics.  Meanwhile, Kano and Saiz carry on the tradition of Wrightson, Bissette, Veitch and Paquette with their flair for visual innovation, crafting awe-inspiring page compositions.  I’ve said it before, and I’m not the only one to make the comparison, but for me, Swamp Thing has become DC’s answer to Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Daredevil, in the way it can feel both like an homage to all that’s come before and a fresh new start unburdened by the darkness of past storylines, and is just pure, exhilarating fun.  Those who did drop the comic after Scott Snyder left are missing out!

 

19. CHEW

 

Chew continues to see-saw in and out of my top 10.  As I said last year, it’s not really a reflection on the quality of the title, which has remained consistently entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny, but more on the emergence of hot new titles vying for attention.  It’s interesting, because I can remember when Chew was the new kid on the block, arguably the first in that new wave of white-hot Image issue #1 buzz-books, and now it has reached the point where it is a most venerable stalwart of the Image lineup, several years and nearly 40 issues into its run.  I think one factor in its slip down the rankings this year is that it feels like there have been a lot of occasions where the wait between issues has been a good bit longer than a month.  I seem to be going through this pattern lately of getting the new issue of Chew when it comes out, and not being able to really recall what happened in the previous issue, and taking a while to getting round to read this latest one.  But then when I finally do sit down to read the new issue, I immensely enjoy it and feel keen to get to the next chapter.  And then the cycle repeats itself.  So, Chew might be in need of a little extra spark to reassert itself up amongst the best of the best in Image’s ever-growing lineup, but it’s definitely not in any danger of being dropped, as John Layman and Rob Guillory continue to deliver a comic packed with delicious goodness. 

18. STRANGE ATTRACTORS

Charles Soule again, this time paired up with Greg Scott in this delightfully smart and inventive comic from Archaia.  This was one of my best purchases from New York Comic Con, with Archaia’s typically superb production values making it a beautiful hardcover graphic novel package.  Strange Attractors tells the story of bright academic Heller Wilson becoming the protégé of aging genius/eccentric Dr. Spencer Brownfield, who may or may not have spent the past 30 years secretly keeping New York City running through the power of super-maths.  It’s a masterfully-structured tale, the various narrative threads weaving together like strands of a complex equation.  There’s an ominous air of impending doom hanging over much of the story as it steadily moves forward, quietly immersing you, but the end result is surprisingly inspirational and upbeat.  A highly potent love letter to New York City, and one that certainly made me miss it, having read this shortly after returning home to Scotland.  This year has really seen Charles Soule mark himself out as a real writer of note, and I for one am keen to see what he has lined up for 2014. 

 

17. SHELTERED

If you’d told me that Lazarus wouldn’t make my top 20 list back when I read issue #1, I’d have laughed you out of the room.  I remember being hugely impressed back when I read the first issue of that new series, thinking this was sure to be one of the standout debuts of the year… then a week later Sheltered came along and trumped it.  Sheltered #1 was just a textbook example of how to grab readers by the proverbial baw-hairs and DEMAND their attention and continued reading, with Ed Brisson evocatively building up a well-realised status quo and ruthlessly tearing it down all in the space of a single comic book.  Out of the ashes of that devastation has risen a tense, haunting tale about children forced to become adults and largely failing at the task, and a harsh study of survival and evil.  And the art of Johnnie Christmas and colours of Shari Chankhamma give the whole thing an ethereal, dreamlike aesthetic, a work of strange, glacial beauty that creates an interesting contrast with some of the horrific things that happen within these pages.  There are many ways Sheltered could go from here, but at this point it has all the makings of a 21^st Century Lord of the Flies. 

 

16. GHOSTED

I’m sure I’ll be writing similar notes throughout this list, but it says something about the incredibly high standard of comics output in 2013 that Ghosted places where it does.  Earlier drafts of this list had both this and Sheltered secure in the top 10.  But rest assured, this is more a reflection on the superlative quality of the year’s books than any slight on Ghosted, a delightfully inventive genre mash-up.  Joshua Williamson’s irresistible “I wish I’d done it first” concept is to mix the classic heist story with the haunted house genre, with our protagonist Jackson T. Winters assembling a crack team of criminal experts for a daring robbery, not to steal money or diamonds, but to steal a ghost from a notorious murder house.  It seemed like a delicious hook for a miniseries, so pure and self-contained.  But the latest issue wonderfully opened up the idea into a bigger world and set the stage for how Williamson’s high-concept could sustain an ongoing.  Though I worry for how the next arc will fare without the indelible contribution of artist Goran Sudzuka, who in 5 issues has excelled in crafting a slick, cool signature style for the book.  Still, the series is off to a strong start, and I’m keen to see what happens next.

 

15. INFINITY

I had largely sworn off the big Marvel/DC event crossovers.  I gave up on Fear Itself, disregarded Brightest Day, skipped Flashpoint, passed on Avengers VS X-Men, ignored Age of Ultron, dismissed Trinity War.  Not since 2010’s Siege had I read an event in its entirety.  But this year has proven to be something of a vintage year for events.  DC’s offering, Forever Evil, has thus far proved pretty enjoyable, though it didn’t quite make the cut for this list.  Marvel, meanwhile, gave us Infinity, a comic I almost never read due to all the talk about how it was impossible to read without a detailed knowledge of Jonathan Hickman’s entire Avengers and New Avengers runs or without buying the tie-ins in those respective books: as a rule of thumb I never buy tie-ins outwith the core event title that I supposedly “have” to read.  But on a whim one day I bought and read the first 5 issues of Infinity and was utterly engrossed, and more recently the 6^th and final chapter brought it all home nicely.  You can absolutely enjoy this story without the tie-ins, though I’m sure they make it richer.  This is an event story that actually feels like an event, with Hickman generating an epic, sweeping tone and a grandiose scale.  The combined threat of the Builders to the galaxy as a whole and Thanos to Earth in particular creates a sense of seemingly insurmountable adversity, making it all the more awesome when The Avengers triumph in the face of it.  Thor gets one of his most badass moments ever.  An ultimate underdog fight between Black Bolt and Thanos is set up so powerfully that I was made into a fan of the Inhumans.  Various characters I’d never heard of before were presented as major players who I’m now invested in learning more about.  And the finale managed to both provide a satisfying resolution and set the seeds for numerous storylines that will likely be picked up on down the line in Hickman’s various Avengers titles, as opposed to just being an advertisement for the next event.  Easily the best crossover event from either company in years, and a shining example of how it should be done. 

 

14. THE WALKING DEAD

What a decline The Walking Dead has suffered in my estimations over the years!  After ranking near the top of my list in 2010, it dropped off the top ten in 2011, and by early 2012 I was beginning to question if I was just buying the book out of habit and whether or not I should just drop it.  But issue #100 marked a major turning point for the series, reinvigorating Image’s most famous series and giving it a compelling new direction that saw the title on an upward curve throughout the rest of 2012.  That trend has continued into 2013, with Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s zombie opus now the best it’s been in years.  And a big part of that is down to the new Big Bad, Negan.  A lot of people argue the series was at its absolute best during the Governor/Woodbury saga (I disagree, personally identifying the period immediately after the departure from the prison, up to and including the “Fear the Hunters” arc as the best, though the Governor stuff comes close), and that the loss of momentum has been due to the lack of a similarly formidable villain.  Well, now Negan has truly filled that void.  He’s a suitably different beast to The Governor too, with a twisted code of ethics and dark sense of humour that has at times even made him weirdly likeable: who thought I’d go from instantly wanting him dead in issue #100 to ranking him as one of my favourite characters?  I still want him to get his comeuppance, though.  The series is going from strength to strength with the way it has built up this new, wider world for Rick, Carl, Michonne and co to exist in, and with the 10^th Anniversary “All Out War” storyline already proving explosive, it seems things are set to get even better!

 

13. FATALE

Another comic to go from strength to strength this year, Fatale was always an interesting series, but one that very much went for the slow-boil approach.  But with its past couple of arcs, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ blend of noir and Lovecraftian horror has really started to turn up the heat.  First, a collection of standalone issues from various periods in history served to expand the mythos of the series in fascinating ways.  And now, Fatale has soared to new heights with this current storyline, with the timeline jumping forward to the indie music scene of the early 90s, and a disquieting moral fable that has served to crystallize the haunted tragedy, the irresistible allure and the poisonous influence of our mysterious protagonist Josephine more compellingly than any other storyline in the title up until now.  Up until now we’ve been told how all men fall for her and find themselves obsessing over her, but this story has truly immersed us in this happening and made us believe it.  With the way Brubaker and Phillips has introduced this poignantly human cast of characters and systematically destroyed them reminds me of the classic “24 Hour Diner” issue of The Sandman with Dr. Destiny.  Fatale as a series continues to evolve and improve, while this arc in particular stands as the best single thing Brubaker and Phillips have done since Criminal: Last of the Innocent. 

 

12. ZERO

Zero is an interesting comic, in that it seemed to be under the radar for quite a while, then all of a sudden it picked up a lot of buzz as the release of the first issue drew near.  Much was made of the innovative approach to the series, which would see writer Ales Kot tell ostensibly done-in-one standalone tales with the eponymous hero, super-spy Edward Zero, with a different artist illustrating each story.  It’s a great concept, one that made me give the series a try, but I was thrilled to discover that the execution was even better.  In the three issues released thus far, artists Michael Walsh, Tradd Moore and Mateus Santalouco have all delivered some stunning imagery, their disparate styles unified by the majestic colours of Jordie Bellaire.  Ales Kot, who has shown creative promise with the likes of Wild Children and Change, here delivers his most accomplished work to date, taking that supposedly episodic framework and in fact crafting an intricately connected narrative tapestry, which we’re uncovering out of chronological order, but which I feel is going to take shape into an immensely compelling whole, once the series has been given more time to unfold.  If Zero continues to build momentum the way it has this early in its run, look at it as a serious contender to leap into the top 10 on next year’s list.

 

11. DUNGEON FUN

Okay, this one is a bit of a cheat.  As I mentioned in my intro at the top, the usual perimeters for eligibility on this list include either being a graphic novel/oneshot, or in the cases of ongoings/miniseries’, that 3 or more issues were released in the contended year.  Dungeon Fun only had one issue released.  And given that I usually enforce this rule so rigorously, even cutting out MonkeyBrain’s Bandette from inclusion of an earlier draft of my list once I realised only two issues had been released this year, a book has to be pretty special to supersede it.  With Dungeon Fun, there are a couple of mitigating factors.  For one, small press titles work on a very different schedule than something released monthly or bi-monthly through Diamond, and in many cases it’s unreasonable for such books to have more than three issues within a year.  But more pressingly, it’s just too damn good to ignore.  A delightful fantasy romp that has rode a veritable tidal wave of critical adulation here in the UK, drawing comparisons to such diverse inspirations as Monty Python, Adventure Time, The Princess Bride and the Legend of Zelda games, Dungeon Fun is truly “all ages” not in the patronising, ghettoised “Y’know, for kids!” way some interpret it, but in the sense that it can capture the imaginations of audiences of all ages.  The wonderful artwork of Neil Slorance is brimming with energy and imagination, projecting this sense of fun and accessibility, and I was able to see first-hand on the convention floor how kids gravitated towards this book and eagerly grabbed a copy.  And the grown-ups can appreciate the razor-sharp wit of Colin Bell’s script, packing laugh-out-loud gags with a density approaching Airplane levels.  This is a book that lives up to its title, as in terms of pure FUN there’s not a single comic released this year that was able to leave a smile on my face as big as Dungeon Fun #1 did.  I know that last year, quite a few people picked up Iain Laurie’s Horror Mountain on the basis of my recommendation in my year-end list, so I can only say that this book comes just as heartily recommended.  Get your copy here: https://sellfy.com/p/3EZi/.

 

10. THOR: GOD OF THUNDER

And while we’re talking about “books that would have ranked if only 3 issues had been released in the year” scenarios, in last year’s 2012 top ten, Thor: God of Thunder #3 came out about a week after I posted up my list.  And that’s a shame, as if that issue had come out sooner (or the list had gone up later), based on the immense quality of those first three issues, Thor: God of Thunder would very likely have broken my top 5.  Fast forward a year, and again I find myself talking about the intense competition and insanely high quality of 2013’s output having some great titles ranking lower than I expected.  But this shouldn’t be read as any decline in quality from Scalped writer (and perennial favourite of this annual year-end countdown) Jason Aaron’s take on Thor: this remains, in my opinion, Marvel’s best title.  The epic 11-chapter “God Butcher” saga that dominated the first year of the series was Thor’s answer to Batman’s “Court of Owls” epic, in how it used the introduction of a deadly new enemy to dig into its iconic hero’s history, push them to the brink of defeat and despair, and ultimately have them kick mega ass.  And Esad Ribic further demonstrated why he’s one of my absolute favourite artists with breathtaking visuals and a magnificent design for villain Gorr.  We then got a pensive, poignant oneshot exploring Thor’s place as a hero, a god and a man in the modern world, before Ron Garney stepped in on art duties for the currently-ongoing storyline, “Accursed”, which has presented a Malekith far more formidable than his cinematic counterpart, and presented a tale by turns funny, dramatic, and strangely relevant as a parable of the nature of war and military intervention in the real world.  With next year promising the return of Esad Ribic, Thor: God of Thunder should continue to be Marvel’s MVP well into 2014.

 

9. FIVE GHOSTS

Over the past year or so, I’ve seen talk about how Image is too big now, how it’s become a playground for famous, established names in the comics field to bring their creator-owned properties to, and thus it’s lost its status as the publisher that gives a platform to exciting new creators.  But then something like Five Ghosts comes along and reaffirms Image’s status as a launching pad for the next generation of comics stars.  Though both do have credits to their name, writer Frank J Barbiere and artist Chris Mooneyham could still be considered newcomers to the wider comics stage, and yet they delivered one of the best Image series launches of a year filled with them.  An ode to pulp adventure spliced with a hearty dose of Gothic horror, Five Ghosts introduces us to Fabian Gray, an explorer whose encounter with an artefact known as the Dreamstone has left him with the ability to channel the abilities of five literary spirits.  Cue some relentlessly paced adventure courtesy of Barbiere’s brisk, action-packed scripts, while Chris Mooneyham has emerged as one of the breakout artists of 2013 with his luscious, evocative visuals that hark back to classic comics of the 70s and 80s.  Five Ghosts began life as a miniseries, but it’s no surprise it got promoted to ongoing status.  No one could have read those stellar first 5 issues and not wanted more of this character and this world.  After an enjoyable fill-in issue skilfully illustrated by Garry Brown, Barbiere and Mooneyham are back in the saddle for a second arc that seems set to draw in the swashbuckling pirate adventure into its melting pot of pulp homage.  And if all that wasn’t enough to cement its place in my top 10, each issue of Five Ghosts now comes with added Doc Unknown: the similarly pulp-infused comic from Fabian Rangel Jr and Ryan Cody almost made the top 20 in its own right, and is now a regular backup feature in Five Ghosts.  This title is a joy to read, and from pointing it out to people at my local comic shop to giving copies of the Haunting of Fabian Gray graphic novel out as Christmas gifts, I have and will continue to spread the word to those I know that Five Ghosts is worth your attention.

 

8. THE PRIVATE EYE

The Private Eye caught a lot of people on the back-foot.  One day, sites began running teaser images of a mysterious new comic from writer Brian K Vaughan and artist Marcos Martin.  What could it be?  Who would be publishing it?  Many of us were preparing ourselves for months of tantalising teasers leading to a big release from someone like Image, but the very next day, The Private Eye launched online, self-published by Vaughan and Martin under their Panel Syndicate imprint, going under a “pay what you want” system, with downloading a digital copy of the comic for free an option.  I’ve bought each issue for $2.99, as it’s easily worth that.  There are few people in comics that do an issue #1 better than Vaughan, and The Private Eye continued that tradition, giving us a dystopian/utopian vision of a future where there is no internet, where in place of online identities people walk around with literal masks to craft their own personas, and the media has become the most powerful law enforcement entity on the planet.  Enter paparazzi/private investigator P.I., and we’re thrown into a futuristic take on a classic, pulpy gumshoe noir.  We’ve had 4 issues thus far, and equally recommended is the special “making of” comic released that delved into the process of creating this comic from the ground up.  Reading this gives you a strong idea of just how centrally involved artist Marcos Martin was in the building of this world and the telling of this story, his vision for the world so integral to the success of the story that his absence is unimaginable.  I’ve read quite a few quality digital comics this year, with MonkeyBrain’s output in particular proving consistently entertaining.  But The Private Eye stands as the cream of the crop. 

 

7. NOWHERE MEN

Here’s an entry that threw a spanner in the works.  Before heading down to Thought Bubble last month, I thought I had my top 20 pretty much figured out.  I still needed to shuffle around the ordering here and there, but the actual content of the list seemed to be finalised.  But then I bought the first graphic novel collection of Nowhere Men at the show, and decided to read it on the train home to Glasgow… I ended up devouring the whole book in a single frenzied sitting during the journey.  I immediately wanted it in the top 20, popping it in at the bottom spot: this is what finally chopped Lazarus off the list, I’m afraid!  But upon going back to the book and rereading parts, I just fell in love with the craft of the thing more and more, and it steadily climbed up and up in my rankings until it reached the slot it’s at now, and even then I flirted with the notion of putting it higher.  The best comics don’t just tell a story, they create a world for the reader, and that’s what writer Eric Stephenson does with Nowhere Men.  The audacious level of ambition on display here is thrilling, as over the course of the first 6 issues he crafts a tale juggling multiple narrative threads, spanning across multiple generations, and a cast of over a dozen principal players.  It could easily have ended up a train wreck, but Stephenson orchestrates it all with panache, crafting a rich, nuanced alternate history of the world where science had the same kind of pop culture boom that rock-and-roll did in the 1960s, complete with its own answer to The Beatles in the form of the founding members of science dream team World Corp.  It’s a mythology made all the more immersive by the comic’s innovative use of posters and archival newspaper and magazine articles peppered within the comic narrative to flesh out the shape of the world between that pivotal era in the ‘60s and our vastly altered present.  The series as a whole really is a triumph of design, with the team of artist Nate Bellegarde and colorist Jordie Bellaire bringing superheroic flair to the world of cutting-edge science.  Read Nowhere Men, and you really will buy into its central notion that “science is the new rock ‘n’ roll.” 

 

6. SEX CRIMINALS

There are certain times when you know you’ll love a comic as soon as you hear its name.  Such was the case with Sex Criminals.  And I was won over even more when I heard of the high concept behind the series: two people with the power to stop time with their orgasms go on a crime spree.  So, I went into this comic pretty giddy with anticipation, and still managed to be disarmed by how great it was.  I think what took me by surprise is that, though a book like this could have easily just coasted on that central concept and been a whole barrel of fun, it’s instead done something much more.  Over the course of the first three issues, it has managed to craft a genuinely sweet account first of the experience of growing up and discovering your sexuality as a girl, through the heightened prism of our narrator Suzie discovering her powers, then of a boy’s experience of sexual awakening through the story of Jon, then the joy and thrill of beginning a new relationship.  And save for the odd flash-forward, we haven’t even got to the “criminals” part of the title yet!  Reading the phenomenal letters page just confirms the chord these issues have struck with real life experiences of the readers.  And on top of all that, it’s genuinely hilarious, with artist Chip Zdarsky utterly cramming the comic full of brilliant sight gags.  Matt Fraction has been on a real roll lately, but Sex Criminals could very well be the best thing he’s ever written.  Perhaps the only thing preventing it from breaking the top 5 is that, three issues in, I need to read some more to see if the dizzyingly high pace can be sustained over the long term.  Next year’s list will tell the tale!

 

5. BATMAN

With the ascension of Image Comics, and how (as can be seen by the quantity of their titles to make my list) the vast majority of my monthly reading now seems to be their output, I have considered the possibility of me at some point dropping Marvel and DC entirely.  Could I reach a point where all my favourite creators are doing by far their best work in Image or for other independents, to the point where I feel like I no longer need my superhero fix?  I may have mulled over this hypothetical future briefly, but in truth, so long as there are comics as excellent as Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman out there, I will always remain a fan of superhero comics.  For me, saying “I refuse to read superhero comics” is as limiting as saying “I will only read superhero comics.”  I will read what entertain me the most, and what I feel are the best comics, period, and Batman is serialised comics storytelling at its finest, by any standard.  It had a slight wobble at the start of the year.  As much as I loved “Death of the Family”, the very last chapter didn’t quite stick the landing for me as much as I’d hoped.  Then we had a few more low-key issues that, while entertaining in their own right, didn’t live up to the title at its exhilterating best.  And, as I’ve mentioned before, I hated the concept of “Zero Year” when I first heard it.  But execution is everything, and with one of the finest creative pairings in comics today at the helm, I feel like a fool for ever doubting.  “Zero Year” has been utterly remarkable, with Greg Capullo crafting some of his best artwork yet; really pushing the boundaries and getting increasingly experimental with his layouts and innovations.  And Scott Snyder has skilfully found new wrinkles in the Batman mythos, and ways of making Batman’s well-worn early years feel fresh and dangerous.  One of the big secrets of this title’s continued to success is that, at its core, Snyder has made it a Bruce Wayne character study, with each major arc picking apart a different weakness, bringing out the vulnerability in a character all too often presented as invincible.  In this character-driven approach to its iconic hero, I think people are perhaps misguided in comparing “Zero Year” to Year One.  If anything, it’s Batman’s answer to Birthright.  For the third year running, Batman closes the year out as not only the biggest, but also the best superhero comic currently on the shelves.

 

4. SAGA

Woe betide poor Saga!  Last year was the closest-fought battle for the #1 spot I’ve ever had in trying to decide between the top two entries in my year-end list.  In the end, Jeff Lemire’s instant classic The Underwater Welder only just squeezed past Saga to top my list of the best comics of 2012.  But I took heart in thinking that Saga was in for the long haul, and was all but guaranteed to top this year’s list.  I had it pencilled in for the #1 spot from January.  But over the course of this year, sadly, I feel like the mighty Saga lost a step.  Only a step, mind, but even that slight faltering, combined with the massive impression made on me by the three remaining entries on the list, were enough to have that prized #1 slot slip from Saga’s fingers once more.  I think its downfall was that a lack of forward motion or a sense of urgency in the plot, particularly in this current third arc.  I do feel like the ending of this most recent issue signals that the proverbial shit is about to hit the fan and things are really going to start moving, but up until now it feels like much of the narrative progression has ground to a halt in favour of just hanging out with the characters and getting inside their heads a bit more.  This would be a bigger problem for most books, but thankfully Saga happens to have some of the best characters in comics, and so hanging out with them is a joy in of itself.  Because while I may bring up the concerns about pacing, I’m almost not bothered about the wider story of the intergalactic war going on, as I’m so engrossed with what Marco, Alana, Prince Robot IV, The Will, Lying Cat et al are up to, the interesting conversations about life and love they’re having.  I’ve actually got a sneaking suspicion that Brian K Vaughan is in fact trying to stealthily get us into an intimate family drama about what it means to be a parent and to be a child, about the families we’re both born into and that we make for ourselves,  and he just cleverly disguised it as a sweeping sci-fi/fantasy epic.  His cast are so fully realised that I already feel like I know them, and so it’s extra devastating when any of them die, or even placed in mortal danger.  And what can be said about Fiona Staples that hasn’t already been said?  In her tenure on this title, she has evolved into one of the premier artists in comics, and each issue is packed with more beautiful imagery and masterful characterisation.  This is true superstar work, and her work here has secured her spot on the comic artist A-list for years to come.  It’ll be interesting to see how Saga fares next year.  Will it go down the list if the pace continues to frustrate?  Or will it go up the rankings if the plot kicks into motion, or if I more fully embrace the narrative working on a whole other level than what I’d perhaps originally anticipated?  Perhaps next year it might even claim that elusive #1 spot?

 

3. THE WAKE

Surprisingly, Batman is not the highest-ranked Scott Snyder comic on my list.  No, that accolade goes to The Wake, his collaboration with artist Sean Murphy.  With American Vampire spending most of this year in hiatus, The Wake was left to fill the void in Snyder Vertigo output, and it instantly became the imprint’s standout title for the bulk of 2013.  Channelling the likes of Alien and The Thing, The Wake tells the story of marine biologist Lee Archer, taken down to a secret base at the bottom of the ocean with various other aquatic experts, where they quickly end up stranded and pitted against monstrous creatures from the black depths below.  I think there is something inherently alien and frightening about the deep, deep sea, and Sean Murphy’s visuals here prove utterly masterful at capturing that sense of isolation and claustrophobia.  I first became a fan of his on American Vampire: Survival of the Fittest, and what I’ve seen of Punk Rock Jesus is very impressive, but this is Murphy’s most accomplished work yet, true auteur stuff.  Snyder, meanwhile, managed to craft a narrative packed with tension, shock reversals and genuine frights, but his most audacious move has come at the halfway point, which we’ve now reached as the year comes to a close.  If The Wake had just been a 5-part miniseries about this horrific ordeal experienced by this ensemble of characters we come to care about in their deep sea base, it would have been considered a home run success as an intimate, tightly-contained thriller.  But Snyder is instead doing something much more ambitious, weaving vignettes of the distant past and the impending apocalyptic future through the narrative, and setting the stage for the second phase of the series, which promises to explode open the scope of the story into a tale of global dystopia in a catastrophic future where the siege of phase one has escalated into all-out war for the future of mankind.  It’s risky, as if it doesn’t work the whole thing could collapse.  But if he pulls it off, it’s going to be spectacular.  When it’s all said and done, I can see The Wake standing as a trademark comic for both Snyder and Murphy: when it’s all collected in a lovely hardback, that’s always going to be a hot seller.  And I can already see The Wake being a hit movie in a few years.  But that might be getting ahead of ourselves.  First, let’s see if issues #6-#10 can be executed as note-perfect as issues #1-#5 were.  With the talent involved, I’m confident!

 

2. EAST OF WEST

It’s strange seeing East of West ranked above Saga, considering back when East of West #1 came out I wrote I talked about the parallels between the two titles, and how I felt that Saga #1 did a better job of introducing its world.  In fact, I didn’t warm to East of West right away, originally dropping it after issue #2, so I remained vocal in my affirmation that Saga was the superior series.  But I continued to hear good things about East of West, so I ended up getting the first graphic novel around the time issue #6 came out to give it another try.  As it turns out, I was a fool.  A blind fool!  Something just clicked for me on repeat reading, and I fell in love.  Really, the comparisons with Saga only work on the barest of surface levels, as this is ultimately a different beast.  Saga is using the backdrop of a massive, epic intergalactic war to tell a very small, intimate, personal story about a family’s struggle for survival.  East of West is telling a massive, epic story that’s staggering in scale, so much so I feel like even now we’ve yet to taken in the full scope of its multi-pronged narrative.  It’s a story so big I don’t think I can do it justice in this paragraph, but basically it’s about an alternate history of America, one where the Civil War went a different way and ended up with America divided into 7 nations, and our story begins with the time drawing near where the Four Horsemen are destined to bring about the end of the world.  Only one of them, Death, has his own agenda, one that involves getting revenge on those who wronged him and reclaiming a lost love.  Each issue is an exercise in giving us a piece of the puzzle, unlocking another part of this sprawling world and hinting at how it might connect into the bigger picture.  You get a firm sense in reading that writer Jonathan Hickman has this whole universe intricately mapped out, and each chapter is just him methodically shining a spotlight on it one small chunk at a time.  And that first issue I originally found to be less accessible than Saga #1 has opened itself up as a rich exercise in world-building, and an immensely enjoyable comics package in itself, one I’ve revisited just about as much as Saga #1 by now.  The series as a whole has offered up great reread value for me, with my Volume 1 graphic novel having already got a good battering from how well-thumbed it’s become.  A good deal of that is because artist Nick Dragotta makes the comic an absolute pleasure to look at, each page a breathtaking work of art I want to hang on my wall.  It is Dragotta’s flair for design that has brought Hickman’s vast ensemble cast to life.  As last month’s 30 Characters Showcase feature on my blog demonstrated, East of West has just been a machine for pumping out memorable new characters this year, emerging from the ether fully-formed and instantly iconic.  A friend of mine described East of West to me as Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” as a comic.  I can see where he got that from, but I disagree.  For me, it’s Ennio Morricone’s “Man with a Harmonica” from Once Upon a Time in the West as a comic.  With East of West, Hickman and Dragotta have crafted a work of desolate beauty that stands as the best new comic of 2013, a year packed full of excellent new comics.  

 

1.  THE MANHATTAN PROJECTS

It’s a Jonathan Hickman double-header!  For me, when it comes to comics, 2013 was the year of The Manhattan Projects.  It was always a good comic: it placed very respectably at #6 last year, and almost as early as I’d decided on Saga as my likely #1 comic of 2013, I’d pencilled in The Manhattan Projects at #2.  But in 2013, it’s like a switch flipped and the series catapulted from “very good” to “mind-blowingly fantastic.”  Literally, right from the start of the year: it was January’s issue #8 specifically that I identify as the series truly hitting its stride and launching into a chain of A+ issues that hasn’t been broken since.  The issues released in 2012 were all about setting the stage, introducing us to an alternate vision of 1940s America where the gathering of famed scientists for the construction of the atomic bomb was in fact a cover for numerous other, more dangerous and outlandish experiments, and none of those beloved scientific minds of history were what they seemed.  By the end of last year, representatives of America, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (not to mention the odd alien planet and alternate dimension) had gathered under The Manhattan Projects and declared themselves beyond the jurisdiction of any one nation.  And so, with 2013, we launched into the consequences of this action, with Oppenheimer, Einstein, Feynman, Von Braun and co pitted against an Illuminati-type organisation of figureheads representing entrenched power and the old way of thinking, led by none other than an orgy-loving mason President Truman, and a reanimated A.I. President Roosevelt.  Yes, this happened.  January’s issue #8 did the unthinkable by making us root for and even grudgingly respect Von Braun, who up until this point (and after it, really) has been portrayed as an unrepentant Nazi bastard, as he battled against the odds against A.I. Roosevelt.  Then issue #9 turned the tables with a massacre montage of Godfather proportions, cementing the scientists’ of The Manhattan Projects’ status as rulers of the world.  It was also the issue that confirmed for me that, more than any book starring The Avengers, the Justice League or the X-Men, The Manhattan Projects is the best team book in comics.  After that, issue #10 saw guest artist Ryan Browne tell an absolutely bonkers story from within the fractured mind of Joseph Oppenheimer, where the absorbed consciousness of Robert Oppenheimer punched horses and witnessed Being John Malkovich type scenes of legions of Oppenheimers engaged in acts of depravity.  Issue #11 switched gears again with a poignant character study of Harry Daghlian, the most human of the entire ensemble cast despite being a flaming radioactive skull in a containment suit.  Issue #12 then flipped that around into an emotional gut punch that cast scenes from earlier in the series in a disturbing new light.  From there, it became clear that, if the first arc of the series was about the team being assembled, and the second arc was about it reaching the height of its power, the third arc was about the team becoming fragmented by threats from within. 

 

I can happily rattle off issue-by-issue accounts of what went on without needing to go back to my comics for reference, because I’ve read each issue so often as to know the chronology of what’s happened pretty much by heart.  Even without anything else, that alone would probably be enough to justify its #1 spot here.  More than any other comic I read this year, The Manhattan Projects held the most reread value for me, where I could repeatedly read the whole thing from the beginning, or jump into issues out of order, and continue to enjoy it and get more from it.  That to me says I got more enjoyment from these comics than any other on the list, and to put anything else at #1 would be patently dishonest on my part.  But thankfully, there’s so much more evidence to support the title’s claim at the top spot.  Every member of the creative team triumphs in their role.  Writer Jonathan Hickman’s profile is arguably larger than ever right now, coming off Infinity and with his acclaimed role as master architect of the Avengers line for Marvel, but The Manhattan Projects remains his most fun, accessible book.  And it’s so character-driven, too.  Each member of the cast is so well-realised that I find myself thinking about where their story will take them or absently doodling them the way I might do about Batman or Spider-Man, and it’s even made me more interested in reading up on their real world counterparts.  If East of West is a vast puzzle that is gradually pieced together, The Manhattan Projects is much more about instant gratification, throwing jaw-dropping concepts at us and packing crazy revelations into each issue, only to then detonate that status quo and launch us into something new and even more exciting, like Hickman’s daring himself to somehow manage to maintain this crazy pace.  We’ve seen new world orders be formed and dissolved, and central characters have been maimed or killed in the process.  It’s a thrill-ride, but doesn’t sacrifice the smarts in the process.  Artist Nick Pitarra has grown leaps and bounds over the course of the series, going from an intriguing emerging artist who drew influence from some of my favourites in the field to becoming a master storyteller in his own right.  Each issue of The Manhattan Projects is a dense read that I take my time on, and a large part of that is that Pitarra crams into each page visual detail that enriches the narrative and the characterisation, in keeping with the spirit of the script but quite independent of it.  I savour and dwell on each page of a given issue, marvelling at the construction and becoming immersed in this twisted world Pitarra presents to us.  I mentioned that I like doodling characters from the comic, and I end up doodling them in a crude approximation of Pitarra’s style, because that’s how those characters look to me… they seem more real in his style than they do as real physical humans in old photographs.  And his perfect partner is colorist extraordinaire Jordie Bellaire, who textures Pitarra’s figures just right to give them a cartoonish, spritely weight on the page.  Her influence on the aesthetic of the book has become so indelible that she ended up recoloring the early issues she didn’t draw for the trades, because now those early issues just don’t look right without her.  Even letterer Rus Wooton was given opportunity to showcase his deft work this year, with one extended sequence in issue #12 really requiring him to take centre stage and shoulder the weight of the narrative.  These guys really have come together to form what is for me a comics dream team. 

 

I find it galling that The Manhattan Projects doesn’t get more recognition.  Of course, those who read it love it, and sing its praises.  But I sometimes see major comics news sites not bother to review new issues on the week of its release, and it’s been annoyingly absent on some of the year-end lists I’ve seen.  This seemed to be the case with previous list-topper Scalped as well, though its status seems to have grown some since its conclusion.  But it’s there loss, as month in month out, I get more enjoyment from The Manhattan Projects than anything on the shelves.  On an issue-by-issue basis, it’s a joy.  As an extended serialised narrative, it’s a triumph.  And there’s so much I’m itching to see from the series in 2014.  First on the wishlist: what is the secret origin of Ustinov, and how did he end up as a floating brain in a jar?  Will the series maintain its momentum and hold onto the top spot next year?  Who knows?  If this list has shown anything, it’s that there are no sure things, and that there are always new titles clamouring to grab readers’ attention.  But for now, what I can say for certain is that no comic made me love comics in 2013 more than The Manhattan Projects.

So, to wrap things up, here’s an overview of the annual standings, and what comics have made the #1 spot each year I’ve ran this feature on my blog….

2010: Scalped

2011: Scalped

2012: The Underwater Welder

2013: The Manhattan Projects

 

Thanks for reading, everyone.  Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

30 Character Showcase #8: The Ranger

This month marks the arrival of the 5th annual 30 Characters Challenge, the excellent event run by ComixTribe publisher Tyler James, where participants have to create a new comic character for every day of the whole month of November.  I participated in the first year, successfully completing the challenge with 30 badly-drawn characters of my own, but haven’t done it again since.  I won’t be participating this year either, but thought it might be fun to spend each day writing up a little showcase to celebrate a new comic character who showed up in comic pages for the first time this year.  Comics are one of the most highly inventive mediums around, and this has been a particularly strong year for pumping out exciting new stories packed with compelling new characters.  Let’s take a look at some of my favourites.

8. THE RANGER

Created by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

It says something about the impression this character left on me that he’s only appeared once, in a single issue of East of West, and that alone was enough to merit his spot on this list.  East of West #6 is a strange issue, in that after we’ve wrapped up the first arc (or at least the first graphic novel’s worth of content) of the series, we get a largely one-in-done issue that doesn’t feature our main character at all, instead beginning with a look at some of the supporting players, before transitioning into the story of a completely new character.

Issue #6 gives us the story of The Ranger.  In what appears to be a recurring theme in the world of East of West, his story is one of heartbreak and loss.  After his wife is murdered by a blatantly guilty culprit in the most open-and-shut case known to man, a corrupt judge finds the defendant not guilty due to a hefty bribe.  And this is one push too far for our Ranger, who snaps, kills the judge and the courtroom attendants, and executes his wife’s killer himself.  This kickstarts an uprising, and a new, relentless form of justice that rises through The Republic of Texas, brutal in its extremes but highly effective.  In a relatively small amount of pages, Hickman crafts a character that plays like a cross between Judge Dredd and The Punisher, and Dragotta gifts him with one of the most distinctive designs of anyone in the East of West universe.  He even has an adorable little robot dog I never noticed on my first reading!  The way The Ranger is realised not only brings him to life, but helps to flesh out the whole mythos of The Republic of Texas as a whole.

Right now, The Ranger exists in isolation from most of the characters in the larger narrative.  But as issue #6 came to end he’d found a thread that could draw him into the fray, and I can’t wait to see how this exciting new presence collides with more established figures in the story.

Now, I could probably go on for another week just gushing about East of West characters, but we need to show some love to other comics creations of 2013.  So, this marks the end of East of West week.  Starting tomorrow, we move onto different comics, and more amazing new characters!

30 Character Showcase #7: Chamberlain

This month marks the arrival of the 5th annual 30 Characters Challenge, the excellent event run by ComixTribe publisher Tyler James, where participants have to create a new comic character for every day of the whole month of November.  I participated in the first year, successfully completing the challenge with 30 badly-drawn characters of my own, but haven’t done it again since.  I won’t be participating this year either, but thought it might be fun to spend each day writing up a little showcase to celebrate a new comic character who showed up in comic pages for the first time this year.  Comics are one of the most highly inventive mediums around, and this has been a particularly strong year for pumping out exciting new stories packed with compelling new characters.  Let’s take a look at some of my favourites.

7. CHAMBERLAIN

Created by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

Thus far in my extended examination of East of West and its thrilling new character creations, I feel like I’ve largely been engaging in an extended celebration of Nick Dragotta.  Death, the Three Horsemen, Xiaolian, I feel these characters are triumphs of design.  Dragotta has crafted them in a way that they feel instantly iconic, and placed them in the kind of dynamic, dramatic tableaus that linger in the memory and make their respective presences reverberate off the page.  For all his excellent dialogue Hickman has gifted him, when I think of Death in East of West, I think in images: walking away from the headless corpse of the President, his back to us, calmly replacing his hat, at the end of issue #1, or riding on his mechanical horse cannon, a pack of wolves walking beside him and a murder of crows flying over him, at the conclusion of issue #5.  But Chamberlain is a creation who is almost entirely a triumph of Hickman’s writing.  Save for some truly spectacular facial plumage in the form of the pointiest beard known to man, Dragotta doesn’t have much to work with in terms of his visuals: he’s a regular old man in a suit who spends most of his time sitting down, smoking cigars.  But what he does do is talk, and Hickman has him talk beautifully.

In the 7 nations that America is divided into, Andrew Archibald Chamberlain is the Chief of Staff of the Black Tower, opposite number to the White Tower, marking him out as head of the Confederacy.  We’re first introduced to him amidst all the other leaders making their respective greetings to the incoming President in issue #2, and he initially seems like one of the least interesting.  But it’s him we linger with as he departs the meeting and heads back to the Black Tower, and it’s there he meets with Death.  Given how Death’s visit to the White Tower in the previous issue went, I think we could be forgiven in assuming that this scene will result in Chamberlain meeting a similar fate to his opposite number.  But instead, Chamberlain talks his way out of it.

In this verbal duel with Death, Chamberlain reveals a greater complexity than what was initially apparent.  He may not the ardent believer in The Message – the prophecy each leader is charged to help bring to pass – that he publicly claims to be, enjoying the fleeting pleasures of the power afforded to him to desire the end of the world anytime soon.  He’s a snake, utterly self-serving, but in that selfishness his goals may align more closely with Death than with his fellow advocates of The Message.  I say “may” a lot here, as Chamberlain has already revealed himself to be such an effortless liar that we don’t know exactly what kind of con he’s pulling and who he’s lying to.  The one thing that’s clear is that his only true ally is himself, as indicated by him throwing apparent kindred spirit Bel Solomon under the bus the moment their partnership threatens to inconvenience him in issue #6.

It’s hard to determine whether we can really call the magnificent bastard likeable or not, but it’s undeniable he has a sense of charisma to him.  His extended monologues have a certain philosophical, pragmatic charm to them, which at times seems to almost win over even those intent on killing him.  So, what is Chamberlain destined to be in the grand scheme of things: deeply flawed good guy or oddly endearing bad guy?  A bit of both?  Like so many things in East of West, that is, for now, a mystery.

30 Character Showcase #6: Xiaolian

This month marks the arrival of the 5th annual 30 Characters Challenge, the excellent event run by ComixTribe publisher Tyler James, where participants have to create a new comic character for every day of the whole month of November.  I participated in the first year, successfully completing the challenge with 30 badly-drawn characters of my own, but haven’t done it again since.  I won’t be participating this year either, but thought it might be fun to spend each day writing up a little showcase to celebrate a new comic character who showed up in comic pages for the first time this year.  Comics are one of the most highly inventive mediums around, and this has been a particularly strong year for pumping out exciting new stories packed with compelling new characters.  Let’s take a look at some of my favourites.

6. XIAOLIAN

Created by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

Here’s a case of a character that took me by surprise.  With the previous entries of this special week-long look at East of West – Death and the other Three Horsemen – they made an immediate impact as striking, powerful characters.  With the way Xiaolian was first introduced in issue #2 of the series – in shackles, as seen above, with a surprise reveal that Death had a wife and though he thought her dead she was in fact alive – there might have been concern that she would not be a character of agency.  The “damsel in distress” is of course a common trope in fiction, and so when a female character is first introduced like this, I feared that she would just be a princess in a castle, a largely abstract object whose rescue would become Death’s long-term goal fuelling him throughout the series.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Far from being a long-term goal, her freedom is secured within another 2 issues.  And rather than waiting passively to be saved, she plays an active role in securing that freedom: it is her, not Death, who slays her father and sister that rule the House of Mao and have kept her prisoner for 10 years.  Xiaolian is revealed to be a strong, nuanced character with a compelling backstory in her own right.  She is revealed to be a formidable warrior, someone convincingly capable of taming the heart of Death.  And while the narrative of Death’s betrayal is almost entirely a mystery at this stage, we’ve had a more substantial look at the agonising cost inflicted on Xiaolian in this time, witnessing her being betrayed by her sister, fighting but inevitably falling to the combined might of the Three Horsemen, losing her hands, and having to watch on helplessly as her infant son is seemingly killed.  But this is no “woman in refrigerator” scenario where a female character suffers solely to motivate a male character.  It motivates Xiaolian, and we can see how it has changed her, and we witness her begin to enact a revenge of her own.

Xiaolian benefits from a cracking design by Nick Dragotta, too.  In the divided alternate America of East of West, thus far I’d argue it’s the Chinese-populated People’s Republic that Dragotta has brought to life most evocatively, with reimagined American landmarks and the mecha-styled outfits of the armies.  Xiaolian benefits from this aesthetic, while also emerging as distinctive in her own right, thanks largely to her cybernetic prosthetic hands.

In our most recent sighting of Xiaolian, her circumstances have changed substantially, with her repositioned as Premiere of the House of Mao and of the PRA, leader of a vast army, and primed to go to war with the other 6 nations of America.  She’s arguably the most powerful mortal player in the grand East of West tapestry, and seen as a formidable threat by many other characters in the ensemble.  Any worries about her being a background player were utterly unfounded, as she is now one of the prime movers-and-shakers of the whole narrative.  But what really earns her place on this list is that she is, in my opinion, the most fully-realised character in East of West, arguably the heart of the whole story.

30 Characters Showcase #5: The Three Horsemen

This month marks the arrival of the 5th annual 30 Characters Challenge, the excellent event run by ComixTribe publisher Tyler James, where participants have to create a new comic character for every day of the whole month of November.  I participated in the first year, successfully completing the challenge with 30 badly-drawn characters of my own, but haven’t done it again since.  I won’t be participating this year either, but thought it might be fun to spend each day writing up a little showcase to celebrate a new comic character who showed up in comic pages for the first time this year.  Comics are one of the most highly inventive mediums around, and this has been a particularly strong year for pumping out exciting new stories packed with compelling new characters.  Let’s take a look at some of my favourites.

5. THE THREE HORSEMEN

Created by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

Okay, I don’t know if this entry is kinda cheating, since it’s three characters for the price of one.  But really, these three come as a set – War is arguably the most prominent of the trio, but I can’t recall any scene with one where the other two don’t also show up – so I’m including them all as a single entry.  In this week’s extended showcase of the excellent new characters introduced to the world in East of West, I began yesterday with Death, and so it feels natural to now pass on the spotlight to the remainder of the Four Horsemen: War, Conquest and Famine.

East of West #1 begins with them being reborn in the form of children, and we quickly learn that their return has dire implications for the world.  It’s funny, after introducing us to an utterly adorable cast of kiddies in FF, Jonathan Hickman can turn around and give us the most utterly vile, horrific children seen since King Joffrey.  In a world filled with moral murk and dangerous people, these little terrors – not even yet matured into their adult form and their full power – are already undoubtedly the Big Bads, casually massacring enough people to leave literal hills of corpses in their wake in issue #1, wiping out half the US Government in issue #2.  Where they go, bad things happen, and their presence brings with it an involuntary sphincter-tightening of the reader bracing themselves for the worst.  And their badness is hardly new, with flashbacks hinting at betrayal and maiming of our protagonists in times gone by while not yet going into the specifics: cryptic snippets of a terrible past reminiscent of Once Upon a Time in the West, with Hickman and Dragotta very much casting War, Conquest and Famine in the Henry Fonda role.

I also like how, despite how despicable and intimidating the Three Horsemen are, Hickman finds a way to make them blackly funny.  I’ve probably laughed at least once in just about every appearance they’ve made.  Or maybe that’s just because I’m a sick puppy.

Going forward, I’m keen to learn more about these villains individually.  So far, we know that War is the apparent ringleader, that he relished being a woman for centuries until this recent rebirth has left him unwillingly gender-switched into a boy.  We know that Famine is very visually striking, a skeletally gaunt woman with weapons that resemble a pair of whips.  Conquest is the least distinct thus far, though I noted that he seems more visually striking in his briefly-glimpsed adult form from the flashbacks.  But I see that there’s a spotlight issue on the Horsemen coming up, so hopefully that will give us a fuller portrait.

30 Character Showcase #4: Death

This month marks the arrival of the 5th annual 30 Characters Challenge, the excellent event run by ComixTribe publisher Tyler James, where participants have to create a new comic character for every day of the whole month of November.  I participated in the first year, successfully completing the challenge with 30 badly-drawn characters of my own, but haven’t done it again since.  I won’t be participating this year either, but thought it might be fun to spend each day writing up a little showcase to celebrate a new comic character who showed up in comic pages for the first time this year.  Comics are one of the most highly inventive mediums around, and this has been a particularly strong year for pumping out exciting new stories packed with compelling new characters.  Let’s take a look at some of my favourites.

4. DEATH

Created by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta

From Monday-Friday this week the 30 Character Showcase will take an extended look at some of the many excellent new characters introduced in East of West, the epic new Image sci-fi/Western mashup from writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Nick Dragotta.  It is arguably the best comic series to launch this year, and has quickly established itself as one of the very best titles on shelves today.  In my opinion, a big part of that is down to the characters, with Hickman and Dragotta populating their alternate-history America with a wealth of wonderfully-realised characters, with engaging personalities and distinctive designs.

And at the centre of it all, perhaps the most engaging and distinctive of all the figures within the ever-growing East of West ensemble: Death.  6 issues in, and there’s still a great deal we don’t know about how this incarnation of the Four Horsemen fits into the world around them, how exactly Death came to be divided from his brethren, and why they portrayed him.  Or why he seems to have changed colour from black-skinned to a solid white – a veritable “pale rider” – since that betrayal.  But though a lot of mystery surrounds death, he is nonetheless a commanding presence cutting a bloody path through the world of East of West in his quest for vengeance on those who wronged him.

Right from his first appearance, he makes his impression, entering the saloon with an instantly-iconic first line of “And so I have arrived,” and from there quickly introducing his now-familiar Highly Intimidating Monologue.  Hickman gives Death a way with words that utterly hammers home his gravitas and the idea that he’s the scariest man in any room he walks into.  And while his followers Crow and Wolf aren’t featured individually in this 30 Character Showcase, they work incredibly well as an extension of Death’s presence on their page, their sparse, iconic designs suitably complimenting Death’s.

In the issue where he first appears, Death murders the President of the United States, which is a hell of a way to make a first impression.  But from there, he just keeps revealing more and more and becoming all the more compelling.  Take, for example, his means of transportation, as seen above.  In its first appearance, it appears to be a futuristic space-pod, something which presumably runs like a high-tech floating motorcycle.  But once he sits on it, it grows legs and turns into a kind of robo-horse.  That alone would make it incredibly badass.  But then in issue #4 it is also revealed that it has a massive cannon capable of wiping out whole batallions of opponents with each blast.  Issue #4 in general is a simply epic showcase for Death’s power and badass credentials.  But in issue #5 we get a glimpse of a different, more vulnerable side to our stone-cold protagonist, as his tragic love story with Xiaolian is further explored.  It’s an added dimension that gives him more nuance than just being an implacable force of nature.

There’s so much more to discover about Death and his shady history.  Chief on the list is how someone so seemingly unstoppable was laid so low.  And you can be damn sure I’ll be avidly reading each upcoming issue of East of West to find out more, and to see just what he’s going to do next!