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Every weekday of December (except for December 25, that is), Phillyist will be counting down to 2008 with our highlights from the past year and our predictions for the next. If you have a list you'd like to submit, let us know!
As I've mentioned once or twice before on Phillyist, this year I went from being distantly fascinated by comic books to being a seriously obsessive weekly comic book collector. So here are my favorite new or continuing books released this year, in order from least good to most good.
10. Hellboy - Mike Mignola's giant red demon with a hand made of stone and a heart made of gold is easily one of the greatest comic book creations of the past 40 years. If you thought the movie was good, definitely give the books a try; they're way, WAY better. Hellboy was still going strong this year with a brand new miniseries in which he fought his way through the decaying myths of Russian folklore. That story is complete, but we've been promised another one next year, and I can't wait.
9. Batman - Another great old character who's still going strong is the Dark Knight Detective himself, thanks to the fact that DC has placed his self-titled book into the capable hands of Mr. Grant Morrison. Morrison forced poor Bats to deal with all kinds of terrible things this year, like evil pseudo Batmen, and the revelation that he'd had a son by the daughter of his nemesis - and not just any son, either: a wild, vicious, arrogant, amoral boy little like Batman's adopted child, Robin. Then he faced an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, and the return from death of that nemesis mentioned earlier. And through it all he remained the goddamn Batman - a super-smart badass who can hold his own against adversaries with ten times his strength, thanks to cunning, talent, and those wonderful toys.
8. Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite - I didn't expect much of a comic written by a guy who's best known for being in a rock band (Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance), but this book about a group of strange children adopted by an old man and trained to be a mighty super team, is funny, weird in the best way, and all around a really brilliant piece of entertainment. It's the saga of an exceedingly dysfunctional family, but with the drama writ large, and accompanied by robot fights, talking monkeys, and the oncoming threat of the end of the world.
7. Nova - Marvel's sci-fi space opera is so fun it's almost criminal. The story is that there used to be a group of folks called the Nova Corps who went around using their super powers to save various galactic civilizations from evil and disaster - sort of like DC's Green Lantern Corps. But due to a horrible catastrophe, the entire Corps was killed except one man, a human who now holds within him all the power of the Corps, as well as all the knowledge of an entire alien world, in the form of a computer in his head called the Worldmind. He tries to deal with the pressures of being pretty much the only intergalactic policeman in the entire universe while fighting off evil alien viruses and space zombies.
6. All-Star Superman - Grant Morrison is writing the best title on the shelves for each of DC's two main superstars. His Superman book, because it's an All-Star title, is blessedly free to pursue its own stories, separate from those of the main DC Universe and continuity (which is good, because the main DC Universe doesn't make any frigging sense anymore). So Morrison made this book a love letter to the Silver Age of Superman, when anything could happen, and pretty much everything did. All the major characters are here - Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen - but Morrison, with the help of artist Frank Quitely, manages to keep them all seeming fresh and new while also successfully activating a powerful nostalgia response in his readers. The book is warm and funny, but also serious enough to be moving and to have real substance. A true work of art.
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 - Joss Whedon's brilliant television show about the young woman who had to deal with being humanity's only hope against vampires and demons on top of the normal pressures of high school, college, and so forth, ended after seven seasons. Even fans who thought that last season was crap were sad to see the show go - and thus joyful to see Whedon's concept for the eighth season resurrected in the form of a bestselling comic for Dark Horse actually written by Joss himself. Well, the first bunch of issues were written by Whedon, anyway; since then, fellow TV and comic author Brian K. Vaughan has taken over for a short stretch. Both authors have somehow managed to distill everything that was great about the show - the clever metaphorical storylines; the snappy, hilarious dialogue; the utterly engaging soap opera plotlines; the brutal action - and translate it directly into the comic book medium. It's exactly like reading a season of the TV show. A really great season of the TV show. Long live the Buffyverse!
4. Omega The Unknown - Much beloved award-winning fiction author Jonathan Lethem comes to the comic book medium with this title, a reimagining of a long-forgotten old comic about a mute alien superhero who has a strange connection with a young Earth boy. You might be afraid that a writer of traditional fiction would pack the panels full of words and forget that there are pictures there to tell the story, too, but Lethem knows when to shut up - something that's even more important to learn when your main character can't talk. And when he does toss some words in a bubble, they're far more intelligent, erudite, and carefully chosen than your average chunk of comic book dialogue. Lethem is writing a superhero comic here with plenty of the robot-fighting action you'd expect from such a thing, but surrounded by a complex, subtle mystery story about a young boy coming of age and learning what it means to be human.
3. The Order - Up-and-coming comic author Matt Fraction has been given the task of writing the story of California's own brand new, government-regulated superhero team. The members are picked from a pool of people who are all heroes of one kind or another in real life, and who are then given superpowers of their choice and sent out to fight crime together. Fraction has packed the book with exciting, crazy super fights against mistakenly reactivated Russian Cold War-era superweapons (including a bear!), and zobos (that's zombie hobos to you), but he also uses each issue to psychoanalyze one of his characters and delve deep into that person's motivations and past. And he looks at what it would really mean to try to handle the public relations and everyday politics for a superstar superteam in the age of the internet. It's hilarious, brilliant, exciting, and insightful.
2. Nextwave - Warren Ellis is arguably the greatest living comic author, and this is one of my favorite series by him. It's a brutal parody of superhero books - and of the Marvel Universe in general - that revels in everything that is great and ridiculous about superhero books. It's sick, twisted, laugh-out-loud funny, and pure fun from beginning to end. Sadly, the last issue was released early this year - but hey, that just makes it easier to collect.
1. World War Hulk - Giant crossover stories are de rigueur in the comic book world these days, and they're usually pretty disappointing (*cough* Countdown *cough*), but Marvel's World War Hulk was something else. Sure, a lot of the subplots and ancillary material were pretty bad, but the main story was thought-provoking, action-packed, beautiful, and deeply moving. It goes like this: a while back a small group of the world's big superheroes, having finally decided that the Hulk was just too dangerous to be allowed to live on the Earth any longer, shot him into space. The Hulk built a new life on the alien planet he landed on, only to have it almost entirely erased when the ship his "friends" had sent him there in exploded, killing his pregnant wife. Angrier than he's ever been (and thus more powerful than he's ever been), the Hulk came back to Earth seeking vengeance. That's the premise, but it isn't all giant superfights after that; this story also examines what it means to be a hero, the plight of the average person when a war or natural disaster destroys his/her home (echoes of Katrina and 9/11 - especially given that the home in question is New York), or when his/her home is invaded and occupied by an outside force (echoes of Iraq). It talks about concepts like sacrifice, the misuse of power, self-destructive cycles of revenge, knowing and embracing your true self. All while big guys are hitting each other as hard as they can. You'll cheer, you'll laugh, and you might even shed a tear at the end. Pretty impressive for a pile of funny books.
Image Credit: Flickr user buschap
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I cannot BELIEVE you put Hellboy at number 10. I feel hurt and lonely.
Hey, I love Hellboy! He made it on the top ten! It's just that his miniseries this year wasn't as great as miniseries of previous years.