by Kenny Cooper
Last year, I made my first Best of the Year list. There are a few repeats from last year but a few new additions as well. I tried to get a wide spectrum of comics to place on the list and I think when you have land sharks and Daniel Clowes on the same list, you’ve accomplished that. Enjoy.
1) Baltimore: The Plague Ships (Dark Horse)
Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy and BPRD, rarely ever leaves that circle of characters to do something else. This year, he came out with this book which is based on the prose novel character Lord Henry Baltimore that Mignola and Christopher Golden. Years after the events of The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, Baltimore is missing hair and a leg while obsessively hunting Nosferatu-style vampires in the early 20th century. Artist Ben Stenbeck manages to follow Mignola’s style of art rather well, making moody and black action bleed from the pages. Mignola is a master of the gothic horror-adventure comic and The Plague Ships are no different.
2) “Batman Must Die!” from Batman & Robin (DC Comics)
Last year, I lumped the best of the Batman books together into one slot on the list. One of those books, Batman & Robin, makes a return this year. Since the book’s start, Grant Morrison has been proving that, even though the Batman mythos might have over a thousand stories to its name, it has the capacity to be fresh. “Batman Must Die!” is the culmination of the plot points Morrison’s been planting since before R.I.P. Frazier Irving who can be misused as an artist from time to time (see Iron Man: The Inevitable), Grant really understands how to work his dark and gothic sensibilities for a wonderfully creepy and exciting finale to this chapter in Batman’s history. Stay tuned as Grant shakes up the status quo yet again this next year with Batman, Inc.
3) “The Black Ring” from Action Comics (DC Comics)
Fresh off a stint at Marvel Comics, former Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell has been given the reins to one of DC’s oldest and most revered books, Action Comics. Since its inception, the book has been focused on Superman. However, these last couple years have seen the book handed to some of the peripheral characters in the Superman mythos. With Cornell and long time Superman artist Pete Woods on the book, the focus has shifted to Superman’s primary enemy Lex Luthor. Spiraling out of a plot piece in Blackest Night, Luthor has tasted cosmic power and he wants more. With Superman off walking the earth, Luthor is committed to finding a Black Lantern power ring that will grant him what he wants. The book has been a great character study of what makes Luthor tick and has developed a fun if a bit wacky sense of pulp action. If “combat spoon” and “mad scientist gorilla” sounds good to you, this is your book.
4) Daytripper (DC/Vertigo)
Brothers Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon are both writers and artists and it’s more than likely that both are weaving in and out of the writer/artists hats in this book. Daytripper is unlike virtually anything else out today in the comic world. The book is about the lives of Bras de Oliva Domingos who lives out his life in each issue only to die at the end of each issue. Next issue, he’s alive and well again only to live out another, radically path to a radically different death. The formula is a unique and interesting format to explore the themes of life and death in comic form. It gives each issue the capability of high emotion and sucking the reader into another life of this man Bras.
5) Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965 (DC Comics)
The creator of this book, Joe Kubert, is quite possibly the most revered and longest-running comic book artist alive today. He started drawing comics when he was eleven years old and has been a constant presence in the comic world since. He runs the Kubert School of Artists and his sons Adam and Andy are highly respected artists in their own right (Andy’s work on Batman with Neil Gaiman made it on my list last year.) His art was featured in some the early runs of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Hawkman. The man is 84 years old and he’s still capable of fantastic artwork such as last year’s Wednesday Comics feature “Sgt. Rock” and this year’s Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1965. Kubert has always favored the war story and this one is obviously no exception. The story involves a group of American soldiers advising the South Vietnamese before the official involvement of the United States. Their base, however, is attacked by the enemy and the Americans are forced to defend themselves. Kubert’s gritty and stripped-bare pencils really give this story the dirtiness and intensity that drags the reader into this tale loosely based on a true story.
6) Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows (IDW)
In early 2008, writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez debuted the supernatural horror series, Locke & Key. This series stars the Locke family who have moved into an old family residence named Keyhouse in Lovecraft, Massachusetts following a horrifically traumatic experience. However, the house they’ve moved into is filled with magical keys, a door that takes one into the afterlife, and a supernatural being in a well (at first) with sinister intentions. This year came the third installment, Crown of Shadows as the being (calling himself “Dodge”) looks to unlock the mysterious Black Room. Rodriguez’s art style manages to be distinctive and crisp with a great sense of pace and timing. Hill’s characters are real and truly damaged with all the traumas that have hit the family. The series has managed to corner the market in truly scary horror comics.
7) Parker: The Outfit (IDW)
A repeater from last year, Darwyn Cooke’s sequel to The Hunter has managed to hit amongst the best of the year again. Adapted from Donald Westlake’s Parker series, Cooke combined the books The Man With The Getaway Face and The Outfit into a single outing. With a new face, Parker looks to get back to taking scores but his scrape with the Outfit has made him a marked man whether he now looks suspiciously like Lee Marvin or not. It’s up to Parker to take the fight to the Outfit and its mysterious leader, Bronson. Darwyn Cooke’s slick and stylized pencils never look better than in black, blue, and white in a 60′s caper setting. Nobody draws a sleek 60′s car quite like Darwyn Cooke.
8) Sea Bear and Grizzly Shark (Image Comics)
A common complaint about the state of comics today is that everything is dark and serious and nothing is light and fun anymore. Those people were then probably happy to see this book come out. The premise is pretty much what you would expect: a story in which a bear is hunting people in the sea and a story where a shark runs amok in a forest, eating random tourists. There’s absolutely no rhyme or reason to why any of this is happening. The book is just pure, intentional nonsense and yet it’s hard not to enjoy it. The book makes absolutely no bones about how utterly silly the whole thing is and just comically absurd from start to finish. Jason Howard (who handles the Sea Bear) and Ryan Ottley (who handles the Grizzly Shark) show great comedic timing in this book. At a time where comics are trying to gain some of its light-heartedness, a lot of books try and sadly fail (such as Hit-Monkey or Galacta, Daughter of Galactus). This book managed to give the comic world beautifully drawn, hilariously brutal bear attacks on the ocean and shark attacks on land and God bless it for it.
9) Strange Tales II (Marvel Comics)
Last year, Marvel tried a bit of an experiment. It collected some of the biggest names in indie comics and gave them a three-issue anthology mini-series to create short stories with their famous characters. Some of it was funny, some of it was serious, but it was all nothing you would have seen in the mainstream books. This year, Marvel released another mini-series with indie artists like Rafael Grampa, Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez, and Jeffery Brown. Each story brings its own unique flavor to the series, from Kate Beaton’s hilarious take of Kraven the Hunter going to the prom to Gene Luen Yang’s oddly touching take on Frog-Man. There’s assuredly something for everybody in this mini.
10) Wilson (Pantheon Books)
A celebrated fixture on the comics scene for years, Daniel Clowes came out with his first original graphic novel (as in not first serialized in his book Eightball) and his first graphic novel since 2005′s Ice Haven (which made my best of the decade list last year). Wilson holds much of the style Clowes has developed in his other stories like Ice Haven. Rather than a straight linear story, Clowes tells his tale in short, one page stories that each have their enclosed story yet move the overall story along. Like much of his other stuff, Clowes doesn’t a single art style but employs 5 or 6, ranging Charles Schultz-like simplistic to Basil Wolverton-style grotesque to Hernandez-esque realist. Like all Clowes stories, Wilson ultimately revolves around the flaws of humanity and the ugly side of people as the title character chaffs and squirms awakwardly through life. Like just about all Clowes outings, it’s a brutally honest look at the imperfections we all have.
Photo Sources:
http://www.ifanboy.com/content/articles/The_Best_of_the_Week_in_Panels_-_08_04_2010
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/3/36139/1307862-batman_and_robin_013_020_super.jpg
http://www.thefanboyseo.com/comics/action-comics-theres-something-wrong-with-lex-luthor
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2009/12/08/ba-and-moon-deliver-in-vertigos-daytripper/
http://indiepulp.blogspot.com/2010/06/review-dong-xoai-vietnam-1965.html
http://io9.com/5399963/locke–key-crown-of-shadows-1-exclusive-preview
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/09/11/first-preview-of-darwyn-cookes-parker-the-outfit-surfaces-on/
http://www.ifanboy.com/content/articles/The_Best_of_the_Week_in_Panels_-_06_23_2010
http://techland.time.com/2010/10/14/the-comic-book-club-strange-tales-ii-and-knight-squire/
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/05/do-you-need-to-like-a-character-to-like-the-comic-hes-in/
