Best Single Issue (tie): Fantastic Four #561; Amazing Spider-Girl #16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 27

It’s been the paradox of Mark Millar that the mastermind of some of the most important creator-owned comics of the past several years (Wanted, Chosen) in this one reserved his energy and vision for his work-for-hire output (FF, 1985) while his indie stuff (Kick-Ass, War Heroes) was somewhat careful and predictable (as self-admitted movie pitches their sketchiness is understandable, but not altogether welcome). FF #561 was practically the perfect comic book, reminding everyone who needs it (and we all do) why monthly bursts of serial entertainment can be worth it in an age of limited runs and packageable novel-lengths. Millar & Hitch have cracked the Lee/Kirby code of how to lay on broad planes of widescreen action and conflict while moving a story forward and also layering weight and depth to their cast’s characterization. In this issue, the penultimate chapter of the “Death of the Invisible Woman” arc, it all came together, with unforced revelations, emotional consequence and classic spectacle both perfectly enclosed and intriguingly connected to wider tapestries.

Millar & Hitch’s promised 16 issues is, by current standards, a recommitment to longevity in a short-attention-span medium, and Millar has been explicit about the book’s aims to bring back an era of goodwill from the grim & gritty precipice. The creative team on Spider-Girl, with an upbeat mythos approaching its 130th consecutive issue, wrote the book on both. A generation behind Millar and Hitch and rooted in the classic era those guys are reinventing, DeFalco, Frenz and Buscema are masters of breakneck action and long-haul character development. Much is said, both pro and con, about the modern, manga-influenced trend of “decompressed narrative,” in which it takes eight issues to tell 20 pages’ worth of story; not enough acknowledgement is given to the virtues of cumulative narrative, and Spider-Girl builds great emotional impact over time while delivering highpoints regularly. The ones listed above were just a few examples, but they’re frequent; there’s something to be said for slow or solitary issues that don’t keep you wondering what’s going on, but Spider-Girl is the model of the ongoing yarn that makes you want to know more.

Less Is More Award: “The Resistance” by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk

Tucked into the back eight pages of Marvel’s midyear Who Do You Trust? one-shot was a story more satisfying by surprise than many eight-issue arcs are with a year of advance buzz (not to name any names). With roots in Marvel’s halcyon 1950s and a number of mythic types, the Agents of Atlas strip, of which this was then the most recent installment, entwines effortlessly yet imaginatively with modern event epics. Parker and Kirk manage both fairytale magic and pulp pulse-racing with their band of spaceman, robot, goddess, mermaid, gorilla and secret agent, and this tensely plotted, inventively executed short story about the team’s under-the-radar operations in the company-wide Skrull war had the same strange mix of dreamlike anxiety and folkloric charm that always makes the Atlas strip like nothing else being published. It showed that the Agents will fare just as well when their first-ever ongoing series (now drawn by Carlo Pagulayan) starts in February as part of the next crossover event – and with the fine track record of Parker and Kirk’s earlier mini and special appearances for them, you can be sure that more will be more too.

Family Reading Award (tie): Justice League #22 and Secret Invasion: Requiem one-shot

Our first winner finds the temporarily disembodied android Red Tornado conversing with his live-in human lover Kathy, visiting him while he’s hologramically stored in the Hall of Justice’s computer matrix:

Kathy: I haven’t said anything, but I’ve noticed. …Even before Batman had to store your program in the JLA computer, you were cold as ice.

Tornado: One night I watched Roy and Kendra having sex.

Kathy: All the satellite feeds in this place and you don’t get porn?

Tornado: I watched them sharing their feelings, and I thought about what they have that I never will, no matter how many new bodies I get.

Kathy: What are you talking about? I love you. I make love with you.

Tornado: I’m not just talking about sex. …I’m talking about family.

Kathy: I’m your family….

Tornado: We have an arrangement. But I’d like to make that arrangement more traditional. Will you marry me?

We’ve come a long way from the days when Steve Gerber could be threatened with termination for keeping in a line about the place where Howard the Duck “was first laid.” But seriously, one of the many miracles writer Dwayne McDuffie is working with this book is seeing where the portrayal of traditional superheroes as full humans with grown-up sexuality intact, and neither distorted into the fanboy softcore or chick-flick soap-opera we’re used to seeing, could lead. It’s making him the anti-Ennis, with non-pathological capes for a non-Puritanical era, and the fact that as a kid I never would’ve dreamed I’d see a Comics Code seal on a book like this, but it’s still there, shows that they’ve done some growing up too.

In our second winning entry, from writer Dan Slott, robot Jocasta tries to understand the troubled history of her creator and infamous spouse-abuser Hank Pym after the (unrelated) death of his ex-wife Janet “The Wasp” Van Dyne:

Jocasta: …you grew to love the Wasp…

Pym: Yes. Very much. More than anything.

Jocasta: …Then why did you hit her? I don’t understand. …Was it a show of affection?

Pym: What?!

Jocasta: Human culture has many references to such acts. Boys dipping girls’ braids in inkwells. The French Apache dance. Various sexual fetishes involving pain, humiliation, and…

Pym: Stop. What I did to Jan was NOTHING like that. It was WRONG.

Damn straight — pain and humiliation is just fine when it’s agreed to; that’s why we’ll wait eight months for an issue of The Ultimates. But seriously, we’ve come a long way from the days when that model of mental health, Moon Knight, would stop in the middle of a break-in to jeer over his com-link at the “perfume” of an opponent’s gay associate and Daredevil would put down psycho leather fetishists more dangerous than Dr. Doom. These days the Big Two seem to have a welcome policy that people are people, we’re all adults, and most of the worst things in the real world are done by guys who wouldn’t think of kissing a dude or putting on a tight costume.

Afterlife Achievement Award: Gil Kane

Deceased comic heroes are never not with us for long, when renewed copyrights or revised continuity call for it, so why not an acknowledgement of the hard work and continued legacy of bygone comic creators whose presence continues to be felt in the books being read today? These comebacks can shift just like the changing fashions for favorite characters, and last year the clearest influence was the agile body-language and anatomical-diagram elegance of Gil Kane. Accepting the award were Ron Garney – whose slashing line and wiry physiques on Skaar, Son of Hulk recalled the glory days of Kane’s work on comic adaptations of the Robert E. Howard characters this book both homages and surpasses – and Harvey Tolibao & Bong Dazo, whose schematic form and kinetic grace on Avengers: Initiative brought the thrill of cast-of-thousands superhero crises to the clear yet kaleidoscopic heights of color and motion they were meant to reach and have often lost sight of in the transition from big idea to big business since Kane’s heyday. He’s smiling somewhere, and these guys are shining right here.

click on image to view full-size

Hit and Miss Award: Alex Ross

Alex Ross reestablished himself as the cover artist of the year, with work, especially on Batman and Superman, that added more classics to the canon of single-image pop culture than we see in some whole decades.

The Ross-conceived “One World Under Gog” storyline made Justice Society of America one of the must-read books of 2008. Ross worked two miracles by creating a dignified variation on his classic Kingdom Come and contributing significantly to Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos. The Kingdom Come Superman, plucked at an opportune and continuity-preserving point from that book’s timeline, tries to warn our world about another sole survivor, Gog, who in antiquity outlived the cosmic war that shattered the Old Gods’ one planet into the New Gods’ two and plummeted him across the dimensions to ours, where he is finally awoken today. Gog is a fatherly, fearsome Old Testament-type figure who offers global peace at a terrible price, which gives rise to warring factions of those wiling and unwilling to pay.

Ross’ ancient/alien design was inspired, making Gog look like a living sarcophagus with touches of Kirby’s archaic-futurist Flash Gordon fashion sense. Scripter Geoff Johns sensitively conveyed the conflicts of the regular cast’s principled but not prissy generational heroes, and pared Gog’s dialogue down to single-ballooned words or short phrases like the reality-creating verbal talismans of unfathomable ancient gods. Artist Dale Eaglesham brought both a sculptural sense of Deco-era imagery and a sensational grasp of modern-era effects and spectacle. This is the kind of pop they’ll be talking about for years and the kind of myth that could be passed down for ages.

That was the good news – and even the bad didn’t start that way. The Ross-masterminded Project: Superpowers did a fascinating job of making you care deeply about characters you’ve never heard of, resurrecting legions of now-public-domain heroes from comics’ past with smart reinventions and a keen sense of history. It started out stunningly, but by the end of the first eight-issue mini the storyline was falling apart, with jump-cut revelations covered over by excessive exposition and muddy, slapdash “painted” art (not by Ross, and that’s much of the problem). Ross’ own concept notes and sketches show a wealth of ideas, but it’s not being managed well. The standard-issue self-narration in the previews for Black Terror read as if Ross’ partner, the usually ingenious Jim Krueger, had accidentally swapped his diagrammatic character pitch for the fully realized script, and the advance pages for the cheese(cake)y Masquerade didn’t even have lettering, for presumably good reason.

Avengers/Invaders (still ongoing as this column is written) is a moving and imaginative collision of comic histories, with meaningful insights into the modern characters Ross has avoided tackling before, and fascinating fleshings-out of some of Marvel’s most iconic yet in some cases least developed characters of the past (especially the young Bucky and original Human Torch). But since the series’ midpoint the elegant, Ross-compatible art by Steve Sadowski has been marred by crude and careless fill-ins on random pages by Patrick Berkenkotter that disgrace the reputations of everyone involved, and Krueger’s generally captivating script has been distracted from by huge internal inconsistencies (like a major plotline hinging on the memory of a traumatic deathcamp revelation in 1945 when the premise of the whole series is that the characters have been snatched to our time from 1943 – I mean, does anyone in the office read this stuff?).

There’s too much good about Avengers/Invaders to give up on it, though I’m boycotting all the Project: Superpowers books except the Death-Defying ’Devil mini, since at present only writer Joe Casey seems to have his head in the game. But I still think this could all be solved if Alex Ross got his eyes and paintbrush back in too.

Disappointment Worth Mentioning: Age of the Sentry

The Sentry is one of a handful of truly iconic characters Marvel has come up with since the end of the ’70s, but outside of Paul Jenkins’ original miniseries and Greg Pak’s World War Hulk no one has quite known what to do with the character’s multi-era stature or psychological complexity. Age of the Sentry centered on the former – or at least was doing so when I gave up after Issue 2. Editor Mark Paniccia and writer Jeff Parker are each geniuses, and have a special touch with retro; in particular the auteur of Agents of Atlas could’ve created a memorable Maneely/Everett-era what-if from this material, but what came out has all the insipidness of a Weisinger-helmed ’50s Superman story with none of its whimsical charm.

How does that happen? This way: Many of the goofiest comics of the past are also the best and most fondly remembered, and it’s because the people making them, though commercially-driven and dangerously unschooled, were dead serious about what they were doing, and working at the absolute top of their capabilities. When approaching material that hopes to capture their reckless vision, you have to put yourself in a certain state of ecstatic desperation in which your filters are loosened and both the amusing rough edges and raw inspiration can rush in; you can’t get there by going in deliberately careless and turning off what you do best. See any of Joe Casey’s work on Gødland or Charlatan Ball for a textbook lesson on doing this every month, or, even more to the retro point, see Ty Templeton’s Hoverboy one-shot for a primer on how to get it very wrong (in the self-consciously overstated lead story) and perfectly right (in the deliriously, deliberately clueless backup). But skip this Sentry and spend some capital on giving the new Agents of Atlas ongoing a future to remember.

Comic Movie Countdown

10. Wanted: The original was as much a landmark as Mark Millar thinks it is, which is why I’m glad he got himself attached as a co-producer a.) so he can make a lot of money to publish more of ’em and b.) because this flick had so little to do with the source comic that the screenwriters probably could’ve just changed some character names and not owed him a dime. They came up with some involving, conflicted assassins, but nothing as brave and bratty as Millar & JG Jones’ colorful and unrepentant badguys, and they wove an interesting concept about the worldwide balance of justice being maintained by a secret, bloody order no one knows about, but nothing as inspired as Millar’s vision of the world’s overall grimness being the result of an organized, triumphant evil no one notices. And the much-hyped slowdown/speedup effects just made me keep checking my watch for five-minutes-ago (I still think the widely-hated Daredevil was the best attempt so far at reconciling classic story-structure with the videogame attention span and SFX aesthetic). As it is the filmmakers, while thinking themselves outrageous, did many things to make the story and its characters more palatable and managed to lose most of what made them likable. Of all involved, only Millar and his print collaborators deserve to take another shot.

9. Punisher War Zone: Didn’t see it. I mean, did you?

8. Synecdoche, New York: No, I’m not saying it was a comic movie, or that it belongs anywhere but near the top of any general year-end lists; it’s just that I need something to make this list an even ten, and, witnessing the dreamlike sequence and texture of Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, I found myself thinking that the lyrical depressive reveries of Ben Katchor, Chris Ware and Lili Carré might be filmable after all. Hollywood agents, back away from the spandex and take note!

7. The Spirit: The night before I saw The Spirit I watched PBS’ broadcast of the avant-garde opera Doctor Atomic by John Adams and Peter Sellars. And the problem with those guys is they too often mistake density for depth. No worries of that with Frank Miller, who abandons sequence and meaning to shove slabs of sheer style and sensation through the plate glass window of the movie screen, in a big-budget Theatre of the Absurd based on the barest bones of Eisner’s creation. There’s no narrative or even cognitive vocabulary for what Miller has come up with here, and while it’s categorically not a good thing, it’s too early and simple to say it’s bad. As collaged storylines and painterly cinematography go, you can do a lot better (see Julian Schnabel’s last two films), but as low-subtext, raw-spectacle superhero fare rolls, we routinely do a lot worse – and worse than you’ve heard this is.

6. Hellboy II: The Golden Army: Now this is how to make a movie that has little to do with the comic. Post-Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s surreal side was allowed by Hollywood to come to the surface for a visually poetic monster-fight blockbuster that was just as close to recent folklore fantasy entries (Golden Compass, Narnia, yadda, yadda) as to any other superhero adaptation, and a lot closer in spirit and sensibility to Mignola’s original than the first film in the franchise, though at best they stand side-by-side in terms of anything Mike himself has in mind for who these characters are and what their odysseys mean.

5. Hancock: Now this is how to make a movie that doesn’t credit its comicbook sources. Hancock is the closest we’re likely to come to a movie version of the Hawkman saga’s immortal-love dynamic, but that was really just one strain in a smartly conceived story that found attentive ways to connect the dots between superhero conventions, recurring classic lore and many eras’ controversies over who gets to be called human and what’s deserving of the name – all without political heavyhandedness and with a sure grip of multiplex essentials. Charlize Theron, the action-heroine who can act, performed the superhuman feat of almost stealing the show from an earnest and magnetic Will Smith, and despite a way too happy ending for anything the previous hour-and-a-half was pointing to this was above-average entertainment with an important message on both sides of the screen: the movie’s box-office success marked the arrival of superhero fiction as a viable Hollywood genre independent of well-known franchises, a fixture of American folklore like gangster and cowboy pop.

4. The Incredible Hulk: More than mortal strength was needed to leap over the low expectations set for this flick, and it managed to surprise everybody. A wretched-of-the-earth subtext (from Bruce Banner’s hideout in the favelas of Brazil to the carnage his released inner demon helps unleash on Harlem, USA) and a sober suspicion of government power made this a most uncommon monsterfest, with the source of the horror being not what the traditional villain figures might do but what the designated goodguys could be capable of. That’s a healthy skepticism that’s been forced by the past eight years of imperial overreaction, and a questioning of how advanced civilization really is that’s always been implicit in the Banner/Hulk character’s need for force but quest for self-control. The film itself reached the balance that eludes him, serving up cool cataclysm and human interest in equal measure. And in Geek Nation’s self-interest, it proved there’s been a new start for the Hulk franchise and it’s just the beginning for Marvel Studios’ potential.

3. Changeling: There’s more to comics than costumes, and one of the year’s most worthwhile movies had a strong comics connection with not one cape in sight. Prestige sci-fi and superhero scribe J. Michael Straczynski brought subtle horror, righteous humanism, tight storytelling and almost none of his sometimes-trademark schmaltz to the true-life story of a missing child switched for an impostor by a corrupt L.A. police force which then throws the defiant mother in a nuthouse to silence her. It’s hard to believe this really happened, and hard to forget the way the tale of real-world evil and heroic persistence is told. Clint Eastwood is a non-experimental but photojournalistic filmmaker who knows how to stay out of the way of a great story and has a true tough guy’s instinct for sparing no difficult details of human failings. Must-see moviemaking, and the filmgoing public has a comic-industry icon to thank for much of it.

2. Iron Man: A-list acting, believable situations and urgently topical themes made this an unprecedented breakthrough in superheroes on film. Iron Man had heady special effects, gritty details of the tortured birth of a hero, exotic global locales and harrowing conflicts both within people’s souls and where titans clash. The three-dimensional characters played out larger-than-life versions of very real-world questions, with Obadiah Stane personifying reckless self-interest and Iron Man embodying force with honor – a narrow choice, but one true to the imperial history of the character and the nature of the country we still were at the time. With a commitment to Hollywood’s top talent (especially Downey and Paltrow, it goes without saying) and to Marvel’s (with Adi Granov’s impeccable design), this film opened up new worlds for the genre and brought the comics’ universe fully into view. After Sony crashed and burned the Spider-Man franchise, the Marvel Age of Movies truly began here.

1. The Dark Knight: 2008 was a gluttonous year for geeks and alternative cineastes alike; Iron Man was the greatest superhero movie ever made, and Dark Knight was the first great movie that happens to be about a superhero. The art-blockbuster equation that’s proven so elusive with Ang Lee and Bryan Singer on flicks like this really comes to fruition with director Christopher Nolan. A ghostly beauty, haunting performances and a thoughtful script rooted Dark Knight in film history and raised its subject matter into cultural myth. This was not the fisticuffs of sadistic throwaway pulp but the primal, poetic struggle and existential consequence of Kurosawa or Scorsese, a saga of hard-won humanity illuminated all the clearer for the depth of darkness in forsaken or self-extinguishing souls. What’s at stake in this story is not victory but redemption, and the movie’s historic success suggests that more people than not think that’s a dream worth having, however long the night.

Best Comic You May Never Read: The Gita by R. Sikoryak

R. Sikoryak doesn’t recreate styles, he reincarnates them. Recolliding the pulp and highbrow atoms by adapting classic literature in vintage comic formats and looks, Sikoryak reappraises the value of Our Ephemeral Heritage while both burlesquing and transcending the infamous dryness of the definitive not-good-but-good-for-you comic, Classics Illustrated. In the process he gets to the essence of the original texts in a way that spurs true interest in them while standing in nicely for their most important themes and sensibilities, all with a supernaturally-channeled command of whatever famous-comics look he has chosen for the experiment.

Many readers saw his 1991 Action Camus – a punchy condensation of The Stranger in the form of eight ’30s-style Action Comics covers complete with a Gauloise-dangling Superman lookalike too contemptuous of emotional display to even bother with the title-appropriate red “S” – in Vol. 2 of Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories last year. Far fewer fans got to see The Gita, largely unpublished but projected at several of Sikoryak’s unique “Carousel” shows in New York City, where he and other alternative cartoonists narrate and act out slideshows of their work.

The Gita was a précis on the great Indian epic Bhagavad Gita in Peanuts style. At a time of unprecedented Western interest in India’s culture and future, this was a great retelling of an important text through cartoon/commercial avatars that, for better or worse, have the closest stature in American culture to a pantheon of gods, and with note-perfect (stroke-perfect?) fidelity to Schultz’s style, it was a touching statement on how both ancient and modern tales and characters decisively enter the cultural bloodstream. Published serially in a Canadian yoga mag, it was denied full incarnation as a book by Peanuts’ rights holders. Hopefully they’ll come to understand what true reverence is; The Gita deserves to live on as more than just a legend.

Cult Favorites:

Trends of the Year:

The meta-event: Comics-about-comics could be as much of a time-filling narrative crutch as self-referential meta-narrative in other media, but last year saw more than its share of gripping stories based in characters fighting for the very survival of fiction. Justice League of America #25-26 showed Anansi, the African spider god who controls the strands of story, trying to weave a self-serving trap of rearranged reality while seeing if the one character aware of his manipulations, Vixen, could cut across the deceptions (a narrative coup within a coup by writer Dwayne McDuffie; no one’s better at putting flesh and bones on token black characters tossed off by bygone white creators). Vixen eventually triumphs by being herself, not some contrived external view of her, with the essentially original actions that follow from this being something Anansi can’t hope to preordain; this was an affirmation of the unpredictable that gave great hope for individual lives and for the prospect of innovative comics (implicitly and upliftingly critiquing the overdetermination and toy-breaking tyranny of many equally sweeping yet much more high-profile spacetime-crisis crossover events).

Wonder Woman art by Bernard Chang (click on image to view full-size)

In Wonder Woman #24-25 writer Gail Simone pitted the title character against the reality-crumpling Queen of Fables, an archetypal figure of control and poisonous retribution who has intersected with our world through nexus-points of imagination in the form of characters like the wicked stepmother of European fairytale. As such, she is a concept that can’t be killed, though equilibrium can be restored, and Wonder Woman reasserts her relevance as a determined force for self-definition when the Queen manifests as, what else, a Hollywood producer trying to distort Wonder Woman’s life in a bad superhero blockbuster. The story was steeped in a consciousness of Wonder Woman’s own nature as a representation — though, in the post-Hillary era, one much more fully realized than what the wicked stepmother is or has in mind.

This theme of less-than-three-dimensional characters trying to intrude upon our world in a way that shuts down the magic of imagination and its diverse possibilities also pervaded Paul Cornell’s Fantastic Four: True Story miniseries and Greg Pak & Fred Van Lente’s “Sacred Invasion” arc in Incredible Hercules #117-120. In the former, the old Dr. Strange villain Nightmare tries to transgress on the theoretical realms he has heretofore been contained by, going from dreams to fiction and finding varying levels of resistance in different depths of either strongly-rooted literature or superficial potboilers. What’s at stake is the ability to dream new potential rather than just corner the market on others’ lives of the mind, and this was a similar crisis to that faced in “Sacred Invasion,” where a band of Earth’s mythological heroes race on a conceptual plane to stop the Skrulls’ invasion from reaching the zone from which religious belief springs, thus removing indigenous sources of the power of possibility.

The centrality of “magic words” to both visionary religion and transformative fiction was prominent in Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, which, while using stand-ins for the classic pantheons, focused on the semiotics of empowering people and apprehending reality, from equation to incantation, with cursed ciphers and charmed symbols releasing the forces that guide humans’ destiny through either the absence or substance of imagination.

All these stories incarnated the most essential and titanic figures in the human fictional canon – perhaps in our very conceptual makeup – and thus delivered deeply-rooted narrative thrills, urgently “about” something, even as their characters’ main crisis was to continue to exist. Rewritten definitions, lost knowledge, edited science and politically hijacked gods have been among the scariest plotlines of the real Earth’s past eight years, and in comics like the ones mentioned here these anxieties bloomed into things of beauty that offer not just escapism but imaginative ways out.

Post-morality: We’ve seen a decade or three of vigilante heroes “crossing the line” of legality to get important jobs done (though more often just serving to rationalize a comfort culture’s weird recreational bloodlust), and of lovable rogues giving “the villain’s perspective” (a more honest project that can be harmlessly and highly entertaining, though at this point it’s hardly anything new). Acknowledging that there’s not necessarily a line to cross, or that it’s been hidden or become a shifting center, is where the real, erm, edge of pop storytelling lies.

Arguably the trend began a few years ago with Fred Van Lente’s Scorpion (though she wasn’t seen much last year), a Generation Goth fatalist with a hardbitten sense of purpose and of who should be kept safe but a shifting conception of what authority should be listened to and of what ethics a situation calls for. She’s driven just as much by post-adolescent disgust at unjust force and undue secrecy as by any personal propriety or illusions about the righteousness of her intelligence-agency employers. We’ve always known that paragons are predictable and outcasts are truly interesting, but the Scorpion series shifted the sympathy of mainstream comics decisively to the misfit.

Artist: Cliff Chiang (click on image to view full-size)

“Sympathy” might not be the word for Gail Simone’s astounding Secret Six, but the fact that her brilliant miniseries was followed up by an ongoing in 2008 says volumes about what the Big Two are now willing to encompass. This never-predictable, endlessly readable and boundlessly wrong book follows a troupe of super-mercenaries whose rap sheets and personality defects are constantly thrown into differing perspectives by the corruption and dysfunction all around them on both sides of the official “hero/villain” divide. The tug of conscience, the unlikelihood of doing good in a broken society and the lure of self-justification are the ongoing thematic stars in this book’s spiraling sequence of outrageous situations and rotating cast of compelling characters.

A different blurry line – between the odiousness of power-brokers and the effectiveness of their tools – was traced in the intriguing True Believers mini from Marvel, beautifully drawn by Paul Gulacy (no surprise) and imaginatively written by Cary Bates (you heard me). Concerning a clandestine group of e-subversives who both foil Marvel’s traditional villains and expose the misconduct of its supposed heroes, with tough opposition and some implicit sanction from many official quarters, the series followed the wavering balance between seizing power for popular good and failing to separate the already-powerful’s values from the methods they have access to (the True Believers are mostly disillusioned secret agents who’ve crossed over to the world of Smoking Gun-type gadflies and higher-stakes hackers, though not without some of the intelligence-op’s tendency to see human beings as information commodities and the basement technocrat’s confusion of flesh-and-blood with videogame playthings still in their system). Kids used to wistfully wonder “what if you could fly”; comics like this anxiously contemplate what you’d do with power – of all kinds – if you had it.

Final Crisis art by JG Jones, Carlos Pacheco, Marco Rudy, Jesus Merino (click on image to view full-size)

True consequences: Comics do scale, but they can’t always handle scope. Bigness is a specialty of superhero fiction, but not often fullness – we can see the universe exploding but not necessarily feel the consequences of this on a personal or even a planetary level, as the gameboard is turned over to inevitably be set back up. The two flagship events of Marvel and DC truly changed that game, though. Real danger is about the outer world being engulfed and the inner world collapsing, and these two crossovers, by and large, conveyed a feeling of existential, not just structural, dread, setting up threats to the true power-source of heroism: not “strength,” but hope. In Final Crisis Grant Morrison plumbed the depths of depression, symbolizing the exile from possibility that is personal despair with a villain who bends reality to his doomy perspective; in Secret Invasion-connected books like Avengers: Initiative by Slott & Gage, the feeling of a whole society disfigured and turned against those who represent its core values was overwhelming and portrayed with the exhilaration of having no alternative but to charge at the onrushing monolith. (The election-year feeling of tide-turning was in fact industry-wide, with the late great Virgin Comics’ Dan Dare mini by Ennis & Erskine showing old space-soldiers overturning both a hostile rival civilization and a feckless homegrown leader in a seeming affirmation that you can have your cavalry and peaceable kingdom too.) Time was ticking and hope draining out for people starving in Darfur or languishing in secret U.S. prisons; deadly armies were commanded by our own usurped government and backward billionaire fanatics worldwide; fantasy can’t turn the tide but we need to imagine something different and know that these feelings are shared, and creators like these showed that the lines between the universes of everyday meaning and mere entertainment can be breached and filled with a force of life.

Special thanks: Steve Schneider, Deb Grogan