10 for 10: Favorite Comics of the Decade

2010 is nice and round and that warrants another Best-of-decade list. Also because I’d hate to discontinue the worst journalistic trend of the decade.

In any event, by ‘Best-of’ list I mean ‘Favorites’ list because the following selection is pretty personal and represent the comics and graphic novels that stuck with me after I’d finished them.

All-Star Superman, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Frank Quietly (DC Comics)

A version of Superman that’s both steeped in nostalgia yet feels completely new. I’ve never been the biggest Superman fan. Recent takes have been burdened by the weight of the character’s own mythology and there was an annoying tendency to write Superman as a Christ-like figure. Which made him ridiculous. But growing up, I had a fondness for the Superman stories from the 50s and 60s illustrated by the legendary Curt Swan, and which I read in collected editions. Those stories were plain odd. Jimmy Olsen would dress up as a turtle. Brainiac was a green bald dude in a leotard with electrodes on his head. Superman would say things like “Great Scott!”

Grant Morrison’s and Frank Quietly’s twelve-issue take on Superman brings back that exhilarating sense of weirdness from those old comics. But at a deeper level, Morrison and Quietly give us more than the world’s-burdens-on-one-man’s-shoulders template. Why exactly does Lex Luthor hate Superman so damn much? Why is the Clark Kent alter ego such a ridiculous buffoon? And why is Jimmy Olsen such a weirdo? Superman was the first superhero to become a cultural icon. And yet it was Morrison and Quietly who gave the character the sense of awe and wonder that he’d been lacking in recent years.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (First Second)

I usually hate ethnic identity crisis stories. They’re almost always boring and self-serious, populated by characters whose only trait is their minority status. But Yang’s take on the genre (if we can call it that) is different. He weaves in the legend of the Monkey King—a personal favorite of mine growing up—with a story of teenaged anxiety and confusion. It’s an odd combination, and the two dovetail into each other at the end. It’s one of the most inventive and entertaining comics about beginning to grow up.

Black Hole by Charles Burns (Pantheon Books)

Black Hole focuses on a group of teenagers infected with an STD that creates strange physiological changes. On one level, the comic works as an allegory for the AIDs scare in the 90s—the first issue of Black Hole came out in 1995 (though it didn’t conclude until 2005, when Pantheon Books published it as a single volume). You could also read it as a metaphor for adolescence. Well, whatever.

For me, the power of Black Hole is visceral. I’d never been creeped out by a comic before. I went to junior high and high school through the 90s so I was used to wall-to-wall violence and gore, most of it excreted by Image Comics (I still have crates of Spawn action figures). But the dread in Charles Burns’s Black Hole slowly simmers, building through nightmare images—shed human skin flapping on a branch, dream sequences, and characters that find themselves in situations where the menace is obscured but undeniably present.

Fables, written by Bill Willingham, illustrated by a variety of artists, but mostly Mark Buckingham (DC Vertigo)

The aughts were very good for DC Comics’s non-superhero books. While major adult-oriented titles like Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Sandman, and The Invisibles ended their respective runs, DC’s various imprints introduced 100 Bullets, Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Fables. All of these newer titles have epic storylines and concepts, but Fables is consistently inventive and surprising in the way it delves into and often upends the archetypes and themes established in well-known fairy tales. The premise: characters from fairy and folk tales (collectively known as Fables) are exiled to modern-day Manhattan, forced out of their homelands by a mysterious enemy known only as The Adversary.

The worlds that the series creator/writer Bill Willingham depicts are deceptively complex: there is the Homeland from which the Fables have been exiled, Fabletown—the secret Upper West Side enclave the Fables currently call home, and the Farm in upstate New York, where the Fables that can’t pass as human (ie the Three Pigs, the Three Blind Mice, assorted dragons) are compelled to live. Each location has its own culture, its own rules, and its own diverse cast of characters. But Willingham weaves all of these ideas into a very human story about people who’ve lost everything, trying to exist in a foreign world hoping to one day return home. Fables is occasionally bittersweet, occasionally funny, but always exhilarating to read.

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Pantheon Books)

Everyone, myself included, drooled over David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp in 2009 (except the people that thought it was pretentious which, point taken). But Chris Ware was the creator who really pushed the boundaries of sequential storytelling at the start of the decade.

Certainly Ware isn’t the first to do this, but he’s part of a pantheon that includes Will Eisner, Bernard Krigstein, Jim Steranko, Dean Motter, Eddie Campbell, and Bryan Talbot. These are all creators who worked to redefine the comics medium, just as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and William Burroughs changed the way people read prose and poetry. But the heart of Jimmy Corrigan isn’t Ware’s stylized storytelling; it’s an incredibly sad story about a lonely man in Chicago meeting his long-lost father for the first time.

Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke, adapted from the novel by Richard Stark (IDW)

Darwyn Cooke is one of the best storytellers working in comics today. He can create entire narrative sequences in what seems like a few strategically-placed lines. I wondered whether I preferred The Hunter—which was adapted from Richard Stark’s novel—over Cooke’s other huge endeavor, Justice League: The New Frontier, which re-imagines the Silver Age of DC Comics’s superheroes amid the Cold War.

But re-imaginings of superheroes were abundant during the decade (in fact, there are two on this list). And while the number of crime comics has increased rapidly, it seems, since the success of Frank Miller’s Sin City, Cooke’s adaptation is far and away the best. The problem with most crime comics is that they incorporate the shadowy look of film noir and a few common tropes (the femme fatale, the disaffected PI), but it all seems more like a parody than a good crime story. Cooke, with the advantage of working from Stark’s novel, avoids that pitfall, and he also gives New York City a unique visual quality, casting the city in cold, steely blues.

The French comic The Killer, illustrated by Luc Jacamon and written by Matz, is also an exceptionally-written and beautiful crime drama.

Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly Publications)

This is the best work Adrian Tomine has ever done. I’ve been a fan since my aunt gave me a copy of 32 Stories, which was mostly a sketchbook charting his evolution as an artist and storyteller. Tomine’s next book, Sleepwalk, had its moments but I don’t feel he really put everything together until Summer Blonde. And, man does he ever put it together.

A friend of mine once complained that Tomine’s artwork is “stiff.” I know what he means I think. His lines are very precise and his storytelling from panel-to-panel is sharp and clear, but the art itself isn’t particularly kinetic. Compared to Chris Ware’s bizarre and brilliant layouts or Jillian Tamaki’s beautiful, swooping linework, Tomine can seem a bit staid. But I think this really works in his favor. His characters, especially in Summer Blonde, have a lot of rage and tension simmering beneath their exteriors, which creates a really neat tension with the artwork.

The Ultimates, written by Mark Millar and illustrated by Bryan Hitch (Marvel Comics)

The Ultimate Marvel imprint feature Marvel Comics’s re-launching of their core properties. It began with Ultimate Spider-Man and progressed with Ultimate X-Men, both of which were critically acclaimed and well-recieved by readers. But it was The Ultimates—a 2002 re-launch of the Avengers superheroes—that really shook things up. Written by Mark Millar and illustrated by Bryan Hitch, The Ultimates is essentially an action movie on the page. Visually, the creative team opted for elongated, “widescreen”-style panels and compositions.

But what makes The Ultimates so good is that it has some of the sharpest writing in a superhero comic since Peter Milligan’s and Mike Allred’s run on X-Force (which was released around the same time as The Ultimates). During their 13-issue run, Millar and Hitch explored how the presence of a US government-sponsored superhero taskforce completely skews the global balance of power, and what other countries might do in response to this sudden shift. For a series featuring shape-shifting aliens, superheroes frozen in icebergs, and Hulk rampages, the incisive political subtext was, paradoxically, grounded in the real world.

The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard (Image Comics)

I did my due diligence about this in a previous post, so I’ll just link to it and we can all move on.

We3, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Frank Quietly (DC Vertigo)

This is essentially Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. Except instead of two dogs and a cat, We3 features a dog, a cat, and a bunny. All of whom are cybernetically-enhanced assassins. And it’s one of the weirdest-saddest-funniest stories I’ve ever read.

This is the second appearance on this list by both Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly. Apparently, they had a good decade. Morrison especially has been busy; he revamped X-Men, Batman, and the entire DC superhero universe. He jumpstarted seven lower-mid-tier superhero properties with Seven Soldiers of Victory and completed a wild series called The Filth. Morrison is known for his looping, ambitious narratives and yet his writing is most effecting when he’s telling a simple, straightforward story about three animals just trying to find their way home.