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Column:
Special Feature
Extended Flashback: 2007 in Review
By Adam McGovern
Published: 2008-02-01
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Warhol only got it partly right — in the future most
everyone will be famous, and all the rest of us will have awards
shows. In that spirit, this humble effort to make sure that, at least
in some sense, the year 2007 lasts forever…
Comic of the Year: Doktor
Sleepless by Warren Ellis (writer) and Ivan Rodriguez (artist)
[Avatar Press].
A literal thought-criminal infects the ideas of a deceptive urban
utopia’s population in this gothic flash-mash of cyber romance,
Lovecraftian farce and shamanic procedural. Drunk on ideas,
pathologically original and utterly unlike anything else you may be
reading.
Most Likely to Succeed: Lilli
Carré
Lilli Carré, everyone’s best-new-talent nominee last
year, is keeping the promise more than any writer-artist.
Carré’s dreamlike vignettes — of lonely
lumberjacks, dysfunctional daughters & moms, random people killed by
solidified thoughts of tea — short-circuit the predictable
storytelling of mainstream comics and shock the monochrome palette of
indie dourness with a kind of alternating current of whimsy and
despair. This is never more vivid than in The Thing About
Madeline (the latest of her undated minicomics to turn up at SPX
’07 and thus at least new to me), in which a woman’s
literally divided selves keep colliding on each other’s
road-not-taken. It’s as if Madeline keeps waking up on either
side of hellish repetition and cherished routine — it’s
all in how you look at it, and she’s blessed and cursed to see
it from both sides. Carré gets an astonishing range of
emotional shadings and intellectual degrees from her rubbery bodies
and masklike faces, as if she’s seeing through our human shells
and making pure feeling her medium. If you come across yourself
reading this or any of Carré’s incomparable books, grab
it out of your hands and run! [www.lillicarre.com]
Lilli Carré
Artist of the Year: Eric Nguyen
The Strange Girl alum was the breakout artist of 2007,
bringing to life both the nightmarish grit of Sandman Mystery
Theatre: Sleep of Reason (the best pulp meditation yet on
America’s post-9/11 moral dilemma) and the dreamy wonder of the
Ian McNee: Ritual of the Sphinx sequences in Marvel’s
Mystic Arcana mini (a Promethea-esque vision quest that
was one of the year’s most welcome surprises). With a stylistic
critical mass that suggests the grand scale and blocky brawn of Mike
Oeming crossed with the quirky insight and hallucinatory invention of
Ben Katchor, Nguyen showed himself capable of much and ready for
anything.
Writer of the Year: Greg Pak
Pak was the one in 2007 to pick up the Grant Morrison banner and
prove that crossovers can be art. In the main World War Hulk
mini the relentless momentum of Pak’s narrative and the
punishing physicality of John Romita Jr.’s bravura visuals
conveyed anxieties run amok and real-life war-weariness raised to a
hysterical pitch. Pak’s regular Incredible Hulk book was
an even more fascinating narrative of the War’s underground
factions and captive bystanders, conveying the human cost and psychic
shockwaves of conflicts real and fantastic like few other comics of
our war-torn decade. The other “fronts” in tie-in titles
were almost all as interesting — especially the deranged
displaced-persons/profiteer melodrama in Zeb Wells’ Heroes
for Hire — and the ramifying followup books shaded the
narrative across the genre spectrum, from the sober and humane postwar
elegy of Pak’s Aftersmash one-shot to the inventive
suspense and moral ambiguity of his lost-platoon Warbound mini
to the offbeat insurrection comedy (!) of the Incredible Herc
ongoing (!!), an on-the-road (and on-the-run) adventure with Hercules
and Amadeus Cho alone against SHIELD in a battle where what’s
most at risk is heroism itself (this last one a real-life dream-teamup
between Pak and rising auteur Fred Van Lente as co-writer). Every
precinct of what I think of as the Paniccia Comics Group — that
most original and oddball corner of Marvel’s overall cosmos,
under editor Mark Paniccia’s wise dominion — gave its all
for the kind of epic that will hopefully become a trend; call it
event-garde.
Best Miniseries:
The Highwaymen [WildStorm]
The buddy thriller about larger-than-death action icons called out
of retirement to save a 2020s world about as deserving of it as the
declining one we’ve got now was the debut of the year from
writers Marc Bernardin & Adam Freeman (with artist Lee Garbett).
Plausible futurism, slicing wit, white-knuckle pacing and five-star
non-spandex genre vitality made this the blockbuster movie-on-paper of
’07. Fanboys and WildStorm notoriously didn’t listen, so
hopefully Hollywood and Barnes & Noble will.
Best Single Issue (tie): “Day of the Dead” by Darwyn
Cooke & J. Bone (writer & artists), The Spirit #11 [DC];
“No More Crossovers!” by Gail Simone (writer) and Neil
Googe (artist), Welcome to Tranquility #12 [WildStorm]
No comic you were told to expect packed the impact of the climax of
Darwyn Cooke’s historic Spirit run and the finale to Gail
Simone’s meta-historical smalltown superhero saga. The currents
of folklore converging and taking new courses in Simone’s story
were as astonishing as her pacing and emotional pitch were absorbing,
and Cooke’s command of the bittersweet warmth and haunted charm
of Eisner’s original is a language we can only hope Frank Miller
will master for his movie of the same character. It seems
uncoincidental that both Cooke’s and Simone’s alt.events
were also superior forms of the moment’s other pervasive genre,
the zombie drama; what better way to show that super-comics can meet
the challenge of finding new life and locating their heart?
Next: Page 2 of 6
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