Previously in 2008:
The Year You Just Read

It was a tumultuous election cycle with historic and hopeful consequences for America and the world. It was a perfect storm of quality and attention for comicbook culture, with the first superhero flick that may take home a major Oscar. And rest assured that at least one of those trends is covered in depth below…

Most Likely to Succeed: Amy Reeder Hadley

click on image to view full-size

A breakout manga star of 2006 was the standout debut artist in big-budget Western comics for 2008, showing several careers’ worth of skills in Vertigo’s Madame Xanadu. Hadley brought Matt Wagner’s earthy, mystical script about an immortal itinerant sorceress to life through the tones and textures of diverse times and cultures from Camelot to Kublai Khan’s realm and Marie Antoinette’s France. Hadley merged the storybook charm of her past resume with the gravity of horror and grand fantasy sources, balancing crystal-clear storytelling and inventive compositions that moved the narrative along briskly while rewarding scrutiny of her rich patterns, active background environments and diverse crowd scenes. This is an artist able to communicate in multiple visual languages, energizing the directness of genre comics and accessing the personal expressiveness of indie and general-interest graphic lit. All corners of the artform need more of that, and she’s ready to go in any of its directions.

Writer of the Year: Paul Cornell

Artist: Leonard Kirk (click on image to view full-size)

It was the year of the oddball, with the flagship titles of some of the biggest franchises in the hands of the most eccentric visionaries – Grant Morrison on Batman and Final Crisis, Gail Simone on Wonder Woman, and Dan Slott as head writer of sorts on Amazing Spider-Man and, at least announced last year, Mighty Avengers. The Big Two have been pursuing a healthy and adventuresome multiplex/Independent Film Channel dynamic the last few years, with huge events bankrolling the house while left-field creators and concepts are given more room to flourish than ever before. 2008 saw the greatest shift of this fringe farm team to the marquee titles, with little to no loss of or interference with the creators’ idiosyncrasies and edginess.

Still, it’s one thing to take a blockbuster and make it art while keeping its mass appeal intact (as all the above have); if there’s anything more impressive, it’s taking obscure or original characters in unusual stories and growing them into hits on their own terms almost overnight: often in 2008, just as many of the brand-new ongoing series Marvel is gambling on went to public-demand second printings as the surefire event stuff – including the astounding and unclassifiable Incredible Hercules by Greg Pak & Fred Van Lente and Captain Britain and MI 13 by Paul Cornell. A one-man reprise of the British Invasion that transformed comics in the mid-’80s with Moore, Gaiman, et al., Cornell brings his novelist’s nuance, grasp of riveting characters and ingenuity of pace and plotting to a fresh, exciting, frequently harrowing and often tender saga in which mythic champions of Britain’s archetypal values and stalwart everyday embodiments of its contemporary multicultural character struggle with supernatural threats to the fibre of the human spirit.

Cornell also scripted one of the most refreshing mainstream miniseries of the year, Fantastic Four: True Story, in which his literary background brought canonical fiction to life in more ways than one, as the FF entered the universe of great books to save its collective characters from an attack on the human imagination. Like the earnest and intensely human characters of the recent Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters comics conceived by Grant Morrison and excellently helmed by Palmiotti & Gray, Cornell’s characters are super-citizens, with their sights locked onto the community ethics and creative space all those costumed battles – and uniformed ones – should be worth fighting for. The best comics come into being from an urgent need, be it the hardbitten optimism of the WWII years or the self-definition of indie diarists; Cornell showed that comics that mean something can make for the coolest reading, and for that geeks of all flags should cherish him as our own.

Graphic Novella of the Year: Aetheric Mechanics

Best Publication About Comics: Comic Foundry

click on image to view full-size

Leading Import: Giuseppe Palumbo

Inker of the Year: John Floyd

The idea of inker-as-storyteller may seem oxymoronic in a process thought to be assembly-line in nature; the inker readies a comic’s imagery for print and is a producer, not a creator – or so the stereotype goes. But the aesthetic choices at all points of the process – and the harmony or creative dissonance between all of its contributors – are what can make mainstream product shine as much as indie vision, and last year John Floyd shone the brightest. His textures in the surreal and atmospheric Mark Waid/Michael O’Hare story in the concluding Countdown to Mystery issue that memorialized Steve Gerber kept pace with and enhanced the changing moods and lurching realities of a tricky narrative and intricate visual landscape, lending a believability and agile tactile immediacy that made him a co-creator, not just a technician, in this otherworldly yet intimately emotional tale. For the Birds of Prey franchise, Floyd was able to alternate between slick modern-day cleanliness for the expository scenes and a jagged, wavering weight and definition for the Joker’s appearances that served as visual background music, making it seem as if the substance of the air and light itself were bending to the imbalance of the crazy cast-member and the hazard he represents. An apocryphal Hollywood producer once said you know a movie score is good if you didn’t notice hearing it; dependable craft is valuable, but Floyd is among the inkers that go beyond, and are worth noticing.

Most Valuable Player (writing): Fred Van Lente

Artist: Ryan Dunlavey (click on image to view full-size)

Not the biggest but perhaps the best news in mainstream comics last year was the not-so-secret invasion of indie phenomenon Van Lente. Best known for the offbeat self-publishing empire he founded with artist Ryan Dunlavey on the uproarious and nearly unprecedented edutainment comic Action Philosophers and beloved for cult favorites like the “super-Sopranos” series The Silencers, Van Lente has been infiltrating high-profile corporate comics for a few years now, contributing to Papercutz’s Tales From the Crypt reboot to amusing effect, fleshing out would-be media franchises like The Weapon and Cowboys & Aliens for Platinum Studios, and creating the groundbreaking anti-heroine The Scorpion for Marvel along with sundry oddball short stories that are often the most memorable few pages in large anthologies and omnibii.

By 2008 Van Lente seemed to be everywhere, or at least everywhere interesting, wrapping up his 12-issue run on Marvel Adventures Iron Man with inspiration and charm to create the kind of novel-sized state-of-the-canon accomplishment, summing up and advancing a classic franchise, not seen since the Mark Millar run on Marvel Knights Spider-Man; creating gems of tight and inventive plotting and delivering unforced modern morals in Wolverine: First Class, one of those rare “all-ages” titles with a light touch and literary substance worthy of the name; helming the company’s high-stakes Marvel Zombies franchise with the third miniseries in the set, mixing adrenalized ass-kicking with subtle end-times dread in the manner of the great and worth-it horror authors past and present; adding to the very thin archive of non-Kirby Eternals stories that matter with a metaphysical thriller taking up almost every riveting page of the title’s outsize annual; and breaking through to a new dimension of serious subtext and captivating craft in the moody X Men Noir. This was all while debuting the humor-history followup to Action Philosophers, Comic Book Comics, with Dunlavey and collaborating with alt.star Greg Pak on Incredible Hercules, the freak-flagship book of Marvel’s offbeat, best-selling fringe. That just scratches the surface of Van Lente’s output last year, and of the contributions to come.

Most Valuable Player (art): Amanda Connor

click on image to view full-size

She only had a handful of books last year, but even in years where there’s not much more than one – like 2007’s witty, ass-kicking Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special – Amanda Connor creates an event, so I’m not waiting for the industry. There are many artists making groundbreaking contributions to the medium – individual style is flourishing with the classic precision of Chris Weston and Dale Eaglesham, the gritty naturalism of Bryan Hitch, the pop-art wit of Cliff Chiang and Marcos Martin, the dynamic design and down-to-earth detail of Leonard Kirk, Pat Olliffe and Gene Ha, the painterly dreamlands of Daniel Acuña and Tommy Lee Edwards, and many others. These artists make magic with strong scripting partners like Mark Millar and Dan Slott, and there are other writers whose vision comes through so clearly that even the most functional of art accompaniment is enough reason to follow them whenever their name comes up on a comic cover, like Warren Ellis and Peter David. But there are exactly two artists I’ll pick up a comic for no matter who wrote it: P. Craig Russell and Amanda Connor.

Russell’s high-art elegance needs no introduction, but Connor’s classic wit needs as much exposure as the Big Two can be smart enough to give. For a medium called “funnybooks” comics could use a lot more sense of humor about themselves, and Connor’s work is rooted in the very best anarchic imagination and inspired mischief that defined the newspaper-comic canon that forms our very medium’s Year One. Fortunately, her most high-profile book last year, a four-issue Terra miniseries from DC, also had a delightful script by the increasingly versatile Palmiotti/Gray team, and her strengths were given expansive play. The fish-out-of-water (or mole-out-of-earth) story of a subterranean being trying to save a clueless surface-world from itself, the series provided a showcase for acrobatic battles that are one part high ballet to one part Katzenjammer Kids slapstick; the emotional conflicts of various unhinged characters occasioned the range of facial expressions for which Connor is justly acclaimed and still relatively rare in a less than character-driven medium (at this point she’s second only to Jaime Hernandez in individual and expressive likenesses, and closing fast); the otherworldly locales were a panorama of weird settings and tricky perspectives, which Connor’s cartoon-based, classically-structured style and mix of fevered imagination and disciplined technique fit more than perfectly.

Connor’ style steeps the reader in comicbook reality while feeling very familiar to the foibles of real life, homaging the hallmarks of comic history with spot-on superheroics and fantastic worlds while taking it past the pinnacle and over the top with a satirical eye toward foundations of overstimulated conflict and overendowed physique that can use a little refreshing graffiti. Her art is also strong enough to withstand and work well with any kind of coloring, be it the flatter graphic approach of the past or the modern air-brushiness of Terra, in which Connor’s keen sense of how to define three-dimensional volume with sheer, sure-lined contour provided a fine canvass for lush effects following her solid lead. Connor is a top storyteller because her active, fully-imagined art tells a story both independent of and alertly intertwined with the writing; few artists can accomplish that, and it’s a power she’s at the height of, and which this of all media will hopefully be calling on more.

Best Graphic Album: Look Out!! Monsters

click on image to view full-size

M.C. Escher Prize for Non-Sequential Art (tie): Grant Morrison and Lilli Carré

From Lilli Carreé’s The Lagoon (click on image to view full-size)

The effect that’s left to impress us with is what ways low-tech creators find for wiring their stories directly into our perceptions of the world, and two creators from ostensibly opposite ends of the art/commerce spectrum stood out and sank in. In both cases, the storytelling was straightforward in its components and extraordinary in their combined effect.

Writer Grant Morrison’s Batman was a radial narrative, with the present adventures being a shifting focal point into which the franchise’s established past and Morrison’s imagined future for it kept feeding. The core was composed of several crossroads of altered consciousness – memories and hallucinations of childhood trauma, a Himalayan purification ritual, and a police sensory-deprivation experiment – branching out in subjective and contextually shifting events and personal transformations. Morrison’s Final Crisis was a prismatic narrative, paced like pictograms on the faces of an Egyptian stone, revealing different things from each vantage point and possessed of an eternal weight, both fascinatingly unfolding and preordained like its mythic subject matter, stately in its first three issues and then spinning wildly from Issue 4 onward.

Writer/artist Lilli Carré has always been deftly digressive, conveying the feeling of a kind of constellation of incident that the reader floats within and is alternately pulled between; in The Lagoon her narrative was kinetic and tactile, shifting close and wide focus, packing events into multi-paneled single pages or stretching them out for sequences of many single-paneled spreads, and creating dense fields of texture that communicated a palpable sense of duration and consciousness of claustrophobic or comforting closeness, and frightening or exhilarating vastness. Measure was a sub-theme of the whole story, as marked out by solidified sounds and depictions of aging characters’ successive selves, but the organic, intuitive swell and contraction of experience was what Carré’s narrative instincts dissolved her readers into.

It’s long been the job of filmmakers and comic creators to sculpt our perception of the passage of time; Morrison and Carré are two creators at the cutting edge of both storytelling craft and conversational physics who make us uncommonly aware of the presence of time.

Best Comic Outside of Comics: “Don’t Talk With Yer Mouth Full” by R., Aline and Sophie Crumb, The New Yorker, 11/3/08

The form of diaristic comics is booby-trapped to lure its practitioners into a self-glamorization that undoes the claim to messy authenticity that first made them seem fresh; on the other hand, in the abbreviated medium of comics a little charisma can count for a lot, and “writing what you know” can founder unless, y’know, something ever happens to you. All three Crumbs have been guilty of making themselves the subject but having not much to say about it at one time or another, but this collaborative strip wasn’t one of them. The built-in culture clash of exile R., New York archetype Aline, and cultivated misfit Sophie with R.’s relatives at a family reunion in the Minnesota heartland was an endless vein of affectionate weirdness-watching from all sides, and the mix of unforgiving caricature and uncompromising self-exposure in all three cartoonists’ best work came together in a transcendental (if typically burlesque) acceptance. Stranger-than-fiction family lore and an anxiousness toward yet melancholy longing for the old, regionally unfathomable America flavored and fleshed out a remarkably textured four pages, all with a relentless and redemptive humor. It’s nice to see comics’ most insistent oddballs at home with themselves.