Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Anyone who has been trapped with me in a discussion of comics knows that I read far, far too many of them—nearly 1300 of them in 2014 alone. You might also know that I feel that comics readers and prose f/sf readers don’t communicate with each other enough, or well, so I’m taking it on myself to highlight some of the best comics from last year that would be of interest to f/sf readers. American comic books are still dominated by superheroes, but I’m going to mostly look past the vast majority of those and concentrate on fantasy and science fiction in other genres. (I’ll make some exceptions when warranted.)
Crossed: Wish You Were Here, by Si Spurrier and Fernando Melek (Avatar Press: web comic, collected in four volumes), came to an end this year. Garth Ennis’s original Crossed series in 2008 was the freshest update to the mass horror idea in the forty years following the original Night of the Living Dead. The Crossed, victims of a virus transmitted by body fluids from person to person, are Romeroean zombies whose driving emotions are rage and lust rather than mindless hunger. Wish You Were Here is the story of a small colony of refugees slowly going mad on a small island off the coast of Scotland; as in the best of Romero’s work, Spurrier understands that the true danger is not the monsters but the other survivors. Romero himself has returned to comics with Empire of the Dead (Marvel Comics, series of miniseries), a sequel to his 2005 film Land of the Dead, which introduces a new breed of horrors walking among the humans in semi-thriving New York City. It’s not as good as Romero’s best work, but there's a lot to like in it. And I would be remiss not to mention Afterlife with Archie (Archie Comics, ongoing), Robert Aguirre-Sacasa and Francesco Francavilla’s utterly terrifying vision of a post-zombie Riverdale.
Michael Carey and Peter Gross’s fantasy of literature The Unwritten (DC/Vertigo; monthly comic) has entered its final phase in Unwritten: Apocalypse, which will have just concluded as this goes to print. The Unwritten is the story of Tom Taylor, a man who, like Christopher Robin Milne, was turned into a fictional character by his novelist father, becoming “Tommy Taylor,” the protagonist of a dozen Harry Potter-ish novels. The novels turn out to be true, while simultaneously also being completely fictitious. Joined by a journalist-turned-vampire and Lizzie Hexam from Our Mutual Friend, Taylor explores the nature of fiction and of his abusive father’s secret plans, while hunted by an immortal killer who sees in Taylor the perfect weapon to seek vengeance upon the world.
Fred Van Lente and Clayon Henry’s Archer and Armstrong (Valiant Comics; ongoing, now completed) was a buddy adventure story. Obadiah Archer grows up in a Creationist theme park, raised by his adoptive parents to be the perfect assassin for their Church. His target is the Great Beast, aka Armstrong, a drunken bar brawler who is also (in effect) Gilgamesh’s ageless brother. Of course, through wacky shenanigans, they quickly become friends, and the series turns its focus on modern insanities: conspiracies of ninja nuns working for the 1%; time-traveling Nazi UFOs; cryptozoology; and the secret church of no-it-isn’t-Scientology and the hundreds of “dead” celebrities it has trapped in limbo in Hollywood. Constantly inventive and three-quarters deranged, this series was an utter joy. (Among Van Lente’s other great output this year is a revival of Magnus, Robot Hunter, set in a world where the Singularity may have already happened.)
Kelly Sue DeConnick wrote several first-rate books this year. In addition to the brightly lit space-action superhero Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics, ongoing), her two main titles were Pretty Deadly (Image, ongoing), with art by Emma Rios; and Bitch Planet (Image, ongoing), with art by Valentine De Landro. Pretty Deadly is a fairy tale of Death and his close relations; the first story is a Western about the woman so beautiful that Death stole her away, and of the daughter born to them. (The upcoming second story arc will be set during the Great War.) Bitch Planet is a women-in-(space-)prison exploitation film in comics form and is brilliantly over the top in its embrace of violence in the pursuit of freedom.
Robert E. Howard’s main creations are rampaging through comics still. For the last decade, Dark Horse Comics has had one or more Conan ongoing or standalone series running, with a mixture of adaptations of Howard’s original stories and new material. Their People of the Black Circle was the best of the adaptations this year, and the ongoing Conan the Avenger, with new stories by Fred Van Lente and art by various, is extremely good. Groo vs. Conan (Dark Horse, miniseries) was a silly, witty metafictive showdown between Conan and one of the most successful of his parodies, Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier’s brainless Groo the Wanderer. Also outstanding is Gail Simone and Walter Geovani’s Red Sonja (Dynamite, ongoing), a bawdy and bloody revision of Conan’s most famous fellow barbarian. Like most of Simone’s work, it finds glory and sorrow among outcasts and villains.
Jonathan Luna and Sarah Vaughan’s Alex + Ada is a near-future story of a man and the android assistant he falls in love with. The reluctant Pygmalion, Alex, resents his mother for buying him an android servant, but when he discovers that she can be (illegally) awakened to full sentience, he feels morally compelled to do so. It doesn’t go smoothly for anyone. The story never settles for an easy answer and is a example of how the act of visualization of a future technology is, itself, a manifestation of the sf process; their world is our world, just more so and further on.
Warren Ellis returned to comics in force in 2014, with three monthly titles. In Moon Knight (Marvel, ongoing), Ellis and Declan Shalvey reinvigorated one of Marvel’s fallow superheroes. Supreme Blue Rose (Image, ongoing) is another metafiction, a meditation on the difficulty of finding meaning in a shared universe where history is periodically being rewritten as the writers change their minds. Supreme, a third-rate Superman knockoff redeemed in the 1990s by Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse, is everywhere and nowhere in this story; gorgeous art by Tula Lotay brings an atmosphere of haunted desperation to the quotidian. And finally Trees (Image, ongoing) with art by Jason Howard is a grand sf story, as if Bruce Sterling mashed together Thomas Disch’s The Genocides with Harlan Ellison’s “Sleeping Dogs.” Some years ago, the Trees arrived—giant, silent, alien towers, planting themselves randomly around the world. Popup towns thrive under them, scientists study them, and slowly the world warps around the intruders while most of the world simply tries to ignore them. Humane and menacing, a grand story made of small parts.
Morning Glories, by Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma (Image, ongoing), is about halfway through a projected 80-issue run. This is the story of the Morning Glory Academy, a private boarding school for exceptional children. The students are caught up in a grand process, being prepared for some great challenge in the future; time travel, blood sport, human sacrifice, evil twins—it’s all here, in a wide-ranging, wildly inventive, and utterly controlled narrative that comes with its own notes in the back for further study.
Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory (Image, ongoing), is also wildly inventive and feels like it could explode at any second; it is (primarily) the story of Tony Chu, an agent of the Food and Drug Administration, which gained paramount importance in the wake of an avian superflu pandemic. However, the world is also overflowing with food-based psychics—Chu himself is a cibopath, who can tell the entire history of anything he eats; other people he encounters can, e.g., make superweapons from chocolate or write food reviews so vivid that anyone who reads them has the actual experience of tasting the dish. And of course there are vampires. And space graffiti in letters of fire thousands of miles high. And an armored superchicken secret agent. Of course there are.
Mind MGMT, by Matt Kindt (Dark Horse; ongoing), is the story of a clandestine extragovernmental agency of psychics that putatively disbanded years ago but, in the nature of horrible secrets, has refused to go completely away. It’s a Jason Bourne story told by Thomas Pynchon but much more melancholy and haunting than that might imply.
Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland, by Joe Hill and Charlie Wilson III (IDW, completed miniseries), is Hill’s reworking of a novella that he wrote involving Charlie Manx, the monstrous presence of his novel NOS4A2. The first issue explains how Manx’s life was captured by Christmasland, a holiday theme park fallen to ruin; the final issue shows the creation of Christmasland and the fate of its inventor. The five issues in-between are the story of the passengers of a prisoner transport van that accidentally ends up in Christmasland and the unlovely things that happen to them therein. Hill is a powerful writer, able to evoke pathos or madness with just a few sentences, and the three interlocking stories are full of striking images that loom larger with repetition and recurrence.
Prophet by Brandon Graham with various artists including Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple, and Giannis Milonogiannis (Image, ongoing) is gearing up for its grand finale. Genetically modified clones of a twentieth-century superhero obey their millennia-old orders to preserve, protect, and resurrect Old Earth in a dreamlike, endlessly inventive, melancholy space epic of sentient planets, ancient intelligences, loss, and friendship on scales that dwarf the merely human. The main series has just concluded, but a final story, Prophet: Earth War, will play out in six parts this coming year.
The insistently oddball Knights of the Dinner Table by Jolly Blackburn (Kenzer; ongoing) is still one of my favorite comics. Knights is the story of the roleplaying community of Muncie, Indiana, focusing on four players and their GM. It’s crudely drawn—most of the panels are cut-and-pasted images of characters sitting around the eponymous dining room table—with the weight of the action carried almost completely by dialog. For the past year or so more, in the tradition of fantasy literature everywhere, they have been revisiting one of their great past stories, in which the players managed to reduce their world to a smoking, dog-haunted ruin with the help of two great cursed swords. In the current timeline—a few years after the first story in player time, centuries later in game time—one of the players outsmarts himself and unleashes the dormant swords on the world. Now he and another player are possessed by the ancient evil, while the others stage a desperate, literally cosmos-spanning plan to stop them from destroying the world. The multiple levels of story—the game world, the players, their surrounding community, and the repercussions of this campaign within the entire industry—flow seamlessly and hilariously into each other.
Finally, you probably don’t need me to tell you about Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky (Image, ongoing), since it was named Comic of the Year for 2013 by Time. But yeah, it’s stunningly good. Suzie and Jon are a young couple who share a secret: when they orgasm, time stops for them but not for the rest of the world. So, like any sensible people, they use this power to rob a bank—only to discover that they’re not alone. Funny, sweet, dirty, funny, tender, funny, this is one of the best exemplars in any medium of how stories don’t need to stop when the sex begins.
So, there you have it: Horror, fantasy, science fiction, worlds aplenty. Mostly in color, for many many dimes.
—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors
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