20 Best Comics of 2010

20. Afrodisiac
By Jim Rugg  Brian Maruc

Afrodisiac was one of the first comics I fell for this year, and as the months rolled on by, it ended up being a point of return again and again. A makeshift collection of faked comics history, centered around a satire whose target I had little personal knowledge of, Afrodisiac was that rare example of an in-joke the rest of us can fake our way through. I still couldn't explain blaxploitation without a working internet connection at hand, but I can guarantee you that Afrodisiac's rewards won't require it. Come in alone, like My Bloody Valentine: you won't be disappointed.


19. Wally Gropius
By Tim Hensley

In a more unstable world, Wally Gropius would end up shelved alongside the Harvey/Dell comics it's so visually reminiscent of, working like a diabolical physical delivery device for absurdism: Dick and Jane couldn't ask for better. For now, we'll have to rely on those who picked it up to pass along the word, one believer at a time.



18. Lose 2
By Michel Deforge

For artists, there's probably no moment as mutually terrifying as it is happy than the moment where their work leaves the realm of "has potential" to "is actually great". From there on out, the challenge remains the same: do what one has done well, again, hoping for a greater example? Or ditch one's past, to embark on the road of the new challenge? Deforge crossed that line with Lose 2, proving himself to be the lifer that his initial work had hinted at. If you're looking for that specific moment when the penny dropped, don't wrack your brain too hard: it was the maggots, son.


17. Batman  Robin 13
By Frazer Irving  Grant Morrison

The thing that great super-hero comics rely on more than anything else is their ability to instill a feeling of possibility, and none of them felt more alive to that sensation than this, the first chapter in the "Batman and Robin Must Die" story arc. While that story ended, as they all do, with an eventual win for the good guys (as well as the usual rearrangement of the status quo), the first chapter opened a door that seemed capable of going anywhere. How could Batman survive a bullet to the skull? How did Frazer Irving draw a picture that made its sound effects felt inside your brain? Had Grant Morrison actually started trying again? If you'd read more than three of these things, you knew that the answers would eventually come--but for that moment, it was like old home week.

16. Nana 21
By Ai Yazawa

Due to unfortunate illness, it's possible that this may be the last installment of Ai Yazawa's Nana that anyone will ever read. If so, Yazawa would have struggled to end the series with a firmer display of her talents. Volume 21 is a page-by-page rendition of raw emotion, the moment when a soap earns the opera modifier, and few cartoonists can match her ability to capture that moment when comprehension is experienced and grief--the kind that never truly heals--breaks you in half.


15. Grandville Mon Amour
By Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot's next chapter in Grandville may at first feel like an extension of the first book's final pages--our badger likes revenge, and he'd like some more--but if you look past the actual fangs of evil, it's a little more than that. It's one long argument for personal integrity, a character embracing the complexity of truth over the comfortable popularity of the lie. It just so happens that it's told by a muscle-bound animal with a ferocious temper, and that his best friend is a rat who uses British colloquialisms and isn't sure how many children he has.


14. Orc Stain
By James Stokoe

The best thing about Orc Stain wasn't the gigantic phalluses, its makes-sense-but-doesn't lingo or those excellent two-page spreads, it was what it didn't do at all: it wasn't a "fun romp". Instead of delivering the too-cool-for-school condescension that his skill would've let him get away with, James Stokoe took Orc Stain seriously (even when the crazy-for-castration types went gronch-chop-crazy) and came up with one of the most unusual exercises in genre mix up available. Nobody is doing anything else like this, and at this point, you have to wonder if anyone could.


13. Night Business 3
By Benjamin Marra

As great as his USAgent story in Strange Tales was (pretty great) and as trendsetting as that Maureen Dowd thing was (pretty trendsetting?), my heart will always belong to Night Business. A nakedly unrestrained id delivering a passionate meditation on all of the things that healthy boys love the most, Ben Marra's Night Business is a comic that's impossible to get tired of.

12. Le Dernier Des Mohicans
By Cromwell  Catmalou

A very free adaptation of the James Fenimore Cooper novel, Le Dernier Des Mohicans may be the most visually striking comic I've seen this year, and to be honest, I'm not totally sure how the damn thing was made. In what looks like oil paintings, Cromwell delivers a bad-guy focused take on the read-it-in-high-school book, and the result is unusually kinetic: they might hang in frames most of the time, but here, they slide, slam, and bleed. Sinewy braves equipped with slippery blades, their axes of death hungrily rain down on meaty British scalps, and there's never a second you aren't rooting for evil to triumph. Who knew that you'd have to go to France to experience such a resolutely American tale? (Besides French people, I mean.)


11. Powr Mastrs 3
By C.F.

Powr Mastrs is weird, but not in a bad way--it just isn't like anything else, except for all the comics that rip off its oddboy style. Comparisons abound--it's a fantasy story, it's a noiserock take on genre, it's what Matt Fraction would write if his guts matched his mouth--but the truth is that it's a vehicle, fast-moving and ramshackle, piloted by Picturebox's idea of what the best comics should be: an artist, doing their own thing, zero compromise and no interference. Almost all of the comics on this list share something in common, and Powr Mastrs 3 exemplified that thing on every page: singular vision, delivered without restraint.

10. Hellboy: The Storm
By Mike Mignola, Duncan Fegredo  Dave Stewart

Along with the BPRD series, 2010 was the year when the Mignola-verse made its biggest strides towards the story promise it had spent the decade building--it was the year when its worlds collapsed, its characters changed the most, when all those beasts lurking in corners invaded the main page. But even more than that, it was the year when Fegredo made Hellboy his own. A great artist who has long suffered the unfair criticism of just-not-being-Mike, Fegredo brought forth some of the most indelible moments in the series history--the pig's tears, the car split in half, the self-blinded man--and it become impossible to imagine it under any hands but his. This: worth waiting for.


9. King City
By Brandon Graham

Few serialized comics wore the monthly installment plan as well as King City, and the stands will suffer for its passing in the coming year--this was something to look forward too, and something to treasure upon arrival. The story of a boy who loves sandwiches, sexy girls and uses a cat to cut people in half, Brandon Graham's King City was the sort of comic that had people wanting to live inside its pages, even if they hated puns more than Nazis.


8. Prison Pit 2
By Johnny Ryan

While the first Prison Pit carried with it the startling impact concurrent with a talented artist breaking new ground, Prison Pit 2 delivered surety: that wasn't a one-off, Ryan said, and I'm definitely going somewhere with this. Beaten in the "this is what action looks like" department only by Darwyn Cooke, Ryan's nasty tech-mammal beatdown looked like baby's first cyberpunk Kamandi, and it ably maintained the promise of this comic's initial volume. This, as they should say, is what we all should be getting down with: pure comics.


7. "The Prisoner of Mars"
By Mike Mignola

 Lurking behind the reprinted pages of his one-off humor piece The Amazing Screw-On Head, "Prisoner of Mars" was Mignola at his non-Hellboy best, stretching an upper-class shaggy dog story of near-miss apocalypse into a bizarre library of the man's favorite things: pulp, mustaches and murder. The final line may carry with it a whiskered history most identified with the local VFW, but by the time you get there, you're more than ready to cackle along with them.


6. Pluto 7
By Naoki Urasawa

While the ending of Pluto stands on equal foundation with its beginning, it was Pluto 7 that hit me the hardest. Taking its least interesting character and plopping him in center front, Urasawa challenged himself more in this volume than in any others thus far, delivering a keenly felt piece of melodramatic sentiment so bald it should have failed, but didn't. Crowds of children laughing, those ratcheting sobs, hands, open and falling--this was one of the most bittersweet things I believe I'll ever read, but it was beautiful all the same.

5. It Was the War of the Trenches
By Jacques Tardi

Political comics, propaganda work, however you define them, they're almost always miserable trash, and the few exceptions are always found in the punchy one-shot of a good editorial page. Except: Tardi. Trenches was the angriest comic released this year, and while the specifics of its subject matter may be historical, its philosophy hasn't aged a day. War is a brutal, ugly thing, and while some may excel at depicting its horrors with excited doses of adrenaline, Tardi's tale never allows for a moment of escape. For him, political extermination destroys us all, and there's no reason why the bystander should be permitted to participate merely as casual audience.


4. The Outfit
By Darwyn Cooke

The simplest thing Darwyn Cooke could have done would have been to follow up his first Parker adaptation with the exact same thing, but louder. Instead, he went deeper--deeper into his own toolbox of reference, deeper into character, deeper into violence--and the result was a comic that stands alongside the best this field can offer. There's no wasted moments here, no sense of caution or indecision. Like its main character, The Outfit is a triumph of uncaged proficiency, and it's the kind of story that you never want to see end.


3. Weathercraft
By Jim Woodring

Weathercraft was probably one of the funniest comics released this year, which is no small feat for something that has no words at all. But beyond the inherent hilarity of watching the greedy suffer, it's the results of Weathercraft that form the foundation of its appeal. It's a comic that stays behind when it's closed, twisting in memory until you're not sure you caught what it said, a demanding experience that's unusual and unique. There's no other medium that could tell the kinds of stories that Woodring prefers; luckily, he's come back to stay.


2. Love and Rockets: New Stories 3
By Gilbert Jaimie Hernandez

An incomparable installment in their storied career, New Stories 3 saw Gilbert attacking his oldest obsessions with more humor than ever before, while Jaimie shocked a legion of fans with the most refined (and masterful) chapter in his Locas saga to date: "Brownville". The story, a plot-looks-predictable-on-paper study of tragic family history bookended by a twist-the-knife epilogue, it was one of the least flashy things that Jaimie could have picked to draw: and yet it didn't feel that way for a second. A studied, experienced line courses through the book, with tiny slits and flecks of black throwing one's attention along the panels, through those dark circles of sorrow and the shadows concealing horrors--all of it so intuitive, all of it so pregnant with meaning. Nothing broke hearts this year like "Brownville"; thankfully, few even tried.

1. Acme Novelty Library 20
By Chris Ware

For the most part, 2010 was a year where we saw more of what we knew was great already. There were some exceptions to that, and Acme 20 (or "Lint") was the best of the lot. Continuing to deliver with what seems to be an unlimited storage of ambition, Ware's latest installment in his Rusty Brown saga saw him peeling back the most popular topic in American contemporary fiction--our "normal" life--and breathing into it a level of attention that hasn't been seen since John Updike finished his Rabbit novels. Stained with all the hope, failure and passion that motivates the silent hordes, Ware's attention to detail never falters or compromises. There's little evidence of the human hand at work in Acme, it's a tour in engagement, an explosion in motion...and yet, as we pass through its shattering conclusion, we're not left broken on their other side, but redeemed. This is a life, the comic keeps saying--not yours, not Ware's. It has to pass, that's what they all do. But for a moment--maybe a few, maybe only while it's read--let it be experienced whole.

Source:- Comixology.com