Attackerman

I didn’t read every comic book in 2011. In fact, I got married, read all five volumes of A Song of Ice & Fire, sped through four seasons of Breaking Bad and now Sons of Anarchy and did a ton of reporting, so I didn’t have time to read all the comics I wanted. Perhaps you’re like me and need to get caught up to speed. Here’s what you should still read and what you shouldn’t beat yourself up for ignoring.

Scalped is the best comic book published today. There are great comics out there. All of them are bad compared to Scalped. Imagine The Wire set on an Indian reservation. It’s even better than that. In 2012, Scalped will end. I may end up getting one of R.M. Guera’s illustrations of Dashiell Bad Horse as my next tattoo in commemoration.

Uncanny X-Force is constantly on the brink of sucking and yet it’s great. “I keep expecting it to fall apart and stop being good, but…it doesn’t,” writes Kelly Thompson. This was a pretty big year for the X-universe in general. UXF missed out on the Schism. Why? Because Rick Remender launched an interminable storyline in which the X-Men’s assassin squad disappears into the Age of Apocalypse in the hope of saving Archangel’s life… only to see Archangel transform into the Heir of Apocalypse… and Deathlok is there for some reason… and Fantomex hooks up with Psylocke… and it works. UXF suffers because the new team doesn’t have the obvious rationale that its predecessor did — i.e., secretly killing anti-mutant militias — but Remender started off the book by having the team kill a child, an original sin that hangs over the series. Every issue I expect UXF to fall off, but it just barely keeps its heels on the ledge. Worth reading for that alone.

Irredeemable works best when it gets addresses the crisis of post-apocalyptic governance. Throughout most of the year, I was thisclose to giving up on Irredeemable. For the unfamiliar, it’s a story about Superman going insane under the burden of being Superman and killing like a fifth of the world’s population. Sounds interesting, right? By year four, not so much — it’s a meta-comic, so this year writer Mark Waid really wanted to say something about “cosmic” books and so he locked The Plutonian into a space-asylum for an anticlimactic story. But Waid, um, redeemed the book by focusing away from The Plutonian and onto the question: how does the rest of humanity survive in the shadow of a vengeful supergod? Since no single country has the economic resources to finance the rebuilding of the world’s metropolises, the U.S., China, U.K. and Japan invest in each others’ reconstruction as shareholders. The exigent circumstances of survival, not The Plutonian, doom the American way of life while pointing to its last hope for resilience. Nifty.

Cyclops was right. Kieron Gillen is writing the best X-storylines since Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon. Uncanny X-Men is out-and-out great. It took Morrison and Whedon to make Cyclops a compelling character — for 40 years he was written as a brooding whiner, not a leader — but Gillen is making him something more: a dictator. And not even the kind of dictator that’s easy to dislike! Gillen’s Cyclops is Generilissimo Scott Summers, who’s got the mutant race on his back and gnawing self-doubt in his stomach that he can’t show anyone. Imagine post-Civil War Tony Stark without the entitlement complex. Cyke may turn into King Lear before Gillen is done with him.

Fear Itself forgot why it existed. Dear Marvel: quit it with the universe-wide crossovers. You’ve done exactly one great one in the last decade, and it was Civil War. Secret Invasion sucked; the Dark Reign reign was good but Siege sucked; Fear Itself really, really sucked. It was supposed to be a neat and timely allegory about resilience in the face of fear. But after the first issue, the engine of the storyline — the reanimation of the Serpent, the God of Fear — didn’t require human hysteria to power itself. So all we got was a punch-up in which all these Marvel characters have Asgardian hammers, stuff gets broken, Bucky dies, Thor dies, Iron Man gets drunk, the baddie is defeated and by the time all the epilogues are finished the Marvel U is back to the status quo ante. After reading this crap, I just have to blame myself for buying the issues, since I’m just enabling Marvel.

The New 52 is meh. I was never a big DC reader, but I am the kind of person who spends money on comic books every month. In other words: I’m DC’s target audience for the New 52 reboot. And you know what? Animal Man and Batwoman are great comics. I don’t understand what the reboot actually rebooted in those comics, but they’re worth the cover price — Animal Man because his weirdo Byronic naturalism is a great addition to an allegedly retired superhero; Batwoman because she’s the freshest take on Batman in forever. DC does apocrypha better than it does canon: Superman remains a big yawn, even with Grant Morrison trying to make Kal-El into class warrior out of Homage to Catalonia. But fuck DC because of this.

Someone please buy S.H.I.E.L.D. and Alpha Flight. If Marvel has become DC through all the retcon reboots of the past decade, then it’s finally catching up to DC in learning what to do with its marginal characters. Someone let Jonathan Hickman play around with the history of S.H.I.E.L.D. and he turned it into the best non-superhero superhero story since Jim Starlin went cosmic. The main characters of S.H.I.E.L.D. include Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla; there’s a fistfight between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz. Then someone let Greg Pak turn Alpha Flight into a first-rate hero book by having them resist a fascist Canadian (!) government. Pak figured out that we Alpha Flight fans are perfectly willing to let writers have fun with our beloved characters as long as it seems like those writers are having fun. And then it turned out that I was the only one who bought either book and they got canceled. So please: buy them in graphic novel form so Marvel can correct its mistake.