TOP 10 BEST COMICS OF 2022 - 10-6
It's December, what else were you expecting but a listacle?
I love Best of… lists, but my consumption of media has been scant this year. I haven’t seen many films, I haven’t read many books, and figuring out what music I listened to that was from this year is really difficult (thanks Spotify!) so it’s not that easy to pull together.
One thing that is easy to talk about is my best comics of 2022, because I keep an elaborate spreadsheet and there have been some memorable releases this year. My rules for this were simple: The book had to launch this year. It goes without saying that certain ongoing series have been great, but nobody wants to see Saga top a “best of” list again (even if it’s not been firing on all its cylinders this year, hmm).
These two entries mark the last posts for the year, but I have plenty planned for 2023, so let’s get this party started! I’ve put links where possible for the collected editions of the books I’m spotlighting, all in an effort to get Amazon to acknowledge me as an affiliate, but until then, here’s my list--!
10. SUPERMAN: SPACE AGE (DC COMICS)
#1 released July 26th 2022
Written by Mark Russell
Art by Mike and Laura Allred
Lettered by Dave Sharpe
Edited by Jillian Grant, Brittany Holzherr and Paul Kaminski
Mark Russell is one of the best writers of modern comics, and when it was announced that he was writing a prestige miniseries starring the greatest superhero ever created, it was an unspoken endorsement by DC that they knew it too.
Back in the short-lived “DC You” era (a year before Rebirth landed), when DC were trying desperately to court readers back after the disastrous, audience-splitting “New 52” initiative, Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell’s Prez was a sublime take on a classic Jack Kirby premise from the 60s-- the teen president-- and I’ve followed him ever since…
…But so has controversy, with his Superman-meets-Jesus series Second Coming courting mainstream attention for its very specific (and blasphemous?) premise.
Superman: Space Age teams Russell with one of the greatest art teams of their generation, Mike and Laura Allred, to deliver a fantastic package for the reader, and over-sized, real-time retelling of the Superman story told against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, the space race, and more, culminating in what looks to be a dramatic reinterpretation of Crisis On Infinite Earths.
Rather than being a straight Superman story, Space Age features brand new interpretations of Batman, Green Lantern and Lex Luthor, and I loved every page.
9. NIGHT OF THE GHOUL (DARK HORSE COMICS)
#1 released October 5th 2022
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Francesco Francavilla
Lettered by AndWorld Design
Designed by Emma Price
Edited by Will Dennis and Tyler Jennes
This one is a bit of a cheat, because it originally saw the light of day as a comiXology exclusive, a digital platform for reading comics. But I only picked up the Dark Horse Comics print version, which started coming out a year later, just in time for Halloween 2022.
Scott Snyder and horror go hand-in-hand. The man got his big break writing American Vampire, and has pumped out terrifying tale after terrifying tale, with the likes of Severance, The Wake, Wytches, and his horror-infused “New52” Batman run with Greg Capullo giving us the faceless Joker, the horrid Batman-Who-Laughs, and the concept of the Dark Multiverse, to name but a few. The man knows horror, and that’s why I’ve used the word “horror” far too many times to be comfortable in this opening paragraph.
Night of the Ghoul re-teams Snyder with his Detective Comics collaborator Francesco Francavilla, who is no slouch in the genre either. This is the artist behind the record-breaking Archie Comics series, Afterlife with Archie, which led to a Sabrina-led spin-off that directly inspired the Netflix show. These two know each other’s strengths, with their aforementioned Detective Comics tale, The Black Mirror, pitting then-Batman Dick Grayson against brand new monstrous threats in the wake of Bruce Wayne’s latest death. Don’t worry. He got better.
Night of the Ghoul is about a cursed film by the same name, and the father and son who find the director who might hold the missing reels of said film. Finding and completing the film would be the father’s big break, but what he finds in the facility that the horribly disfigured director is kept within promises a whole different fate.
It’s fucking horrid.
Body horror expertly composed by Francavilla and a story that spans World War 2, through the golden age of horror movies, to the present day, weaving a conspiracy of nightmares from point a to point b, comes together to freak readers the fuck out. I can’t recommend it enough.
8. BOLERO (IMAGE)
#1 released January 19th 2022
Written by Wyatt Kennedy
Art by Luana Vecchio
Lettered by Brandon Graham
I didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked up BOLERO #1 (all caps, I don’t make the rules). I try to pick up any #1s I come across when browsing the new releases, because you never know what kind of magic you might stumble across, and in this era of IP-chasing by the movie studios, you also don’t know what’s going to be turned into a film franchise before you blink. BOLERO caught my eye, and I read it, and I re-read it, and then I re-read it again.
BOLERO is peak comics. A woman who managed to ruin her relationship with the love of her life discovers a way to travel to parallel universe in an attempt to find a world where she didn’t mess things up. She has 53 chances at making things right. If she travels to more than 53 universe? Well, she’s explicitly told she should most definitely not do that.
The premise is pretty simple, considering. A broken relationship. A chance to put things right. An adventure. A journey. An odyssey. This is all classic storytelling tropes, right? But the way in which Wyatt and Luana come together to create something so wonderful and different is next-level. Who hasn’t wanted a second chance at making right what had previously gone wrong? This cross-dimensional Quantum Leap love story is one I cannot recommend enough.
7. PUBLIC DOMAIN (IMAGE)
#1 released June 29th 2022
By Chip Zdarsky
Edited by Allison O’Toole
A lot of people can take or leave Chip Zdarsky (not his real name). His persona is a lot, but he’s got a big chunk of comicdom cache thanks to his work on the creator-owned Sex Criminals with Matt Fraction, and his acclaimed stints on the likes of Howard The Duck and Spectacular Spider-Man, as well as his ongoing Batman and Daredevil runs.
I think a common misconception about Chip is that he’s a comedy writer. Or, more specifically, just a comedy writer. But having followed him since Sex Criminals and seen what the man can do given an opportunity, he’s so much more than that. He’s an award-winning creator who wrote one of the most affecting stories of Spider-Man in the modern era. He’s writing Stillwater, about a small town with a big secret-- if you live there, not only do you not age, you also cannot die. There’s the vampires-as-superheroes book The All-Nighter, his grim psychological / war storytelling in Invaders-- a book featuring Captain America and Namor, for crying out loud!-- and the crime series Newburn for another. He’s not the kind of writer / artist to rest on his laurels, and he doesn’t skate on what’s worked before. He’s gone from Howard The Duck all the way to Batman, and that speaks a lot to not only his talent, but the trust he’s engendered in the big two comic houses.
The writer / artist brings his very specific sense of humour back to the creator-owned realm with Public Domain, a series about a family who win back the rights to the superhero their father created, and what comes next. It’s funny, sad, and feels genuine. None of these characters are one-note, despite initial appearances, and the world feels lived in and real, making their adventures (or mis-adventures) all the more nerve wracking. We want these people to succeed. But at what cost?
This book reminds me of one of my all-time favourite miniseries, 2006’s The Escapists, written by Brian K Vaughan and drawn by Philip Bond and Eduardo Barreto. That too was a “real life” take on what it means to create superhero comics, and what they mean to those who do so. I cannot think of a greater compliment to give a book in 2022.
6. SACRAMENT (AWA UPSHOT)
#1 released in June 2022
Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Marcelo Frusin
Lettered by Sal Cipriano
Designed by Chris Ferguson
Let’s start with Sacrament #1’s solicitation, shall we?
The Exorcist meets Alien in this sci-fi/horror story. In the year 3000, Mankind abandoned Earth and fled into outer space. Now, a disgraced priest, called into action to perform an exorcism on a remote space colony, is about to discover that no matter how far you run, you can't escape your demons, and the Devil is, in fact, real.
How was I not going to pick this book up?
Peter Milligan is a writer who made it big in the US as part of the last wave of the eighties “British Invasion”, spearheaded by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison (I know Grant isn’t British, I didn’t name the damn thing). After being given the nigh-impossible task of following Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man, Milligan’s big break was the acclaimed Vertigo series, Shade, The Changing Man, another attempt by DC to capitalise on a pre-existing property and give it a mature edge. He made one of Steve Ditko’s lesser known creations decidedly un-goofy, with a take that cemented him as one of the more iconoclast of comics creators out there.
He went on to critically acclaimed series after series, working with Duncan Fegredo on the gender-blurring Enigma for Vertigo, Mike Allred on the satirical superhero series X-Force / X-Statix, re-inventing Human Target with Edvin Biukovic and later Javier Pulido after Biukovic’s untimely death, and many more. He’s worked for every publisher there is to work with, having had runs on Detective Comics and X-Men. The man has been around, but for all that success, he’s never been considered in the same breath as his contemporaries, which is an immense shame.
These days he’s eschewing working with the big two and instead setting up shop at various smaller publishing houses, culminating in one of my absolute favourite books of this year. Sacrament is a strange beast. From the solicitation, you know it’s not going to be a straight forward story, but the direction Milligan takes it, and the grisly art from Marcelo Frusin, makes it all the more horrific. It’s a meditation on religion, on spirituality, and what it takes to believe in the face of the unbelievable. It’s also dripping with gore. Frusin colours himself here, and he knows exactly what he’s doing with the balance of shadow to gristle, and it delivers on all fronts. The story itself hasn’t concluded yet, and I believe the final part is either coming out in the next week or so, or in January, and it’s the kind of tight 5 issue story you can envisage being adapted quite easily into film. Just an all round brilliant miniseries.
Part 2 of this list will land next Wednesday, but until then, have a great Christmas!