Best comics of the 00s? - Page 2

Oh man, one that completely slipped my mind.

David Petersen's MOUSE GUARD.

Gorgeous, entertaining, and one of the best family friendly books on the market.

It also has a critically acclaimed pen 'n paper RPG based on it.

I never liked The Boys (its essentially Ennis "Every superhero but superman sucks!" wank fantasy).
This reminds me: Hitman was truly great, and why the fuck it aint collected yet?

EDIT: on the subject of Bendis; Powers, Daredevil, the independent work (Jinx, Torso) and Ultimate Spider-man are great, everything else is either mindless fun or meh)

luca get out of this thread

Luca you trail rape and destruction throughout every thread the same way a slug trails mucus.

I didn't like The Boys at first, but for some reason I kept reading it. Now I love it!!

It might be your low standards.

My low standards allow me frequent erotic encounters!

But what about the itching afterwards?

Do vegetables even count?

Sounds like someone needs to read more Ennis!

Of course not, they just sort of moan and gurgle.

God how did we ruin this thread so quickly.

I think that ones makes someone moan and gurgle.

Hitman is maybe my favorite comic book of all time. Because of its setting in the mainstream DC universe, Ennis had to restrain himself from making dick jokes all the time and just concentrated on writing a fun action/adventure book that touches on pretty much any genre a geek could love. It's not a particularly deep book, but it's just so damn sincere. The last few issues never fail to kinda wreck me.

nature runs it course..you all summoned Luca here.

He does like Hitman, so i'll give him that.

We gambled with the stars, and we rolled snake eyes.

I'll say this about Ennis: his Battlefields series of WWII comics have been uniformly excellent so far. "Dear Billy" is definitely worth a read.

Well said; was his "Enemy Ace" series any good?

EDIT: i hated "Adventures in the Rifle brigade"; thats a good or bad thing?

The one about the nurse? If so, it's fucking fantastic.

Yeah, the one about the nurse. It was really good.

I lost interest in Enemy Ace after the second issue or so, so can't really comment.

Ennis and MCcrea did a two issue hulk mini, "Hulk Smash!", which was a hulk attack from the perspective of a soldier; i love that one.

Startling Stories: Banner is probably my favorite Azarello comic, while were talking Hulk.

Has Global Frequency been mentioned yet? I know it's sacrilege, but in some ways I think it's better at times than Planetary. Planetary is definitely the stronger book on the whole, but I think Global Frequency is such a great idea that's carried out with such great skill.

The freerunner/parkour girl running through half of fucking London issue alone merits it into the list.

Yep, gotta give props to Ellis for doing the parkour thing long before it had become fashionable. Love Global Frequency, and would have loved to have seen the television series they were planning.

A lot of the titles mentioned came out just as I was starting to get into comics again, so I'll agree that this was a pretty great decade for the form. I haven't picked up a monthly title on a regular basis since 2005, though, so I'm far behind on second-half-of-the-decade stuff. (Although I did blaze through Planetary a few months back and adored it, but I'll agree with Brad that Global Frequency might -- might -- be a stronger, tighter work.) And I completely agree about Carey's run on Hellblazer. That was one I was reading as I was getting caught up on the trades from very early in the run, and his stuff was just as strong as the Jamie Delano/Garth Ennis stories.

If I had to pick, though, the crime fiction junkie in me would throw in votes for Gotham Central, Ex Machina, and Criminal (which I read recently, too). The line in the first or second issue of GC about the commissioner not understanding what it was like for the detectives to see the Batsignal hit me in a way where I had this completely different understanding of Batman. I think it's one of the only comics to get that other people live in Gotham, and its influence on The Dark Knight's pretty obvious.

I don't read a lot of superhero comics, but I did love DC: New Frontier and Brian Michael Bendis' run on Daredevil where he overthrew the Kingpin and made himself the new boss of Hell's Kitchen. I thought that was pretty awesome.

I actually hope to get back into reading comics regularly this decade, and I'm starting with Scalped. I hear great things.

I came up with the idea for Gotham Central. Like I was in writing for comics class at SCAD at the time, and we had to come up with a pitch, and that was basically mine. We were encouraged to actually mail them off to companies if we felt they were strong, but at the time I was like "Man, nobody would actually want to read that." so I just threw it away after grading.

Yeah, well, I came up with Lady Death. So there.

hahahaha A PROUD LINEAGE INDEED

Speaking of Darwyn Cooke, I'm going to throw out his Parker adaptation as warranting inclusion on this list (is it even a list anymore?). I prefer that and his work on The Spirit much more than The New Frontier, actually.

A few B&W favorites that haven't been mentioned:

-Eddie Campbell's How To Be an Artist.
-The first Blue Monday mini, a series that I think got forgotten in the wake of Scott Pilgrim. What's Chynna Clugston-Major up to now, anyway?
-Evan Dorkin's Dork #7 (the autobio issue) is probably my favorite single comic of the decade.
-Fortune and Glory - Still my favorite Bendis.

I definitely prefer the Spirit to New Frontier, which I actually don't really like all that much.

Oh man, and where is Queen and Country in this list, because that was a spectacular series. Is that too early, or is it post-1999?

It's post-'99. First issue came out in 2000 or 2001.

Nope, definitely belongs here. I remember it kicked off mid-2001, and the second or third issue came out just after or before 9/11. That book was fantastic, but am I wrong in thinking it kind of fizzled out towards the end?

That's pretty funny, and surprising, because I think that's an incredibly accessible idea. I wasn't paying attention to anything going on in the DC universe at that time -- my titles back then were mostly Vertigo stuff, and the only superhero comics I was reading regularly were Batman and Daredevil -- and I felt like I didn't need to understand what was going on to get Gotham Central. It was very self-contained, and I liked that quite a bit. I wound up recommending it to a bunch of people, and they all said similar things. (Although I guess Allen is now the Watcher now or something?)

On a completely unrelated note, I was in this course at the time that simulated working in television -- you were either a writer pitching shows, or a network hearing pitches, and at the end of each week, everyone on a mailing list "voted" on what shows they'd watch in that "timeslot." I pitched Gotham Central (using "Law & Order" with Batman), and it got picked up/wound up doing pretty well, and was nominated for a couple end-of-term awards. I was not at all surprised to learn that Brubaker had developed it as a tv series originally. (I think.)

How is Brubaker's run on Captain America?

Also, fuck yeah, Queen & Country. Occasionally hard to follow, but I loved the artwork and the low-keyness of it.

It may have, I haven't gotten around to the complete series, just the absolutely stellar first volume.

Brubaker's Cap is fantastic, possibly moreso because it's a character that nobody seemed to know what to do with up to that point. He even takes the mandated Death of Captain America and crafts a strong story out of it.

Some may disagree, but I'd put "Transmetropolitan", which ended in '02, in the "comics that fizzled out" column.

I don't know how true this is, but apparently the death of Cap was something Brubaker was planning from the outset. I think it just got pushed forward to tie into Civil War. It's an excellent series though, particularly the first two arcs with Lark on the WWII-era artwork.

Its high points certainly didn't occur in this decade. Aside from the storyline fizzling out, Robertson's art got...well, "sloppy" is too harsh, but it's certainly looser and less detailed than it was early in the series.

You may be right. In any case, it's something that could have been simply a big shock event handled with the care of a real writer.

Carey's first Unwritten trade is just out, so people can catch up on it.

Blue Monday is really great, and should get as much love as Scott Pilgrim does; hell, the entire issue where Victor goes back to his goth ways for a day as an april fool's prank is aces; far as I know, Clugston Major is trying to wrap up the "Thieves like us" storyline for a while know.

Just read it. Great stuff so far. Seems more focused than the Lucifer stuff. Can't wait to read the next volume.

And sigged.

You not liking something that's popular doesn't qualify it as overrated, it just means that you don't like it.

A couple more. Joe Casey's run on Wildcats, particularly Wildcats 3.0.

And Howard Chaykin's American Century.

Two excellent runs chopped down far before their time.

The Escapists would make my Honorable Mentions list. And so would Cooke's Spirit.

That's crazy. Granted I haven't read a regular Batman book in probably 10 years but I think Gotham Central is the best thing to happen to Batman in ages. Then again, I'm a huge Law & Order nerd.

To be fair, my pitch wasn't nearly as good as what we got.