The Best Comics Right Now.

I like comics a whole lot. I originally got into them when I was in the eighth grade. My friend's Kevin and Nick started reading a comic called "Spawn", which turned out to be the best thing a 13 year old with delusions of violent grandeur could ask for. A comic where the main character is a man sentenced to a life in hell given a chance to redeem himself or fall forever mixed with a dash of ultimate bad-ass antagonist who likes ripping the hearts from his victims (I'll always love you, Violator). After reading that comic I become rabid for anything with the "Image" logo; Wildcats, Gen 13, Savage the Dragon, or whatever. Not long after I got into comics though, I discovered girls. I soon realized that girls and comics are oil and water and if you want one then you have to give up the other.

Now, 26 years old with a girlfriend who knows more about comics that I do, I am free to love any damn superhero/antihero/social delinquent/mysoginistic aardvard. It's good times. But now, my knowledge has widened and my interests changed (thanks, college!). Several years ago I got my first copy of Cerebus and also read the graphic novel, Watchmen. Twedo very different books focusing on very different themes, but both changed me. Cerebus focuses on a power-hungry Aardvark who spends most of his days as a mercenary/bishop/politician/thief/pope. As you may have guessed, it's somewhat elaborate, but its focus on feminism, politics in government and in religion fascinated me. Granted, the intent of the author was to criticize and show feminism as fraudulent, but I'm not too smart and thought the exact opposite. Watchmen, well, it's complicated and would take at least five hundred words. I don't have time for that. Needless to say, I didn't "get it" at first, but it worked its way into my mind slowly and got me into a whole other world of comics.

From then on it was a slippery slope into more slippy things that I like: Sin City, Bone, Ultimate X-Men, Astonishing X-Men. The list kept growing. Now, I feel I'm pretty much at the top of my game and can say whether or not a comic is worth the time with some validity. I pride myself on knowing good writing, or more precisely, writing that lacks the stench of pretension and is filled with wit, humor and themes that are much greater than the characters or books themselves. The books that make this list?

Ex Machina, Y: The Last Man and Runaways are all on that list. I put the together here and not individually because they're all written by the same man; Brian K. Vaughan. This guy is amazingly talented and has the ability to bring complex themes together with humor unlike anyone else in the industry. Ex Machina goes after post 9/11 politics ina way that is simply jawdropping. Y: The Last Man is about a man, the only man, to survive I-don't-know-what (I'm only two books in) and his life and times being hunted by a world filled with only women. Runaways, my favorite of the bunch, focuses on a group of teenagers that find they're all the sons and daughters of super-villains. Soon they find they all have powers or are aliens or have Velociraptors that they can communicate to through telekinesis. You know, all the usual stuff that teenagers find out once puberty arrives. The book is amazingly seductive with its smart ass teenage rebellion and its unflinching mistrust of all adults and what is considered "right", but its main draw for me is its realism. People die. Kids die. Main characters die.

On top of all that, there's also Planetary. Warren Ellis is the writer, I'm not familiar with much else that he's done in the past, so I can't go much into that. He has an amazing knowledge of literary figures and pop culture icons, which he uses to give each issue a mythos all its own that is very reminescent of the serialized comics of the forties and fifties. You're likely to find ghost cops roaming the streets of Hong Kong, Area 51 victims and Godzilla in just about any issue. The larger picture comes out by issue twelve though and the story begins to look closely at man's penchant for violence among other things. Honestly, I haven't made it past issue twelve, so I'm not sure what happens after that. I'm sure it's TOTALLY mind-blowing though.

Right on. I think I'm gonna go now. That Ryan Reynolds movie, "Just Friends" is on and I think I might be in love with the girl in it. You know, the one in all the Scary Movie movies.