Welcome to the 25th edition of ‘Leave Your Spandex @t the Door’!
Wow, has it really been 25 weeks since the start of this column?
…
Oh, yeah, wait. It hasn’t. That would have been the case if the column was actually ever on time. Oh well!
This and the next week I’ll be taking a special look back through 2003. I’ll be going through the past year, month-by-month, seeing which titles made their distinct mark in our memories. Don’t expect to see much mention of luminaries of the Superman/Batman or Teen Titans variety that seem to be monopolising our top tens this year. Thre are so many other places you can get that sort of thing, this is the spandex-lite zone of the site.
[Note: Since I don’t have a precise listing of what shipped when, I’m going with the cover dates, and what I know of each company’s advance-dating strategies. Allow 1-2 months error margin in the rundown!]
JANUARY
Ah! Happy 2003! The year is certainly off to a bloody start. The January ‘Hairstyling’ award goes off to SNOW-WHITE, who gets shot in the head in the last page of FABLES #9, the penultimate chapter of the Animal Farm storyline. The perpetrator? The poster child of maliciousness and bestiality: Goldy Locks! More on her later! This last page has been etched in memory as the best cliffhanger of the year, leaving me on the edge of my seat, biting my toenails to see what happens next. Couldtey really kill off the title’s star character, and in such a gruesome fashion? Well, turns out they can’t, but the way it all unravels in next month’s issue is very satisfatory, and introduces a very juice new element in the Fables canon.
SANDMAN PRESENTS: BAST kicks off, by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Joe Bennett on pencils. The ancient Egyptian goddess Bast gains a new believer in modern-day America. When the girl dies, Bast revives her body with the soul of a young kitten on the helm and sets to exact vengeance on the town.
Chris Claremont bears his teeth with MEKANIX #1, showing he can still cut it as a writer. 2003 is set to be the year he gains back the readers’ respect as an x-scribe. It all starts here, with a look at Kitty Pryde’s adventures in college, as she is forced to confront racism, not with fists, but with taking a stand and starting a debate. Throw in the greatest x-men battle sequence of the year, against alien mutant-hunting machines, and you have a real winner.
Y THE LAST MAN #7 is the start of the second storyline, ‘Cycles’. Having introduced the characters and settings, Brian Vaughan takes a left turn and throws Yorick, the last man on earth, in the middle of Marrisville, a town full of reformed female convicts. There he will find love, lose love and have a family reunion with his sister, Hero (now a member of the fanatic Amazon posse, bent on eradicating every last male sperm from the planet. That means Yorick.)
In LUCIFER #34, the first part of ‘Come to Judgement’, the funeral for Elaine Belloc (the angel child that gave her life so Lucifer could be reborn) is held, and Solomon, God’s pet investigator (who may or my not be THE Solomon) tries to uncover the perpetrator.
FEBRUARY
I’ve placed the first circulation date of CROSSGEN’S TRAVELLERS volumes this month, an they more than deserve the February ‘so addictive’ award. The Travellers are digest-sized, affordable, full-colour reprints of Crossgen’s best titles. They make ideal gifts for those pesky young girls you want to pass the comics love torch on to. I know I got my young cousin addicted to them. Now you can too!
Not much else going in this month. Worth of note is the VERTIGO X ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL, commemorating Vertigo’s tenth anniversary, and showcasing their scheduled projects for 2003. Peter Milligan also takes the chance to revisit Shade The changing man, in a short story illustrated by Mike Allred.
Speaking of Pete and Mike, X-STATIX#6 is part one o ‘Moons Of Venus’, a clever take on the ‘sins of the past’, the ‘masked villain’ and ‘good guy turns bad’ motifs of superhero comics. X-Statix leader Guy Smith resigns from the team and a new masked villain shows up, claiming to be Guy turned evil: ‘Bad Guy’. But is he?
MARCH
Marvel takes a bold step and launches the three GUS BEEZER ones-shots, written by the unsurpassable Gail Simone. Gus Beezer is a 7-year old comics fan (quite the odd phenomenon these days) with an overactive imagination, who tends to give his own superheroic spin to events around him. Each issue features Gus Beezer’s own hand-drawn comics on the lower 1/5 of each page. Winner of March’s ‘Look Kids, Comics!’ award!
On another Gail front, AGENT-X #7 marks her departure from the title, due to (according to rumours) creative differences with the editor, Andrew Lis. In the story, Agent-x is hired by Shameful William, a pan hedonistic collector, to retrieve a batch of stolen celebrity and superhero panties. Ah, Gail!
Sean Phillips and Ed Brubaker launch the ‘sleeper-hit’ of the year, SLEEPER #1, universally-applauded by the critics and its fans, but dwindling in sales. Holden Carver is an undercover agent in Tao’s criminal empire. But when the only person who knows of his double status disappears, he finds himself in quite the predicament!
Judd Winnick decides Joss Whedon is full of ^&%$ and gives his own take on vampire lore, with the help of veteran vampire artist Tom Coker in BLOOD + WATER #1. Our protagonist is on the verge of death, horribly deformed from sickness, and his friends decide to save his life, by introducing him to blood-sucking 101.
Mike Carey converts Lucifer into a team book for the Naglfar storyline, launching in LUCIFER #36. Lucifer selects the crew to set sail on Naglfar (the ship made of dead men’s fingernails) on a quest to retrieve Elaine Belloc’s trapped soul. A Cabaret dancers impregnated by mystic tarot deck, a demonic warriors, fallen Cherubim, a bastard angel child, the ghost of another one’s foster father, and a Norse god of charm. Explosive dynamics abound, as there’s little love lost between the crew members.
APRIL
April’s ‘reminder of how good comics can be’ award goes to CATWOMAN #16, the closing chapter of the ‘Relentless’ storyline. Within the span of 5 issues, Ed Brubaker has taken Catwoman’s newly re-established life, put it through the blender and then force-fed it to her sister, along with the occasional eyeball. The Black Mask is furious at Catwoman for mucking about his territory, and exacts his vengeance by going after all her loved ones. An abundance of emotional moments, non-stop beautifully-choreographed action sequences (courtesy of the much-missed Cameron Stewart. Get that boy back on the title, pronto DC people!), the most shocking villainous act of the decade (the aforementioned eyeball feast) and the mother of all finales. –sigh-
H-E-R-O #1, the revamp of the classic DC series, under the helm of Will Pfeiffer and newcomer ‘Kano’. The HERO device gives its users an endless access t various super powered identities. In the first storyline, it falls in the hands of a suicidal teenager, who narrates his adventure on an emergency self-help hotline.
In FABLES #12, Lan Medina returns on artistic duties for the two-part Caper storyline. A reporter has uncovered evidence of the existence of the Fables community. Now the Fables form a covert team to deal with the new threat. Bluebeard, Prince Charming, Sleeping Beauty, the Charmed Frog, Pinocchio and of course the Big Bad Wolf, in a truly-inspired action plan!
Gail Simone and Lea Hernandez return to their KILLER PRINCESSES with #3 to wrap up the girls’ first mini-series. The Killer Princesses are dim-witted beauty queens, members of a sorority that goes by the motto ‘better a world without intellect’. Think of Charlie’s Angels gone horribly stupid. Made nigh-famous for the graphical dog-humping scenes contained within.
MAY
Winner of May’s ‘crowd-pleaser’ award, what else? The X2: X-MEN UNITED MOVIE!!! After watching it 3 times in the cinema, and two on DVD, I can safely say I love ever
y minute detail of it. In my mind, the best comics adaptation… until X3.
In more movie-related news, X-STATIX #9 is the “X-Statix: The Movie†issue, with the team visiting the shooting of their new movie adaptation.
HELLBLAZER #184 features the most devilishly clever poker game in comics this year. It took a second read-through for me to actually understand how it was played out. Mike Carey with Marcello Frusin. The Carey boy is constantly delivering the goods!
VERTIGO POP: BANGKOK #1 I the third in the series of vertigo pop series, after LONDON and TOKYO. A young couple journey to Bangkok and become entwined in the drama of a prostitute trying to escape her ‘employer’.
Y THE LAST MAN #11, the beginning of “One Small Stepâ€. Yorick Brown is the last man… on earth. But that’s not counting the two astronauts trapped in orbit around earth, and preparing emergency landing. The problems start when a group of Israeli soldiers want to intervene and get the men for themselves. Greedy vixens.
JUNE
Oh, June is a GREAT month for comics! I couldn’t for the life o me decide which title should get this award, so it had to become a 3-in-1!
1. THING: NIGHT FALLS ON YANCY STREET by Evan Dorkin and Dean Haspiel. My personal favourite mini-series for this year. Evan Dorkin provides the best take on the Thing I have ever read, as he introduces a new love in his life, in a period where he is already romantically linked to Alicia Masters. Things get even more complicated for ol’ Blue-Eyes as he discovers his new lady-love has a secret, and is persecuted by the Frightful Four! I never thought I could enjoy a Thing story so much, but there you have it!
2. LOVE FIGHTS #1 by Andi Watson. My favourite new series of 2003, tells the story of Jack and Nora. Jack is a superhero comics penciller, and the owner of Guthrie, the civilian identity of the superhero cat Future Feline. Nora is a reporter for a superhero tabloid. When they meet, sparks fly. And it’s not all the Flamer’s fault. Stylised art, laugh-out loud moments and touching romance. Uh-huh, yeah!
3. TOM STRONG #20 by Alan Moore and Jerry Ordway kicks off the ‘Crisis of Infinite Hearts’ storyline. A freak occurrence in the time stream will cause a tragic boat accident before his birth to change its outcome. Instead of his mother’s black lover dying, his father does, and so begins the saga of Tom Stone! The world becomes a better place because of Tom Stone, who proves to be more adept at solving problems than Tom Strong ever was. But why then has this mysterious woman travelled across dimensions to Strong’s house to ask for his aid in destroying the alternate timeline? Alan Moore tries his hand at writing a time-travel / alternate realities storyline, and the results are, as anticipated, incredible!
Andy Diggle and the artist known only as ‘Jock’ launch a remaining of the classic DC war-team, the LOSERS, now in the form of a team of ex-federal agents who faked their deaths when they discovered they were being set up by their employers. LOSERS #1 kicks off the series, which has proven so far to be the best action movie never to have been shot on film. Crazy stunts, enjoyable antiques by the adorable hacker, Jensen and more than your money’s worth of widescreen action, on paper!
The Big Bad Wolf and Snow-white finally get down and jiggy with it in ‘Storybook Love’, beginning with FABLES #14. Bluebeard has been hiding Goldilocks in his apartments, after the explosive events of Animal Farm (see January), but now he decides to make his move against Snow-white. So now a drugged Snow-white and Bigby find themselves doing the bad deed in the deeps of the forest, with a rifle-bearing Goldilocks after them, while Bluebeard fences with Prince Charming for his possessions. Mark Buckingham shines throughout with his separate page layout designs for each of the ongoing plot threads in this storyline!
Philip Bond guest-pencils for X-STATIX #10, in a story starring the dearly –departed Edie Sawyer a.k.a. U-Go Girl. Venus De Milo discovers Edie’s diaries, describing how she first arrived in L.A., and how she ended up joining X-Force. I still miss Edie terribly, after her tragic death in X-Force#128, and this issue reminds me why.
And to wrap up the first half-year, the cutest offering from DC this year, the LIL’ ENDLESS STATUES set, modelled after Jill Thompson’s lovable chibi versions of Sandman’s extended family. A must-have keepsake for all fans!
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Coming up next week: The countdown to the new year concludes, with dead-beat superheroes, dead princesses, and Death herself.
As always, I’m waiting for your comments through email or in the official LYS@D discussion thread.
Manolis Vamvounis
a.k.a. Doc Dooplove
