Salon.com weighs in on graphic novels
Not all geeks are like me: pale, unattractive trolls who scrape, Hunchback of Notre Dame-like, from store to store to get their fix of tan, attractive superheroes.
No, some of them are high-falutin’ writers for Salon.com, which just put out a list of this year’s notable comics and graphic novels.
I haven’t read everything on the list, but I’m a big fan of “Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together” — I devoured it in one sitting and I’m eager to read it again — and “All-Star Superman” from DC Comics.
One I was surprised missed the list was “Captain America,” which is notable to me for just being a great comic, but maybe to others because the main character is now long-dead. Marvel Comics foresaw the expectations of most of us (that Cap would be back among the living in no time flat) and defied them, first by keeping Steve Rogers a corpse, but also by not filling his boots immediately.
I don’t know about Matt (really, I know nothing about the guy. Is he tall, I wonder?), but I’m working on a Top 10 comics of the year list which I look forward to foisting upon you and our loyal podcast listeners in the coming weeks.
– Greg Elwell
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Columns like this are always interesting — and, typically, each year, I do two — one for best comics and one for best graphic novels. However, I generally want the best graphic novels to be stuff that’s collected for the first time — it seems somehow unfair to have someone’s debut OGN compete against “all the Spider-Man by Stan Lee,” for example. (However, I haven’t always stuck completely true to this rule — I’m pretty sure I included “Bone One Volume” and “Palomar” in my top 10 lists before.)
And I think it’ll get even more tricky — do webcomics deserve their own list? Manga? Should I just suck it up and go back to one list, for comics, graphic novels, whatever? I think this year I’m sticking with the two lists, but I think the waters are muddying.
– Matt