THE FUTURE HAS TAKEN ROOT IN THE PRESENT (It's the 2021 recap)
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that one wanted to summarize the events of the year that was in the form of a funny little editorial to be distributed to the hungry masses through the charmingly dated medium of a newsletter. Could there, then, be a more appropriate final piece of news for the year than a multimedia conglomerate acquiring the third-largest publisher in all of comics? Everything there is to know about the Embracer/Dark Horse deal right now is in the press release, so it's not really worth going into it any deeper, except for the fact that it does confirm a trend we picked up on early in the year: following the catastrophic circumstances of 2020, the comic book industry, by and large, chose to get more professional than it ever had before. This prospect is scary, because that kind of corporate consolidation always leads to the terrible outcomes of late-stage capitalism. But on the flipside, this newfound air of seriousness has encouraged the working hands of the industry to stake their claim over how things should be done, and hold one another in the solidarity of unions. There are a lot more people taking comics a lot more seriously than there were even a few years ago, and, speaking as someone who named their newsletter "HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS", I think this change is entirely worthwhile.
And we're going to need all the seriousness we can muster in the coming years, because the other big industry trend of 2021 is people that should know better buying into any number of fly-by-night scams that feel doomed to end in tears in one way or another. Delivering comics via newsletter is not going to be a thing until several technical challenges get solved in a way compelling enough for mass adoption. Non-fungible tokens are never going to be a thing, ever, because their sole use and purpose, by design, is to be an instrument for financial speculation that will only depreciate in value as the early adopters cash out. These things will come and go, hopefully, as all bad gimmicks must. We might even avoid the massive crowdfunding campaigns for celebrity-backed vanity comics from publishers who clearly had the means and the ability to make the comics happen regardless this time!
Anyway, that is going to be it for the news that's fit to remember. The rest is quite simply too stupid to relitigate, especially the stories I nailed on the first go-around, so I'll advise you to check the archives out if you ever get curious. As ever in life, the most important thing is the comics, and once more, the comics were good. My highlights of 2021 were not just better than the others, they were also, somehow, more Comics than the others. They could only ever be comics, and the best of the best could only ever be physical comics. If you're looking for an easy new year's resolution for 2022: get the jab, put on the mask, and get yourself to a comic book shop. It's just the better way of enjoying comics. Trust me on that one.
That's about as much preamble as I can come up with; let's present the best comics of the year, in no particular order.
Let us start the festivities with a comic that is, to me, most representative of what comics in 2021 were like. It's The Nice House on the Lake, by Alvaro Martinez Bueno and James Tynion IV. First: it's an horror piece, and 2021 has been particularly generous in that respect, whether that's the incredible The Swamp Thing at DC, or literally anything that Vault Comics have published in this calendar year. Second: I think it has the coolest integration of in-diegesis full-page prose you will find in a comic this year, sorry not sorry Johnathan Hickman. It's extremely cool world-building through prose and design, but with a lived-in quality that added to the presentation in important ways. Third, and most importantly: this is a comic with killer hooks left and right. The main one, which I still dare not spoil because the comic is that good, opens an interesting conversation about becoming older in times of incredible crisis. Then, there's the main storytelling conceit of the book, which keeps things satisfying on a month-to-month basis by centering each issue around the point of view of one of the residents of the eponymous nice house as its many mysteries get uncovered. This allows every individual issue to stand out from the rest, which in turn makes the value proposition of the single issue comic that much cooler, and you know I'm all about that. Plus it's drop-dead gorgeous, especially because Jordie Bellaire colors it, and as always she's a highlight.
I'd be lying to you and to myself if this summary of my favorite comics of the year did not have at least one Tom King book in it, and the lucky winner for 2021 had to be Strange Adventures, which is, for my money, his finest work yet. Like The Bat and the Cat and Rorschach, this is a book about the stories we tell ourselves about our selves, and how they affect the world around us. But Bat/Cat is too enamored with its many idiosyncrasies to keep to any sort of through line, and Rorschach, by design, is about what you put into it, which is really fun to document, but it also means that everyone's experience of it will be slightly different. Being about a search for some kind of truth, Strange Adventures is far more straightforward, which works in its favor as the series deals with topics (Imperialism, masculinity, propaganda and other cruelties) that require a hand as steady as it is principled. Across two time periods, and assisted by two of comics' most talented composers of imagery (Mitch Gerads and Doc Shaner), stories of space-faring heroes and the darkness at the heart of their violence get challenged, and the end result is as true and as radical a statement on comics as you can make at a mainstream publisher.
Has it been an off year for Marvel Comics in general, or is it just that Jason Aaron is still the writer of Avengers? Either way, it really feels like Marvel were desperate to return to business as usual this year, whether it's finding ways to extend the Krakoa status quo in the X-Men books by undermining anything too dangerous, The Amazing Spider-Man being a book largely about retcons for most of the year, or Dan Slott's continued employment. It's a shame, because the few books that took big swings turned out to be some of the year's best. Eternals could have been your standard just-in-time-for-the-movie MCU retread; it absolutely wasn't. Instead, Kieron Gillen and Esad Ribic took their considerable power to make and remix incredible imagery to deliver a potent critique of Jack Kirby's creation, which successfully lays out an argument as to why they're so interesting and essential. Maximalist in scale and in approach, it built a history and a society for the Eternals, and doomed it to failure because the Eternals cannot help but be who they are. It's powerful, it's fascinating, and it delights in throwing game-changer after game-changer. I had a blast reading this book, so please don't remind me that its inciting incident is the off-panel mass suicide of the Eternals in the aforementioned Jason Aaron Avengers run.
In times this near-apocalyptical, it took something really special to make me genuinely look forward to the future for even a moment. And that was Superman and the Authority, which is, supposedly, the final word on all things Superhero by one Grant Morrison, with the help of Mikel Janin and some of comics' finest. Anchored to the history of radicalism of both Superman and the Authority (the Wildstorm superteam, not the general concept of "authority", although of course you could read the title that way), they deliver four issues of optimist futurism packed with ideas other comics would spend entire runs exploring. All throughout, it embraces new ways of thinking, and it calls on us to imagine something new, with the impertinent winks and nods that Morrison has built a career out of. It's their Action Comics by way of The Invisibles. It's JLA's modern Camelot with a bit of The Filth on top. It's all good, and it's all new, and I love that DC Comics have chosen to embrace it in the way they have, in letter by way of Phillip Kennedy Johnson's Warworld Saga, and in spirit almost everywhere else.
But no comic in 2021 was more comic than Echolands, a work so bold and so dedicated to being uniquely itself that it comes presented in a landscape format. It's like W. Haden Blackman and J.H. Williams III, frustrated by the way their New 52 run on Batwoman went, and frustrated in general with the way big corporate comics go, decided to go all the way out and make every single comic they wished to make AT ONCE. It's an adventure through styles, genres, presentations, and ultimately Adventure itself. Because of the way it's presented, its world embraces and engulfs you, overwhelms you with fine detail until you are fully immersed. If I seem like I have trouble describing this comic, it's because it's an experience more than anything else. It's something that could only be a comic, because it could only be done in comics. You need to see it for yourself, you need to touch it, and you need to turn its pages. It's the purest expression of everything that is cool and good about this medium, and that's why I had to tell you about it.
And that, chums, is everything about 2021 in comics worth remembering! The big headlines, at least. For everything else, just read the dang archives! That's what they're here for! Sorry about the delay, sorry it's like this, but it's the gosh darn holiday rush! That's my last piece of 2021! We'll return in 2022, all rested and all raring to go, since they were dumb enough to make the next big X-Men story a ten issue Wolverine vehicle. In the mean time, I'm going to keep my manifesto fingers warm, you're going to enjoy the celebrations of the new year, and we'll meet back here, ready to fuck shit up on the double, in 2022. Merry Crimbo, Happy Nude Year, and as ever, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.