The Year Happened And Now Here We Are: An Awards Ceremony For 2023
Awards Without Honor Or Ceremony
Hello, comics. I know you've had a rough go at it this year, and I haven't been there for you as much as I would have liked. But it's the holidays, and the holidays are a time to get close to one another, so here we are. I know what happened to you because it happened to me too: I love you, but you don't love yourself nearly enough. We can get through this, and I can help. You know what people do when they need to feel better about what they do? They have big dumb award ceremonies where they talk about how good they are for hours on end, in a format that is easy to write and adapt so they can get something out, if for no other reason than to provide proof of life. It's easy, any hack can do it, and so can we, comics. We can go to the cozy cabin on Trash Mountain, and warm ourselves in the glow of the endless fire. Ready?
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN BEING A TOTAL DUMBFUCK: MARK MILLAR
Wow, Mark, talk about fucking around and finding out, huh bub? For those blissfully unaware: a few weeks back, this bored millionaire with a Netflix deal and nothing that would matter to show for it decided to jump face-first into the year's dumbest culture war, to take up the cause of one of its dumbest soldiers. (I would give you the recap, but my duty to spare you from knowledge that would make you dumber forbids it. When you know that it started with the fact that semi-obscure Marvel Comics villain The Hood has not been written into a comic for a while, you pick up on the worth of the argument pretty quickly.)
For the purpose of our story, the only facts that matter are these: he soon found himself hanging around the dumb fascist grifters that live at the end of this particular spiral, and he began to circulate their dumb bullshit. And then, quicker than he would have liked, he started insinuating about the wrong people, namely those to whom he owes the career in comics he seems to resent. For it had always been known, if you asked the right people, that his standing on the shoulders of those that had come before him was a whole lot less metaphorical than that of the many talented people that let him put his name on their scripts. When the whistle was blown, Mark Millar thus found out what had been fairly common knowledge, namely that there's no such thing as a halfway crook, and that it's hard to get the toothpaste back in the tube.
And so, our dumdum supreme is now in the awkward position of having to pretend he never meant to endorse all the conspiracy theories he definitely endorsed. And all the while, he's also publishing some of this year's worst comics. BIG GAME is a transparently hollow take on the superhero mega-crossover event that dares to ask what would happen if supervillains and superheroes fought while never believing in anything. It's completely fucking dire. His play for the future of comics is just to get the artists that were already doing the biggest comics in the world to do the biggest comics in the world. It's nothing. It is as dumb as everything else he has ever done. So, fuck off Mark, and take your comics with you; you're not the future, you're a grown man acting like you're still 14.
SPECIAL EGO DEATH AWARD FOR THE COMIC SO BAD IT VERY NEARLY BROKE ME: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
This is not going to sound particularly novel to anyone that has ever been involved in any endeavor in or near the field of "The Arts", but, as someone with negative amounts of formal training in the fields of writing, comics, criticism, and writing comics criticism, I am sometimes gripped by an all-consuming fear that none of what I do, or have ever done, is of any value whatsoever to anyone, and worse, that none of it is even mine. There is nothing more terrifying to me than putting the mind on neutral and letting myself go with a flow other than my own, which is why I'm purposefully leaving this mixed metaphor in. I have carried this fear with me this year more than any other year because of one comic, and one comic only, and that comic is The Amazing Spider-Man, edited by Nick Lowe, written by Zeb Wells, and featuring the art of John Romita Jr., Ed McGuinness, and Patrick Gleason.
Here's the thing: people hated that comic months before I did, for the same wrong reasons why people usually hate comics nowadays, a general aversion to change or conflict or anything interesting at all happening to their precious characters. So long as the comic was good, I could be a contrarian, point out that the back-to-basics approach worked really well, especially following the over-complicated over-reliant on continuity mess of Nick Spencer's run, and things would be more or less fine.
But then, it turned out that the haters had been correct all along, and all it took for me to change my mind was the worst issue of the year, The Amazing Spider-Man #26, part of a shameful little publicity stunt that revealed how inconsequential and short-sighted the creative leadership at Marvel Comics really are.
This is where it gets perverse: this is a comic so bad that it demands your attention, but all the while it is not worthy of it in any way. When you fall into its trap, whether that's because you need the validation or because you can't help but try to make sense of these things, you follow its trail to nowhere, and all you get to show for it is the kind of corny and embarrassing shit that every other clown with a twitter account is already saying. And then people you're eager to impress point out you're being a total fucking mark for the dumbest bullshit imaginable, and they're completely right, and you feel so bad about yourself you don't write for months because it hardly feels worth it.
Look: there's a good ending to this, the long journey of doubt led me to finally reading Judge Dredd and now I'm making 2000 AD my entire personality, but it was really touch-and-go for a while, and I blame this single comic for all of my bad takes of 2023. I'm good now. (Also, I stopped posting on Twitter; that helped A LOT.)
MOST VALUABLE PLAYERS AWARD, FOR A VERY SPECIFIC USE OF THE PHRASE "MOST VALUABLE": JORGE JIMENEZ AND TOMEU MOREY
It's been a wild and wacky year in Chip Zdarsky's Batman, one that involved leaps into the multiverse, a poorly thought-out showdown with Catwoman, and a battle against his own mind so stupid that it made me decide to stop buying the comic then and there. I don't know how it happened, I don't know why issue #140 was my breaking point, but then again I don't know how you go from 50 issues of Daredevil so elegantly weaving together all the character had been and interrogating the book's premise to Batman impotently screaming at Catwoman that his parents were rich in panels that border on the absolutely craftless.
What could keep one coming back to a book so harshly described? Why would you put up with any of this, especially when refusing to play along would save you five American dollars a month? It's simple, really: it's because Jorge Jimenez is the best artist working in superhero comics today and Tomeu Morey is the most essential colorist working in superhero comics today. It's a whole bunch of things, from the many instantly iconic characters they have designed using influences from areas of pop culture well beyond what American Corporate Comics usually explore, to the total mastery of action and layout that makes each and every page feel propulsive and dynamic, to the total control over imagery and mood, making sure every moment feels like the most iconic version of itself.
It's the kind of visual spectacle that is so self-evidently great that writing about it only serves to restate the obvious; it's stuff anyone with eyes and a love of comics will have intuited the first time they saw them at work. And I am writing all of this because of the three issues of Batman they have contributed to this year. That's right: they weren't even doing the comic for most of the year! Jorge Jimenez was doing Nemesis Reloaded, a bad comic by a certifiable dumbfuck! And guess what: that comic feels like a minor Jimenez work in every way imaginable, and not having the most essential colorist in comics along for the ride makes it all the more dull.
What I'm saying, then, is that Jorge Jimenez is so dedicated to being the best artist working in superhero comics today that he will only do his best work in the pages of Batman. Meanwhile, Morey was being iconic all over one of the other best-looking cape comics of 2023, teaming up with Daniel Sampere on Wonder Woman. If that isn't insane fucking value for DC Comics, I don't know what is. No one else can even come close, and no one else has. And that's why they are 2023's Most Valuable Players.
THE PEOPLE'S CHAMPION AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT IN BEING HUMBLE BEFORE COMICS: DAN WATTERS
Several people in comics have had higher-profile years than Dan Watters' 2023. But, if I may be bold for a minute, none of them have been as consistently strong, in every possible circumstance a writer of corporate comics can find themselves, as Dan Watters has been in 2023. He expanded his weird little corner of Gotham in the backups for Detective Comics with committed formal boldness, supporting the main story with tales of Azazel (cool), The Question (even cooler) and a few other bit players in Ram V's grand epic. And on its own, it would have been a lot.
But then, he also had a couple of features in and around Superman, including cooler-than-cool takes on Doomsday and motherfuckin' Bloodwynd! BLOODWYND! Oh, and there was that Loki miniseries, deftly putting the God of Stories in his place just in time for The Immortal Thor. He killed it on a Knight Terrors tie-in. And that's just the stuff he doesn't own! He also did The Seasons Have Teeth at Boom, a wonderful series about nature, time, regrets, and giant monsters!
If this industry had even one ounce of sense, Dan Watters would be its next superstar writer. I think it's poised to happen in 2024, and I will wish for it to happen with all my heart. Here is someone humble before comics. Here is the People's Champion. Dan Watters, go and get them.
BEST WILDSTORM COMIC OF THE YEAR: THE VIGIL
It is always appropriate to celebrate Wildstorm and its legacy, but it was even more appropriate this year, as last year's celebration of the publisher's 30th anniversary carried over into a whole lot of really exciting books. There was Rosenberg and Segovia's WildC.A.T.S., a joyous festival of shooting, slicing and blasting featuring all of your favorites being their cooler than cool selves; Ackerman, Narcisse and Merino's Waller vs. Wildstorm reimagined the early years of Stormwatch in a DC crossover overloaded with bitter Cold War cynicism; they even got Lanzing and Kelly, fresh off of their underappreciated runs on Captain America and Batman Beyond to make a new Planetary, which they called Outsiders because Warren Ellis is a coward and a fraud!
And all of those are fine comics, worth looking into if you've ever had any affection for the creations of Brandon Choi and Jim Lee; but if you wanted to get deeper about it, if you wanted to see Wildstorm not just as a fictional universe and its associated characters, but as a way of making comics, a particular blend of superheroes and high-concept sci-fi spy thrillers using metaphor and allegory to get into complex topics, relating to history, heritage and life as an outsider to the imperial core (more has been said about all these things by people way smarter than me), then The Vigil was where it was at.
It's a smart comic. It's a cool comic. It had more big ideas in all of its six issues than a lot of the supposedly forward-looking comics have had over their entire run. Most importantly, it's a comic that nobody but Ram V could have devised, and that makes it precious. I loved that comic a whole bunch, much like I love Wildstorm a whole bunch. Happy 30th, here's to thirty more.
ABSOLUTELY THE BEST SINGLE ISSUE OF 2023: DANGER STREET #9 (JORGE FORNES, TOM KING AND DAVE STEWART, DC COMICS)
I've written at length about that one, and it never got better than this! This comic is a formalist tour de force, its every choice working together to make a life-affirming masterpiece about stories and their power to connect us to ourselves and to others! That's it! That's the whole thing!
THE TRUE AND RIGHTFUL STONE-COLD FACTUAL BEST COMIC OF THE YEAR: DETECTIVE COMICS (RAM V, SI SPURRIER, DAN WATTERS ET AL., DC COMICS)
Barely needs to be explained, does it? It's an incredibly imaginative and all-around beautiful gothic opera about people, ideas, and the world they create! It's the rare follow-up to a Grant Morrison work that understands the characters and the themes that were there! Everything about this comic is a little miracle, including the fact that it is playing out in Detective Comics Comics' Detective Comics. There were a lot of excellent comics this year, some I didn't even bring up yet! (Birds of Prey was a primordially kickass all-out action comic! Immortal Thor beautifully married classic bombast and clever subversions! I got caught up in the whirlwind romance of Barnstormers, and w0rldtr33's take on extremely contemporary horror felt timely and essential!)
But, god damnit, nothing got me quite like Detective Comics did. Here was a comic on a level all its own. Nothing got close, and nothing made it look as easy or as accessible. Earlier this year, I said that Campbell and Williamson's Superman had set the bar for Cape Comics. But all the while, Detective Comics had been the gold standard. Unbeatable, and undeniable. It is, factually, the best comic of 2023. Humble yourself before it. Humble yourself before comics. See you next year.