Time Will Continue Until Morale Improves: An Awards Ceremony For 2024
All that is worth remembering about 2024, but mostly just what happened in comics.
Well, gang, that’s it! With the final Wednesday of 2024 in the books, we are officially out of new comic books for the year! Was 2024 good? Yeah! At least in comics! Why else would I recommit myself many times over to this newsletter? Lack of options? Lack of any other skill? Maybe! But it was an interesting year, and from those interests, I’ve made another one of these award ceremonies that everyone seems to do at this time of year! So, let’s cut the nonsense, and on with the show!
WORST INNOVATION, GRIFT, OUTRIGHT SCAM OR ADJACENT FEAT OF FLIMFLAM: RED BAND COMICS
We’ve talked about it before, and we’ll talk about it over and over again: with its survival within the machine of Capital at stake, the comic book industry has entered an unprecedented period of rapid change. This, in turn, has led every publisher still standing, as well as the occasional start-up, to throw out any old invention they can devise to stake a claim over the future of the form.
Some of those inventions are beautifully simple, like DC’s Compact Comics line, which for a small, reasonable price, gets you a full-color copy of Watchmen you can fit in just about any bag. Some are deeply stupid, like the bonus pages accessible via QR Code Marvel trotted out with the launch of those new X-Men comics. For every “Holy Moly I found out about Hewligan’s Haircut from a Best of 2000AD collection and that has brought me a lot of joy”, there’s an equal and opposite “Sure DSTLRY’s marketplace for limited edition digital comics offends me, but I can pick up a premium quality copy of White Boat printed on actual paper at my actual shop and that is actually undeniably great”.
And then, there’s Marvel’s Red Band comics, launched with this summer’s Blood Hunt and continued in comics like Hickman and Capullo’s Wolverine: Revenge and that new relaunch of Blade. Imagine if you will having to pay one extra dollar to read what is either the comic you should have gotten in the first place, in all of its gory glory, or the exact same comic, but there’s maybe just a bit of splayed guts here and there. Or imagine the reverse: paying one dollar less and getting a lesser comic for your trouble. I find either scenario deeply unacceptable.
What’s the case for it, really? Protecting kids from cartoon horrors? (Like the most violence they see on a daily basis is Fortnite?) Giving Adult Collectors a premium Director’s-Cut-type product? (There’s nothing premium about these comics whatsoever, so good luck!) This only envelope this is pushing is that of the kind of overpriced gimmicks Marvel thinks they can get away with. It’s lame! It’s bad! It’s the worst new thing in comics this year!
THE TK ULTRA PRIZE FOR BEST TOM KING COMIC OF THE YEAR: WONDER WOMAN
Was 2024 the best year to be a Tom King fan? Well, considering the state of the discourse around his comics, I’m gonna say it’s between “no” and “fuck no”. All things said, while I don’t think it was Tom King’s best year, I do think it was Tom King’s most year, and the list of books with his name on it is impressive enough to be worth highlighting.
There was Animal Pound, which I didn’t think much of at the time, but then, against all odds it turned out to be a prescient and insightful bit of allegory about how American politics ended up eating themselves through unchecked injustices and bad compromises made at a foundational level. There was the conclusion of The Penguin, a magnificent exercise in formalism working as a tightly wound bit of neo-noir clockwork, centering around the most fascinating comic book figure of the year (see also: that TV show everyone liked).
There was Helen of Wyndhorn, in which the team that made the already-a-classic and soon-to-be-a-feature-film Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow continued exploring their fascination with superbly crafted pulp fantasy, pushing themselves even further, this time to explore our drive towards escapism in a genius genre mashup of romantic literature and classic Conan the Barbarian. There was the first finale of Love Everlasting, also a genre mashup, also impeccable in its mimicry, and also with a fair few things to say regarding our relationship to fiction.
There was Jenny Sparks, which I’ve written plenty about. There was Black Canary: Best of the Best, which so early on just feels like flexing. Hell: there was even a whole Archie Comics tribute in there, which would feel like a minor work had it not made it so obvious how much of an actual Archie superfan its writer truly was.
But then, there was also Wonder Woman, and that one feels a little bit more special. It’s not just that it’s an ongoing comic, which adds to the stakes in a very tangible way. It’s that it’s also possibly the best ongoing comic in DC’s main line. It’s consistently exciting, often provocative, and on occasion it will sucker punch you with how funny it is. (Consider issue #16, in which our primary antagonist gets annoyed into submission by Detective Chimp doing Columbo shtick) Everything I said about that comic way back in my review of #1? It holds up. It’s fantastic old-school melodrama with new school action theatrics. I love it more than I have loved several comics this year, and this is why it’s there, fuck you!
BEST COMIC THAT, HMM, REALLY MAKES YOU THINK, ABOUT THE NEWS, AND ABOUT POLITIC’S AND ALL THE SOME SUCH, YOU KNOW?: JUDGE DREDD - A BETTER WORLD
Boy, the news, right? So many events, all of them happening; and the circumstances too! Can’t forget about the circumstances! Sometimes it feels like the circumstances are happening more than the events do, despite the fact that it’s the opposite! The news is always happening! Forever! And that’s not even the most fucked-up part! The most fucked-up part is that sometimes, the news happens SO MUCH that they make comics about it!
Alright, now the serious part. There are two things that Judge Dredd does exceptionally well, and when they’re both done at once, they turn it into the actual, Grud’s honest truth, best ongoing comic in the world bar none, One Piece be damned. The first is playing the long game. An idea will be brought up in one prog, slowly growing in the background and appearing every once in a while, only to become a full-blown story years and years later. All the key parts of A Better World, whether that’s Judge Maitland, the state of sector 304, or the model budget proposal that kickstarts this whole adventure, have been elements of Rob Williams’ episodes going back to 2012. Some of them also appeared in Hershey! So, already, you’ve got the delicious taste of payoff on the palate.
But then, there’s the other great flavour of Dredd: an absolute and relentless confidence in a set of beliefs, about itself and about our world, that allow it to be completely unflinching about many of the hard, complex topics that a comic about law enforcement in a fascistic society in our own hyperactive future will run across. A Better World believes, as the research does, that defunding the police and using that money to fund education and infrastructure, including housing, leads to lower crime rates. It also believes that there is a capitalist class in our society that financially benefits from the actions of a fascist regime, and that this class will ally with said regime to manipulate events and the media for their mutual benefit. Finally, it believes that the Justice Department of Mega-City One, being the series’ main organ of fascist power, uses law enforcement mainly to maintain its own power, and that as such it is hopelessly corrupt.
The result of all of that is a landmark Dredd story, given steel-beam-hardness through the implacable formalism of Henry Flint, and serving tragedy only matched by its most infamous tales of failed democracy movements. (Collected in Essential Judge Dredd: America) It can’t end in any way other than the way it ends, which is terrible. But the thing is, it also believes that a better world is possible. If that doesn’t make it incredibly relevant to our here and now, I don’t know what does.
WORST EDITOR, AND I KNOW USUALLY THESE TITLES ARE LONGER BUT THERE ISN’T MUCH MORE TO SAY BESIDES THE FACT THAT THIS IS INDEED ABOUT THE WORST PERSON TO HAVE EDITED COMIC BOOKS THIS YEAR: TOM BREVOORT
According to the adage, the difference between editors at DC Comics and editors at Marvel Comics is that the former are idiots, while the latter are tyrants. There’s nothing new in that, as demonstrated by the fact I already forgot the identity of whoever had been heard from when I heard that bit of received wisdom from someone else. This year, however, it really seemed like Team Red was gunning for both, and that was reflected in the violently inflammatory and on occasion outright defamatory discourse that surrounded many of their biggest comics of the year. And the fact that some of it was completely earned makes it notable enough that it needs an award.
Too much has been written about The Amazing Spider-Man under Nick Lowe’s stewardship already, and most of it is not of any value whatsoever. Sure, the man is not interested at all in delivering on the romance comic thrills that made Spider-Man one of the most uniquely poignant comic book characters ever devised, and that has made his tenure a largely mediocre soup of “game-changing” doomsday plots and magical artifacts that exhaust in-between bits of greatly realized comic book action. But I was born in nineteen hundred and ninety-two, which means that The Amazing Spider-Man has actually been a bad comic for the majority of my lifetime, which means there isn’t anything particularly novel about making its fans miserable.
The X-Men, however? Well, they had an incredibly thrilling run that very nearly changed everything about how comics are made and sold, launched by an epochal story whose legacy will go beyond that of the comics that followed it. And then, Tom Brevoort showed up and appointed himself “Conductor of X” in a move meant to evoke the “Head of X” credit that Jonathan Hickman had been given when he was holding the reins. Shortly thereafter, the X-Men comics, now under the “From the Ashes” banner, got really mediocre.
It was as if all of a sudden, the order had been given from on high to stop making these comics be ambitious or introducing new ideas. Almost as if they were trying to overcorrect for the perceived sins of the Krakoa era by ditching the complex notions of nation-building, culture and identity to return to stories about respectability in the face of bigotry that remains dangerous, but not as outright genocidal as it had been previously. Almost as if all this talk about the future had made the X-Men too dangerous, and so they needed to be defanged and declawed.
And all of this would have remained in the realm of interpretation and idle speculation, except for this one thing: Tom Brevoort loves to write about his job. Whether that’s in letter columns or his very own newsletter, the self-proclaimed Man With A Hat has made his feelings on the comics of the Krakoan Age exceptionally clear. He agrees with nearly every single bad faith half-baked criticism that has been made in the awful comment sections of nearly functional comic book piracy sites. Worse: nine times out of ten he’s completely wrong about the comics he’s attempting to repudiate. Relationships that were made implicit in the text? Never existed. Conflicts about the nature of the Krakoan project, on political and spiritual levels? Never happened. Attempts at bridging the gap between mutants and humans through gestures of good faith? Why, you’d think these dastardly mutants would kill TV’s Jon Hamm on sight!
There are words to describe what this is, whether that’s ignorance, selective memories, grudge settling or anything else. All of them demonstrate a refusal to engage with anything outside a corpus of corporate friendly, adaptation-ready, echo chamber of stories so overdone even the stories referencing them are overdone. It’s self-indulgent nostalgia, and, in a marketplace so completely begging for new takes on the classics it embraced TWO launches of parallel but completely different universes, that is outright malpractice. This is the kind of thinking that should disqualify you from having a job in the industry. This is the kind of thinking that makes you, beyond the shadow of doubt, the worst comic book editor working in 2024.
THE PEOPLE’S CHAMPION AWARD FOR ACHIEVEMENT IN BEING HUMBLE BEFORE COMICS: CHRIS CANTWELL
You may think having written the Iron Man ongoing would disqualify you from an award meant for the little guy, but, let’s be honest with ourselves: the Korvac stuff really lost me and I had to be convinced to check out the stuff that came afterwards. The good news is: it was excellent and it convinced me to keep an eye on Chris Cantwell. And that, in turn, got me to check out two comics bearing his name and released this year, that are so completely in the spirit of comics by and for the People that I just had to hand him these particular laurels.
The first is Plastic Man No More!, a complete heartbreaker of a black comedy about trying to be a dirtbag made good in a world that only ever sees you as an unimportant second stringer that’s only good for jokes or morality plays, and the lengths one would be willing to go to in order to stop that from happening to anyone else.
The other is Challengers of the Unknown, which has just begun but which already promises drama, adventure and mystery with a soupçon of being an intruder in a world that seems to have only been designed with your betters in mind, and those ever-dazzling touches towards the Kirby-esque. It’s a wonderful little thing, I want more of it, and if being wonderful isn’t the criteria by which I judge what a People’s Champion should be then there’s no point, is there?
THE TRUE AND RIGHTFUL STONE-COLD FACTUAL NEVER IN DOUBT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS BEST COMIC OF THE YEAR: THE ULTIMATES
This was inevitable, really. On the simplest level, The Ultimates covers several of my favorite trends of 2024. Most obviously, it’s a parallel universe full to the brim with playful and clever reinterpretations of the familiar figures and imagery of its main canonical counterpart, and it finds plenty of entertainment value in showcasing how it’s solving the puzzles of each of its characters.
On a deeper level, and this is absolutely no surprise coming from the writer of 20th Century Men, it also comes with a growing awareness of its own circumstances, historically and politically. Where Hitch and Millar’s The Ultimates was considered a satire just for putting the names of celebrities in its dialogue, this feels like the genuine article, a probing questioning of America, its values and its histories, as well as the place of the Superhero-entertainment complex within all those things.
But there’s more to my pick than mere convenience: it’s also a superbly realized comic. Within its framework of misfit and criminal idealists uniting to take down a dystopian conspiracy of power, you’ll find Deniz Camp’s incredible gift for writing in different modes, from one issue to the next and sometimes within a single issue itself. You’ll find Juan Frigeri’s consistently pitch-perfect artwork, recalling the wide-screen destructive mayhem of decades past and connecting it to something looser and more expressive, and really contemporary.
The end result is the same: this is a comic that makes you want to read more comics. Even better: this is a comic that makes you want to read actual books. It’s a gateway to the world, and out of all the comics that carried this ambition this year (and there were a lot, which is great news), this is the one that pulled it off on the biggest possible stage. Therefore, that’s my pick. (If you wanted me to say something cooler, then pretend I said it’s The Power Fantasy) Humble yourself before it. Humble Yourself Before Comics.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS WILL RETURN IN 2025.