Though I just finished ranting about how useless an endeavor creating year-end wrap-ups and best-of lists is, I do appreciate reading them from time to time. In the case of best-of comic book lists, it gives me an idea of what collections and on-going series’ I should look into catching up on.

Comic Book Resources has compiled and released their best 100 comics of 2008 list. I’m bringing it up here because four of the five books ongoing in 2008 that I’ve recommended via Comic Tips have placed in CBR’s list. I think this is as good a time as any to say: told you so!

The four comics in CBR’s top 100 of 2008 that I’ve said you should be reading are as follows:

• #85 Dynamo 5
• #72 Echo
• #42 Air
• #08 RASL

I was absolutely thrilled to see RASL in the top ten. I’ve voiced my concerns for it and its quarterly release schedule in the past, and it’s good to see it getting some recognition for being something special. I was disappointed to not see any Jonathan Hickman books in the mix; I’d imagine that the delays affecting his books have caused many to wait for trades. I would also liked to have seen House of Mystery in the list, but everything else feels just about right.

One thing is for certain: I need to read this Criminal TPB that has been sitting on my desk for three months.

Air is a creator-owned comic published under DC Comic’s Vertigo label and written by G. Willow Wilson with art by M.K. Perker. I believe this is the second time this team has collaborated on a comic, with the first time being on the Vertigo series Cairo.

Air introduces us to an airline stewardess in a post-9/11 world named Blythe. Blythe probably shouldn’t be a stewardess; she’s so deathly afraid of flying that she has to take medication in order to keep from losing her shit on the job. Her world gets turned upside down on the day she checks the bags of a mysterious man with fleeting accents and half a dozen names. Is he friend, foe, or just a nobody? Throw in a belligerent German passenger, Blythe’s best friend Fletcher, an anti-terrorism organization called The Etesian Front, and G. Willow Wilson’s four-year road map for the series, and you’ve got Air.

Despite dealing with as serious a subject matter as international terrorism, Air manages to be romantic and whimsical, and in no small part due to the art. Turkish artist M.K. Perker has created a fan out of me with his unique style. Characters have long and well-defined features that lend themselves to conveying emotion through body language and facial expressions. This allows for a character’s demeanor to be read without words, though there are plenty of them.

Conversations in Air, however fictitious certain scenarios may be, feel real and natural. Plot also flows naturally from panel to panel, page to page, and so far for each of the four issues always a scene with something new, abstract and wonderful that catches me off guard. I love it. It’s a breath of fresh… gas.

As Air is only on issue four, your local comic shop would be the best place to find it. ScifiGenre.com, the shop I use, still shows all four issues in stock on its website. A trade paperback collecting the first five issues will be coming out in March of 2009.

Back in July, shortly after I started offering regular Comic Tips, I recommended everybody check out Rasl, a psychedelic sci-fi comic written and drawn by Jeff Smith with covers by Steve Hamaker. I just want to sent out a reminder that issue #3 finally dropped with the 10/15/08 week of comics. Up to this point it would appear that the book has been on a schedule of four months/issue. Unfortunately, at the back of issue #3 is an ad saying that the next issue won’t be dropping March of 2009. Thus, it looks like four months has now been stretched out to five, but it’s well worth the wait. Things really start to pick up in issue #3 and you start to get a good idea of what’s going on with Rasl, the extra-dimensional art thief.

With such an unfortunate release schedule as two to three times a year, I am worried that interest for Rasl will dwindle and it would cease to exist. Don’t let that happen! If you need a little bit more of a nudge, you can check out a five page preview of Rasl #3 over at Boneville, Jeff Smith’s website.

Video game lore that extends beyond the games themselves, specifically through comic books, has traditionally been disastrous. With the high volume of video game comics these days, however, there are bound to be a few hits. For instance, I found that The Darkness Levels comics released just prior to the video game’s console debut in the summer of 2007 complimented it nicely and enriched my experience when I played through the game. Conversely, I had a bad run-in with the World of Warcraft comic and its lack of substance. Then again, as evidenced by the Halo comic, sometimes a venture into the wonderful world of sequential art can fail simply by being tardy; Issue #1 released in August of 2007 with #2 arriving that following November. We didn’t see issue #3 until August of 2008, a year after the series started. Disaster!

Unbeknownst to me until very recently, a manga based on the Ace Attorney series of video games have been coming out in Japan since 2007. Fortunately for us fans, Capcom has a hit on their hands and in September of 2008 they, along with Del Rey Manga, brought it to the western world under the name Official Casebook Vol. 1: The Phoenix Wright Files.
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Terry Moore is a creator whose work I have had little to no exposure to. I have always seen Strangers in Paradise trade paperbacks on the shelves and posters on the wall at my local comic shop, but I would walk by. I hear about Strangers from people all over the internet, but I click away. Word is that the movie was quite good, but I’ve never checked that out either. I deeply regret passing it by for all this time now that I have delved into Echo, Moore’s latest original creation.
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Once in a while I stumble upon a comic creator that is so good at what they do that it’s very difficult not to obsess over them for a good long while. This has happened to me in the past with Garth Ennis, Robert Kirkman, Jay Faerber, and now it’s happening again with Jonathan Hickman. My initial experience with his creations was through the first issue of Transhuman that I pulled on a lark because the idea of a mockumentary comic sounded novel and the cover was interesting. Now I simply cannot get enough of this man’s work, and that’s unfortunate since most of it – including Transhuman as well as A Red Mass For Mars – has been heavily delayed.

Jonathan Hickman has completed one mini series so far, however, called The Nightly News. The original 6 issues first shipped between November of 2006 and July of 2007. Unfortunately, I was late to the party and didn’t find out about the book until I visited Hickman’s website, but I immediately put in an order for the trade paperback. It arrived this week.
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I just realized a couple of things about both of the comics that I have recommended in the last two weeks: they’ve both been from Image Comics, and they’ve both been Science Fiction comics. That really is not representitive of the majority of the books that I tend to read from week to week, but I figure that DC and Marvel publications get enough attention that I don’t need to talk about them here. That said, I am going to try to mix it up a little bit more in this and the coming weeks.
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