The Best Cover of 2024: SOMETHING IS KILLING THE CHILDREN #37

 

The Best Pages & Panels of 2024

 

ALIENS VS. AVENGERS #1

VOID RIVALS #8

WHAT'S THE FURTHEST PLACE FROM HERE? #20

ZORRO: MAN OF THE DEAD #3

The Best Art of 2024: SEAN MURPHY & SIMON GOUGH "ZORRO: MAN OF THE DEAD"

 

    I awarded the best art of 2017 to Sean Murphy's Batman: White Knight, so it's really no surprise that his art for Zorro: Man of the Dead was excellent. He wrote and did the art while Simon Gough did the colors. It was a short, 4-issue mini-series for the small press Massive. Murphy is great at drawing action along with making his books look cool as hell. The backgrounds, the style that's totally his own, and the expressive characters...the art in this book was exceptional. 

The Best Writer of 2024: JONATHAN HICKMAN

  

       The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel's flagship book forever, hasn't been that good in a very, very long time. When you read the old, classic issues, there's an evolution of Peter Parker taking place and the soap opera bildungsroman story makes all the superhero drama meaningful. That ended a long time ago, when Marvel decided to deep-freeze Parker in amber and never age, never have kids, never evolve besides maybe changing his employment for a bit. Thankfully, a new Ultimate Spider-Man came out in 2024, and writer Jonathan Hickman decided to showcase what The Amazing Spider-Man could be if it actually evolved. Peter Parker is married to Mary Jane and has two kids. He's still Spider-Man and there's still the Green Goblin and The Kingpin and everything is similar, but it also feels revitalized and fresh and thus exciting to read. A Spider-Man comic...in 2024...is actually a great read! Who knew? Hickman, of course, is something of a master at revitalization. The X-Men books were fairly forgettable until he introduced the epic "Krakatoa" storyline that changed the game and made the book worth reading again. And while Hickman has always kind of been a hit-or-miss writer and often his stories have sometimes been too overly confusing, he really put out some excellent books in 2024. Besides Ultimate Spider-Man, he finished writing his 8 issue G.O.D.S. comic book that was wild and a lot of fun. He co-wrote an entertaining Dr. Doom one-shot. And he also, shockingly, made Aliens vs. Avengers a great book. Surely, in the hands of most writers, that would have been just a stupid book with Captain America and The Hulk fighting Aliens on a spaceship while cracking jokes or something. But Hickman made the book...gulp...interesting. A book featuring Aliens and The Avengers is serious, thought provoking and good. Only a good writer can even attempt to pull that one off. & Jonathan Hickman did. 

The Best Comic Book of 2024: WHAT'S THE FURTHEST PLACE FROM HERE?

     My favorite comic books of the year included Absolute Batman, Ultimate Spider-Man, Something is Killing the Children, and Saga. But the best book of the year, and a comic book that has been consistently either the best comic book out there or close to it since it started, is What's the Furthest Place From Here? from Image Comics. Written by Matthew Rosenberg and drawn by Tyler Boss and Dylan Burnett, this book is wild, weird, funny, engaging, entertaining, bonkers, fresh, alive, and totally insane. There were only four issues released in 2024, but we did finally get the revelation of all the big answers to this strange world. The basic premise has teenagers and twentysomethings living in a post-apocalyptic world, and everyone is living in gangs not unlike the gangs from that movie The Warriors. There's also The Strangers, mysterious beings that will swoop in when someone disobeys "the rules." Every issue is sort of a journey to a new place filled with new weirdo's. Danger is everywhere and everyone talks in quips and everything is "off." Finally we found out where the adults are; walled up in a city on an island to prevent a disease that ravaged the world. The book is super dark but very, very funny. Whenever an issue is released, I always read it right away. I can't wait to sink my teeth into this world again, to be immersed in this wild, crazy place full of wonderful, colorful freaks just trying to survive. It's fantastic.