elsewhere/strange horizons: "best of 2008"
The Best of 2008
2008 proved to be an interesting year. Fewer zombies, thank the deity of your choosing-or at least, I read fewer of them, so they didn't make it onto this list. A few more superheroes, depending on how you define things (and no, I didn't read Marvel's Secret Invasion or Dark Reign, and since DC's Final Crisis periodically made me want to bludgeon the DC brain trust vigorously about the head and shoulders with its own output, that won't be here either). Perhaps not as much space opera as I would have liked, but that's somehow a surprisingly difficult genre to find a lot of in comics. And it turns out that the world ends with a bang, a whimper, and just about every unpleasantness in between that you could imagine. A few themes did emerge in this year's reading:
1. Apocalypse yesterday
2. The War of the Worlds redux (see also: apocalypse yesterday)
3. Warren Ellis (what can I say? Man was busy this past year. See also: apocalypse yesterday.)
4. Everything old is new again (see also: War of the Worlds redux, apocalypse yesterday)
A very few items did carry over from last year's list-though for most of those, the noteworthy thing isn't so much the quality as the fact that at some point during the year, some of them just seemed to trail off mid-story, with their creators having to push them to the back burner due to other commitments, the stresses of life, etc. In any event, there were far fewer carry-over titles than I'd initially expected, which indicates that this year was pretty good for new speculative titles.
And as for the stuff that's new to the list, some of them may actually not be comics. Given the last two columns, that's probably not a surprise.
And so: alphabetically by title, forward into the fray! [...]
2008 proved to be an interesting year. Fewer zombies, thank the deity of your choosing-or at least, I read fewer of them, so they didn't make it onto this list. A few more superheroes, depending on how you define things (and no, I didn't read Marvel's Secret Invasion or Dark Reign, and since DC's Final Crisis periodically made me want to bludgeon the DC brain trust vigorously about the head and shoulders with its own output, that won't be here either). Perhaps not as much space opera as I would have liked, but that's somehow a surprisingly difficult genre to find a lot of in comics. And it turns out that the world ends with a bang, a whimper, and just about every unpleasantness in between that you could imagine. A few themes did emerge in this year's reading:
1. Apocalypse yesterday
2. The War of the Worlds redux (see also: apocalypse yesterday)
3. Warren Ellis (what can I say? Man was busy this past year. See also: apocalypse yesterday.)
4. Everything old is new again (see also: War of the Worlds redux, apocalypse yesterday)
A very few items did carry over from last year's list-though for most of those, the noteworthy thing isn't so much the quality as the fact that at some point during the year, some of them just seemed to trail off mid-story, with their creators having to push them to the back burner due to other commitments, the stresses of life, etc. In any event, there were far fewer carry-over titles than I'd initially expected, which indicates that this year was pretty good for new speculative titles.
And as for the stuff that's new to the list, some of them may actually not be comics. Given the last two columns, that's probably not a surprise.
And so: alphabetically by title, forward into the fray! [...]