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Essex County named one of Canada Reads’ Top 5 Novels of the Decade!

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Brett

Official Press Release

ESSEX COUNTY named one of Canada Reads’ Top 5 Novels of the Decade!

The CBC’s Canada Reads, a nationwide book club program in which 5 books compete (each championed by a Canadian celebrity) to be named the #1 book of the year, has officially announced the final 5. Jeff Lemire’s phenomenal Essex County has made the cut, becoming not simply the first Top Shelf book, but the first graphic novel ever, to be in Canada Reads! This year, the Canada Reads program bears the theme “the essential Canadian novels of the past decade,” so the honor is even more prestigious.

The celebrity champion of Essex County has also officially been announced: indie rocker Sara Quin, one-half of the award-winning band Tegan and Sara ! Along with Sara’s spirited defense of the book in the Canada Reads broadcasts, we can expect plenty of attention on author Jeff Lemire, ranging from this Q&A to a variety of podcasts, interviews, and more!

The selection of Essex County for this program is a huge honor for Jeff Lemire, Top Shelf Productions, and the comics industry at large. It poses an opportunity for an entire country to discover the power of Jeff’s work, and to debate its values against four other excellent books. Our deepest congratulations to Jeff and the other finalists!

Canada Reads encourages everyone to spend this winter reading all 5 books, with various programming allowing readers to get to know the finalists better, all building up to the official competition in February 2011. Happy reading, and may the best book win!

Friday Five: Favorite X-Men Characters

Posted on November 19, 2010 by

Sorry I missed the Friday Five last week, I was out of town. This week I’m going to take a look at the characters I like the most from my favorite family of comics ever, the X-Men. The first comic I bought was an X-Men comic and I was hooked ever since, particularly because of the great stories in the 1980s of Chris Claremont and the art of Dave Cockrum and John Byrne. As the X-universe expanded, I continued to like a lot of the work that was added to the canon over the years and it has remained my favorite. Without further ado, here are the characters that made it my favorite.

Honorable Mentions: Magneto, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, Angel, Beast, Rogue

5. Professor X: Early on, Professor X was my favorite (Heck my rap name is, to this day, Professor Rex. Yes, I said my rap name. I’m a rapper in my free time). I liked the fact that, despite the fact that he was in a wheelchair, he was the most powerful mutant on Earth. I liked that he was a teacher and a leader and often taught the X-Men by letting them alone and letting them succeed or fail on their own without really ever letting them be in much real danger (except in the early days with characters like Thunderbird and Jean Gray). I didn’t like the 1990s and 2000s turn where it was revealed that he had been manipulating his students’ minds all these year. It fit and I buy it in the context of the story, but I guess I felt the same betrayal the X-Men felt.

4. Emma Frost: One of the few female superhero characters whose ridiculously inappropriate sexualized costume actually fit with her personality, I love the growth in Emma’s character over the years, going from what seemed to be one of the baddest of the bad villains to one of the key good guys. And not in the flippant, seemingly patternless way that Magneto or Quicksilver flipped back and forth, Emma’s change was the growing of her character as a human being. Her personality is a great one and seems to be quite at odds with the rest of the X-Men, which makes for reading her stories much more interesting.

3. Kitty Pryde: With the last three characters, we have the three that I identified with the most. While I always looked up to Professor X the most, I always felt the most like Kitty, the awkward young person who was good with computers and not really good yet in social situations. The person who was frequently underestimated, but still managed to somehow saved the day more often than not. I also thought that her relationship with Colossus, another of my favorites, was always the best-written of the relationships in the X-universe and, really, in most of comics. It hasn’t lived up to that in recent years, but the way it was written by Claremont back in the day was, to me, perfect.

2. Wolverine: My father is Canadian, so Wolverine was the first thing that ever connected me to my Canadian heritage. I didn’t know much about Canada growing up (other than what I saw in the movie Strange Brew), but Wolverine was from there and he was a badass, so I figured it must be pretty badass to be part Canadian. Wolverine always had the power set I most wanted in the X-universe and, for a long time, he was my favorite. But his growth was somewhat stunted over the years and he became awfully over-exposed. There may not be a Marvel character that is involved in more great stories than Wolverine, but part of that is because there are so many of those stories. Last year’s Old Man Logan and a number of other stories show there’s still a lot of good stuff being written about Wolverine, but those seem to be simple explorations of the same territory, unlike…

1. Cyclops: There are few characters in the history of comics, particularly characters who have existed for a long time (Cyclops first appeared in the early 1960s) who have grown as much as Cyclops. And few of those growth stories over time, especially over decades, make sense and are realistic and ring true. Cyclops started out as “Slim” Summers an awkward teenager with a tragic power that prevents him from experiencing life as a normal teenager and promises to prevent him from ever being part of normal society. As he masters his powers and grows to become the leader of the X-Men, he fails as often as he succeeds, but he never, well almost never (see: the start of the Madelyne Pryor storyline) gives up and he’s not particularly good at being a leader and eventually cedes his leadership position to maybe the greatest African-American female comics character ever written, Storm (shows you how great the X-Men comics have been over the years that she just misses the top 5 character list). But he fails to be dissuaded and continues to learn and grow despite going through one of the most disturbing character histories of anyone in the entire Marvel universe. But along the way, he does learn. Go back and read the X-Men issues of the mid-1980s and compare the Wolverine of then to the Wolverine of now. Very little difference. Now compare the Cyclops of then, an awkward young man searching for his place in life and trying to deal with tragedies that few could survive, to the Cyclops of now, the badass leader of the X-Men, and all of mutantkind, who can handle any problem, can make decisions none of us could ever make and who will do anything he has to do to ensure the survival of his species. And he’s winning. And he’s dating Emma Frost. As much as I always felt like Kitty Pryde and thought it would be awesome to be Wolverine, I really always aspired to be Scott Summers and be the person who could save everyone, the person who would make the hard decisions that affect the fate of an entire race, an entire planet. Cyclops is to Marvel what Jack is to Lost. These are the characters that I look up to an would most want to be — flawed leaders who learn from their mistakes and don’t always do the right thing or accept their positions of leadership with ease or calm, but do them anyway because they know no one else will do what needs to be done.

Man, that’s good writing. The fact that I can draw all of that information about Cyclops off the top of my head without having to look up a single detail shows you why he’s my favorite X-Men character and my second-favorite comic book character of all time. Behind…well, that’s a different post altogether.

Friday Five — Top 5 Major Marvel Events

Posted on November 5, 2010 by

So every Friday, I want to do a Top 5 list with some kind of connection. These are my opinions based solely on the comics I’ve actually read. I obviously can’t rank those works I haven’t read, but if there’s something that should be on my list that isn’t, let me know and I’ll check it out and will add it if I think it should be on the list. The idea isn’t just to give my opinion, but to open up discussion, so if you agree or disagree, let me know in comments…

This time around, I’m going to do my Top 5 Major Marvel Events…

Realm of Kings/The Thanos Imperative Honorable mention, Realm of Kings-The Thanos Imperative: This series isn’t over yet, but it has already become one of my favorites, as I described it elsewhere today: A recent battle between the Inhuman Blackbolt and the mad human mutant leader of the alien Shi’ar empire (and Cyclops’s brother) ripped a hole in the universe while killing both. That hole, called the Fault, opened a doorway to the Cancerverse, a universe ruled by the Lovecraftian “many-angled ones” where “life won out” and nothing dies (but is still quite undead-esque) and the inhabitants of that universe (including the Avengers-dopplegangers “The Revengers”) want to come to the Marvel universe to take power. The only thing that can stop them is Thanos, this universe’s avatar of death and pretty much most evil being, so the entire army of the Marvel cosmic heroes teams up with Thanos to save the day. All that with snappy dialog and funny characters, including a talking Russian telepathic dog and Rocket Raccoon, who is just what his name implies. Yeah, that’s awesome. If it ends well, it might move up the list.

5. Secret Invasion: I know some people don’t like this one as well and I think the ending is a bit anticlimactic, but the sense of paranoia and fear of conspiracy that permeated this series to me was so well done that I’d have to rate it this high. The Skrulls coming in on top of the string of events (Civil War, World War Hulk, Decimation, House of M, Avengers Disassembled, Secret War) that the Marvel Universe had just gone through, to me, was a perfect choice and it was very well-written.

4. Days of Future Past: This story was one of the key tales in terms of launching the Marvel multiverse and it set in motion a string of events and characters that would impact Marvel comics for years to come. I’m a sucker for dystopian post-apocalyptic stories and the X-Men, so a story that combines the two is just great. It would be higher on the list if it weren’t just two issues long.

3. Civil War: Certainly the best examination of politics that the Marvel universe has ever done, this one was a direct commentary on the issues raised by the war on terror and the actions of the George W. Bush administration. Some people complained that they didn’t like the way some characters reacted to the situation and thought it was inconsistent with the characters’ past behavior, but I disagree, I think the characters were all quite well-written in the scenario. It would be higher on the list but, like most other recent Marvel cross-overs, it’s too big and involves way too many mini-series and one-shots.

2. Secret Wars: It wasn’t the first of the company-wide crossovers, Contest of Champions beat it to the punch, but Secret Wars really set the tone for how crossovers would work in comics. It is to comic crossovers what movies like Jaws and Star Wars are to blockbuster movies. It had a great storyline that was well-plotted and it had no shortage of shocking moments and real changes to characters that re-wrote the Marvel universe at the time. It had some weaknesses, as the writers didn’t quite figure out how to fully develop so many characters and a number of the characterizations were false (such as the Wasp and the X-Men), but overall, it is still the gold standard for Marvel (although DC would almost immediately eclipse it with Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was bigger and better).

1. The Dark Phoenix Saga: This is the story that made me a comic book devotee for life. It was played out over time and developed slowly, but surely, and the whole story was developed more like a novel than your run-of-the-mill comic book plot. The greatest group of characters in comics at the time (and the most diverse) was put through the most difficult and gut-wrenching story that centered around the very nature of power itself, betrayal, love, sacrifice, and cosmos-spanning action. All of the elements you would like of a great comic story are here — great plot, great characters, great dialog, great art and a story that stays with you long after you are done reading it. And it stands up well, it has just as much impact now as it did in the 1970s-80s. This is what made the X-Men a phenomenon and was part of one of the greatest comic book runs ever, the run on the Uncanny X-Men written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Dave Cockrum and John Byrne.

Top 10 Politically-Charged Comics

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Brett

Geek O System has a listing of their top 10 politically-charged comic books. It’s a decent list and definitely worth checking out. In reality the list of politically-charged comics is much longer than 10 and the debate as a top ten could go on forever.

Here’s our take of 10 politically-charged comic books you should check out, not necessarily a top ten. While we agree with most of the choices here’s our take in no particular order starting with the ones we agree with:

V for Vendetta – Agree with this pick. It’s hard to argue about a comic who’s basic story is based on fascism vs. anarchy.

Persepolis – Growing up during the Iranian revolution and reflecting on how that impacts your identity? I think that qualifies as pretty political.

Superman: Red Son – Mark Millar’s alternate take on Superman sees him landing in the Soviet Union and what happens when the workers of the world have Superman on their side.

Civil War – One could make a hell of an argument that this was a statement on much of President Bush’s policies in the aughts.

Y: The Last Man – Gender studies in the form of a comic book.

Watchmen – Alan Moore’s dissection and deconstruction of not just super hero stereotypes but also the Cold War all set upon the backdrop of the possibility of World War III.

Our four additions:

Ex Machina – Brian K. Vaughan’s series focused on a super hero turned Mayor of New York City. The politics were sometimes in your face and some times subtle but such topics as gay marriage, drug legalization and birth control and abortion were touched upon. We also can’t overlook an entire arc set during the Republican 2004 Presidential Convention.

DMZ – Brian Wood’s tale of a reporter stuck in Manhattan during the Second American Civil War. The first thirty issues are a damnation of President Bush’s policies and the act of war but with President Obama in office the series quickly pivoted to focus on the expectations we project on our elected officials and the disappointment we suffer when they don’t meet them.

The First President of Japan – I think the title says it all. Written by a Johns Hopkins University Professor the series focuses on the election of the first President of Japan and rising tensions in Asia concerning the United States, China and the Korea’s. An under the radar comic book and one well worth picking up if you can find it.

Queen & Country – Greg Rucka’s spy series focuses on the Britain’s SIS with a focus on the human touch. This is a spy thriller at it’s best.

List of Best of Lists

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Brett

We’ll be posting our “Best Of” List on January 1st (kind of hard to do a best of when they year hasn’t ended). But, here’s a listing of everyone elses’s. We’ll be updating this list as new lists are produced, and if you come across any, please share them in the comments and share them with everyone.

Do you agree with these picks? What are your best comics or comic based movies of 2009 or even the decade?