Earlier I mentioned that my first love is still superhero comics, so a natural rejoinder to the title of this post might be, “Stop reading superhero comics stupid!” Sorry, but I’m not quite ready to abandon the genre yet, but I’m more than willing to dance along its fringes. In an effort to expand my horizons this year at Comic-Con, I went thru the list of the 2009 Eisner award nominees in the hopes of uncovering a hidden gem. Unfortunately, the results were mixed and by no means conclusive. For your consideration below are the titles from my Eisner crawl and my summary judgment:

Air: Letters from Lost Countries (G. Willow Wilson/M.K. Perker)

Summary: This one’s much harder to categorize, and that’s part of its charm. Blythe is a flight attendant with a fear of heights. Her life goes sideways as she gets sucked into a romance with a mysterious traveler, who may or may not be a terrorist. The story continues to spiral into the bizarre as she finds herself visiting countries that don’t exist on any map and in the middle of a conspiracy to control the future of travel.

Judgment: The cover quote from Neil Gaiman says that Air “parachutes into Pynchon” and I’ll give him that. It’s pleasant mix of neo-mysticism that smacks of Pynchon, Castaneda and Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine. I’m along for the ride, but I’ll pick it up in trades, because the storyline threads are so squirrelly.

Groo: Hell on Earth (Sergio Aragones)

Summary: Aragones’ bumbling Barbarian leads a country’s army into battle as it’s military-industrial complex gears up, and in doing so spews pollutants into the environment.

Judgment: I have a great deal of fondness for Groo and the humor of Aragones, so when I heard that there was a new series out that was Eisner-worthy  I snapped it up. However, I was sorely disappointed. This is a pretty transparent eco-fable. It’s unfortunately heavy-handed and not particularly funny or educational.

Omega The Unknown (Jonathan Lethem/Farel Dalrymple)

Summary: A complete reimagining of the original Omega the Unknown by Steve Gerber in the late 70s. Alexander is a young boy who has suddenly lost his parents in a car accident. He seems strangely unaffected by this, but finds himself pursued by mysterious robots and rescued by a mysterious mute hero.

Judgment: Overall this was an odd mix of a writer/artist team more used to literary/indie work being thrown into the superhero genre. The storytelling is layered and nuanced and touches on such themes as alienation and friendship that seem somewhat out of place in a title with killer robots and spandex-clad supermen. By far the most jarring for me was Dalrymple’s artwork, which again seems like it would be more at home in a Vertigo/Indie title than a Marvel comic book. To me this was an interesting experiment that didn’t quite hit the mark.

The Twelve (J.Michael Straczynski/Chris Weston)

Summary: The story of twelve mystery men from WWII who get caught in a Nazi trap and end up in suspended animation. They wake up in the world of today and get taken in by the US government.

Judgment: If the premise sounds just like Captain America – well it is. The “man out of time” shtick has been done before, and better. The fact that there are twelve of them does allow for some variations in storytelling, but I didn’t find anything remarkable. I only picked up Issues 1-6 of this, but nothing in those issues made me care about finding out how this story resolves.

Short Box (noun) - Cardboard storage containers that are the exact width and height for a comic book that has been bagged and boarded. The short box is 15 inches in length and often used for more modest collections.

In a recent interview at PAX, a journo asked us “Why do you make videogames?”. While I suspect he was more interested in an answer from the artists and designers (as opposed to us business types), I nevertheless felt obliged to consider a response. The answer I came up with surprised me. At the end of the day, I still believe in the heroic ideal. I grew up on a steady diet of classical mythology, arthurian legends and comics – and however outmoded and quaint, I still believe in notions of honor, courage and standing up for what you believe in. The reason I’m drawn to work in videogames, particularly fantasy RPGs, is because this is one of the few fields where such concepts are still immediately relevant – if only from a story and game design purpose. Likewise, I believe the field still attracts believers in the heroic ideal and it delights me when I come across a kindred spirit. Now what the heck does this have to do with a post about comics? Well this is my roundabout way of explaining why after all these years and the explosion of the comics genre – superhero comics, however deconstructed, are still my first love.

Speaking of deconstructed heroes, I’d have to say the title that I’m currently most enjoying on an issue-to-issue basis is Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. This is the story of a Superman-type hero named Plutonian and his fall from grace into an utterly eff’d up genocidal SOB. The story-telling is very well done and jumps back and forth between the reprehensible acts he is doing now and the little betrayals in the past, where Waid slowly reveals how Plutonian got this way. If you enjoyed Waid’s writing on Kingdom Come, and the depravity of Alan Moore’s Kid Miracleman, you might want to give this series a look.