2007: Long, long, long

I posted a while back about the short comics that I liked most in 2007. Now it’s the turn of their longer brethren, each filling at least one separate publication.

This isn’t a “best of 2007” as such, because my tastes aren’t catholic enough to compile one of those, and because I haven’t read everything that might be a candidate for such as list. But here are some of the longer comics, newly published in serial or book form in 2007, that I particularly enjoyed.

Bryan Talbot Alice in Sunderland. A remarkable catherine-wheel essay. My seven-part review starts here.

John Rogers, Raphael Albuquerque and others Blue Beetle. Cheeringly good-spirited superheroics. I reviewed an issue here.

Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8: The Long Way Home. The best adaptation of a television series into comics since at least the heyday of TV21. I reviewed the opening story here, and individual issues here and here. The second main storyline, written by Brian K Vaughn, was a relative disappointment, given its lack of character humour and Georges Jeanty’s inability to draw a good likeness of lead slayer Faith.

Warren Ellis and Raulo Caceres Crécy. An idiosyncratic (and foul-mouthed) history lecture, reviewed here.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips Criminal. Straightforward, noir-ish crime stories – a staple genre in any other medium, but a rarity in comics. Brubaker and Phillips’s work would be good enough to shine even if there was a glut of them. I reviewed one issue here.

Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang Dr 13: Architecture and Mortality. Postmodern fun and games, with appealing clear-line artwork. I reviewed it here.

Adam Warren Empowered. The first volume, at least (reviewed here), is an inventive exercise in having your cheesecake and eating it too. The second volume tones down the metatextual games and seems much sleazier for it.

Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith Fell. Taut, grim policiers. Templesmith’s art works even better depicting the mundane than it does dealing with the undead.


Simone Lia Fluffy. One of the strengths of comics as a medium is the ease with which it can deploy the unreal to give new perspectives on the familiar. Here, a talking rabbit provides Lia with a lens through which to examine parenthood and emotional commitment.


Andi Watson Glister. Frothy and magical. I reviewed the first issue here. The third makes a smooth turn into perfectly-pitched folk tale territory, complete with repetitive tasks and, seasonally enough, the robin as an emblem of resurrection.

Paul Grist Jack Staff. Grist’s sparkling unconventional storytelling is a delight every time, and the use of obvious avatars of old British boys’ adventure comics characters hits my nostalgia buttons. There’s a review of one issue here.

Jeff Parker and Juan Santacruz Marvel Adventures: The Avengers. Funny, inventive and each story self-contained in one issue. Jeff Parker’s work here and on X-Men First Class suggests that superheroics can still be a valid genre for casual readers. One of the best issues was reviewed here.

Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen Nextwave: Agents of HATE. Superhero comics with all the humour, violence and wild invention of prime 2000AD. Sadly missed.


Andi Watson and Simon Gane Paris. A romance with beautifully appropriate artwork. My review is here.

Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert The Professor’s Daughter. Not new, but newly translated into English. A beautifully painted pulp horror rom-com. Reviewed here.

James Turner Rex Libris. Wacky, literate and visually unique. I reviewed one issue here.

Nick Bertozzi The Salon. A fine piece of storytelling, with something to say about creativity, too. I reviewed it here.

Posy Simmonds Tamara Drewe. The stuff of literary prose fiction, with jokes and pictures. Simmonds’s best long-form work to date. I reviewed it here.

Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme Tiny Tyrant. Not new, but newly translated into English. A glowing jewel of a children’s comic, reviewed here.

Rick Geary A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Saga of the Bloody Benders. Geary’s meticulous but off-kilter non-fiction series moves into the nineteenth-century American countryside to find it just as disturbing as the cities.


Nicholas Gurewitch The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories. A compilation of Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship strips (see the link in the web comics section of the side-bar). Simultaneously funny and disturbing; a Terry Gilliam in candy colours.


Various The Wallace and Gromit Comic. Gone, alas. See this review for why I miss it.

Reviews: Doctor Who, Crécy, Buffy

Doctor Who Magazine issue 385, “Bus Stop!” by Rob Davis (story), John Ross (art), James Offredi (colours), Roger Langridge (letters), Clayton Hickman and Scott Gray (editors), Panini Magazines, 22 August 2007, 9 pages of strip (out of 68), £3.99

Of the three regular licensed Doctor Who periodicals, Doctor Who Magazine is the one aimed mostly at adult readers. The comic strip runs only to a handful of pages each issue, but this time out it’s worth a look even if you aren’t particularly interested in the articles, because “Bus Stop!” is possibly the best Doctor Who strip published since the TV series returned to the screen.

It’s an inconsequential, one-off story about assassins trying to kill a future president by bumping off his ancestor, the present day Mayor of London. But although slight, it captures the upbeat energy and invention of the modern TV show without either the stodginess of storytelling that tends to weigh down the Magazine strip or the toothless, anodyne feel that usually disarms the strip in Doctor Who Adventures (on which Ross is the regular artist). Despite catching the TV tone, it remains resolutely a comic strip, using devices, such as keeping the Doctor off-panel for the opening page of his conversation with a bus passenger, that would not work on the small screen but which do work on the printed page.


Good stuff. I hope that we see more from this team.


Crécy by Warren Ellis (story), Raulo Caceres (artwork) and Felipe Massafera (cover), Avatar Press/Apparat, July 2007, 44 pages of strip, US$6.99

This is the Anglo-American way of war: stay as far away from your enemy as possible, and kill him before he can get near you. Before the cruise missile, before the Lancaster bomber or the Martini-Henry rifle, the way to do that was with the longbow. Handled by a skilled archer, it had a greater range, penetration and rate of fire than any personal weapon before the twentieth century. Muskets replaced it, not because they were inherently more effective, but because any untrained idiot could fire one, whereas it took years of practice to be a longbowman. At Crécy in 1346, the flower of French chivalry met the longbow for the first time, and died. This was in the early days of the Hundred Years War – in truth, perhaps just a particularly intense stage in the 750-year war that began with the triumph of the Bastard in 1066 and ended with the crushing of the Monster in 1815.

Warren Ellis’ story is a monologue by an English longbowmen, anachronistically aware of the 21st century readership he is addressing. His language is foul, and so are his attitudes, but his blunt, coarse honesty keeps the reader on side as he explains why and how the English are fighting in France, while the humour, scatology and xenophobia keep things from getting too schoolmasterly. His account is reasonably accurate, if you discount a far more complete sense of national identity than existed in the fourteenth century, and it is both informative and cruelly entertaining.


In keeping with Avatar’s house style, Cacares’ artwork suggests that much more time has been spent on elaborate rendering than on composition, but it is serviceable.

In comparison with Crécy, the old-school true war stories reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics seem bloodless in more senses than one.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight issue 5, “The Chain” by Joss Whedon (script), Paul Lee (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), cover by Jo Chen, Dark Horse Comics, August 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

A new Slayer is recruited to impersonate Buffy, going underground (literally) to intimidate a demon lord with the power of Buffy Summers’ reputation. “There’s always a name … The name can inspire terror, awe, sometimes great things…”

The name on the credits is Joss Whedon. So … how do we know that he actually wrote this?