3. Amazing Spider-Man #800 by Dan Slott, Stuart Immonen, & Team: Dan Slott and his many artistic collaborators really tell a story here worthy of milestone status, playing on an old Spider-Man trope that never fails to feel compelling—imperiling the many meaningful friends Pete has made over the years. The core concept for Peter Parker is he’s a lovable loser gifted with superpowers and doing his best to satisfy the responsibilities that come along with them. This makes the stakes for Pete always intriguing. After all, it’s his value to the world in question, and who hasn’t contemplated that?
But when the danger comes to his supporting cast, Spider-Man really turns compelling. Slott knows this, clearly. He also has a decade of stories to draw friendships from. That combination makes for one of the most taut over-sized comics in recent memory, one that eschews the multiple vignette thing similar issues resort to in favor of a grand finale for Slott’s landmark run on Marvel’s flagship comic, Amazing Spider-Man.
2. Nightwing #44 by Benjamin Percy, Chris Mooneyham, & Team: I have a documented love of Benjamin Percy’s run on Green Arrow, which concluded earlier this year, so I was looking forward to this issue as soon as it was announced Percy would on Nightwing. I was not, however, prepared for how much I’d like this book. Simply put, Percy wrote his fingers off (gross, I know), crafting a comic rich with clever turns of phrase, great interactions between characters (especially Babs and Dick), and a sprinkling of the odd factoids that make Percy’s narrations in comics (and novels/short stories) so compelling. This is also a timely story, with much to say about mankind’s accelerating reliance on tech.
My other major point of praise is Chris Mooneyham and team’s artwork. Be it a subway or junkyard, the art depicts Bludhaven as a gritty, hard-boiled place, more late 70s/early 80s New York than the absurdist alternate Atlantic City it had become under other recent writers. It’s a choice that contributes much without detracting from character or narrative, and it has me hoping this team remains on the book for a good while.
1. Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles #5 by Mark Russell, Mike Feehan, & Sean Parsons: As unlikely as it sounds, I have been made to laugh, cry, and consider about my place in society by a comic book about the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Snagglepuss. And this just a few months after the book’s writer, Mark Russell, inspired me to say this aloud to a friend, “The most cutting satire about 2018 is a comic book about The Flintstones.” Yes, it’s all very strange.