Comics Bulletin logo
Search
  • Columns
    Random
    • Crisis On Infinite Earths #1: Old Timers Review

      Chris Kiser
      April 7, 2015
      Columns, Crisis in Infinite Comics, The Full Run
    Recent
    • Revisiting the Witchblade/Fathom/Tomb Raider Crossover

      Daniel Gehen
      February 8, 2021
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

      Daniel Gehen
      December 4, 2020
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 1

      Daniel Gehen
      October 30, 2020
    • What Looks Good
    • Comics Bulletin Soapbox
    • The Full Run
    • Leading Question
    • Top 10
    • The Long-Form
    • Jumping On
    • Comics in Color
    • Slouches Towards Comics
  • Big Two
    Random
    • Exclusive Marvel Preview: "Black Knight" #2

      Chris Kiser
      December 3, 2015
      Marvel Comics, Previews
    Recent
    • 3.0

      Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia

      Daniel Gehen
      February 22, 2021
    • 4.5

      DCeased: Dead Planet #7 Presents a Hopeful Future (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      January 22, 2021
    • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

      Daniel Gehen
      December 3, 2020
    • DC Comics
    • Big Two Reviews
    • Marvel Comics
  • Indie
    Random
    • Singles Going Steady 10/31/2018: Ice Cream and Bad Eggs Make for Halloween Fun

      Chris Kiser
      November 5, 2018
      Image, Indie, Reviews
    Recent
    • 4.0

      Review: Beast Wars #2 another chance to change the past

      Stephen Cook
      March 3, 2021
    • 4.5

      Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • Reviews
    • Archie Comics
    • Boom! Studios
    • Dark Horse
    • IDW
    • Image
    • Oni Press
    • Valiant
  • Reviews
    Random
    • 2.5

      Fraction #2

      Chris Kiser
      June 9, 2004
      Reviews
    Recent
    • 3.0

      Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia

      Daniel Gehen
      February 22, 2021
    • 4.5

      Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • 2.3

      Review: SAVAGE #1 Needs Taming

      Daniel Gehen
      February 16, 2021
    • Singles Going Steady
    • Slugfest
    • Manga
      • Reviews
    • Small Press
      • Reviews
      • ICYMI
      • Tiny Pages Made of Ashes
  • Interviews
    Random
    • Grace Randolph & Amy Mebberson: A Look at Neverland...Muppets Style

      Chris Kiser
      October 12, 2009
      Interviews
    Recent
    • Interview: Jon Davis-Hunt Talks SHADOWMAN

      Daniel Gehen
      June 8, 2020
    • Interview: Becky Cloonan talks DARK AGNES and Her Personal Influences

      Mike Nickells
      March 4, 2020
    • Simon Roy

      Interview: Simon Roy on His Inspirations and Collaborations on PROTECTOR

      Mike Nickells
      January 29, 2020
    • Audio Interview
    • Video Interview
  • Classic Comics
    Random
    • 5.0

      Classic Comics Cavalcade: R. Crumb: Conversations

      Chris Kiser
      January 23, 2014
      Classic Comics Cavalcade, Columns
    Recent
    • Countdown to the King: Marvel’s Godzilla

      Daniel Gehen
      May 29, 2019
    • Honoring A Legend: Fantagraphics To Resurrect Tomi Ungerer Classics

      Daniel Gehen
      February 15, 2019
    • Reliving the Craziest Decade in Comics History: An interview with Jason Sacks

      Mark Stack
      January 2, 2019
    • Classic Comics Cavalcade
    • Classic Interviews
  • News
    Random
    • The First-Ever Buffy & Angel Event Begins in HELLMOUTH #1

      Chris Kiser
      September 11, 2019
      Boom! Studios, News, Press Release
    Recent
    • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • Image Comics and TMP Announces SPAWN’S UNIVERSE

      Daniel Gehen
      February 18, 2021
    • SAVAGE DRAGON IS A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 17, 2021
    • Press Release
    • Kickstarter Spotlight
  • Books
    Random
    • Collecting Profile: NFL Superpro

      Chris Kiser
      August 31, 2019
      Books, Collectibles, Collecting Profile, Columns, Marvel Comics
    Recent
    • Collecting Profile: Disney Frozen

      CB Staff
      November 22, 2019
    • Collecting Profile: NFL Superpro

      CB Staff
      August 31, 2019
    • “THE BEST OF WITZEND” is a Wonderful Celebration of Artistic Freedom

      Daniel Gehen
      September 15, 2018
    • Review: ‘Machete Squad’ is a Disappointing Afghan Memoir

      Jason Sacks
      July 31, 2018
    • Review: ‘Out of Nothing’ is the Antidote to Our Sick Times

      Jason Sacks
      July 23, 2018
    • Review: ‘Bizarre Romance’ Shows Rough Edges in the Early Days of a New Marriage

      Jason Sacks
      July 10, 2018
What's New
  • Review: Beast Wars #2 another chance to change the past
  • Collecting Profile: Blue Beetle
  • Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia
  • Collecting Profile: Kraven the Hunter
  • Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good
  • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY
  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Contact Us
  • Write for us!
  • Visit Video Game Break!
Home
Columns

2010 Eisner Award Countdown – Week 2

Chris Kiser
July 10, 2010
Columns, Comics Bulletin Soapbox

Welcome back, Eisnerites! Following last week’s debut column, our reviewers have labored tirelessly at their keyboards to bring you the second edition of our 2010 Eisner Countdown. The big show is just 15 days away!

This week, we’re examining the Best Writer category (where everyone seems to be copying off each other’s papers) along with the eclectic mix of nominees for Best Single Issue. As always, we aren’t content to stop at what’s on the ballot, coming at the Eisner committee with a full barrage of Biggest Snubs!


Best Writer

The nominees are…

  • Ed Brubaker, Captain America, Daredevil, Marvels Project (Marvel) Criminal, Incognito (Marvel Icon)
  • Geoff Johns, Adventure Comics, Blackest Night, The Flash: Rebirth, Superman: Secret Origin (DC)
  • James Robinson, Justice League: Cry for Justice (DC)
  • Mark Waid, Irredeemable, The Incredibles (BOOM!)
  • Bill Willingham, Fables (Vertigo/DC)

Danny Djeljosevic:

Deserves to Win:

The “Best Writer” category is most baffling this year. Save Blackest Night, none of Johns’ listed material is particularly beloved, which signals a weak year for the writer. Did the last issue of Rebirth even come out? This year shows more promise with The Flash and Green Lantern, so Johns will deserve it more when 2011’s nominations are announced. And while James Robinson reminded us that comics didn’t have to be shitty in the nineties with Starman, Cry for Justice is not good. At all. I don’t even bother with Bill Willingham comics.

Ed Brubaker wins not by default, but by virtue of being the best writer of the bunch — I mean, Criminal AND Incognito? No contest. Though I won’t throw a hissy fit if someone decides to give Mark Waid some much-needed love. For a guy so prominent, we really take him for granted. Let’s stop that, us.

Biggest Snub:
Women. Non-whites. People working outside of mainstream comics. Failing that, where’s Jason Aaron?

Chris Kiser:

Deserves to Win:

If you’re looking for witty zingers about James Robinson’s nomination in this category for Cry for Justice, you’ve come to the wrong place. Gotta have your fix? Fine. Take five minutes to open up a new browser tab and Google the term “JUSTIIIIIIICE!!!” Satisfied? Good. Now get off the guy’s case. He once wrote Starman and The Golden Age, okay?!?!

Having been a DC guy for as much of my life as I can remember, I’d love to toss Dan DiDio’s golden boy Geoff Johns my vote here, but I just can’t justify it based on 2009’s output. Also, I find it terribly perplexing that among the four books listed as part of Johns’ nomination, his best effort of the year, Green Lantern, is nowhere to be found. With “Rage of the Red Lanterns,” “Agent Orange,” and the first group of Blackest Night tie-ins (which were often better than the main series), Johns continued to pump enough new mythology into the GL franchise to fuel it for the next decade.

Yet, instead of honoring that achievement, Eisner hands a nomination to Flash: Rebirth. Now that’s a reason to cry for justice! (Okay, so maybe just a little Robinson joke.)

With Johns out of the picture, that leaves this category’s other Big Two superstar, Ed Brubaker, to bring home the Bru-bacon. Any of the five books next to his name could have earned him a nomination alone, thus their cumulative effect is staggering. I’ll simply focus on my favorite of the bunch, Daredevil, where Brubaker wrapped up his stint on the series with a coda that rivaled even Brian Michael Bendis’s acclaimed finale.

Biggest Snub:
Not a year goes by that Grant Morrison couldn’t deservedly end up on this list, but I’ll refrain from letting this write-up sound exactly like the one I did last week for Best Limited Series. Instead, I’ll simply plagiarize Danny’s picks for that category and give my Biggest Snub to Jonathan Hickman. Between Fantastic Four and Secret Warriors, few writers matched his perfect balance of off-the-wall ideas and traditional superhero sensibilities.

Charles Webb:

Deserves to Win:

Of the 2010 nominees, Ed Brubaker is the strongest in the group by simple virtue of consistency. If it sounds like I’m damning the prolific writer of Captain America and Criminal, I’m not. A singular talent in the industry, he’s excelled over the last few years at solidifying the modern street-level hero in the Marvel U. His ear for dialogue and touch with characters drive the slow-burn stories that fill out his bibliography, making it curious that Bendis, and not Brubaker, has consistently been tapped as the architect of the large-scale Marvel events. A win for Brubaker would validate methodical, tightly-plotted storytelling that has even non-comics readers talking about his work.

At the same time, I’m uncertain as to how James Robinson’s nearly universally-derided work on Justice League: Cry for Justice made it on this list. This was, simply put, a bad book that added nothing to DC’s portfolio aside from the embarrassment of junior high school morality wrapped inside a ridiculous revenge story that birthed what is shaping up to be the worst book of 2010 (that would be The Rise of Arsenal). Furthermore, Robinson’s work on Superman was middling to decent but nothing that I can recall with any degree of accuracy.


Best Single Issue (or One-Shot)

The nominees are…

  • Brave & the Bold #28: “Blackhawk and the Flash: Firing Line,” by J. Michael Straczynski and Jesus Saiz (DC)
  • Captain America #601: “Red, White, and Blue-Blood,” by Ed Brubaker and Gene Colan (Marvel)
  • Ganges #3, by Kevin Huizenga (Fantagraphics)
  • The Unwritten #5: “How the Whale Became,” by Mike Carey and Peter Gross (Vertigo/DC)
  • Usagi Yojimbo #123: “The Death of Lord Hikiji” by Stan Sakai (Dark Horse)

Danny Djeljosevic:

Deserves to Win:

Okay, I see what’s going on here. Because there are hardly any self-contained stories in comics anymore, there is a painful lack of great nominees. I haven’t read Ganges yet but I assume it is the best, being a book that doesn’t have superheroes in it.

For how old school “Blackhawk and the Flash: Firing Line” is, it’s surprisingly joyless and rote and ends just as it’s beginning. It’s not quite the wretched “girls night out before Barbara Gordon gets Killing Joked” Brave & the Bold issue, but it doesn’t quite hold up as a particularly good self-contained story. If anything, it makes a case against single issue stories.

“Red, White, and Blue-Blood” fares better among the superhero stories, but the beautiful Gene Colan art is the real winner here. The weirdly-paced story resorts to opening with a needless framing device that insecurely tells readers just why anybody should care about a World War II-era Captain America story at a time when everyone really just wants to know when Cap is coming back.

“The Death of Lord Hikiji” doesn’t have that “very special issue” vibe that the other ones do. Instead, it tells a violent, heartbreaking story that fits within a single issue as well as within the series at large. Feeling neither compressed nor decompressed, the story lasts as long as it needs to.

But “How the Whale Became” was a pretty good issue of Sandman, no?

Biggest Snub:
Everything else, honestly. I’m sure there’s an issue of Scalped that would fit just fine here. But I’m going to be self-indulgent and suggest Uncanny X-Men #512, “The Origins of the Species,” in which the X-Club goes back to early 20th Century San Francisco to battle a steampunk Sentinel, among other things. It doesn’t feel forcibly compressed unlike some of the nominated stories nor does it feel like an inessential bit of filler.

Chris Kiser:
Deserves to Win:

When reading over 200 individual comics per year, it’s easy to lose track of which issues were the best, even the really great ones. That said, if you’d have asked me my opinion of the greatest single issue to hit shelves in 2009, I’d have had no trouble pinpointing The Unwritten #5 as the one to beat them all. Even without looking to the Eisner ballot or critics’ “Best of” lists as a cheat sheet, “How the Whale Became” easily stands out as some of the best 22 pages printed in recent memory.

Purely as a piece of historical fiction, it demands respect. A creative imagining of a literary rivalry between Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, Carey and Gross’s story is an insightful look at the interplay between politics and literature, highlighting the capability of either one to destroy the ambitions of the other. By the time you’ve read it all, the line between art and agenda appears all the more fine.

Joined to the Unwritten series as a whole, though, this issue also shines. While the first story arc hinted at the presence of a conspiracy somehow tied to the production of the world’s fiction, “How the Whale Became” demonstrates how far the influence of this cabal has truly reached. Raising the stakes for subsequent storylines, this issue also introduced a quickly beloved tradition for the fledgling Vertigo series: awesome one-shots. Whereas the readers of most titles come to dread their writers’ departure from the “main” story, I find myself often counting the days until the next Unwritten standalone.

Biggest Snub:
Neil Gaiman’s Batman #686 may have elicited more excitement from me than any other issue of the year, but it was merely chapter one of “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader,” a two-parter that lost its steam in the second half. I might have nominated Planetary #27, if only Warren Ellis could have done a better job explaining the time travel paradoxes at the heart of his series finale. All things considered, Green Lantern #43, featuring the origin of Black Hand, is probably most deserving of a spot on this list. It’s certainly better than that Barry Allen issue of Brave and the Bold, that’s for sure.

Jason Sacks:

Deserves to Win:
No offense to JMS, Stan Sakai, Ed Brubaker or especially the great Gene Colan, but there can only be one winner in this category, and it’s probably the one that you know the least about: Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges.

Huizenga is probably the most thoughtful and creative cartoonist working in the medium today, and Ganges is his playground. Every page he creates is a monument to creativity and imagination, to extremely thoughtful page design and an eye for the perfect moment and image.

This issue is simply a depiction of the torture that main character Glenn Ganges goes through as he battles a nasty case of insomnia. That means that this issue isn’t highly plot-based, but it is the perfect idea for an incredibly well-produced meditation on the kind of battle that we all go through occasionally.

This comic works, and works beautifully, because Kevin Huizenga is a magnificent and incredibly imaginative storyteller. His panel and page arrangements are among the most thoughtful and innovative of any creator seen recently.

That’s important because so much of this issue depends on Huizenga’s storytelling abilities. He has no plot to speak of here, so the success or failure of the comic depends on his use of recurring images, clever page layouts, and, of course, his ability to make readers feel interested in literally wandering around the inside of Glenn Ganges’s mind.

In other words, Huizenga sets himself a very high level of difficulty. However, being a world-class cartoonist, Huizenga delivers on his promise.

Ganges #3 is really nothing but an extended interior monologue. And at that, it’s an interior monologue with little grounding in reality. As such, it could have been deadly dull. But Huizenga, one of the finest cartoonists working today, delivers a fascinating and deeply involving book. Ganges #3 is a brilliantly conceived and delivered comic that provides a virtual clinic on great comics storytelling.

Biggest Snub:
Jonah Hex #50 is the story that the crappy Hex movie should have told. It has everything you might want in a Hex tale. Creators Gray, Palmiotti and Cooke deliver a story filled with vengeance, murder, a bit of romance, a touch of humor, and the stalking of 50 bounties by the ever-intense Jonah Hex. It’s a totally satisfying product, from the gorgeous cover to the humorous conclusion. Darwyn Cooke’s art is amazing as ever, adeptly complemented by Dave Stewart’s coloring, and the story chugs along like a steam train crossing the prairies. It’s a crime that this comic wasn’t nominated for Best Single Issue.


Are you on board with our picks? Take issue with our guys’ collective man-crush on Ed Brubaker? We’d love to hear from you on our message boards. Plus, don’t forget to visit us again next Thursday for an art-centric edition of the countdown, featuring our selections for Best Penciler/Inker, Best Cover Artist, and Best Digital Comic.

Chris KiserComics Bulletin Soapbox

Share On:
Tweet
Keith Champagne: Going Another Round with WWE Heroes
Top 10 Least Necessary Trade Paperback Collections

About The Author

<a href="http://comicsbulletin.com/byline/chris-kiser/" rel="tag">Chris Kiser</a>
Chris Kiser

Raised on a steady diet of Super Powers action figures and Adam West Batman reruns, Chris Kiser now writes for Comics Bulletin. He once reviewed every tie-in to a major DC Comics summer event and survived to tell the tale. Ask him about it on Twitter, where he can be found as @Chris_Kiser!

Related Posts

  • “The Long, Strange Trip of Deathlok the Demolisher”

    Paul Brian McCoy
    May 22, 2017
  • Classic Comics Cavalcade: “Straw Into Gold: Captain Marvel in Marvel Super-Heroes #13”

    Jason Sacks
    November 13, 2015

Latest Columns

  • Revisiting the Witchblade/Fathom/Tomb Raider Crossover

    Daniel Gehen
    February 8, 2021
  • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

    Daniel Gehen
    December 4, 2020
  • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 1

    Daniel Gehen
    October 30, 2020
  • Comictober 2020: DRACULA MOTHERF**KER

    Daniel Gehen
    October 27, 2020
  • What Looks Good for the Week of 10/14/2020

    Daniel Gehen
    October 12, 2020
RSSTwitterFacebookgoogleplusinstagramtumblr

Comics Bulletin is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for website owners to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com, audible.com, and any other website that may be affiliated with Amazon Service LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, Comics Bulletin earns from qualifying purchases.

All content on this site (c) 2018 The Respective Copyright Holders