Superhero Comics nowadays can be divided into Marvel, DC and “Other” – the “Other” being the smaller publishing houses like Dark Horse, Wildstorm, that kind of thing. For best of 2008 I thought I’d pick one of each.

Best Marvel Comic of 2008

This is a difficult one. Judging “the best Marvel comic” this year is pretty much like being asked to judge the “world’s tallest sheep” competition, or being asked to rank a series of bottle-cap collections. We’re not talking life-changing events here.

Basically, nothing has really been that good. And that’s something it hurts to say. Marvel at its best gives us ideas too big to fit on the page. It gives us living, breathing characters, and it makes us love them, and then it drags us along as it almost destroys them. The times Marvel is good I have driven into town to get the latest issue of Daredevil, or sat open-mouthed in the pub while my cider goes flat, poring over a panel from Ultimates. The times Marvel is great it tells us stories that embed themselves deep in your psyche. I can look at film footage of New York and see where Mr Fantastic’s son became a God, or the island that Terrax the Tamer pulled out of the earth, or the bridge where Spiderman failed to save Gwen Stacey – events that were more real to me and to others like me than anything that happened in the news. At its best, Marvel doesn’t give us stars, it gives us supernovae.

Which is why it pains me to say that this year, they’ haven’t really delivered. They should have. They have more than their share of the best writers – Millar, Bendis, even Neil Freakin’ Gaiman, for heaven's sake. They still have the number one illustrator, the guy with daylight between him and second place. They’ve got easily half of the top ten characters. They’ve had movies bigger than… big.

But in 2008 Marvel promised us “KAPOW!!!!” and gave us “…meh”.

Spiderman, who was creatively painted into a corner by the major story arc/train wreck/episode of multi-organ failure of 2007 called One More Day, meandered about without getting worse but without actually getting much better. Hulk went from an arc where he was green and smashed up a whole lot of things to one where he was red and smashed up a whole lot more things. Daredevil, who has attracted some of the best Marvel writing of the last thirty years, crossed a particular line for me early in 2008 and is high on my list of comics to check out in the summer of 2508, the late summer, if I remember, and I’m not busy, and I don’t remember what happened in January 2008. Ultimates – if this wasn’t a family oriented website, I’d tell you what they’d done with Ultimates, which two years ago was the best thing on the shelves. I think there is actual footage on youtube of the guy who writes Ultimates poisoning wells and burning orphanages and pushing babies onto railway tracks, but I’m not sure, so don’t quote me on that.

So – what was Marvel’s best in 2008?

It was probably the movie of Iron Man.

Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Junior, was funny, spectacular and accessible. It made an intrinsically unlikeable character someone you could like, it made things believable. It was, for a few short months, maybe the best superhero film ever made. It was a damn good film, as superhero films go. Go see it. You’ll like it.  

So – Iron Man, the movie. A bit of a worry that the best the House of Ideas has given us this year is the filming of something they came up with in 1963. Next year, they assure us, is going to be different.   

Best DC Comic of 2008

And on to DC. DC is the other big comics house. DC gave us Superman, in the thirties. They gave us Batman, in the thirties. They gave us Captain Marvel, in the seventies, after they sued the guys who originally gave us Captain Marvel, in the thirties, and stopped them doing it. They started with the best characters superhero comics ever had. And since the nineteen forties it’s been up, up and away for DC, when they followed up Superman and Batman with the release of characters like… that guy. And that girl who was super-powered and stuff. And the Bug Eyed Bandit.

Judging from that, you could argue that DC is the literary equivalent of those people who win the lottery and put every cent in the bank and then live off the interest, drib by drab, over the subsequent decades. Sensible, secure; not that much fun to watch anymore.

But you’d be wrong. DC have most of the best villains, They’ve got a fair few of the best characters. The best of DC is as good as it gets – Watchmen, Killing Joke, All Star Superman, that kind of stuff. And they have had periods of sustained, coruscating brilliance in the last few decades. But again, DC lately has promised much, much more than they have delivered. They debuted the new Supergirl a while back and have written her so badly that it actually hurts. They brought us All Star Batman, which is good the same way that only getting shot in the leg is good. Green Lantern was apparently quite good, if you like that sort of thing, but I don’t, but if you like that kind of stuff, go check it out.

So what was DCs best of 2008? Unlike Marvel, it’s not a movie. It’s The Movie. It is, if you’ve been living in a cave in Mars for the last ten years with a bag over your head, The Best Superhero Film Of All Time. It’s Dark Knight. Dark Knight, which came at the end of the age of comic book superheroes. Dark Knight , which was maybe the movie that finally killed off the idea.

The thing is, Dark Knight is not, and never was, a superhero movie. It’s a movie about an idea in crisis. It’s a movie that shows what happens when the ideas upon which the superhero is based – individualism, the mask, the righteous individual who does what the police would love to but cannot – are taken to the extreme. It’s a movie that shows us exactly where the limits of the hero and the superhero are.

And the appeal of Dark Knight is that things don’t really look good for the superhero in all this. It is no coincidence that across cultures and continents the Age of Heroes is always sometime in the distant past, whereas the villain has not only survived, but has gone from strength to strength in the modern and post-modern age. Because in the end, as Dark Knight shows us, out of superhero and supervillain, the idea of the supervillain is the only one that makes sense.  

In Dark Knight, the Joker is in control. The Joker acts, and Batman is forced by his nature to react. The reasons for this are complex, but basically Ledger’s Joker crosses boundaries, whereas Bale’s Batman cannot. Batman is defined as much by his limits – he’s the one who needs the bulletproof suit - as by the effort and ingenuity he brings in his doomed attempt to transcend them. The Joker embraces the freedom that Batman has explicitly and emphatically rejected.  

In telling the story of the Joker versus Batman, Dark Knight is telling the story of colour versus monochrome, a going out into the world versus a retreat into a cave, the miraculous versus the merely meticulous, the kaleidoscope versus the microscope.

Without going into details, and with the caveat that the truth about any character worth knowing can never be known, it is interesting to look at the way both the Batman and the Joker have reacted to the shocking acts of violence that occurred in their pasts. Everyone knows the story of Batman’s origin, how his wealthy parents were murdered before his eyes. Everyone knows this because Batman could only deal with it by making it a myth, a myth that has warped and trammelled not only his life but the life of others around him. The events of that one night have become the criterion separating what can be kept from what must be stripped away – everything Batman is and does and feels must be weighed against the weight of that shocking, transformative night. Batman without that shortcut down crime alley, without the gunshot, without Joe Chill, is nothing.  

But the Joker has reacted to the horrors of his past by becoming…indefinable. He has chosen chaos rather than control, because you can’t control without yourself being controlled. Where the Joker comes from, who he is, what he wants – everything is mutable, and everything is free. His psyche is inaccessible to Batman because, like water in the desert, once you get there, it’s not there anymore.

Grant Morrison, as usual, saw to the heart of the matter when he wrote one of the greatest Joker stories ever told – Arkham Asylum, a Serious House on Serious Earth. The Joker, he hypothesizes, is not insane. He is in fact hyper-sane, the first example of what Morrison calls a “brilliant new modification of human perception.”

The Joker, Morrison suggests, responds to an exponentially increasing amount of sensory input by going with the flow, by allowing it to form and shape what can only loosely be described as his personality. It is, Morrison suggests, a way of processing information that is vastly more suited to modern life than our stone-age neural patterns. Batman, who responds to chaos by focus and exclusion, can only ever follow behind whatever it is that the Joker has become.

Anyway – Dark Knight. If you need any more urging, Ledger got better with every film, the direction is textbook, and it’s grossed more money this year than even Bruce Wayne could imagine. Best of 2008. Go. See. Dark. Knight. Now.

And lastly – best of “the others”. I might use that as next month’s column, when I may or may not be at Clarion South, the short story writing extravaganza. The best “other” comic of 2008 is something called Ex machina, by Brian Vaughan and Tony Harris, brought out by Wildstorm. I’ll talk about it then. So, tune in next issue – same Bat-site, same Bat-url… and see you then.