Favourite Comics of 2023 Part Two: Mark Waid's Shazam!, Tradd Moore's Doctor Strange: Full Sunrise, Alex de Campi's Parasocial, Bad Karma

Once more, I pull from my favourites from DC, Marvel and indie presses. For those who know of Mark Waid, it should be no surprise that he and Dan Mora are absolutely having a blast on Batman/Superman: World's Finest, and their readers arem too. Also, Marvel, in particular, surprised me with Tradd Moore's bending, gob-smacking Doctor Strange: Full Sunrise, while Alex de Campi kept producing superior creator-owned Parasocial and Bad Karma with Saskatoon artist Ryan Howe (always have to plug fellow Canuck artists). Image seems to producing phenomenal creator-owned books, so they got two spots.

DC
Batman/Superman: World's Finest, writer Mark Waid and artist Dan Mora

2023 was quite the year for both Waid, penning a World’s Finest: Teen Titans revamp and Shazam! and Mora, also drawing Shazam!, gifting art lovers with many breathtaking covers and interiors. It’s no surprise then, that Waid, a masterful character writer and neo-classic scribe, is obviously having so much fun writing Bruce and Clark in a classical way, but just skirting outside of trenchant continuity. Mora’s gloriously detailed, heroic and expressive pencils shine in this whimsical title. This combination wooed me. While it’s a master class in character writing from Waid, the accompanying pencils from Mora warrant a re-read. Waid always pens a heartfelt script and a plot that does some unexpected and entertaining turns, such as minor character beats as Supergirl and Robin having an unresolved feud in the background. I found myself pre-ordering the collected hardbacks. And still do.

Marvel
Doctor Strange: Full Sunrise
Apparently, Tradd Moore and Heather Moore had carte blanche to show the good doctor journeying through the spiritual plane, getting through all manner of kaleidoscopic escapades. The result was this trippy, oversized, visual feast. Moore’s art takes centre stage. And for this, I am grateful. On terra firm, Strange acts as a mid-wife to an otherworldly character holding Strange’s life in balance. Stephen Strange’s other-dimensional adventure features phantasmagoric splash pages and sweeping vistas. While there are allusions to Gnosticism, this yarn’s all about the trip, not these religious allusions, and a tremendous tribute to trippy Silver Age experimentation that was a way to draw out the college hippie set. Heather Moore’s colour palette is bonkers. (Ed. note: Where has this colourist been all my life? I must pay more attention and look into them.) The journey is mind-bending and dense. Strange appears as arguably a slender transwoman or at the very least androgynous. I would wager that the whole works would make Steve Ditko himself, a heady Doctor Strange architect, blush with pride and appreciation. Once again, this is a book that might very well stand outside of continuity, unlike anything else from Marvel in 2023, for readers who want a stunning, expansive journey with the Sorcerer Supreme.

Indies
Parasocial from Alex de Campi and Erica Henderson
Bad Karma from Alex de Campi and Ryan Howe
I have committed it to print before and will do so again-de Campi writes across genres and so exceedingly well. Some have compared her to a modern Alan Moore, and in this sense, this descriptor is accurate.

Parasocial (Image Comics)
Parasocial, de Campi and Henderson’s second collaboration, is billed as a modern version of Stephen King’s Misery. That said, it does expand far more on this fan-celebrity symbiosis. In the end, both parties come out looking culpable. Parasocial is particularly timely, given the modern pop-cultural addiction to social-media use and consumer adoration of a particular TV show or movie or celebrity, the latter of which often has feet of clay. Once again, de Campi shoehorns in social shredding or social commentary into the plot without making it completely feel she is doing so. Henderson’s pencils disarm readers because her work is seemingly simplistic and cute. Beware messenger, as anyone who read their redux feminist goth Dracula! Motherf**ker!, knows. This story goes dark, disabusing the presumptive reader of that notion. The duo proves once again they can do contemporary horror and suspense.

Gorgeous cover by Tony Stella.

Bad Karma (Image)

Bad Karma, de Campi’s team-up with Canadian artist Ryan Howe and artist Dee Cunniffe, is a stunner of an original graphic novel. Damaged army vets Ethan and Sullivan discover that Aaron Carter, an innocent man, is on Death Row for a mercenary job they did a decade ago and embark a Christmas road trip to save him. So, it’s pulp to bone. And as I read it,

Bad Karma just kept getting better and better. It felt as though an auteur directed a 1980's action flick that was too smart for a studio film script with fallible, loveable characters. Ethan’s ex-wife Cheryl is also not resigned the traditional limiting supportive girlfriend/nagging wife/vindictive ex role. She kicks some serious ass. Howe's art seems deceptively simple at first but is, in fact, nuanced. Dee Cunniffe's colour palette and use is dynamic and moody. de Campi explains in the afterword that she spent four years doing this one, first as a Panel Syndicate webcomic, enjoying it all the while and after raising funding, took Bad Karma to Image Comics. All this hard work and love shows in each panel. Bad Karma is fun and sad and smart as hell and sometimes feels like you’re watching an action movie circa 1985, such as the original Lethal Weapon flick.

My Favourite Comics of 2023 Part One: Phillip K. Johnson's The Incredible Hulk, Ram V's Swamp Thing & Eric Palicki's Black's Myth

Wow. Admittedly, 2023, was a great year for comics. There were many compelling new single-issue series, original graphic novels and trade paperback collections not only from the Big Two, but also from the indie-press renaissance. I am unsure how to approach my favourites because they are legion. Where to begin? 

(I will add images as I find time, but I realize in blogging that I am spending far too much time on process-trying to post a certain format, font size, etc., and just want to get the word out my latest passions. In 2023, I wrote most of a novelette (about 8,000 words) in a spiral notebook on luncch breaks because I got too frustrated with how slow and obfuscating Word is. The horror-comedy story's about, in a nutshell, what Jehovah's Witnesses might fear the most. And what if a queer ex-JW was called in for help? But more on that later... So in 2024, I guess I am going to try to worry less about process and more about producing work.)

Marvel and DC still manage to surprise, even while caught up in the mire of event storyline, printing a seemingly infinite number of X-books (Marvel) or Bat-books (DC). Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Nic Klein’s The Incredible Hulk is rich with monsters, continuing in the vein of Al Ewing’s The Immortal Hulk. Steve Skroce's Clobberin' Time, a fun romp starring the Thing, was a hoot, pairing everyone’s favourite blue-eyed brawler with the Hulk, Doctor Strange and … Doctor Doom? From DC, I enjoyed Mark Waid and Dan Mora’s beautifully retro-yet-new Batman/Superman World's Finest and Shazam!, the most charming and entertaining reminting of that title in years, Ram V’s Swamp Thing and Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Wonder Woman: Historia, sort of the Amazonians’ epic year one.

Some indie titles of 2023 prove true my claim that this is an indie-press renaissance, jumpstarted by the onset of the pandemic. Comics creators want to get their creator-owned, original works out there. We have Black’s Myth, a black-and-white, film-noir werewolf police procedure with all the can-do spirit of a 1980’s upstart indie (Editor’s note: Read that phrase again if you like!). Alex de Campi’s latest books prove once more that she can write across genres with ingenuity. In the creator-owned Parasocial, she teams again with artist Erica Henderson of Squirrel Girl (comic-book) fame, with whom she did, Dracula! Motherf**ker! and is a cautionary tale about the fan-celebrity relationship. Her original graphic novel Bad Karma, with art by Canadian Ryan Howe, feels like a 1980’s-action-film, but shrewder, featuring two damaged vets trying to save a man wrongfully convicted and on Death Row. Both remain top-notch storytelling with incisive social commentary. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillip's Reckless, their pulpy, immediate original graphic-novel series from Image continues to astonish. Not to mention Humanoid’s fascinating bio-comic Bela Lugosi and Monstrous Books’ Kolchak The Night Stalker 50th Anniversary Graphic Novel tells stories from before and after the character’s network-television existence.

In keeping with my predilection for outcast characters, here are three of my hands-own most-loved titles about loner characters from 2023. Coincidentally, two are about green guys. One is about a werewolf. Guess they all change shape, though.

The Incredible Hulk (Marvel)

Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Nic Klein, taking their cue from Al Ewing and Joe Bennett’s Green Door mythology and Bruce Banner’s dissociative personality disorder developed in 50 issues of The Immortal Hulk, have steered The Incredible Hulk into a full-out, pedal-to-the-metal monster horror comic. Their tenure comes hot on the hells of Greg Pak’s, which elicited a lukewarm response from many faithful readers. The book is a free-for-all as all the monsters in the Marvel Universe take a run at Ol’ Greenskin, from encounters with the Man-Thing and a vintage Ghost Rider to any number of supernatural nasties. The Hulk is, in turn, suppressing the Bruce Banner personality. Gone are the gentle multiple-panel, almost magical green-to-flesh tone (and vice versa) transformations of yesteryear instead replaced by flesh-ripping and bone-cracking sequences which Ewing laid all the body-horror groundwork for. The Hulk is also a wander again, particularly in the South, giving the book the feel of the syndicated TV series of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and of the comic during much of the eighties, for that matter. Johnson is clearly delighting in playing with Ewing’s toys. 

Four issues in, the arc reminds me of Brian Michael Bendis picking up Frank Miller’s groundbreaking character beats from Daredevil and fleshing them over 55 issues between 2001 and 2006. But more to the point, Johnson is developing characters in new directions and expanding the mythos-and shoehorning in all sorts of delightfully dreadful monsters that are terrifically (or horrifically) interesting to watch the Hulk tussle with, especially with Klein up to the task in all its gruesome glory. The sole drawback is that pace was a little slow as Johnson established the story, but an atmosphere of dread was fine compensation. Still, the protagonist-antagonist combinations also put me a mind of Mark Waid doing the very same with Daredevil and with Superman and Batman. In short, this Jade Giant is a fun, gruesome read not for the faint of heart.

The Swamp Thing Volume 3: The Parliament of Gears (DC)

Writer Ram V and artist Mike Perkins stick the landing, as the Americans love to say in podcasts, on Swamp Thing. The final six issues of their 16-issue run, which I recently discovered was supposed to be ten issues, is a visual delight and an intellectual stimulant. The combination of Mike Perkins’ realistic penciling style and Ram V’s Green musings and keen understanding of Swamp Thing mythos and character are a one-two punch. Parliament of Gears was touted as the finest ST fare in years for a reason. It’s a satisfying, thunderous finish to V’s cerebral-horror arc. Like Phillip Kennedy Johnson on The Incredible Hulk, V takes the foundations of a seminal writer, in this case Alan Moore, from his legendary tenure on the title, and develops them in interesting yet logical and intelligent ways. Perkins’s jaw-dropping work ranges from the pedestrian and mechanical to the utterly fantastical, gory, and alien. Want to see wondrous vistas, unsightly horrors, and some fine character mannerisms? Perkins has you covered. New Swampie avatar Levis Kamei (who I maintain looks very suspiciously like a shorter-haired Ram V …) faces off with his brother Jacob, a preternatural contender who wants to bring a cold older to the world. The green guy must unite the Green with its different fellows for the final showdown. It's a dense, sprawling and epic conclusion.

Guest stars include Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern, the Authority’s Jack Hawksmoor, King of Cities (how cool a title is that?) and Tefé Holland, Swamp Thing’s daughter, whom Levis’ love interest Jennifer asks for help. A virtuoso, Perkins gives readers gore, but also phantasmagoric tableaus. Mike Spicer deserves a shout-out for his astonishing colour palette. Perkins also pulls off an astonishing trick. Aside from all these other merits, he depicts new character Trinity, created by nuclear tests in Trinity, New Mexico, and as a result unnervingly powerful (it’s comics, after all, as they say) as a sultry, glowing entity. Ram V also goes beyond the established Moore lore and adds a whole cosmic or psychedelic aspect to the green guy’s lore, expanding on the mythos of the Green, the Red, the Rot and the Parliament of Gears, literal man-made machinations trying to elbow into these ecosystems.

Black’s Myth (Ahoy Comics)

Here’s another fine example of a creator-owned comic offering a unique vision, thanks to Ahoy Comics, delivered with aplomb. Comics creator Eric Palicki has gone and made a series about a supernatural police procedural, a clever fusion of genres, starring lycanthrope Jamie “Strummer” Jones, the bi protagonist.  It’s black and white, so readers can see the art as it was meant to witness, on the drawing board. Wendell Cavalcanti’s linework is classical human form stuff, and stunning as a result. comics-in-arms include Saladin Ahmed’s 1970’s/early 1980’s Abbott series or even Mark Waid’s Black Magick (one with a bi intrepid reporter, the other with a bi intrepid witch detective), involved, sensual and compelling. This second arc is on the racks now but will come out in the second collected trade paperback. It’s this kind of bi rep and can-do-it attitude that you often don’t find at jaded bigger houses, and I’m all in.