2022 was an amazing year for comics. As we look to close out the year, our staff wanted to highlight some of the best comics we read in 2022. Each person was asked to pick one title that resonated with them and stretched what comics could be. We all have different tastes but anyone should be able to look at this list and find a hidden gem they missed this year. Even though we love ranking things here, this has simply been presented in alphabetical order. Dig in and find a new favorite!
A. X. E. : Judgment Day
Writer
Kieron Gillen
Artist
Valerio Schiti
Colorist
Marte Gracia
Letterer
Clayton Cowles
Publisher
Marvel Comics
Event comics aren’t meant to be good.
I mean, they aren’t meant to be bad either, of course. But the quality is clearly secondary to their true mission: Creating excitement, so people have to buy the series out of fear of missing out. Realigning the publishing slate, moving pieces around the board, so they’re ready for next year’s event, after which nothing will ever be the same. Just like this one and the one last year.
They’re just something that happens, which we all get wrapped up in for a couple of months and then forget all about, because it was a nothingburger. Fun while it lasted, but without any substance.
Clearly no one told Kieron Gillen.
Judgment Day is not just a great event comic, but also just a great comic. It has the earth shattering moments we’re expecting, where everything we thought we knew is turned on its head. The stakes couldn’t be higher, as our heroes fight for Earth’s very survival. There are major deaths, entire corners of the Marvel universe changed going forward, reimaginings of existing characters and exciting new characters introduced.
So far, so typical event comics.
If all Gillen, Schiti, Garcia and Cowles did was execute this well, that would still be praiseworthy. (And believe me, they do execute it well! Schiti and Garcia create some of the most stunning images in recent memory, equally adept at the kaiju battles, as the intimate human moments.) But they go the extra mile: They actually have something to say. Or rather, to ask.
Do we deserve to live?
It’s a question both posed to the characters in the comic, but just as much to the readers. With the way we’re treating each other and our planet, do we actually deserve to be here? It’s a tough question and one many are struggling with (and honestly, one many more should ponder too).
The comic provides no easy answers, even if the heroes are successful in the end. It ends on a positive note, that all is not lost. We can do better and as such should do better.
Every day is judgment day and we each choose how we’ll be judged.
– Rasmus Skov Lykke
Batgirls
Writer
Becky Cloonan &
Michael Conrad
Artist
Jorge Corona
Colorist
Sarah Stern
Letterer
Becca Carey
Publisher
DC Comics
2022 surprised me by being the year I added a Bat title to my pull list. Outside of Gail Simone’s time on Batgirl, I’d just picked one up. It’s not out of any malice. I’d just staked my time with Wonder Woman and Supergirl, and somehow just never found the time or energy to grab a Bat-family issue while it was being written. Cloonan and Conrad changed all that. I’ve loved their writing on Wonder Woman and when I saw their name with Stern and Corona’s art on Batgirl, I was captivated.
Batgirls volume one is electric from the gorgeous colors to the friendship between Cass, Barbara, and Stephanie. It’s a series that tackles some dangerous stuff like Barbara’s computer getting hacked, regular every day citizens being manipulated, and of course the usual hazards of being a young adult super hero. But it’s fun! It’s engaging! Bat fam books have always felt moody and dark to me and I’m happy for those who are drawn to comics like that. Every month I was excited to get the new issue of this comic that’s got heart and power in it’s excellent utilization of the separate skills wash batgirl brings to the team.
-Cat Purcell
Black Manta
Writer
Chuck Brown
Artist
Valentine De Landro
Colorist
Marissa Louise
Letterer
Clayton Cowles
Publisher
DC Comics
Perched on a cliff, eyes oscillating between the expanse of the ocean and the intimacy of ideas buried in unsent messages, he reflects on his legacy.
Legacy, after all, is all a father has to secede to a son.
Manta’s trajectory has always been one of violence and vengeance. His outwardly petty and petulant acts of pride contrast with his thoughtful, sorrowfully dour demeanor. Black Manta is not a good person, and much to his credit Chuck Brown never tries to make him one.
The antagonist, a former disciple of Manta, radicalized by his feelings of betrayal, serves as a warped manifestation of Manta’s legacy and as a stand in for his deepest fears for his son: that the hurt Manta put out into the world eventually will come back to haunt him.
Are his works worth fighting for? Is Manta irredeemable? Does he even want to be redeemed?
Are any of us?
Black Manta is a meditation on manhood, written for men of a certain age who wonder whether what they’ll leave behind has any worth.
And though that question may be unanswerable, this series, in all its quiet, pensive beauty, is absolutely worthy of your time.
-Jude Jones
Darth Vader #26
Writer
Greg Pak
Artist
Raffele Ienco
Colorist
Carlos Lopez
Letterer
Joe Caramanga
Publisher
Marvel Comics
In Darth Vader #26, the title character fights a sandstorm. And while that might sound like a slightly glib presentation of a classic “man vs nature” story, as we all know, Darth Vader hates sand. And so, this struggle is presented less like a character standing tall in the face of the power of nature, and more like someone confronting his childhood bully as an adult.
Like any line of comics featuring a half dozen plus books orchestrated by a wide variety of creators, Marvel’s Star Wars line had a largely middling year, with highs and lows but also lots of perfectly fine comics landing squarely in the middle. But Darth Vader #26 will live in my memory for the way it takes an inherently absurd idea and presents it seriously without losing the sparkle of the absurdity. Writer Greg Pak takes a meme generated by a terrible line of dialogue meant to represent an angsty teen space monk’s idea of romance and turns it both into a story and an expression of the protagonist’s characterization, of the adversity (ie the omnipresence of particulate rock and the way it gets everywhere) he’s overcome to become who he is.
In the hands of Pak and artist Raffele Ienco, who flashback via a series of silent panels throughout the issue to show the ways it has always been there in Vader’s life, sand becomes a bully, a boogie man, a behemoth dominating Vader’s destiny. It is the love he’s lost, the pain he still feels everyday, his loneliness. But also, it’s just, you know, sand. That thing in our world into which we shove beach umbrellas and roast hot dogs over or toss on an icy road to help speed up melting. That tension, between the profound and the absurd, and how it drives and defines Darth Vader, is what makes Darth Vader #26 sing, and it’s a song I’ll remember for a long time.
-Austin Gorton
The Department Of Truth
Writer
James Tynion IV
Artist
Martin Simmonds
Letterer
Aditya Bidikar
Publisher
Image Comics
I have a lot to say about The Department of Truth; I have so much to say I’ve spent two years writing, and editing, and revising a longform essay that is, at this point, no longer about The Department of Truth. That’s the kind of book it is. Conspiracy theories are often empty, vacuums of thought which pull the reader in, and The Department of Truth functions as an opposite. It contains more than itself. It sends the reader hurtling outwards.
The night I write this, Jane Meyer is reporting that “Lawmakers have just added a provision to the National Defense Authorization Act protecting Supreme Court spouses from having to reveal any outside employer, in the name of security. If it passes, Ginni Thomas’s professional entanglements would effectively be state secrets.” The Supreme Court has had a problem over the past year: its public image has changed. The public understands it to be a different sort of thing than they used to believe it. The public has begun to act differently too, protesting not just politicians but these justices that believe they should be above all that rabble. Politicians are now helping the court change that image again, rewrite it to something more palatable. In service of this goal, information that should be public is to be made secret. A lot of art in the past few years has tackled different facets of our problems. But few things have confronted our ur-problem, the problem of our fracturing consensus reality, quite like The Department of Truth.
-Robert Secundus
Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise
Writer/Artist
Tradd Moore
Colorist
Heather Moore
Letterer
Clayton Cowles &
Tradd Moore
Publisher
Marvel Comics
After a year that continued to beat us down, it’s even more important to reflect back and champion the small things that lifted us up. Lucky I don’t have to cast back that far. Tradd Moore’s transcendent Doctor Strange comic only just began a few weeks ago at the time of writing, and the second issue is still a few weeks away. In a single issue, Moore embodies magic – the magic surrounding and permeating a character like Strange, and the magic of comics. I hate to embarrass myself being that kind of comics fan, but it’s impossible for me to read this work without getting swept up in the undertow of Moore’s craft. There’s a lot of sweeping going on here. The lines and curves that cut across each page are breathtaking in the literal sense, where I’m gasping and swearing as I pore over the details. Every mark is set in the precise place, pulsating in waves.
Stephen Strange finds himself in an unknown land, presumably some kind of afterlife following his much-publicized Death earlier in the year. Before he can get much of a bearing on his own situation, Strange is saddled with a quest to find justice for slain children. The issue follows his journey across the wilderness, encountering no small number of trippy visions and critters, to a labyrinthine city teeming with hostile knights. To call the story simple is to ignore how much Moore packs into every single panel, the action is as poetic as the narration. It’s fitting that one of Strange’s magical tools is the heavily featured Eye of Agamotto – as writer/artist, Moore is utilizing every dimension available to him to reward attentive eyes. Heather Moore’s color work is as effortlessly perfect as Tradd’s drawings. Together, they’re like stained-glass. I lose time reading and rereading this comic, captivated by how right it all is. This is a perennial classic in the making, and a permanent reminder of comics’ capacity for the sublime.
-Karen Charm
The Fable
Writer/Illustrator
Katsuhisa Minami
Translator
Adam Hirsch
Publisher
Kodansha
Okay, so, yes, The Fable originally began releasing in Japan in 2015. That’s the nature of reviewing and recommending manga in English – outside of the biggest series, like those in Weekly Shonen Jump (this year’s Jump winner is Akane-banashi, by the way), the series coming out this year in America were big in Japan almost a decade ago. That’s the case for some of my other top series this year, like Yofukashi no Uta (2019), Dead Mount Death Play (2017) and Blue Giant (2013, and on an interminable two-volume-a-year release schedule in English). Anyway, this year Kodansha released the first eight (of 22) volumes of The Fable in English, and we’re all the richer for it.
The Fable deals with the eponymous master hitman Fable, who is directed by his boss to spend a year living a normal life. For the most part, The Fable is a comedy, revolving around its characters trying (and, often, failing) to do normal things like go to the bar, get a job, and cook food. Let me not undersell the comedy in The Fable, which frequently reduced me to idiotic giggling. The Fable also develops a rich side cast who have unusual friendships or rivalries with the hitman, and become just as dear to the reader as the protagonist. Eight volumes gets us through the culmination of the first major arc of the series, an explosion of violence and tension that somehow does not feel out of place in a mainly comedy-oriented series. The Fable displays an unparalleled mastery of mood – the fight scenes are not intricately illustrated, or highly complex or innovative, but they are compelling and memorable all the same. What sets The Fable above the other excellent manga series this year is its ability to accomplish anything it sets its mind on; a perfect premise, airtight pacing, and a depth of human emotion.
-Ian Gregory
Galaxy: The Prettiest Star
Writer
Jadzia Axelrod
Artist
Jess Taylor with
Cris Peter
Letterer
Ariana Maher
Publisher
DC Comics
There’s a scene in Jadzia Axelrod and Jess Taylor’s Galaxy: The Prettiest Star where the protagonist, Taylor Barzelay, a seemingly human boy who seemingly has it all, looks in a mirror and sees her true self—an alien princess with sparkling purple skin and flowing turquoise hair. In that moment, she says, “This is me.” Followed by, “I didn’t realize how much it hurt until it stopped.” If you get it, you get it, and boy did this scene get me.
I don’t want to over-claim my identification with this story. I’m not trans, but I am a person who’s spent a lot of time dreaming big dreams about brighter futures where we’re freer to make our genders what we want. And my favorite characters have always been tricksters, shapeshifters, and superheroes, folks with two (or more) identities and the literally or practically magic ability to mess with expectations and become, through their battles with boring binaries, better versions of themselves. Galaxy: The Prettiest Star doesn’t have to deconstruct the superhero genre to exist within it. Instead, its rebellion is asserting queer, trans joy and presence within an established comics universe and its attendant tropes, and showing that those tropes—about being an outsider whose difference is persecuted but also definitionally heroic—can accommodate change because weren’t they always about that?
Axelrod dedicates the graphic novel to “the girl who needed this book ages ago, and couldn’t find it.” I would have loved this book when I was a girl who sometimes didn’t want to be, but am no less happy to have it now, as a woman who still fights with gender and loves superheroes, even more so when they’re easy to love, which Galaxy certainly is.
-Anna Peppard
The Human Target
Writer
Tom King
Artist
Greg Smallwood
Letterer
Clayton Cowles
Publisher
DC Comics
While Tom King’s tics haven’t softened any over the years — his marriage to formalism, the way his characters talk to the reader like they’re in therapy, his innate ability to turn DC characters into Marvel characters via feet of clay — many of those tics operate as features in this story of a dying man and the superheroes orbiting his life in his final days.
Someone has poisoned Christopher Chance, the Human Target, in a bid to get to Lex Luthor, and that someone is a member of the Justice League International. The JLI are fondly remembered as the “BWA-HA-HA” superteam, but no one’s laughing as Chance interrogates, runs afoul of and, in one case, beds down JLI members one by one on his quest to get the person who killed him.
King presents a team of flawed men and women with differing motivations — revenge, lust, greed — insistent on protecting each other right or wrong. But it’s Greg Smallwood who’s the real star of this comic, turning thick pencil lines and blocks of color into a beautiful, timeless, Technicolor noir that makes even King’s worst narrative excesses look beautiful.
Does it need to be 12 issues? No. Is it still very easy to pick apart a Tom King comic? Yes. Human Target is still King’s best work since Vision and Mister Miracle, arguably the two series that put him on the map when it comes to superhero comics. And for that, he owes Smallwood a fruit basket. And money. Especially money.
-Dan Grote
It’s Lonely At The Centre Of The Earth
Cartoonist
Zoe Thorogood
Publisher
Image Comics
Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely At The Centre Of The Earth captures the aimlessness and confusion of a young adult encountering their first drop of success. It’s less a coming of age title and more a bleak but honest look at a generation who doesn’t expect good things to happen.
What makes It’s Lonely At The Centre Of The Earth stand out is its innovative use of form. This is not a normal comic, it’s a playground for all the things a comic can be. But this isn’t just glitzy distraction, Thorogood uses the manic, ADHD approach to comics as a mirror to her own internal struggles. Not understanding her place in the world or at times who she is, the comic itself has as much of an identity crisis as Zoe.
Early in the book there is a sketch page. A crudely drawn avatar of Thorogood holds a pizza in one hand, a juicebox in the other. They are performing a kickflip on a skateboard emblazoned with the word “PISS”. They are wearing sunglasses, a T-shirt that reads “Thinking about boobs and killing myself”. They have no pants, cock flopping in the breeze. It’s crude, inane, and something the least mentally stable person on your social media page would post with the simple caption “Me rn”. It’s one of the most profoundly stupid, but relatable images I’ve seen. Thorogood follows it up with a question, how much of a problem for the future is it that this is so relatable? There’s no answers in It’s Lonely At The Centre Of The Earth, but there’s more truth here than most things that are sent to print.
-Zachary Jenkins
Star Trek
Writer
Jackson Lanzing &
Colin Kelly
Artist
Ramon Rosanas &
Oleg Chudakov
Colorist
Lee Loughridge
Letterer
Clayton Cowles
Publisher
IDW Publishing
It’s amazing how two issues of a comic book can completely reignite your passion for a franchise. While I used to be a much more hardcore Trekkie, more recently I was a very passive fan. When IDW’s Star Trek relaunch was announced, I was hyped. Set firmly in the core Trek timeline, Lanzing and Kelly created the ultimate Trek mish-mash, combining every iteration of the shows (sorry Kelvin timeline) into a streamlined love letter to Star Trek.
If it was just a love letter though, I wouldn’t be calling it my favorite of the year, especially with only two and a half issues out. The creative team has brought this crew together to face the sort of threat that is uniquely Star Trek. By having something killing the god-like beings scattered through the Alpha Quadrant, we get a comics friendly adventure story that also checks the box for longtime fans. It even subtly turns one of the most popular lines in the franchise- “what does God need with a starship?”- on its head and into a true philosophical threat.
This is the sort of soft reboot the franchise needs in comics, and I can’t wait to see it continue to unfold.
-Tony Thornley
Magical Boy
Writer/Artist
The Kao
Letterer
Dezi Sienty
Publisher
Scholastics
On the day of his sixteen birthday, all Max wants to do is start affirming himself as the trans boy he is. Things get complicated when dark bug monsters start attacking people and Max’s latent magical abilities awaken. Now, he must come into his own as a trans boy and as the descendant of an ancient line of magical girls who fight evil using the power of the light goddess Aurora.
The magical girl anime and manga subgenre has contained trans subtext in works such as Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena. It’s only natural that Western comic book artists, especially LGBTQ ones, would take these influences and use them to tell authentic stories of queer and trans experiences.
Magical Boy not only tells the story of a trans magical boy, but also interrogates society’s expectations of gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. The art gives the sparkles and glamour of a magical girl to a trans magical boy while also showing that everyday queer people and their allies can be magical too.
In this two volume series, Max goes through a lot of highs and lows as a gay trans boy and as the first magical boy in his family. He gets deadnamed, misgendered, and is pressured to be more “lady-like” as a person and magical warrior. Despite this, he gradually learns to define himself and be magical on his own terms. By doing so, he literally and metaphorically transforms and the end result is fabulous.
-Latonya Pennington
Monkey Meat
Cartoonist
Juni Ba
Publisher
Image Comics
We can imagine a lot of things. We can imagine soldiers dying for a pointless cause. We can imagine punk kids selling out for a boatload of cash. We can imagine service workers dying to get the job done. We can imagine our heroes failing us. And, of course, we can imagine the end of the world.
Monkey Meat is about the one thing we simply cannot imagine: The End of Capitalism. Ostensibly a series about a soda company, Monkey Meat is an anthology that looks at the various aspects of Late Stage Capitalism and discovers an inescapable system of cruelty run by, in the book’s most fantastical conceit, hypercompetent businessmen who always know where the bottom dollar is.
It is a searing critique of the world we live in – from the consumerist excesses of billionaires to the imperialistic cruelty that gives them power – without any hope whatsoever of success. The people in power have designed the system so any revolution can easily be co-opted and sold to the masses for a cheap buck. Anything truly dangerous is destroyed, corrupted, and sold to the highest bidder. Even the heavens are not immune to the draw of capital. God will sell your soul for the sake of pettiness.And, to top it all off, it’s hilarious, fun, and sharp in every regard. Ba’s stylized artwork shines both in over the top action scenes and low key character moments. The writing is top notch, at once deeply cynical and blisteringly joyful. The book can’t help but do interesting things with even the weakest of issues. Every time I read an issue, I remember why I love comics. Monkey Meat is a fantastic book and I cannot wait to read the second volume!
-Sean Dillon
New Mutants #24
Writer
Vita Ayala
Artist
Danilo Beyruth
Colorist
Dan Brown
Letterer
Travis Lanham
Publisher
Marvel Comics
In another timeline, I would have spent the entire summer reading obscure indie comics and I’d be recommending something you, a regular reader of this site, had never encountered, with no superheroes in sight (maybe whatever Trung Le Nguyen does next). In this timeline, my favorite single comic book this year is a comic you already know if you know me: New Mutants #24, written by Vita Ayala with art by Danilo Beyruth. Ayala’s bridge between their two great arcs– the “Wild Hunt” story centering Cosmar and Gabby and the later story of Illyana giving up Limbo– packs as many bar scenes, tearful reunions, reconciliations, and none-dare-call-it-a-therapy-session moments as any X-comic since the 1980s, and if you’re an X-fan (especially the kind who follows the shipping news) You Are There. Long-disembodied trans allegory Martha Johansson gets a new codename and a full physical body! Warpath emotes! Fred Dukes gets to be a person! And as for Dani and Rahne…. there they are. I’d follow them anywhere.
-Stephanie Burt
Sabretooth
Writer
Victor LaValle
Artist
Leonard Kirk
Colorist
Rain Beredo
Letterer
Cory Petit
Publisher
Marvel Comics
I’ll confess: when the year started, I was fully expecting the X-Line to lose me. The start of the Krakoan era grabbed me by the throat, and I took its words as a promise for change, that we’d evolve past safe, awkward metaphors written by white men for white men. While things have undoubtedly gotten better on that end (albeit slowly), after two years and countless disappointments in how Black creatives and characters alike were treated, it wasn’t hard to feel that, as much as I might want them to be, these comics still weren’t for me.
And then Sabretooth hit.
I wasn’t expecting much more than a third version of X-Force. I definitely wasn’t expecting the single Blackest book Marvel’s putting out this side of Wakanda, a work that is wholly unapologetic about its existence. LaValle doesn’t center the white reader, let alone the white man on the cover, crafting a narrative that fully expects its audience to keep up with it. For as much time as the book spends with Sabretooth, it spends an equal amount on the perspectives of its largely marginalized cast, namely Oya, the newly introduced oldhead Third-Eye, and, god help me, Nekra, a character with a publication history so racist that “Snap” Wilson said “damn!”
Sabretooth’s narrative is one of disenfranchisement in all of its forms, an examination of the people gleefully abused for the sake of a “civilized” society, a rebuke of western history and bigotry both in-universe and out. LaValle starts with the simple truth that incarceration is an inherent failing of society, and runs with that, using its data pages to discuss everything from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to Nanny of the Maroons, examining real life history to make the Mutant metaphor feel genuine in a way it rarely, if ever, does. Sabretooth isn’t just my book of the year, it’s my book, the one I recommend to everyone who wants to see what a comic can be.
-Corey Smith
The Thing
Writer
Walter Mosley
Artist
Tom Reilly
Colorist
Jordie Bellaire
Letterer
Joe Sabino
Publisher
Marvel Comics
How often is it that you get to read a comics story written by a legendary novelist like Walter Mosley, let alone one that exudes such love for its subject and his history? Thing starts as a personal story for Ben Grimm; the rest of the family is out of town, Ben has a run-in with the cops and Alicia tells him she needs a break from their relationship. When he gets an offer to try out a new dating service, he reluctantly agrees (his experiences as a test pilot have led to mixed results, after all). Before all is said and done, Thing’s adventure reaches a cosmic, metaphysical scope, and yet still tells a satisfying story on a personal scale.
Tom Reilly’s art bounces between the retro-modern Baxter Building, a utopian underground re-creation of New York City’s gilded age, a post-apocalyptic charnel landscape and everything in between. His action sequences are dynamic and exciting to read, fluctuating between blurred motion lines and tack sharpness.
The first issue of this miniseries became the story of the day for the online comics community when it was released, due to Ben self-identifying as non-white in his dating profile. Mosley continually highlights Ben’s status as an outsider in the Fantastic Four, both feared and barely tolerated by the world around him, despite having saved that world countless times. Bellaire even chooses to give Ben a skin tone close to his Black co-stars in certain scenes. Still, perhaps the best summation of Ben Grimm comes on the next page of the infamous dating profile scene: when asked for his best quality, he proudly responds, “I never give up.” When the follow-up question asks about his worst quality, Ben slouches and sheepishly responds, “I never give up… that and I have a bad temper sometimes.”
-Mark Turetsky
20th Century Men
Writer
Denzi Camp
Artist
Stipan Morian
Letterer
Aditya Bidikar
Publisher
Image Comics
How did we ever end up here? How did the world end up so broken and so monstrous? What led us here? Deniz Camp, Stipan Morian, and Aditya Bidikar’s voyage into an Alternate-History of the 20th century dives deep into the ideologies that have shaped our world. Beautifully casting them in the shapes of familiar sci-fi genre fiction, weaving a war epic out of it, the creative team explores the horrors of empire and the true cost of imperialism.
A book full of a million ideas, it’s a dense read and probably the best value-for-money serialized comic in the American Direct Market. But even beyond that, it is loaded with breathtaking artwork, ambitious lettering, and considered writing informed by endless research and a layered approach to characterization.
It’s a book about the bastards who’ve shaped our modern world, their ideas, ideologies, and the systems they’ve built to prop up those monstrous things. And it’s about all those who pay the price for that. In the mold of the best British sci-fi comics of 2000AD and bearing no less ambitions than the works of Alan Moore or Warren Ellis, this is a big swing. It’s thrilling, it’s disturbing, and above all else, it’s angry. It’s deeply angry, melancholic work with a bone deep rage. There’s nothing quite like it being published right now, and it is a privilege to be able to experience it. This is one for the ages.
-Ritesh Babu
X-Men Red
Writer
Al Ewing
Artist
Stefano Caselli
Juan Cabal
Andres Genolet
Michael Sta. Maria
Madibek Musabekov
Colorist
Frederico Blee &
Fernando Sifuentes
Letterer
Ariana Maher &
Corey Petit
Publisher
Marvel Comics
Everyone in X-Men is scheming. There are Quiet Councils and Great Rings and every single member has their own agenda and motivations. Nowhere is this better explored than in Al Ewing and Stefano Caselli’s X-Men Red, following the (literal) daily challenges of Storm as Regent of Arakko (that’s Mars for those who haven’t been reading). Over the course of just 9 issues this year, Ewing has explored the politics of this ancient people and their evolving, nascent culture in the absence of war. It tracks an emotional journey of Magneto, whose identity comes into focus in his new home, Sunspot, who is right at home in this conniving community, and warriors like Vulcan, Thunderbird, and Cable whose own battle worn histories make them prime citizens.
But as much as Red follows the Arakki and mutant leadership, this book is also a direct sequel to Ewing and Schiti’s SWORD, which means that in addition to the machinations on the surface of the red planet, we are also seeing the payoff of Abigail Brand’s covert plots. That Ewing can successfully tie together so many disparate threads, and give a gut punch of a major character death in the midst of a crossover event, not to mention bring to fruition ideas brewing from now two-year-old Hickman stories, is a testament to his power as a writer and a strategist. Caselli’s fluid line work perfectly complements the wild and weird Arakki natives like Ora Serrata (a little dude who rides around on his own giant floating eyeball) or the flowing locks of Ororo’s mohawk. Of all the current X-Titles, Red is the one with the most forward momentum, and the one I’m always dying to read the next issue of. As Red prepares to transform into Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants early next year and back, I can’t wait to see where Ewing and Caselli take the book next.
-Adam Reck
