Toward a Comics-Geek Taxonomy, Plus Five Flatly Awesome Comics

by Glen Weldon

Know this: Among those few, those happy few, those bands of geeky brothers and sisters who dutifully hit their local comic shops every Wednesday to pick up the week's batch of new comics, there exists a host of distinct species and subspecies.

Blue Beetle: What it has to do with my No. 1 Geek Confession of 2008, after the jump. DC Comics

 

Let's start with the most basic split in the trunk of the comic book fan's taxonomic tree. And it's got nothing to do with DC vs. Marvel.

No, this classification is even more fundamental, and it's bound up in one's essential character. Which is to say: It's not what you read, it's how you read.

After the jump: Reading habits as Rorschach blots, the five ongoing series that consistently end up at the bottom of my pile, and why that's a good thing.

Grazers vs. Stackers. That's pretty much your Kingdom Animalia vs. Kingdom Plantae, right there.

Grazers simply work their way through their stack of weekly titles in whatever random order the shop rang them up. Thus they can seem to radiate a sort of blitheness that borders on indifference. And this weird, Adam and Eve-before-the-Fall nonchalance is something inveterate Stackers like me publicly scorn -- and privately envy.

Here's why: Stackers carefully -- nay, ritualistically -- sort through their selections prior to reading. As we set about prioritizing our weekly funnybooks according to any one of a hundred different sets of metrics, we engage in a deliberate process that demands close attention and no small amount of self-reflection.

I know several Stackers, for example, who can't bear the miscegenation of fictive universes, and so finish all of their Marvel books before moving on to their DC books, their Image books, et cetera.

Others read team books first, or sort by genre -- Western before horror before indie, and so on.

By far the most common criterion used by Stackers is the simplest and most subjective one -- how much they like a given series. But even here there's a key distinction.

There are, of course, the instant-gratification types who read their favorite series first. I understand this impulse, having spent a few years in this camp myself. Ultimately, it began to feel like I was eating dessert first.

Today I religiously place favorite series on the bottom of my stack. True, this has the unintended effect of causing me to plow through the books I care less about so quickly that their contents never quite make their way to my long-term memory.

(I couldn't tell you much of anything, for example, about what's happened in some of this year's major crossover superhero "events" -- I know that aliens at one point impersonated Spider-Girl, but I couldn't tell you why. I know, too, that Batman is either dead or on workman's comp, but that's about it.)

Below are the ongoing comic book series — some going strong, some recently cancelled — that always ended up on the bottom of my personal stack in 2008.

• Scalped — Crime noir set on a Native American reservation; contains generous helpings of everything you think of when you hear the word gritty: Guns, gams, gambling, and so forth. But it's also got characters with rich, complex histories that continue to shape them, issue after issue. Never disappoints.

• Blue Beetle — The tale of Jamie Reyes, a young Mexican-American who patrols the streets of El Paso with the aid of a talking alien warsuit, is the one book that consistently comes closest to capturing the exuberant charm and whimsy that was once a hallmark of the superhero genre.

Case in point: For the first few story arcs, the warsuit's word balloons were written in an alien alphabet that I, dweeb that I am, learned to read. Thereafter, every page of the book became suffused with an indelible, super-secret-decoder-ring kind of joy. Writer John Rodgers left the book this year, taking some of the series' particular snap with him; DC Comics recently announced the title's cancellation. Which: Rats.

• Manhunter — A brave, gorgeous, doomed attempt to do a lot of things that superhero comics have historically avoided, namely:

1. Allow a strong, flawed, female lead character to carry a title by herself,
2. Explore the real-world legal ramifications of superheroing (read: costumed vigilantism), and
3. Deal matter-of-factly with gay characters.

Consequently, it's been canceled a lot. Most recently, for good. Too damn beautiful to live, this book.
• I Kill Giants — I recommended this 7-issue miniseries early in its run, half-fearful that it wouldn't be able to sustain its singular, adorable-but-disquieting vibe. I'm happy to report that it's still going strong as we hurtle toward the end, growing more layered and more satisfying in the process. Also, darker. Considerably darker.

• Proof — So yes, the premise — mysterious organization protects Earth from otherworldly threats — is familiar. And the fact that its lead character is an erudite, nattily dressed Bigfoot named Proof might fool prospective readers into thinking the book is little more than a collection of high-concept action-movie tropes.

But this serial takes its time to create the world around its characters — when they're not out hunting chupacabras, they're talking to each other, and caring about each other, in grounded yet endearingly unexpected ways. (The issue in which the lumbering titular sasquatch takes a colleague out on the town for a fashion makeover, for example, made me want to accost strangers on the street and shove a copy into their hands.) It's cryptozoology with heart -- and a distinctive sense of style.

11:54 AM ET | 01- 2-2009 | permalink

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