Creators quibbled over Occupy Wall Street, Spider-Man changes races, and DC relaunches everything are among the stories of the year…

Written By Adam A. Donaldson

It’s time to recount the year that was in the comic world, and 2011 was about as exciting as any year in recent memory for fans, creators and critics. Here are the Top 10 Comic Book Stories of the Year.

10) The Return of the 90s

Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and Marc Silvestri are all drawing best-selling monthly books; Valiant and Extreme Studios are making a comeback; characters like Venom and Cable are featured guest stars again; and Marvel’s polybagging everything. It almost seems like the 90s again, and even Newsarama noticed the similarities in a recent article. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. The early 90s were certainly a very good time for the comic book industry, but sadly those good times were followed by an equally great fall. To wit, there was the launch this year of Avenging Spider-Man drawn by Joe Madureira, which was an instant best-seller thanks to the nostalgia for Joe Mad’s still ample talent, but as soon as number one was released Marvel announced that the artist would be taking a break after the first few issues. I guess it’s better to find a sub than to delay, delay and delay, which at least suggests that we’ve learned something from the 90s.

9) DC Movies Still Struggle

Movies based on Marvel Comics once again enjoyed health box office in 2011 with the hat trick of Thor, X-Men: First Class, and Captain America: The First Avenger. In the meantime, corporate partners Disney and ABC are developing two series based on Marvel books: The Incredible Hulk and Alias. But over on the Warner Bros lot though, their fortunes with DC Comics’ properties were not so rosy. The highly ambitious Green Lantern movie was met with tremendous indifference by fans and the general movie audience, despite the fact that, at the time, Green Lantern was DC’s best-selling comic book. Meanwhile, David E. Kelly’s attempt to launch a Wonder Woman TV show was reviled by fans and cancelled before it began by NBC. In the pipe DC/Warner has got The Dark Knight Rises, which will have to be a traffic wreck of a film to fail, but it will be Christopher Nolan’s last Batman film. Also in production is the Nolan-produced Superman: The Man of Steel, but it’s being directed by Zack Snyder, not Nolan and considering the failure of Sucker Punch to capitalize on fan buzz, there’s a degree of nervousness about the film. On the plus side, the animated DC movies are still doing really well critically and commercially.

8) Alonso Takes Over For Quesada at Marvel

It was the end of an era at the beginning of the year when Joe Quesada stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of Marvel to become Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Entertainment. Quesada governed over a dramatic period in Marvel’s history going from a company struggling to emerge from bankruptcy protection to becoming its own Hollywood blockbuster maker, to becoming a crown jewel in the corporate family of Walt Disney. On the printed page, Quesada launched the Ultimate line, brought Neil Gaiman into the Marvel bullpen, recruited indie comics darlings like Brian Michael Bendis and Grant Morrison to write titles like The Avengers and X-Men and controversially retconned Spider-Man’s marriage to Mary Jane segueing to one of the most creative runs of Amazing Spider-Man in the book’s history. Quesada casts a long shadow, but Axel Alonso has his work cut out for him. In his first year as EiC, DC pulled the rug out from under Marvel with its New 52 relaunch, leaving Marvel looking for an equally massive event to get eye balls.

7) Fantastic Four Turn 50 in Style

The Fantastic Four may be a stalwart of the Marvel Universe, but it’s rarely been one of the company’s consistently best-selling comics. But when Jonathan Hickman killed off original Four member the Human Torch this past January, and ended the series, it got a lot of media attention. The follow-up book featuring the surviving Fantastic Four characters, Future Foundation, became a best-seller and remained a critical favourite as Hickman and artist Steve Epting took Marvel’s First Family in strange new directions. By the end of the year though, in what has to be the quickest resurrection turn-around in comics history, the Human Torch was brought back from the dead and rejoining the new old Fantastic Four. But the positive buzz is well-timed for the super-team, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary this past November.

6) The Avengers Starts Shooting

After years in the making with a scale that’s almost impossible to comprehend, shooting on Marvel Studios’ epic superhero team-up The Avengers began with an all-star cast and a geek dream director in Joss Whedon. The next amazing thing about this film is that with its scale and the various egos and expectations that are at stake, it managed to complete filming on time, and on schedule, at locations across the U.S., and with a minimum of leaks. Not only that, but Whedon was so not-stressed by the shoot that he squeezed in another film shoot, a modern indie version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, into his vacation. Each news item about The Avengers, not matter how minute, is greeted with excited. It’s safe to say that the only film bigger in 2012 is, actually, another superhero movie: The Dark Knight Rises.

5) Digital Comics Come Into Their Own

Web-based comics have been a popular part of the internet for over a decade, but along the way, the major companies have struggled with the digital distribution of their books, and developing the logistics there-in. In 2011, both Marvel and DC made huge leaps forward in the realm of digital comics. DC Comics, while promoting The New 52 (see below) made the bold step of offering same day release of both the hard copy and digital versions of their comics. Marvel Comics, meanwhile, offered free, digital copies in much the same way as Blu-ray discs that come with digital copies of movies: with a free code comic buyers could use to activate the download. Books like Fantastic Four #600 and the upcoming Avengers Vs X-Men #0 come with a code to get a free digital version, which is a trend Marvel’s looking to doing more of. In the years to come, 2011 may be remembered as the year digital comics took on a life of their own.

4) Occupy Wall Street Divides Creators 

No sector of society was left untouched, even the comic book industry, by the blowback of the 99 per cent. Back during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, Frank Miller posted a statement about the protests that was polemic, to say the least. “‘Occupy’ is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness,” said Miller. “These clowns can do nothing but harm America.”

Miller, renowned creator of Sin City and 300 was counterattacked by several of his colleagues, but Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar came to Miller’s defense. “Politically, I disagree with his analysis, but that’s besides the point,” wrote Millar. “I wasn’t shocked by his comments because they’re no different from a lot of commentators I’ve seen discussing the subject. What shocked me was the vitriol against him, the big bucket of shit poured over the head by even fellow comic-book creators for saying what was on his mind.”

From the other end of the spectrum though was another comics legend, Alan Moore. The author of Watchmen added his voice to the Occupy movement saying, “I think it would be fair to say that me and Frank Miller have diametrically opposing views upon all sorts of things, but certainly upon the ‘Occupy’ movement.

He added, “As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs,” he said. “I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail.”

Of course, it’s to Moore’s credit that he was the source of the key Occupy accessory this fall, the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the anonymous protagonist of V for Vendetta. The pasty, mustached visage of V looked out from many a photo of Occupy protests around the world, and in a way, oddly echoing the climactic moment from the film based on V for Vendetta where average Londoners rise up against their totalitarian government, all wearing Guy Fawkes. A rare case of life imitating art imitating a seminal graphic novel.

3) Comic Con Takes a Dip in Popularity

For years, the San Diego Comic Con has been an appointment for fans and media, but for the first time in a long time, there appeared to be a chink in the armour. A lot of high-profile movies like The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises took a powder from this year’s con, and indeed Marvel Comics’ owner Disney opted not to show up to Comic Con at all and instead had their own fan-centric gathering, D23, in August. In the meantime, the movies that did show up didn’t pack the rafters at Hall H like they used to, and although shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood still brought out people in droves, the notion of Comic Con as the launching pad for the next great geek obsession seems to have abated somewhat. And if you want to know why, look at the $36 million box office return for Sucker Punch.

2) Ultimate Spider-Man Goes in an All New Direction

When the Ultimate line was introduced in 2000, it promised to do things that you couldn’t do in the regular Marvel line of books, like kill off Peter Parker and replace him with a half-Black, half-Latino teenager named Miles Morales. Some wrote it off as a publicity stunt, some American right-wing pundits like Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck called it a PC move on the part of Marvel. But no matter your feeling on the matter, the premiere of Miles as Ultimate Spider-Man was a cross-media promotional success, even if you didn’t know the difference between the Ultimate Universe and the regular Marvel Universe. But perhaps the most important reason that this new character was so seismic, immediately being embraced by the zeitgeist, is best summed up by Marvel EiC Axel Alonso. “Miles Morales is a reflection of the culture in which we live. I love the fact that my son Tito will see a Spider-Man swinging through the sky whose last name is Morales. And judging from the response, I can see I'm not alone.”

1) DC’s New 52 Changes the Rules

It was a bold manoeuvre, and certainly unprecedented. DC Comics announced this past spring that the end of its summer crossover event Flashpoint would lead into a company wide relaunch of all DC titles including long-running books like Action Comics and Detective Comics (over 900 and 800 issues, respectively). Not quite a reboot, but definitely involving a bit of a retcon here and there, DC started 52 new books, all with number on issues, beginning with Justice League #1 on August 30 by DC’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns and Co-Publisher Jim Lee. While fans and critics were sceptical, DC’s gamble ended up playing off huge. Wednesdays at comic book stores in the month of September were appointments, not just for the same old comic book fans, but for new readers caught up in the hype. There’s been some controversy, mostly around the portrayal of several female characters like Starfire and Catwoman, but overall the New 52 has been a rousing success, giving a rare economic boost to comic industry in general and DC Comics in particular.

Written by :

Adam