The Inevitable Look Back At 2024

This makes the fifth year in a row I’ve done a sort of encapsulated look at the comics I bought in the previous year, month on month, highlighting an issue or title of something that I particularly enjoyed (or possibly made me think “what the hell?”) For the second year, I’m also going to include a graphic novel if I bought any during that month . . . and I’ve been buying a few this year.

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January

THE BLOODY DOZEN #2

A nicely done six issue miniseries, the second in the tale of the Shrouded College following 2023’s HELL TO PAY, this featured a family of astronauts recruited by the College to head into near-sun orbit and sort out a problem with their prison… which held the twelve strongest vampires ever caught! It was a crazy concept but one that worked and I’m looking forward to the next Shrouded College miniseries, hopefully arriving in 2025.

ELEPHANTMEN: DANGEROUS LIAISONS

I’d picked up the first two ELEPHANTMEN collections a few years ago when Mrs Earth-Prime and I were on holiday somewhere, so when I saw the next two (this and QUESTIONABLE THINGS) on sale when we’d gone away for a weekend, it seemed like it was meant to be. Stunning art and wonderful world building, but my only gripe with these omnibus editions is they’re not designed to be opened out with breaking the spine and releasing the pages from the glue. This means double page spreads don’t really work and where dialogue appears towards the centre, it’s difficult to read. Still, it’s a great story.

February

GHOST MACHINE #1

I mentioned at the start of this year that I was buying more Image Comics than DC in 2023 and a big part of that is down to the Ghost Machine imprint hosting Geoff Johns and a lot of his regular collaborators. GHOST MACHINE was a sampler of what’s to come in 2024 and it’s pretty much delivered on what they promised with the series that came out of it (or which were already ongoing at the time) having lived up to the hype.

DC UNIVERSE: REBIRTH DELUXE EDITION

And talking of Geoff Johns, remember when he was going to fix the debacle left by the New 52, by bringing in the Rebirth era, restoring hope and excitement to DC? He wrote DC UNIVERSE: REBIRTH that teased Dr Manhattan joining the DCU… and then he buggered off to go and play in the movies with the DCEU for a couple of years, which in turn delayed DOOMSDAY CLOCK and his plans to integrate that into the DCU, so by the time he returned, none of this mattered. Anyone else remember that?

That said, I still liked REBIRTH enough to pick up this hardcover edition and give it a re-read. Just a shame his plans to sort out the DCU didn’t come to pass.

March

BLACK HAMMER: THE END #6

This was it – the final issue of the final miniseries set in the Black Hammer world, where the heroes of Spiral City faced off against Anti-God for the final time! There was a lot of finality here in a Crisis-level event that saw multiple worlds, multiple heroes and villains all striving for a happy ending which was well deserved after all these years. There have been one or two mis-steps in the Black Hammer universe but on the whole, it’s been consistently good fun.

ZERO HOUR: CRISIS IN TIME OMNIBUS

And talking of Crisis-level events, the almost 1,000 page ZERO HOUR omnibus landed in March and it’s a thing of beauty. Yes, I know I’m well behind on anything to do with annotations, but at some point I’ll write up this gorgeous tome and all the goodness it contains… and the badness as well. Let’s be honest, if you include every single crossover issue from the original event, you’re going to get some barely connected, red-sky type stories. Even with that caveat, I don’t regret buying this beauty.

April

REDCOAT #1

One of the Image/Ghost Machine titles that launched this past year and has been consistently good is REDCOAT, the tale of an immortal British soldier from the America War of Independence who, to be polite, is something of a scoundrel. Throw in a mystical society that was originally trying to make a member of the American resistance immortal (Simon Pure, the Redcoat of the title, stumbled into the ritual by accident) that’s been hunting him for centuries and then add in ten year old Albert Einstein and you’ve got a great romp ably illustrated by Bryan Hitch. Seriously worth a read.

THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR

Long time readers know that my UNTOLD TALES series of mash-ups involves me looking at comics released in randomly selected dates which means I’m forever trawling through things from the late 70s and 80s that I remember reading first time around. (One of these days I’ll bore you all with a trip through what I used to read and how I got into American comics.) Back in the days of my youth, when I was reading STARLORD and 2000 AD, there was a short lived horror comic called SCREAM that I also picked up and, this year, I bought the three volumes that collected The Thirteenth Floor, a story that ran in SCREAM. Most of this first volume I remembered, but the subsequent stories I’d missed after the title merged with another comic, EAGLE, which I’d also read but had ditched before that merger. Nostalgia will get you every time, my friends.

May

BLOOD SQUAD SEVEN #1

And talking of nostalgia, the 90s was back in a big way in May for me. I pretty much missed the 90s Image explosion – I was a DC guy through and through and, living in the UK, wasn’t really aware of what a big deal Liefeld, McFarlane, Larson, and the others were and why it was such massive news that they were forming Image. I saw the response from DC (titles like EXTREME JUSTICE and the reimagining of FATE) without ever really understanding what it was responding to. Years later, reading interviews and magazines and blogs (remember them?) and watching YouTube, I was able to get a sense of what had happened. So BLOOD SQUAD SEVEN appears as if the Image Universe still existed and posits how things are 30 years later, with the titular team stepping in for Youngblood because of legal reasons… or something. Either way, it’s a fun series with some excellent, clean line work from Paul Fry.

SAVAGE DRAGON: THE ULTIMATE COLLECTION Vol 1

And then in the same month, I pick up this bad boy – an omnibus of SAVAGE DRAGON collecting all the issues into good-sized hardbacks. I’d originally bought the Archives edition on Comixology back when that was a thing as it had been on sale, but that was black and white while these Ultimate Collections are full colour and are wonderfully done. I mentioned above with the ELEPHANTMEN collections about not being able to open them out for double page spreads, but this isn’t an issue here. It’s over the top 90s action from Erik Larsen, stories I never read first time round and I’m really enjoying for the crazy situations that Dragon gets thrown into.

June

GREEN ARROW #13

I think it says something that we’ve reached June before DC show up as the featured comic.

I avoided the Absolute Power big event thing (though I’ll probably pick it up in trade in the new year) so most of what I know about it came through the pages of GREEN ARROW written by Joshua Williamson who had a hand guiding the event. I’ve enjoyed Williamson’s work (both his mainstream DC stuff and his Image titles) and his run on GREEN ARROW was good, solid work as to be expected.

V FOR VENDETTA DELUXE EDITION

I honestly can’t remember whether I read WATCHMEN or V FOR VENDETTA first – I think it was WATCHMEN – but whichever way round it was, they were my introduction to Alan Moore’s writing. Sure, I would have read his short Future Shocks in 2000 AD but wasn’t really aware of him as a writer until I read these two. And this month, way later than I should have, I picked up the deluxe editions of both to sit alongside the battered and well read paperbacks I have of both of them.

It had been some time since I’d re-read V and this edition makes it look even better than it did originally. It’s a wonderfully dark, dystopian version of the future that seems just as terrifyingly close and possible today as it did back in the 90s.

July

SHAZAM! #13

Josie Campbell, after having written the enjoyable NEW CHAMPION OF SHAZAM!, took over the monthly title after Mark Waid left and continued the same sense of fun and heroics that he’d established, something that many new writers on titles tend not to do – they’re keen to put their own stamp on things and throw out everything that came before. Here, though, Campbell makes the title her own without losing that original feeling and the book continues to be fun month after month. Sure there’s conflict and at the time of writing things aren’t looking good for Freddy Freeman, but the characters are still recognisable as Billy, Freddy, Mary and the others and they defeat things by working together.

B.P.R.D. OMNIBUS Vol 6

Back in November of 2023, Mrs Earth-Prime and I went away and, as I often do, I picked up a random trade paperback. That was the first two BPRD OMNIBUS collections and since then, I’ve completed the run of ten. And it was around this mid-point of volume 6 that I realised there was to be no happy ending here, no click of the fingers and everything goes back to how it was. The world was beyond saving at this point and it was just a case of who and how many survive and how they manage that. Full marks to the creative teams involved in having the guts to stick to their original plan laid out in the earliest days of HELLBOY that Armageddon was real and was coming down the line at some point.

August

POWER GIRL #12

This latest version of Power Girl has been very hit and miss for me, but this issue was a nice change of pace and featured PG almost being the character I’ve followed for all these years. Off on a date with an Asgardian, this issue is fun and light-hearted and shows Power Girl enjoying herself with her new beau with not a hint of self-doubt and hand-wringing in sight. That Omen is next to nowhere to be seen in this issue can’t be a coincidence, either, and I just wish Leah Williams, the writer, would jettison that friendship and allow Power Girl to get back to solving her own problems instead of Omen both creating and solving them for her.

JUDGE DREDD: THE COMPLETE CASE FILES #43

The continuation of reprints in chronological order of all Judge Dredd’s stories that brings us up to the Origins storyline. Dredd has been allowed to age in real time unlike the majority of comic characters and while we’ve seen glimpses of his early days in previous stories, Origins recounts his previously unknown involvement in the nuclear war that ended the American presidency and gave total control over to the Judges in the Mega-Cities. Illustrated by the much-missed Carlos Ezquerra, and written by Dredd co-creator John Wagner, it’s a hell of a read that (arguably) ret-cons some of the Judges origins, but also lays the groundwork for Dredd’s softening of views on some things, including his city’s treatment of mutants.

September

LADY MECHANIKA: THE DEVIL IN THE LAKE #1

Lady Mechanika makes a welcome return to publication with a new adventure, this time set in Russia. Despite the incredibly erratic publication schedule – there’s been nine miniseries over the last fourteen years – this series and character never disappoint, and the world building Joe Benitez has done is superb. This time round Mechanika is investigating some sort of dragon like monster that supposedly lives in a Russian lake where some scientists and local children have gone missing. Even though it’s only four issues, I’m willing to bet this is going to be fun.

STRONTIUM DOG: SEARCH AND DESTROY Vol 3

How many times can I buy the same story in a new format, you might ask. When it comes to Carlos Ezquerra and John Wagner’s Johnny Alpha, the answer is plenty. 2000AD/Rebellion are reprinting the early stories is nicely produced hardbacks and, as you can see, we’re up to number 3 which mostly contains the Portrait of a Mutant storyline, detailing the origin of Johnny Alpha and the Search/Destroy Agency. I first read the story in 2000AD back when I was a kid, after STARLORD merged with 2000AD and it still stands up in terms of plotting and art. Roll on April when volume 4 is released.

October

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #12

Way, way, way later than it should have been comes the final issue of Geoff Johns’ JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA. It took nearly two years for this series to reach issue 12 with no word of explanation of where the delays were coming from – art? Writing? Editorial? It’s hard not to point the finger at Johns who, mid way through this series, was telling people of all the good stuff he had coming out soon with Image and his Ghost Machine imprint (and as mentioned above, most of it is good.) If his concentration was on Image, and DC had already quietly shelved The New Golden Age this title was meant to usher in, you can understand him not wanting to spend any more time with these characters. As it was, this final issue was less about the Society and more a final farewell (in story terms – she’s not dead!) to the character of Star Girl that he’d created years before in memory of his late sister. While it might be a nice way to end his involvement with the character, it was a mostly uninspired end to the Justice Society’s run.

November

BLACK HAMMER: SPIRAL CITY #1

Scroll back up to March and you’ll see BLACK HAMMER: THE END #6, the final issue of the Black Hammer universe . . . right up until it wasn’t. In the wake of the climactic battle between the heroes and Anti-God, we find Spiral City in recovery mode – and it’s not pretty. The city authorities have closed the nearby asylum where the supervillains were held; they’re blaming the heroes for the creation of the supervillains; and they’re working on banning anyone with superpowers.

Honestly, it’s a grim, depressing read, the first of the BLACK HAMMER titles that I’ve struggled with because it is so unrelentingly miserable. Hard not to draw parallels with the current state of the world and that’s not a fun thing right now. But I trust Jeff Lemire to do something with these characters and situations, so I’m hanging on for the ride.

DC VERSUS MARVEL OMNIBUS

Yet another massive omnibus landed in November, reprinting all the DC/Marvel team ups/throwdowns from the 70s right up to the present day. Nearly 1,000 pages of classic stories from a time when the two companies were on talking terms and were happy to give the fans what they wanted in the form of Superman vs Spider-Man, Batman vs the Punisher, Green Lantern vs Silver Surfer, and many, many others . . . mostly involving Batman in the later years, to be fair. There’s a companion volume collecting the DC VS MARVEL miniseries that gave us the Amalgam titles and that’s due out in the early part of 2025. Both volumes were originally scheduled for August 2024 but they were delayed, and I’m really looking forward to that being delivered.

December

WILDC.A.T.S. COMPENDIUM Vol 1

Not an omnibus this time, but a compendium – I think the only real difference is that this is a softback volume rather than a hardback. As I mentioned back in May’s entry, the whole 90s Image universe explosion mostly passed me by and with the exception of one or two crossovers, I was mostly unaware of the WildC.A.T.S. as a team until DC bought Wildstorm and starting bringing them into the fold just before the New 52, and then as part of it. This beast of a trade paperback runs from their first appearances to their conflicts with Stormwatch and the Daemonites while introducing us to the various characters. It’s loud, bombastic, and so 90s it’s almost a parody of itself, but it’s still good fun.

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And there we go, that’s my monthly wander through what’s stood out for me for one reason or another this year.