I’m not sure if we would have pegged Batman & Robin as a potential top comic of 2010 at the start of the year – its first six issues had started extremely well (thanks in no small part to Frank Quitely’s art), but tailed off a touch (thanks in no small part to Philip Tan’s art). The book still held a lot of promise, but there remained plenty of questions unanswered as to just how significant the whole thing was going to be as regards Grant Morrison’s overall Bat-Epic (compared with the then-upcoming Return of Bruce Wayne), and whether or not the series was going to be an unmissable comic.

As it happened, the second half of the series turned out to be probably the most entertaining chapter of the entire four-year MozBats run so far – and perhaps, too, the most accessible, given that even longtime DC-sceptic James was prepared to vote for it as this site’s Comic of the Year to boot. And while RoBW had some strong moments, that miniseries almost ended up fading into insignificance – the real Batman comic worth reading this year continued to be the adventures of Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne, to the extent that although Bruce’s return cast a shadow over the final handful of issues, we weren’t really missing him by the time he finally showed up.

The arc that began the year, “Blackest Knight”, gave us the mouthwatering prospect of Batman and Robin visiting London – and was spectacularly entertaining, introducing the Knight and Squire in more detailed fashion (paving the way for the excellent Knight and Squire miniseries later in the year) as well as an array of UK-based villains (never’s the day I thought I’d see a line like “The broon‘s on me!” in an American comic), and also providing some surprising twists and turns in the tale of the thought-to-be-Bruce’s corpse from Final Crisis being resurrected via Lazarus pit. It was more of a stop-off than a significant chapter in the whole thing, but it struck absolutely the tone of humour and thrilling adventure we’d been hoping for from the series.

The development of Damian’s character had started to kick off in earnest with that UK-set arc, but it was with the following “Batman vs. Robin” that it came to the fore. Although the arc saw a less spectacular artist than Stewart and Quitely on the book, Andy Clarke’s work was at least solid, and consistent with the series’ general look in a way that Tan’s “gritty” style hadn’t been. An arc largely concerned with character movement, “Batman vs. Robin” – in addition to confirming Damian’s longer-term status as a fully-settled member of the Bat-family with some superb scenes as he renounced his links with the al-Ghuls – had as its final page perhaps the single greatest comics moment of the year, with the twist reveal of the identity of Oberon Sexton (and although it was largely guessable from publicity material for subsequent issues, I’m not going to spoil it in case anyone’s reading the book in trade). It was the sort of perfectly-seeded-in-advance moment that has been characteristic of Morrison’s run, and once again taught the reader not to take anything for granted.

With the third artist of the year, Frazer Irving, came perhaps the book’s highlight as a whole, as “Batman & Robin Must Die!” brought to a head not only the storylines of Batman & Robin itself, but – complete with its fourth coda issue – arguably marked the end of the story that had begun with the very first issue of “Batman & Son” back in 2006. While we thought that “Batman RIP” had done all that was going to be done with Dr Hurt, it was Batman & Robin – along with one of the subplots of Return of Bruce Wayne – that went so far as to finally uncover his true identity, show his final attempt to bring down the Waynes, and (one would suspect) do away with him once and for all. As such, the whole thing would have been a perfect end to Morrison’s run as a whole – were it not for that brilliant final page that launched us into the Batman Inc status quo, and instead confirmed that those first four years marked the first self-contained “chapter”, both narratively and thematically.

The question, of course, is whether the second chapter can in any way live up to the first – or whether Morrison should have left on the undoubted high that Batman & Robin presented. What’s not in any doubt, however, is that these ten issues were pretty much uniformly the standout superhero comics of the year – and that they can have offered a satisfactory resolution for a long-time Batman reader like myself, and entertained a newcomer like James, shows just how well they succeeded in being the best kind of monthly comics. We may have thought that earlier years had belonged to Morrison’s Batman – but it turns out that they were all just the warmup; 2010 is where we saw writer and characters at their very best.

It was never going to be a particularly close call, for me. The original Demo was a series so good that when my local store in Oxford didn’t bother to stock it (on account of being a satirically shit example of a comic shop)  I used to get an £8 coach to London once a month, purely to buy the latest copy.

The second volume was every bit as good as the first – though admittedly, not as revolutionary. Demo influenced single issue comics in a tangible way, and several of my favourite series since – Phonogram 2 and Casanova to name but two – have followed suit, treating each issue as an object worth owning, distinct from the stories inside it. Demo 2, however, had something else going for it – namely, that Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan have both developed as creators since the original.

It’s hard to pick my favourite issue of Demo 2. Certainly, I’ve got a soft spot for issue #2 – a grisly short about love and cannibalism – and issue #3, a romantic mood piece about a girl with a strange form of amnesia – but every issue (even, in retrospect, the initially disappointing #1) is both original and engaging. Wood and Cloonan create true “graphic novellas”, creating a world, populating it with characters, telling a story and then dissolving it in the final pages. If there’s anything more to be squeezed out of the format, I’m unsure what it is.

One of my favourite things about Demo is that it allowed me to flex my critical muscles in a way that not every comic does. Reviewing comics – both here and for CBR – can be soul-erodingly repetitive at times, as you struggle to find the nuance or invention in the 521st issue of Incredible Hulk – but Demo always gave me something to dig my teeth into – as evidenced by my over-long and self-consciously deconstructive reviews of issues #1, #2. #3 and #4.

Encapsulating Demo any further than that is difficult, simply because every issue was so different. Largely, the only unifying thing about this series was that the truly supernatural elements that it displayed in most of the first series were banished in favour of a more subtle form of magic realism – although it is, of course, open to interpretation. Certainly, it kept me guessing, and that’s one of the things that I love about it.

Overall, it’s certainly not a bad result for a series that started life as a failed X-Men pitch. Easily my must-buy comic of 2010, and if 2011 sees anything even close to being as good as this was in 2010 (and Phonogram 2 was in 2009), I’ll be more than satisfied.

Although most of our Best of 2010 list has been in no particular order, we’ve each picked a standout favourite of our own as a “runner-up”, before the winning title upon which we’ve both agreed. Here’s mine, with James’ to follow.

When Daytripper‘s first issue came out, it initially seemed like a charming little tale about a Brazilian writer of newspaper obituaries, and his difficult relationship with his recently-deceased novelist father. The final pages, however, contained a massive sting in their tail – as the lead character, Brás, was killed in a tragically random restaurant stick-up gone wrong. This led readers to wonder exactly what the premise of the series was going to be – would we be looking at the last day of a different character each issue? The mystery was deepened with issue #2, which introduced us to a 21-year-old Brás – he’d been 32 during issue #1 – thus giving the impression that each issue would be about a different day in that tragically-cut-short life. Only… he died at the end of that issue, too. And at the end of the third (aged 28, this time). Each time, the closing caption of the issue would be a succinct and touching obituary in the style that Brás himself would have written.

And so, although online reviews of those early issues had tiptoed around discussing the fact that the “twist” of each issue was Brás’ death, in retrospect it’s far less of a spoiler to mention it – because it’s the hook of the entire series. Each issue of Daytripper shows the last day of Brás’ life, if he’d died at a particular age – and compares and contrasts how one simple man’s life would be measured if it were to come to an end at an assortment of varied and often arbitrary times. Once the concept was clear and settled into our minds, then, we the reader were left to enjoy the most wonderful, touching, thought-provoking and heartwarming comics series of this year – or indeed, possibly even of the last few years.

Like many who largely only tend to read English-language comics, my only previous exposure to the brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon was with their work on Casanova and Umbrella Academy – so naturally, the quality of their visual work on this series was entirely expected, particularly when allied to a colouring job by the ever-outstanding Dave Stewart. The quality of the story, however, was less anticipated, simply because I hadn’t read anything the pair had written before. Though the series had started out with a certain amount of intrigue and charm about it, it was with two issues in particular that it suddenly exploded into being the outstanding comic of the year. First of all, issue #5 took an unexpected turn by introducing us to an eleven-year-old Brás. By this point, with the series’ premise clearly established, the reader was aware that the character would die at the end – and with him at such a young age, and so full of joy and hope and excitement about the future and the wider world, the closing pages were almost unbearably tragic.

Then came issue #6, which I’d probably mark out as my absolute favourite single issue of the year. For the first time, Brás’ career as an obituary writer, as established back in #1, becomes the focus of the story, as a huge plane crash in his home town of São Paulo sees him writing obituaries for the 93 victims, while all the while worrying whether his friend Jorge (introduced in issue #2, and reappearing to devastating effect in the following #7) might be among them. It’s the issue in which Brás own life is seen to have the greatest effect on other people (notwithstanding other stories that see him, later in life, becoming a successful novelist), and it once again makes the inevitable ending of the story even more saddening. This is further true with issue #8, in which Brás himself doesn’t even appear (save as a voice at the end of a phone) – we instead spend the page time in the company of his wife and infant son, and if the scene in which Miguel reads out his father’s final letter to his class at school doesn’t utterly break you, you’re clearly made of stone.

The real skill of the writers, though, is to find something almost uplifting in their treatment of mortality – although being so much about death, the beauty of Daytripper is about what it says about life. It’s a celebration of sheer humanity, of the things in life that are simultaneously small and insignificant yet personally the biggest and most important, and of the fact that our very mortality can be one of the most life-affirming aspects of existence. It’s a comic of a sort very rarely published – and one that you immediately know people will be talking about extensively in years to come – and its brief existence is something that should be cherished. Having already been responsible for co-creating two utterly phenomenal comics just as artists, the brothers may now have even topped both all by themselves.

The Avengers reboot at the start of this year was, admittedly, fairly strong. The thing is, after 7 years of Bendis’ New Avengers, I was done with it. Between the increased price, the gradual decline in enthusiasm and the fact that the franchise was getting a wholesale reboot, I figured that was the time to leave. If only to reassure myself that I’d never pick up an issue of New Avengers and find myself reading about The Hood for 75% of the story again.

That left a gap in my budget, and after some dithering, I decided to fill it with Avengers Academy. Although Christos Gage isn’t a writer who burns up the charts, his Thunderbolts fill-ins were enjoyable enough, and the new character designs that had been released as teasers really hooked me. Plus, it was launching at $2.99, and as much as I hate to admit that I might let finances get in the way of my love of the medium, price has become a genuine consideration for me since the $3.99 era began.

As it turns out, I’d probably have bought Avengers Academy even if it was $3.99. There’s nothing massively revolutionary about it – it’s just a really well-done slice of superhero-filtered teen angst/soap opera, much in the vein of Claremont’s X-Men or Runaways – but since very few books have that feeling these days, it gets away with it. It, like Generation Hope, feels more like X-Men than X-Men does right now – and as longtime readers of this blog know, I’ve got a soft-spot for the X-Men.

It helps, too, that Avengers Academy combines the X-Men-style soap opera with a high-concept twist half-stolen from Thunderbolts. At the end of the first issue (spoilers!) we discovered that these kids – ostensibly picked to be trained up as the next generation of Avengers – were actually picked because they’re the “problem” children, potentially headed down the path to super-villainy. It’s particularly interesting because the first issue’s main character – Veil – seems completely level-headed, if a little shy and socially reclusive. When we discover that she’s considered a potential villain, the audience feels the same betrayal that the character does, the same will that they be proven wrong. To get an audience invested like that in the space of one issue takes skill.

In an industry seemingly obsessed with events and stakes-raising, it’s always nice to find a book able to tell character-centric stories. I fully admit this is more of a personal favourite than a flawless technical masterpiece along the lines of Power Girl, but if you’re into superhero comics, I find it hard to imagine this one leaving you cold.

Although I make an effort to shy away from the DCU books (one over-complicated superhero universe is enough for me, thanks) I do dip in on occasion. It was actually 2009 that I started picking up the odd issue of Power Girl, purely because it was one of those series that had been on the radar for years, but never quite come around, and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I enjoyed it from the start, but it wasn’t until January’s issue #8 that I had to admit I’d gone from being casually interested to looking forward to it more than almost any monthly I was getting at the time.

Of course, less than 2 months later, it was announced that the entire creative team would be leaving the book following issue #12. Oh well.

It’s easy to see why Gray and Palmiotti decided to leave the book at the same time as Amanda Conner. Not since Kurt Busiek and George Perez teamed on Avengers over a decade ago have I seen what could easily have been generic, mid-level superheroics transformed so definitively into must-read comics. As a title, Power Girl was a bit cute, a bit funny, a bit sexy, a bit violent and a bit ridiculous – in short, all the things that Power Girl, as a character, embodies – and so much of that was down to Conner’s artwork and execution.

In fact, Conner’s work was so consistently entertaining and technically brilliant that she can easily be called one of the greatest pencillers working in the industry today. Every panel was packed with detail, personality and expression, and yet it always serviced the story first. She rendered grand alien landscapes alongside 70s sci-fi throwbacks and made you believe they belonged in the same world. I’m hard pressed to find even the smallest thing to complain about.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, of course, was that when the creative team left and Judd Winick & Sami Basri took over, it wasn’t half as terrible as I was expecting. Admittedly, I have no interest in the more DCU-centric stories Winick is telling, and dropped the book instantly, but at least, from what I saw, the quality remained reasonably consistent. It’s not a matter of living up to the standard of Gray, Palmiotti and Connor – few could – but, at least it wasn’t a pale imitation of their work.

As it was, for the first 5 months of this year, Gray, Palmiotti & Conner undeniably provided the starring role that Power Girl was born for. Although the 12-issue run was too short by half, at least it exists at all. A story so well-told that it deserves a place on everyone’s shelves, and the 5 issues (plus the collection, and a Conner-penned/pencilled short in Wonder Woman #600) that came out this year make the Gray/Palmiotti/Conner run one of 2010′s greatest comics without reservation.

To be fair, it would have taken a lot for Scott Pilgrim not to have been one of the best comics of 2010; and would have been pretty much impossible for it not to have been one of the most important. We’ve already talked about the book (and the film) in great detail here, of course, although I do note that rather than doing a straightforward review, or accentuating the positive, our comments centred largely on the aspects of it that we were pulling apart slightly, or on how the book as a whole fit in with the previous five and worked as a capstone to them. It might have given the false impression that we were both hugely disappointed with the book – and although James was to some extent (so much so that he’d be less likely to consider it in his own end-of-year list), it was still for me one of the most thrilling and significant comics of the year.

In a way, it was always going to be impossible for a series as good as Scott Pilgrim to have the ending that the quality of the previous books had promised – there was so much left to be covered and dealt with, and only those fans most dazzled by the good bits would refuse to admit that there were undoubtedly plot and character elements that suffered from underdevelopment or a lack of closure in the final books. This wasn’t helped by the sheer amount that was being packed in – not just resolution to existing strands, but new elements that were (perhaps ill-advisedly) being added in. Nevertheless, there’s plenty about it that was intensely satisfying, having followed the characters from book one – from the redemption of Young Neil (sorry… Neil), to Knives growing up, to the Stephen/Joseph twist, to Scott’s acknowledgement that actually it was his own flaws and regrettable actions that had been responsible for a lot more of his woes than he had previously realised. And emotionally, the culmination of the Scott and Ramona plot felt right – crucially, with their realisation that the only way past their previously fraught relationship was to move on and start again.

Aside from the closure given to longtime fans, however, it’s worth still remembering that in its own right Scott Pilgrim remained a terrific comic right to the end. Reviews and discussion of the last book have (unsurprisingly) centred around the character material and themes (I’m not even going to try to compete with this one), but let’s not forget that – although not quite as frequently as the previous volumes, due to all the plot that needed getting through – it’s still brilliantly funny at times. And it’s easily the best of the series from a technical point of view, with O’Malley’s art and storytelling construction simply getting better and better, to a point where he can be legitimately considered one of the most brilliant visual creators in the field. The ending might not have had all the elements everyone had hoped for, but it still made for one of the classiest and most talked-about comics of the year. Indeed, despite the relative box-office failure of the film, in the comics world 2010 was undoubtedly The Year of Scott Pilgrim – and 2011 and future years will be all the poorer for its absence.