Ultimate Spider-Man is a great comic. It’s been a great comic for over ten years, now. But is it a comic that we’d ever have thought might make the top of our “Best of the Year” list? Possibly not – because, as good as it is, it’s always been a comic that’s just there - solidly excellent every month, but never really standing out.

But in 2011, it stood out. Boy, did it stand out.

Of course, the book’s year can be divided into two distinct segments – and it would be remiss not to look at the final months of Peter Parker first, since although it’s largely for the Miles Morales issues (to which we’ll come shortly) that this has made the top spot, it’s fair to say that even before then, the book was one of the best superhero reads out there. The tail end of the Black Cat/Mysterio arc was perhaps the only slightly disappointing part of the book’s run this year – as much as I liked the new Ultimate version of Mysterio, the story surrounding the Kingpin’s magical macguffin thingy didn’t really feel like the sort of thing a Spider-Man book should be doing, and had an unsatisfying resolution (I’m hoping, mind, that having escaped without us learning anything at all about him, old smokey-head will become an adversary for the new Spidey in times to come).

At this point, the comics had a “Death of Spider-Man: Prelude” banner on them. But even at this point, I don’t think the majority of us really believed that Peter was going to be killed off (for what it’s worth, my prediction was that he was going to kill Norman Osborn, and in guilt give up his Spider-Man identity for a while before reinventing himself/coming back). What this means is that although at the time the Chris Samnee-drawn issue #155 felt like a pleasant interlude, in retrospect it’s entirely heartbreaking. Here we find Peter on the up, for the first time in a while – making peace with J. Jonah Jameson, getting sweet new webshooters designed by Tony Stark, and finally getting back together with Mary Jane. At the time, it seemed like the start of a brand new era – and maybe it was Brian Bendis’ intent that we’d think that. In fact, as it turned out, it was a cruel tease of what might have been, but served instead as his last moment of true happiness.

In retrospect, the execution of the Death of Spider-Man arc – from a publishing point of view – wasn’t as good as it could have been. The main problem is that fully half of the story played out in a different book entirely – Marvel having been swayed by the PR move of having Mark Millar involved in a big event story again – but fortunately, barely any of the Avengers vs New Ultimates material was actually all that relevant to Peter. In fact, since it’s really two stories running parallel, you can ignore the irritating scrap between other heroes (aside from the fact that it is kind of handy to know just why Peter gets shot at the moment he does) and instead follow Ultimate Spider-Man‘s story of Norman Osborn and the Sinister Six’s final revenge on Peter.

Although it does suffer slightly from some pacing issues (the middle few chapters are a little samey), it’s nevertheless a story packed with a growing sense of menace, and a number of twists and turns (the sudden death of Dr Octopus is almost as shocking as the events of the final issue). And while it’s a little odd seeing Mark Bagley back on the book after all this time, the work is strong, and it’s hard to argue (as good as the artists that followed him have been) that it was entirely appropriate that he should return to draw the character’s final bow. The last issue, #160, is suitably dramatic, and gives Peter a fantastic final “hero moment” – it’s only a shame, again from a publishing perspective, that it ends so abruptly with the moment of his death, and that the subsequent (and highly emotionally-charged) funeral sequence would take place in the separate Ultimate Fallout miniseries. But this is nitpicking, and not reflective of the quality of the story itself – which was just as high as you’d expect throughout.

So, then, ended the Ultimate Peter Parker era. And as much as many of us trusted Bendis on this book, there was a healthy amount of concern come September over whether or not putting an entirely new character behind the mask and webs could ever work. Fortunately, it only took the first issue to blow that scepticism out of the water – because as it turns out, the relaunched Ultimate Spider-Man is nothing short of magnificent. In the five issues released this year, we’ve been treated to a full and involving origin story that has simply been a delight from page one.

Some may have complained that it took as many as those five issues just to get Miles Morales into the costume that we kept seeing on the covers – but the character himself is so engaging, and the world around him has been built so well, that I honestly didn’t even notice over the first few issues that the book was lacking the simple detail of him actually being, you know, Spider-Man. If anything, the manner in which he comes to take on the costume, at the end of issue five, is so satisfying that I’d say ultimately it was worth the wait anyway.

The true masterstoke on Bendis’ part has been in understanding exactly what a “legacy hero”, if they’re ever to exist, should be. They should be entirely new and original in their own right, while still having a justifiable reason to have the name of the original character slapped on the front cover of their book. Ultimate Spider-Man achieves this perfectly. The setup around Miles is drastically different from that of Peter, from his family circumstances to his friends to his personality. He’s been fantastically well-established in such a short space of time that he feels like he’s been around for a while – but he’s as far as can be from just being a retread of Peter. And yet everything that the comic is about is so instantly, recognisably and perfectly what a Spider-Man comic should represent. And scenes like the beautiful tenement fire rescue sequence in issue #3 are just pure, perfect, inspiring superhero comics.

As regular Alternate Cover readers will know, myself and James are about as die-hard a pair of Spidey fans as you’re likely to find. So we’re exactly the sort of comics reader who might have been outraged at the replacement of Peter Parker. But Miles Morales is not only a brilliant, likeable, heroic character – he’s exactly the kind of guy who should be allowed to call himself a Spider-Man. The emergence of this fantastic new character, coupled with the expert craft and storytelling of both Bendis and the increasingly-stratospheric Sara Pichelli, mean that Ultimate Spider-Man isn’t just an unmissable comic – it’s a comic that actively brings a huge sense of joy every time an issue comes out. And that’s why, after over a decade of consistent high quality, it’s actually reached its highest ever point this year – and marked itself out as our undisputed favourite comic of 2011 in the process.

Title: Thunderbolts
Publisher: Marvel
Creative Team:Fabian Nicieza (writer), Mark Bagley (Penciler), Pat Zircher (Fill-in Penciler), Norm Breyfogle (Annual Pencils)
Core Issues: Thunderbolts #34-50, Thunderbolts Annual 2000
Essential crossovers: Avengers (Vol. 3) #32-#34, Maximum Security
Years: 2000-2001

Kurt Busiek may have been the original Thunderbolts writer, but the one with the longest pedigree on the series is still Fabian Nicieza, who shaped the team from issue #34 of the original series, right up until #109. Nicieza spent most of his run working with artist Pat Zircher, who took over with issue #51 – but many will have forgotten that for the first year or so, he mostly collaborated with original Thunderbolts penciler, Mark Bagley.

Today, when creators leave a title, it’s generally at the end of an arc, and often involves a relaunch or repositioning of the characters. This wasn’t always the case. In fact, Busiek actually began several plot threads in the couple of issues before he left for Nicieza to pick up – the most major being the series climax, in which Hawkeye (who was leading the team at the time) announced that the Thunderbolts were going to take down the Hulk.

Much of Nicieza’s early run owed something to Busiek’s plot notes, which is why the veteran writer retained a credit for several issues after. With events such as the return of The Beetle, the debut of MACH 2, the unmasking of Citizen V, the introduction of the new Scourge and the death of Jolt the early issues retained – indeed, recaptured – the pace of Busiek’s earliest stories. Although the opening 12 issues are considered classic, the latter half of Busiek’s run was comparatively limp – many of the book’s biggest events, in fact, occurred during the Nicieza/Bagley period.

Artistically, the book had been consistent ever since the series began. Bagley had drawn almost every issue, and his particular blend of superheroics and storytelling was then, as it is now, a joy to read. When Bagley was taken off the title to concentrate on his Ultimate Spider-Man run, he quickly became one of the industry’s top talents – or rather, people finally recognised him as such. Those of us reading Thunderbolts were already well aware.

For many years now, Marvel has treated the series rather like the red-headed stepchild of the Marvel Universe. While Busiek’s opening 12 issues garnered much acclaim, it was soon eclipsed by his work on the returned Avengers title. Nicieza’s run – explosive though it was, by the fans’ standards – never quite managed to get the book much attention. A cancellation was undone by a Busiek and Nicieza Avengers/Thunderbolts collaboration, and the relaunched book ticked over under Nicieza until it was handed to Warren Ellis and reworked into something massively successful – though perhaps not entirely similar to what came before.

In light of the rejuvenation of the brand, Marvel did little to remind people of the Thunderbolts’ more conventionally superheroic past. Even Busiek’s run – acclaimed though it was – has never been reprinted past issue #12. Nicieza’s run, even those issues with a name collaborator like Bagley – is unlikely to ever see print, if only because the second and third volumes required to get to it will end up slogging through Busiek’s weaker period first.

And yet the Nicieza/Bagley issues are arguably the title’s fasted-paced period, every one featuring a major event and interleaving several compelling plot mysteries. Although Nicieza eventually succumbed to his own predeliction for convoluted plots and pet characters, the run with Bagley, which ended in the title’s fiftieth issue, was incredibly entertaining.

It might not be revolutionary stuff – but if you’re interested in reading a companion to Busiek’s own Avengers run (which received a complete reprint in hardcover), the Thunderbolts of this period is the perfect book for it – not just because of the direct crossover, but because Songbird features in Avengers Forever, the Genis-Vell Captain Marvel of Avengers Forever guests in Thunderbolts, and the 2000 annual follows up on a Hawkeye/Mockingbird plot thread introduced in one of Busiek’s earliest Avengers stories. And best of all, it’s doubtlessly available on the cheap.

(Okay, I completely blew the “30 entries in 30 days” approach, but unfortunately, real work got in the way, as it often does. Still, not long to go! Also, I was trying not to write about the same series twice, but I only just realised I already did a Thunderbolts issue. Oh well.)

I’m not sure why, but I have an oddly vivid recollection of the time I bought Thunderbolts #1. I remember picking the book off the shelves at Alien Enterprises (which was my “local” comic shop that I managed to get to once a month, at best) and being well and truly convinced that this new group of heroes spinning out of the Onslaught crossover were going to be as big as the Avengers. I didn’t care who the creators were. I didn’t have a clue what the book was really going to be like. I just bought it because it was a number #1 issue and it was notionally connected to what I, at the time, believed to be the most awesome story ever told in any medium, ever. Such is the power of your first ever superhero crossover.

(Aside: I found out that Onslaught was actually Xavier by watching, of all things, the monthly Dynamic Forces comics hour on QVC, where they were selling a foil-embossed version of X-Men #54 and turned to the last page to show off the big reveal. These days I’d probably whine about spoilers – though the fact that someone spoiled a comic for me on TV seems pretty fucking surprising as it is – but back then I was so excited and amazed by this notion that I spent the rest of the evening spontaneously erupting in a strange euphoric laughter and had trouble sleeping. Oh, for a plot twist that could do that to me these days.)

Anyway. I remember that after me and my three friends had bought our comics, we immediately headed down to McDonalds in Stratford-on-Avon town centre, and sat in the booth by the upstairs window that overlooked the high street. There we sat, initially in silence, all reading our own copies of Thunderbolts #1. When we finished, we held an impromptu 4-person comic-bookclub over McNuggets and Strawberry milkshake where we all tried to figure out what, precisely, we had just read.

The problem, see, was that since we were all primarily X-Men fans, we only had a little working knowledge of the Marvel Universe. When the reveal came that the Thunderbolts were really some group called “The Masters of Evil”, we had no clue who the hell they actually were. To Busiek’s credit, he did try to explain it for the greener readers – a TV report early on indicated that the group was still “at large” and now more dangerous than ever without the Avengers to fight them – but as a twist ending, we didn’t know how to take it. Had they reformed? I pointed to Zemo’s use of the phrase “The world has clasped a viper to its chest” as proof that they hadn’t, and my friend’s brother, outraged by some perceived betrayal, declared that he wouldn’t be buying the series ever again (and to my knowledge, he never did).

Apparently, in retrospect, Thunderbolts #1 suggests to me that 14 year old boys are the natural audience for superhero comics. We fell for the marketing tricks. We were quick to judge and slow to understand (which, going by Newsarama’s comments and CBR’s forum posts, is the typical response of the true comics fan). We all bought a book we knew virtually nothing about, because it loosely tied into another story and had a #1 on the front. I might be jaded and cynical now, but it’s all too easy to forget that all these industry tricks that still crop up apparently do work. Or rather, they did once.

Anyway, as regular readers will know, I fell in love with the series and continue buying it to this day. It’s about to reach issue #150, which is an achievement in itself. And it only had to endure a failed conceptual reboot, cancellation, a relaunch as “New Thunderbolts”, and then being retitled/renumbered back to the originals to stick around. Who says a series can’t survive without artificial hype?

Every month we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

In recent discussion with Comics Daily Cohort James Hunt, an assertion that I’ve often made about comics reared its head – that Spider-Man: Maximum Clonage Omega was the worst single issue comic I’d ever read. James scoffed at this – worse than Jeph Loeb’s recent efforts? I confessed that it had been years since I’d read it, but that I was fairly sure that yes, in the intervening time, I’d never encountered anything worse. He remained sceptical. Well, with a Dusting Off rolling around on the schedule again, I figured it would be the ideal opportunity to refamiliarise myself with it.

I was wrong.

There is never an ideal opportunity to refamiliarise oneself with Spider-Man: Maximum Clonage Omega.

Originally intended as the capstone to the infamous Clone Saga – at least, the bit of the Clone Saga that was going to wind up with the newly “I’m-a-clone”-ified Peter Parker going off into the sunset and Ben Reilly taking over as Spider-Man, although you’re a fool if you think that was ever really intended to be the end of the story – the six-part “Maximum Clonage” (topped and tailed by these ludicrously-named “Alpha” and “Omega” issues) is, quite simply, one of the most wretched and pointless exercises in the history of comics. Featuring the final stages of the irrevocable destruction of the character of Dr Miles Warren – turning the Jackal into a green, pointy-eared goblinny figure (yeah, like there aren’t enough of those hanging around Spidey) whose agenda has inexplicably shifted from “hate Spider-Man because he let the woman I loved die” to “I want to kill everybody on the planet and replace them with clones”, not to mention one of the most appallingly-conceived and named characters (“Spidercide”) ever unleashed by Marvel, it’s a confused mess on every conceivable level – and the scene in which Peter is confronted by thousands upon thousands of costumed clones of himself a genuine nadir in Spider-history.

But that scene had already taken place by the time Omega rolled around. And Omega is even worse. “Scripted” by Tom Lyle, an artist promoted to writing duties far beyond his horrendous level of inexperience simply because, it seems, no-one else would touch it (so he was the ’90s equivalent of Tony Daniel, in other words), the ludicrous plot is delivered by way of unbearably trite dialogue (“No! I think that you must still die.”), inane exposition (“No wonder I thought that I was the clone so easily.” “Oh, that? When I took the cell samples from you that I used to create your clones, I implanted that thought in your head while I was there.”) and page after page of tedious, circular events. The bomb’s going to go off! Look, it’s the Jackal! They’ve webbed up the Jackal! Quick, stop the bomb! Wait, the Jackal’s free, stop him! Get back to the bomb! Oh no, the Jackal’s free again! Gwen’s got his gun! She’s going to fall! No, he‘s going to fall! It’s honestly enough to make you pound your own head against the wall. And it doesn’t even manage to achieve its stated aim – in the closing pages, the question of who’ll be Spider-Man afterwards is still, staggeringly, left wide open.

What really pushes this into “downright appalling” territory, though, is the art – honestly some of the worst work I’ve ever seen in a mainstream comic. I mean, you know, at least Ultimates 3 had Joe Mad going for it. An incredible four pencillers (including Mark Bagley, although I can’t see anything that actually looks like his work) and five inkers are credited on a 48-page comic (one telling, lest we forget, a single story – this ain’t an anthology), and so even if they were turning in good work, it’d still look as horrendously inconsistent as it does. They’re not turning in good work, though – not at all. Unclear storytelling, absolutely dreadful (and mostly distorted) character work from all concerned… I know that at this point the editors were in a tremendous rush just to get the thing out, but it honestly feels like an insult that anyone thought the work contained within these pages was worth charging people nearly five dollars for. Maybe they reckoned the chromium cover (oh yes) would make it worthwhile.

Is it the worst comic I’ve ever read, though? I’m not sure. Since I first read this I’ve read not only recent history’s Ultimates 3/Ultimatum, Titans and All Star Batman, but also things like Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Dreaming, and Tom Veitch’s Animal Man. Although to be fair, all the aforementioned had better art than this. Story-wise, though… well, it’s rotten, and trite, and pointless, but it’s a very comics-y kind of trite, and people have been churning out guff like it all over the place for years. It’s at least lousy in a more amusing way than the obnoxiously-bad-and-kind-of-proud-of-it work Miller and Loeb have been doing recently, and even Lyle probably can’t be blamed too much for pages that were apparently subject to a bajillion rewrites. In the end, an accolade such as “worst comic ever” is not one to give out lightly, and I’m not sure I’d ever be able to definitively state what I think that is. But I’m pretty sure you’d have to work hard to find something worse-looking – or with a worse title – than this.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

In the late 90s, the quality black hole that had affected almost every comic released in the past decade was starting to lose its grip, not least due to the efforts of writers like Kurt Busiek, who was producing some top quality superheroics on both Avengers and Thunderbolts. In 1998, all of the Marvel Annuals took a “team-up” approach, and Busiek’s contribution (along with co-writers Karl and Barbera Kesel) was the “Captain America/Citizen V” team-up, which, with series regular Mark Bagley on art, was a Thunderbolts annual in all but name.

Bagley’s artwork was as strong then as it is now, delivering consistent, expressive superhero work that places him alongside the likes of John Romita Jr. In this issue, removed from the traditional urban superhero setting, Bagley gets the chance to render jungles and castles in a story that’s positively swashbuckling, as Citizen V and Captain America team up to fight Baron Zemo and Techno.

There are a few continuity-based oddities in the issue. At this point in history, for example, Captain America was using his bizarre photon-shield, The Fixer is in his “Techno” incarnation, and the current incarnation of Citizen V was pretending to be a man, which is a fairly major plot-point that gets addressed in this annual. Ten years later, it seems odd to see such things being treated as the status quo, but it’s also a constant reminder that any change, no matter how permanent it might seem, is usually just a story with an ending somewhere.

Indeed, even the traditional superheroic actions of Captain America seem far removed from the recent political intrigue of the character, both before and after his death. Busiek’s handle on him is actually remarkably effective, though, as he organises Zemo’s slaves against him and helps Citizen V assume her mantle, inspiring others through his actions. This issue (and ’98′s “Captain America / Iron Man” annual, also by Busiek) both suggest that Busiek’s Captain America might just be one of those great runs that never happened – understandably, given how much control Busiek already had over the Avengers franchise at the time, writing both Avengers, Iron Man and Thunderbolts (which had close ties to the property) but none of that makes it any less disappointing that a Busiek run on Cap never happened.

Taken in isolation, it’s a nice little story that treads some unfamiliar ground with some largely under-used characters who’ve fallen out of favour in recent years, though the issue really shines if taken as the chapter of Thunderbolts, slotting somewhere between #17 and #21. With Busiek’s writing and Bagley’s art, it was never going to be a mediocre turn, though, and it’s certainly worth picking up if you see it cheap.

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It’s well-known that the 1990s weren’t kind to comics. A wave of 80s-inspired grit washed through the industry, and Spider-Man in particular suffered ridiculously under the weight of it. As increasingly dark storylines brushed his supporting cast aside and sent Peter himself into a downward spiral, the convoluted and editorially botched Clone Saga was conceived to try and fix things – but what was it that was so bad that they felt they had to take such radical steps as to REPLACE Spider-Man?

Well, there’s the events of Amazing Spider-Man #393, for example. A sort-of sequel to Maximum Carnage, it sees Carnage’s former allies, Shriek and Carrion going on a rampage, with Spider-Man tasked with bringing them in. Shriek is an insane goth-inspired villainess with a maternal complex, straight out of Ravencroft Asylum, and Carrion is her murderous “son”, an ordinary man transformed into a cold, super-powered killer by the Carrion Virus.

This issue is the last of a 4-part story – Shriek has gone to kill Carrion’s real mother so that she can replace her, leading to a stand-off as she’s trapped inside her own house. It’s night, naturally, because at this point all Spider-Man stories took place at night, and while Peter tries to sort the situation out. Mary Jane sits by Aunt May’s hospital bed, the old coot having had yet another stroke, and explains that she’s going to leave for a while because she can’t deal with how depressing life is.

It’s all quite unrelentingly bleak. After he attacks Peter to protect both of his “mothers,” Peter pounds the crap out of a confused, psychologically torn Carrion while shouting about how he should just let the Carrion virus destroy Malcolm (the unwitting host) for what he’s done. Shriek eventually saves Malcolm’s life by absorbing the Carrion virus to prove that she loves her “son,” and Spider-Man takes her to a hospital – though not before he takes a moment to wonder whether he should just leave her to die.

What we’re learning here is that Spider-Man doesn’t have much sympathy for the criminally insane. A pity, really, since he’s clearly not all there himself at the moment – the arc is littered with moments when Peter has an internal dialogue with two sides of himself – The Man and The Spider. Seeing Aunt May in the hospital, he plans to go home and beg MJ for help… but she’s already left town. The issue ends with perhaps the one panel that sums up this entire era for me – Spider-Man perches atop of a stone Gargoyle at night, hunched over and glaring down on the city, the captions declaring: “Never again will he allow the man’s voice to sway him; the man’s hopes to seduce him. Never again will he show his face to that cruel and merciless world down there. The mask stays on, the heart stays cold. Now and forever, he vows…’I AM THE SPIDER’”

Creatively, it’s not quite as bad as things ever got – Bagley’s artwork is immediately familiar as being one of the definitive Spider-Man artists, and in fairness to DeMatteis, it’s a fairly well-executed story for Shriek and Carrion. The problem is, really, that this unremittingly dark, psychological tone was ever considered good Spider-Man reading, because it’s so far from the character’s origins as to be almost unrecognisable.