Since the site’s just back to me and Seb, rather than do the whole “awards” thing like we have the previous two years, we’re just going to pick our favourite 10 comics (mostly in no particular order) and briefly give them a write-up explaining why we think they succeeded this year. We make no claims that this is a definitive list, and we certain’y haven’t read everything released this year – but this is what we enjoyed, and why. The posts start today and will hopefully run every day until the end of the month, when we’ll reveal our favourite comic of the year. Enjoy!

In many ways, the X-Men line is more diverse than it’s been in years. Almost every book has a distinct purpose and identity (with the possible exception of the vanilla X-Men title) and to me, X-Men Legacy is the one that recaptures the spirit of Claremont’s X-Men. While Uncanny X-Men focuses on the bigger name characters, and concentrates on telling the long-form arc that the rest of the titles hang off, X-Men Legacy is telling discrete, character-focused arcs that span the width and breadth of the X-Men universe, slowly building its subplots and taking the time to flesh out characters that have been hanging around in the background for years without much focus of their own.

The year started with a 3-issue Necrosha-X crossover (#231-#233) that actually stood alone quite convincingly. Proteus, back from the dead, versus a small group of X-Men, some of whom we haven’t seen much of in years – Husk, for example. Classic villains are a little thin on the ground lately, so it was good to see the return of both Proteus and Destiny. The arc also re-introduced Magneto, who had joined Utopia in Uncanny X-Men. This set the stage for #234 to clarify the current status of Rogue’s personal life (re: potential romances with Gambit and Magneto) as well as show Rogue using her powers to help the X-Kids, and start to spin out a plot involving Indra’s developing powers and his attitude towards them. #235-#237 were part of the second coming crossover, while #238-#241 return to Indra’s developing powers and move the character forward in big ways, as well as bringing back the Children of the Vault – some of Carey’s own villains – and making something a bit more distinct out of their motivations and status quo.

As you can tell, from the synopses above, there’s nothing especially epic about Carey’s run – no one moment that made me think “this, hands down, is the best X-Book” – but what it lacks in showmanship, it makes up for with consistency and content. Unlike any other writer, Carey seems able to exploit continuity as a springboard for new stories without forgetting to make his tale stand alone. His work could almost be called damage control – ever since the start of his Legacy run, he’s picked stories that need to be addressed and patched them up with care and attention that could only be delivered by someone who loves the stories they’re addressing. That, I suspect, is what makes X-Men Legacy so fun for me to read (although it doesn’t hurt that the central character, Rogue, is also one of my favourite X-Men).

Next year, X-Men Legacy spearheads the “Age of X” mini-crossover, which I’m not massively sold on – it seems like yet another riff on Days of Future Part/Age of Apocalypse, which the X-Books have done over and over. Also, it’ll be the title’s fourth crossover in 20 issues (from Utopia, which happened in #226/#227, to Age of X, which starts in #245), and that’s not a good sign that this book is doing well under its own steam. Carey’s overarching concept seems designed specifically to appeal to long-time X-Men fans, so it’s worrying that it needs propping up so often. Aren’t we supposed to be the core, die-hard fans? Perhaps it’ll survive in this manner, perhaps not – but either way, it’s been a good year for this, probably the quietest, least-hyped of the X-Books, and one that’s been a consistently enjoyable since it began.

My favourite character: Rogue. One of my favourite Rogue issues: X-Men Legacy #224, the one in which her powers are (finally?) “cured”.

It’s pretty telling that as soon as I started watching the X-Men cartoon, Rogue instantly became one of my favourite characters. Why oh why, one wonders, would any teenager find the idea of an IMPOSSIBLY ATTRACTIVE GIRL HE CANNOT TOUCH so fascinating a concept? How insultingly transparent my tastes proved, in retrospect.

Still, even now, there’s no getting away from the psycho-sexual appeal of Rogue’s character as viewed from a certain angle. In a genre that openly caters to adolescent power-fantasies, populated by writers and artists who apparently never got over their own, I suppose it’s not entirely unforgivable that I fell into the stereotype. I wasn’t the sort of teenager who missed the feminist message of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but at the same time, I thought nothing of buying FHM because Sarah Michelle Gellar was in it. Well, I thought something of it, because I avoided taking it to a female checkout assistant, but I bought it anyway. It’s little wonder the teenage me loathed himself.

In any case, Rogue isn’t quite as one-dimensional as that interpretation makes her sound. Despite an arguably male-centric character model (at least under Jim Lee and his immediate successors) there’s more to her than the titillation of male adolescents as desperate to touch a girl as they are afraid of what might happen if they were ever allowed to. At the core of Rogue’s powers lies a fear of intimacy: the worry that connecting with someone might harm you – or them. You can give her powers a purely sexual reading, in terms of their initial manifestation (mid-kiss with her first boyfriend) and their physical activation – but it’s worth remembering that there’s a psychological aspect to them as well. She absorbs memories and personality as much as superpowers.

Although there’s a certain difficulty to resolving a character’s central conflict, the time for it had arguably come in Rogue’s case. Her high-concept is a strong one – but after so many stories where she lost her powers, or dealt with the consequences of using them, each new attempt at telling that story lost some of its momentum. Carey was the first writer to really admit that the time had come to move Rogue on permanently. Which is what finally happened at the end of this issue, when she ganed control of her abilities.

On one level, Rogue’s character hasn’t changed – she’s still struggling with intimacy, even without her powers, and Carey is giving that arc the time it needs. Now, though, she’s been given a new high concept – her powers, now under control, symbolise her ability to empathise through experience. She’s been, for want of a better phrase, a “troubled teenager”, so as a mentor to young X-Men going through their own rough times, she knows what they feel like – literally. And furthermore, she can use her own experience to bring out the best in them, something illustrated when she uses their powers in ways they don’t know how to yet.

As it is, it’s hard to say whether a writer or editor will come along a few years down the line and decide that Rogue needs to be put back where she was – but for now, I’m enjoying the new direction she’s taking.

When I picked up the first issue of The Unwritten – one of the first of Vertigo’s admirable new scheme of putting out brand new #1s at a dollar apiece – I was slightly apprehensive about the series’ chances of turning into something truly great. There was potential there, but it was difficult to see exactly where Mike Carey was going with it, and whether it was going to carve out something truly distinctive and memorable. With the chance to read the first five issues in trade form, again at a thoroughly reasonable price (it’s a ten dollar trade, going for about £7.50 here in the UK – yet another advert for switching to trades permanently for stuff like this), both feelings are exacerbated. The level of potential grows, certainly – but the series still seems to throw up as many questions as answers at this early stage.

Nevertheless, it’s exactly the sort of postmodern metafictional guff that tends to push the right buttons for me – and with the standout fifth issue, a volte face that decides to tell a self-contained story about Rudyard Kipling (it’s a move that, at this early stage, shows the confidence Carey is currently working with – he’s not afraid to invite comparison with books like Sandman that were able to do similar), the premise becomes that bit clearer. In the world Carey constructs here, fiction influences reality – and the sinister figures all-too-aware of, and capable of exploiting, that fact are the main antagonists. Meanwhile, although it’s yet to be explicitly stated, the true nature of the Christopher Robin-meets-Harry Potter Tommy Taylor is far more clear-cut at the end of this book than it was at the end of the first issue. And although I’m sure I’m supposed to at this point, I’ll lay good money on the real identity of “Lizzie Hexam”, to boot.

Still, one of the problems that struck me upon reading the first issue continues to rankle here – I’ve no problem with Tommy being his world’s Harry Potter; as an analogue, he and his friends and the Count work absolutely fine. But Carey is asking us to believe that this is a world in which Tommy Taylor and Harry Potter both exist (it’s stated as such at one point), and yet the extracts from the Tommy books are so deliberately derivative of Rowling as to be outright parody. It’s not a major issue, just one that tends to jar – and in a book that is clearly going to rely so heavily on its meticulously-constructed world, it’s a shame to see cracks already showing.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty to enjoy, particularly if you want a comic that immerses itself in the power, history and mythos of the literary. Carey doesn’t really do much in this first volume to make Taylor himself the most engaging lead – but he generally does a good job of populating the book with good support characters, even for one-off stories such as the classic-style “country house murder mystery” of issue #4. The writer’s longtime collaborator Peter Gross, meanwhile, turns in a solid if unspectacular job here – he’s a very good storyteller, and always has been, and generally conveys things effectively, but there’s little that really jumps out beyond that house Vertigo style I’ve always felt he shares with the likes of Snejberg and Camuncoli. That said, like Carey, he ups his game for that Kipling issue, coping admirably with an array of noted literary figures (just how many Vertigo artists have been called upon to draw Oscar Wilde, now?) in a historical setting.

Overall, there’s a good, solid concept here – ripe for storytelling potential and, crucially, somewhat original (metafiction isn’t new, of course, but the relationship between fiction and reality established here is something a bit different). Whether the planned longform tale – and bear in mind I’m a good year’s worth of issues behind the ongoing, so I’ve no idea how it’s gone since – will live up to this is another question, but I’m sufficiently intrigued that I’ll be onboard for the second trade at least.

This week! Because no-one else will talk about X-Men with me: Chapter Eight of our look at the current X-Men crossover, Second Coming. Click behind the cut to read more!

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Slightly delayed due to the ash-cloud, but here’s the next instalment of our series of Second Coming features – Chapter Four of the Book of Hope, which covers X-Men Legacy #235, as well as “Second Coming Revelations”-branded spin-off, X-Factor #207. Meanwhile, the X-Force #26 instalment (featuring a SURPRISE death, Honest.) will be rushed through this weekend.

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Mike Carey’s take on the mutants is increasing resembling a magic eye puzzle, where I find myself wondering what other readers can see that I can’t. The reaction to the book’s new direction has been universally positive, but a baffling preoccupation with the duller parts of the franchise’s baggage remains throughout, while the structuring of the book’s first arc is plainly more driven by the need for a trade-friendly four issues, instead of the actual nature of the tale.

While the Science Team continue to build Utopia’s defences, while Rogue familiarises herself with Emplate’s neatly-conceptualised home. Where the initial parts of the arc dealt with a larger cast of the second-tier younger mutants, here Carey streamlines the line-up with Bling the sole representative of that earlier grouping. Despite the changing name of the book, the writer clearly feels under an obligation to maintain a degree of consistency, drawing Roxy from Peter Milligan’s run on the book and following up on the development of Gambit’s character which his predecessor undertook. Less excusable is the choice of villain for the story, with the one-dimensional vampire doing as sure-footed a job of sabotaging the story than Sinister did on Charles Xavier’s odyssey in the title’s previous incarnation.

It’s far easier to get behind the consensus which has arisen over Daniel Acuna’s art, which possesses an effortless charm. Using what appears to be water colouring on top of pencils, the artist’s work gives an immediately memorable tone to the title, and one that’s as well suited to the extra-dimensional setting of Rouge’s adventure as the much more mundane base in which Cyclops is attempting to puzzle out the situation. Careful consideration has obviously influenced the work, and the ability to show the lead character naked for the entirely of the issue without to book looking remotely gratuitous is not to be sneezed at.

Aside from a brief interlude featuring Gambit, however, there’s little in the plot to grab the attention.  Tellingly, the issue closes in the same way that it opens, with Emplate’s forces having the upper hand over Rogue. The instalment feels redundant, padding out the tale before its conclusion.