Over the past couple of years I've read a lot of comics. I started with a couple boxes and at some point in my irritating later months at CNET I started picking up more and more each week -- the romper room in our house upstairs is now knee deep in the damn things, there's barely enough room for the PS2. The thing was, the quality of the writing (and sometimes art - more on that later) had ratcheted up significantly. In the post Frank Miller / Alan Moore world I had abandoned years ago writers with skill and a point of view were popping up: Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis (oh, warren ellis -- read Nextwave and you will understand why he is the best of the best), Robert Kirkman (mostly). These guys were taking the narratives in creative directions and their dialogue was either increasingly naturalistic or startlingly stylized.
Take Nextwave -- the tagline on the cover describes the series' voice and style in 6 words: "Healing America by beating people up." And no, this isn't a serious indictment of US foreign policy; and it's not even a deconstruction of American superhero comics; it explodes the damn things. Take Ellis' description of his own series (from an article references by a Wikipedia entry - how meta!): '"It’s an absolute distillation of the superhero genre. No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It’s people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode." It's pure genius so of course it only lasted 12 issues. there are 2 trade collections available (#2 is called "I Kick Your Face").
