2008 proved to be an interesting year. Fewer zombies, thank the deity of your choosing—or at least, I read fewer of them, so they didn't make it onto this list. A few more superheroes, depending on how you define things (and no, I didn't read Marvel's Secret Invasion or Dark Reign, and since DC's Final Crisis periodically made me want to bludgeon the DC brain trust vigorously about the head and shoulders with its own output, that won't be here either). Perhaps not as much space opera as I would have liked, but that's somehow a surprisingly difficult genre to find a lot of in comics. And it turns out that the world ends with a bang, a whimper, and just about every unpleasantness in between that you could imagine. A few themes did emerge in this year's reading:

1. Apocalypse yesterday

2. The War of the Worlds redux (see also: apocalypse yesterday)

3. Warren Ellis (what can I say? Man was busy this past year. See also: apocalypse yesterday.)

4. Everything old is new again (see also: War of the Worlds redux, apocalypse yesterday)

A very few items did carry over from last year's list—though for most of those, the noteworthy thing isn't so much the quality as the fact that at some point during the year, some of them just seemed to trail off mid-story, with their creators having to push them to the back burner due to other commitments, the stresses of life, etc. In any event, there were far fewer carry-over titles than I'd initially expected, which indicates that this year was pretty good for new speculative titles.

And as for the stuff that's new to the list, some of them may actually not be comics. Given the last two columns, that's probably not a surprise.

And so: alphabetically by title, forward into the fray! [...]

I hate Grant Morrison, sometimes.

See, here's the thing: I'd gone along quite happily ignoring Final Crisis, as, it turns out, pretty much the entirety of the DC universe had done to date. Oh, sure, there were a few throw away moments here and there, but nothing I really needed to pay attention to. And then came Batman #682, and all you could do with a lot of it was just sit there and scratch your head if you didn't read Final Crisis, because you really didn't have a strong clue what the heck was going on. So I girded my loins and picked up the previous Final Crisis issues and read the whole goddamn thing. (I will note, however, that he's an equal opportunity irritant. There's a near-throwaway line about "the Batman Psycho merge" that makes absolutely no sense if you didn't read the end of Batman 682.)

The really fascinating thing to note is that at one level, Morrison was definitely true to his word. If you've read his Seven Soldiers of Victory, that's almost all the prolog you need to this series. There's nothing of Identity Crisis, nothing of 52, and the only piece of Countdown hanging around is the weirdness of Mary Marvel. By contrast, we've got Frankenstein and Mister Miracle of the Soldiers playing a major role, Bulleteer whizzing around in the background, and I'm sure that I probably missed references to the others anywhere.

The essential plot of issue 5 is that Hal Jordan gets taken to Oa for trial because the Guardians believe that he attacked John Stewart, and basically all hell breaks loose. Back on earth, Checkmate and Mister Miracle try to fight the good fight with possibly indifferent success, and Dan Turpin seems to lose his fight to Darkseid.

I will say this about Final Crisis. The one line in the whole thing that would have caught me and gotten me to read this series, if one line could have done it, was where the guardians say, "You have 24 hours to save the universe, Lantern Jordan." I mean, seriously. It also gives a possible time frame to the last two issues: however long it's been up to this point, the universe gets mostly saved in 24 hours.

Strange Horizons Columns: Welcome to the Real World, by Iain Jackson:
Part One: Location, Location, Location, and the High Cost of Heroes (and Villains)

Why do so many superhero stories take place in places that never were, or versions of the here and now that kind of . . . aren't, quite? And how do those fictional cities and towns manage to recover from having superheroes and supervillains around? They can be, to put it mildly, quite destructive. In part one of this occasional series, we'll look at where the big fights take place, and what it can be like to have superheroes and supervillains around...

...Apart from the architecture and presentation, Metropolis and Gotham City are the most remarkably mobile cities that you'll ever see. Way back in the mists of prehistory, when I was a young'un, it was taken as gospel that Metropolis and Gotham were what was left of New York when you divided it up the East and Hudson rivers, so that New York was now three smaller cities. Later on, things started moving around a bit. For a while, Metropolis and Gotham were outer major suburbs of New York City. These days, to the extent it can be determined, Gotham has apparently moved off to southern New Jersey while Metropolis has settled down in Delaware . . . unless it's one of the stories that Grant Morrison is writing. He's been fairly clear that he still views Metropolis and Gotham as cities surrounding New York—in his Seven Soldiers series, he notes that the cities are the ugly stepchildren of New York—which means that depending on which writer is handling the story, the cities are in very different places at the same time. Something quantum happening to allow simultaneous different locations at the same point in spacetime, no doubt. (For the sake of sanity, we will ignore the TV series Smallville, in which Metropolis has apparently come rumbling in from the east to obliterate and sit on top of the current location of Kansas City, Kansas, possibly dragging a major lake or bay in its wake.) [...]

A hardback compilation of the former webcomic, Boy Meets Hero tells the story of Derek -- secretly Blue Comet, superhero -- and Justin -- secretly in love with Derek. The latter secret constitutes one of the major difficulties for our guys; Justin wants to be out and proud, while Derek fears losing his job -- in their world, being a superhero is a paid position, just as in the Luna Brothers' Ultra -- and his reputation. To keep the public off guard, Derek is participating in a phony romance, orchestrated by the public relations department, with his superhero partner Sunstar, who also happens to be Justin's sister Jillian. The villains are, of course, conspiring to bring Blue Comet and Sunstar down in revenge for having been beaten in the past.

The artwork is comparatively simple, but mostly works for the story. There is a certain amount of comic-book nudity -- no full frontal (not even in the panel where Justin is told that his junk is hanging out), a bit of buttock here and there -- and romantic sex of the sort you'd see in any mainstream superhero book. The main characters kiss, and we see them on the way to sex, but nothing explicit. And we actually see black gay guys in this story! who get put into peril, but live through it! Granted, they're purely incidental characters, but still.

Those incidental characters bring up one of the few things that annoy me a bit. The story does lean a bit on stereotype here and there. Not a lot, but when it happens, it's somewhat jarring. For example, deeply closeted Derek says at work at one point, "You go, girlfriend!" To his theoretical girlfriend, for that matter, in front of pretty much everyone he works with. It's just hard to believe that someone that deeply closeted would make that sort of mistake in that situation; moreover, he doesn't say anything like that through the rest of the story.

The other issue with the story as a whole is that the guys kind of ... talk too much. The two of them are just spritzing angst everywhere over Derek and his closet and talking about it to each other, to Jillian, a lot. Almost the only frames with the guys that don't contain great whacking chunks of dialogue or narration are those in which they're making love, and it's not as though there are more than a couple of those frames scattered in the story. The villains also have to acquaint us with their unfortunate past with a great heaping hunk of dialogue -- and the curious thing there is that in one case, we actually get thrown into a more effective flashback, with a bit less dialogue. Granted, you don't want to be flashing backward and forward all that much in a 120 page book, but it points out that the authors are entirely capable of showing and not telling quite so much.

Anyway, those flaws aside, it was still a very entertaining and worthwhile read. Recommended.

And at last we reach the titular ... er, title. Surely you understand now why, especially after the previous poster entries, the title for this review entry had to be what it is. Honestly, although I'd bought the issue before the posters, I hadn't looked at it all that closely. Then, after the posters, I finally got around to reading the stuff I hadn't gotten through yet, and well ... there it was.

The back cover bills it as "the world's first Bollywood comic" and ... I kind of can't argue that point. Although I will note that there is a profound lack of entire cities suddenly bursting into song and mindnumbingly spectacular production numbers.

The story? Oh, yes, the story. We start in Mumbai in 1984, with later occasional excursions back in time and elsewhere in India. One of DISCO's operations has just been compromised by the Naada Ninjas -- who wear white and bright colors, for some reason. We jump to Jimmy Grover's residence, where he's yelling at his mother for spending his hard earned cash on that "foul Desi moonshine". Said "foul Desi moonshine" pretty much immediately puts her in the hospital. The doctor tells Jimmy that his mother's liver has failed, and she needs expensive drugs and an operation. He offers to drop the price if Jimmy will, shall we say, put out. Jimmy responds by slapping the doctor and declaring, "You should be ashamed of yourself trying to exploit a lachaar mazboor najuwan like me!" (According to the funny yet seriously incomplete glossary at the end, this means "helpless strapping young lad headed straight for Oprah".) To make money quickly, Jimmy heads for the DISCO Fights (no, really, that's what they're called) to take on all the DISCO champions (no, REALLY) at once. Suddenly, just as he's clearly about to get clobbered, a mysterious man's head appears in a cloud and tells him to use the zhingchak(TM). What, you might be wondering, is the zhingchak(TM)? And well might you wonder! In any event, Jimmy pummels the champions of DISCO, wins the money, pays for his mother's transplant, and is thereupon recruited immediately into DISCO, which turns out to be the Department of Internal Security and Covert Operations. (For reasons external to the story, I had a small hysterical fit when the chief said, "Jimmy, your country needs you.") Moreover, Jimmy's father was in fact one of DISCO's best agents, until he was killed by the dreaded FIRANG. Jimmy of course agrees to work with DISCO, and is thereupon given his father's DISCO Battle Suit ("100% polyester, machine washable"), keyed to his family DNA. There are, of course, all sorts of absurd twists, turns, gadgets and villains -- I suspect people may be particularly fond of Britney Hypnotits, as well as the Fabled Mithunkwalk (the pelvic thrust that really will drive you insane).

Essentially, the story aims for a sort of Indian Austin Powers vibe, Bollywood does Our Man Flint (much cooler and more mod than James Bond). Mostly, it gets there. Mostly. I suspect if you're Indian, it may get there much better than if you're American. There are chunks of ... um, language to deal with. Not a lot, and I don't think any of it's at all important -- but that's just it; I don't know that the ... er, language isn't important. (Seriously, Hindi? Bengali? Something else? No clue here.) Linguistic weirdnesses aside, it's funny and entertaining, and the artwork is highly stylized and insanely detailed. It's definitely a worthwile, fun read. Just, you know, periodically linguistically aggravating.

Given the Virgin/UTV coproduction, I expect that it will be a Bollywood movie for real any day now. Wonder if it'll make it here?

As the release date for Superman Returns nears, people reinterpret the character in more spectacular and peculiar ways....