Frontlist | James Hepplewhite's Top 6 Comics Of 2020

on Jan 04, 2021

6. Vampire: The Masquerade: Winter's Teeth volume one. In terms of licenses that are a good fit for comics, Vampire: The Masquerade should be a no-brainer. There's plenty of opportunity for monstrous action and devious plots. Newcomer artist Devmalya Pramanik shows up, even if I'm not entirely sold on their monstrous action, and writer Tim Seeley writes the story like he's lived under the Camarilla his entire life.

5. Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team. Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team asked the question, what do you do if you're a medic, and the person they ask you to save is the person that killed your former squad? and answered it with kinetic, relentless action. I didn't expect to love it, and by the end of the first issue, I found myself impatiently counting down the days until issue two. Artist Miguel Valderrama's work looks like the next coming of Nathan Fox, and I'm now a big fan of both artists.

4. Reckless volume one: Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Jacob Phillips put together another fantastic comic, this time about a fixer with memory loss. The story swirls around California, domestic terror outfits, and the alphabet soup of government organs. They're so reliably great it's easy to forget how lucky we are to have their work. Hell, I nearly didn't include Reckless here because I'm still not sure how to praise them without regurgitating fifteen to twenty years of critical acclaim.

3. Adventureman volume one. An all-ages pulp project from Matt Fraction, Terry Dodson, and Rachel Dodson. Adventureman is a story about a large modern family becoming the heirs to an old pulp adventuring outfit. In fact, the Dodsons do such a good job; Fraction can ad-lib lines like I've always wanted a slug o'yer science hooch! and it feels just right. If you like pulp stories but don't like their racist caricatures, Adventureman is the comic for you.

2. Don't Go Without Me. Three oversized single issue stories from Rosemary Valero-O'Connell, via Kickstarter and Zainab Akhtar's ShortBox Comics. The stories come fully formed, which means they took a while to make. Valero-O'Connell earned a knack for weighting every moment with expectation, usually from a turned head and gorgeously drawn hair. In more recent news, Valero-O'Connell started a Patreon while she works on The Next Project.

1. Loud!. A night in the life of a club goes bad quickly. Loud! should be a mess and isn't. The club, Loud, feels like a real club because, in the course of the comic, a speaker falls from the ceiling, and an employee quits. Loud feels like an actual, tactile place rather than a setting. Cocaine, guns, and sex get mixed up, and by the end of it, no one's going back to Loud. But you can bet they (and you, the reader) all have a hell of a story to tell. Loud! is addictive and instantly compelling. Well done, Maria Llovet.

Source: Bleeding Cool