If it's the end of a decade, then it's time for multiple Best Of The Decade lists. This isn't exactly one of them, though, despite what it looks like; for one thing, even if it was, you'd all disagree with it and complain that we left off something essential - although anyone arguing for the inclusion of Ultimatum, we believe that can be disproven through the use of science and charts - and for another, we've not read every single thing published in the last decade, so for all we know, there's something really obvious that we'll have somehow overlooked through accident instead of malice. Instead of The Ten Best, then, these are Ten Of The Best (Click on the titles for our explanations why and, in some cases, runners-up to the list that we couldn't help but sneak in):

100% by Paul Pope (DC/Vertigo)
All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC Comics)
Black Hole by Charles Burns (Pantheon)
Casanova by Matt Fraction, Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon (Image Comics)
Laika by Nick Abadzis (First Second Books)
Planetes by Makoto Yukimura (Tokyopop)
Pluto by Osamu Tazuka and Naoki Urasawa (Viz Media)
Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni Press)
We3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC/Vertigo)
Y The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra and many more (DC/Vertigo)

(Thanks to Lauren, David Brothers, Jeff Lester and all who offered advice and good reasons why we were entirely wrong in some original choices.)

Back to start.

The Black List, a list of the year's best unproduced movie screenplays based on a poll of 250 film execs, is a fascinating look inside the movie companies' massive slush pile. Every year about this time, a list of dozens of scripts, with tantalizing descriptions, comes out. To get on the list, a script must have won praise from at least four execs.

The most popular unproduced script this year isn't science fiction — I think. It's called The Beaver written by Kyle Killen, and it's a film about a depressed man who gets hope from a beaver puppet on his hand.

Then there's this, which actually has been made into a 2009 film starring Milla Jovovich:

THE FOURTH KIND by Olatunde Osunsanmi. "A fact-based thriller involving an ongoing unsolved mystery in Alaska, where one town has seen an extraordinary number of unexplained disappearances during the past 40 years and there are accusations of a federal cover-up. Milla plays a woman investigating the disappearances in the town."

That screenplay won 11 mentions from execs.

Nine execs thought this seemed like a great movie (and I agree):

JONNY QUEST by Dan Mazeau
“Young Jonny Quest travels the world with his scientist father, adopted brother from India, Bandit the bulldog, and a government agent assigned to protect them while they investigate scientific mysteries.”

Eight execs were as eager to see this Brian K. Vaughan project as I am:

ROUNDTABLE by Brian K Vaughan
“In modern day, Merlin attempts to assemble a bunch of knights to battle an ancient evil.”

Five execs were intrigued by this weird-sounding project:

WHAT WOULD KENNY DO? by Chris Baldi
“A seventeen-year-old high school kid meets a ‘hologram’ of himself at thirty-seven-years-old and benefits from their friendship.”

Four execs were stoked about this project, which we've already blogged about:

BOBISM by Ben Wexler
“A shy college student discovers that life in one thousand years will be based on his blog — and he has to stop aliens from the future who want him dead.”

And four execs were thrilled by this one:

THE HOW-TO GUIDE FOR SAVING THE WORLD by BenDavid Grabinski
“A loser discovers a book on how to stop an alien invasion and is thrust into action to stop a real one.”

[NYMag.com]

"When one is so bad that I can't seem to shake it after a few weeks, it usually means I have no choice but to write about it, often because that lame high concept is a way for me to explore something that makes me confused or furious about the world." — Brian K. Vaughan, writer for Lost and creator of Y The Last Man, interviewed in Esquire.

We've told you before that Marvel was planning on making the series into a movie, but MTV's recent conversation with Kevin Feige about the project has given us a much better feeling about what's to come - starting with his classic take on the set-up:

I love the idea of kids banding together, discovering this thing, which I think all kids secretly wonder at one time or another whether their parents are good or evil. Well, these guys find out, unfortunately, that their parents happen to be supervillains... I loved, when I was a kid, movies like 'Goonies' and 'Explorers' — and a non-genre example of that is 'Stand by Me' — the idea that when I came home from school, I could go on an adventure anywhere.

Obviously, the studio has realized that it was Vaughan's writing that made the series the success that it was, originally... and luckily, Vaughan's Lost experience means that he knows how to do screenplays, as well:

In our discussions with Brian, we wanted him to be the person to bring it to life. I think it won't be a precise story line of any [of his comics], but certainly it will be most similar to the tone or origins of his structure in its initial run.

Maybe the most interesting news from the interview came when Feige discussed whether Runaways would continue the tight crossovers between all the Marvel movies:

If it fits a dramatic moment that we want to get across in the film, we would be able to do that — but I wouldn't want to rely on having Iron Man come in and wave every five minutes so we can put that in the commercial and sell more... I really want to build movies to stand on their own, and there's no reason that 'Runaways' — with the right script and the right cast — couldn't fit that on its own.

So, post-Avengers, it may be a brand new start for Marvel's movies - and one that doesn't require you to pay attention to four at once.

Could 'Runaways' Movie Be The New 'Goonies'? Marvel President Hopes So [MTV]

One of the major launches for this week is Image Comics' adaptation of the upcoming EA video game Dead Space. With art by 30 Days of Night's Ben Templesmith and writing by friend-of-Alan-Moore Antony Johnston, the six-issue series gives you the backstory of just how the game's mysterious alien race (which possesses and transforms human beings into lumbering killer monsters) got loose in the first place. Murky art and murkier morality will undoubtedly come into play in this one.

For those who prefer their morally-compromised heroes to be much shinier, perhaps you'd be interested in Marvel's Iron Man: Demon In A Bottle, a new hardcover collection of the classic, overwrought 1980s storyline where industrialist-turned-armored avenger Tony Stark comes to terms with his alcoholism and realizes that 12-step programs are harder when you have boot jets. If there's a better way to prep for the upcoming Robert Downey Jr. movie, then it's not coming out this week.

Speaking of morally compromised heroes, DC's Wonder Woman lost some of her satin-tights sheen after she executed a baddie a few years ago. But she burst back onto the comics scene after a few months' absence in 2006, with a delay-plagued storyline from TV writer Allen Heinberg (The OC, Gray's Anatomy) that tried to redefine the character and remind you of why you liked her in the first place. The final result is collected in tomorrow's Wonder Woman: Who is Wonder Woman? hardcover, and — you'll be happy to know — it does include her changing identities by spinning around. Also, Darwyn Cooke returns to his most popular creation with a special one-off Justice League: The New Frontier issue, to promote last week's DVD release.

Marvel's big release of the week isn't actually the Iron Man book; instead, some guy called Stephen King is putting his stamp of approval on The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home, a new mini-series based on his series of novels. It's also a follow-up to last year's hyper-successful The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born mini-series. This one's by the same creative team (writers Robin Furth and Peter David with artists Jae Lee and Richard Isanove), and undoubtedly about to sell as many copies to eager King fans.

Marvel's also launching a new series starring your favorite time-traveling cyborg, Cable (written by novelist Dwayne Swiercynski). And a new Wolverine mini-series called Logan is getting attention due to the involvement of Brian K. Vaughan (Y The Last Man.) If all that new stuff bothers you, though, you could just pick up Secret Invasion Saga and get the background on that whole alien invasion thing they have going on over there.

As usual, you can read through the official list of books shipping to comic stores on Wednesday here and find out where your local comic store is here. Just watch out for spacemen trying to eat your brains.

Since we are future reporters and all, we loved this other Silver Age inspiration for a present-day comic featuring a reporter named Spider. Of course, by "inspiration" we mean retroactively-Photoshopped creation. Is that a retpho? W00t!

Rampant Plagiarism [Mightygodking] (Thanks, Douglas!)

When you were young, did any particular science fiction inspire you to get into writing?

I'm sort of embarrassed to say... well, I'll just lay all my cards on the table here: Isaac Asimov's stuff. Isaac Asimov's science fiction stuff which was, in retrospect, is juvenile and clunky and has much better ideas than style. But, I didn't care about style then I was 12 years old. The cleverness of the mysteries, they don't hold up very well for me as an adult, but as a kid that's the stuff that sparked my imagination.

Do you have a favorite science fiction book of a film?

I honestly think that, even though this is fairly recent, The Matrix was the greatest science fiction movie I've ever seen, and I've seen them all.

Did you like all three?

The other two made my head hurt. I went in cold not knowing anything, completely cold, and it just blew my mind. Going back, I'm a big fan of Phillip K. Dick. Always have been. I'm a big fan of Alfred Bester, and I know a lot of his stuff is out of print now, which kills me. Those formative guys from the 50s and 60s, and any of those guys that Harlan assembled for Dangerous Visions, J.G. Ballard... all those guys are just phenomenal.

And Alfred Bester wrote for comics too, right? Didn't he write Green Lantern?

That's right, he wrote Green Lantern for awhile. He did some pulp stuff before the comics, but he didn't really become big until the 40s and 50s during his run in comics.

What are you writing these days?

I'm currently writing The Brave and the Bold at DC Comics, where I just finished up a run on The Flash. I'm also doing a lot of work at Boom! Studios where I'm the editor in chief.

That's right, and they're based out here in Los Angeles. What titles have you worked on there?

I wrote a miniseries called Potter's Field which came out last year, and I'm working on some more creator-owned stuff for them next year. In the meantime, that's my night job. My day job is the full-time editorial gig. I started there in July of last year, and I couldn't be happier. It's after 20 years of writing, it's cool to flex different muscles editorially because I'm finding that while I'm teaching new writers to do their stuff, it's forcing me to flex muscles that I hadn't used for awhile. Or to sort of articulate things in a way that I only know instinctively.

So were you a fan of Y: The Last Man?

Absolutely! I've been reading Y since the beginning, ever since Brian was a little kid with a stick and a hoop and a crown hat coming by my house going, "Mr. Waid! Mr. Waid! I want to grow up to be just like you!' No, I've known Brian for 10 years or better, and I've been reading his stuff all along. I couldn't be happier for him.

So you follow his work on Lost?

Definitely, and although I know it's a big room with a big group of writers, I can sometimes see flashes of Brian every now and again with the humor.

Do you think anyone could do a good film or television version of Y: The Last Man?

I think if they took enough time with it they could, if they didn't try to cram it into a 90 minute movie, sure. But we'll see... it doesn't matter whether it's faithful, it just matters if it's good or not.

What upcoming comic book films are you looking the most forward to?

Well, Dark Knight. That's the one that's going to rock the house. That's the one that's going to be amazing. Iron Man looks cool, but I was never a huge Iron Man fan, although it's inspired casting. Perfect casting. But Dark Knight... if they can get under the eclipse of the Heath Ledger story, will do really well for them. What I've seen ahead of time looks phenomenal. I just don't think you can say "Why So Serious?" anymore.

Is there any comic book property that you haven't worked on, but would love to?

From Archie Comics to DC Comics to Marvel Comics, I've written pretty much everything, but the one thing I haven't touched is Captain Marvel, the Shazam! version. Some day, at some point in my future, that's somewhere on the line.

Everybody who gets their hooks into it knows it's a great property, it's just that nobody has found a way to translate it. I don't know that you can write it for 40 year old fanboys, I don't know that there's an audience for it there. But it's the perfect young adult property, and it's just waiting to break out. He doesn't have to come from Krypton, and he doesn't have to train for years and years or become a scientist, he just says a magic word. When I was a kid, that's all I wanted.

What about Dollhouse will draw in your Buffy and Firefly fans?

Well, Eliza (Dushku). Duh. It's very different than the stuff I've done before, but at the same time it's still a very hardcore examination of the human condition. It really sort of boils it down to who are we, how are we programmed, what do we need, what is okay about us, and what is really not okay. It's the most morally gray thing I've ever done. I think it might actually anger a lot of my fans, but there are questions I still have to ask. Ultimately I think it will intrigue them because that.

We keep hearing that the strike will be over soon. How has it affected Dollhouse? Have you actually written any of it yet?

I had just pitched the seven episodes for the show, I hadn't written anything. I did not even so much as look at them during the strike, and will not until the strike is over. The day the strike is over, I will start working, so whatever we plan to do will certainly be pushed back by exactly as many months as the strike was... or still is.

Tell us a bit more about the dance project with Summer, we know you've been writing the music for that.

I've been working for a long time composing the score for a ballet short that I've wanted to film because of Summer. It's a little piece and we have a choreographer we're about to start working with it. I don't know if she's suddenly going to be shooting again or what, but we hope to shoot this hopefully in the late spring or early summer. It's something I've dreamed about pretty much ever since I met her.

What would you do with it after you finished it?

I don't know ... I guess go to festivals! I've never been to any festivals, so I guess I'd go to those with my short film. (He breaks into an impromptu little "I'm an indie short filmmaker guy" dance).

We heard you comparing Brian K. Vaughan to a Cylon up there. Are you a big Battlestar Galactica fan?

There is no bigger! I beat that "other guy" who thought he was the biggest fan. I've spent a lot of time with Ron on the picket lines, and he's very gracious about my drool for the show.

The event was strictly limited to 140 people, and hopeful attendees were camping out overnight to get some of the "standing room only" tickets that went on sale just before it started. The VIP ticket packages sold out on the web in 6 minutes, which is great since all proceeds were going to the CBLDF. However, we're sure the creative types in the room didn't mind avoiding fannish questions like "Um, in episode 7 of Firefly, Jayne wears a green shirt. Does that mean he's a spy for the Alliance?" Folks were very respectful, and the monkey got most of the attention in the room. It didn't even fling any poo at all, as far as we noticed. These were the high points of the evening:

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• Vertigo Editor Will Dennis remembered being given the editorial reins on Y after issue #15, and phoning up 100 Bullets writer Brian Azzarello for advice. Azzarello told him, "Great book. Yorick needs pussy. Don't fuck it up."
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• Joss Whedon got up and told a story about being at the San Diego Comic-Con several years ago, and someone came over and said "My friend wanted you to have this book that he wrote," and it was the first graphic novel of Y. Joss took it home where it sat amidst his junk piles until he finally read it and fell in love.
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• Brian responded by saying that he had always been inspired by a television writer who wrote strong women characters, "and that writer was named... J.J. Abrams." Zing!
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• During Joss Whedon's"keynote" speech where he spoke a lot about the final book, he said: "One of the things about the book, is that like the Cylons, he has a plan."
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• Someone asked Brian what Agent 355's real name was, and he decided not to tell anyone. "Some things should be left unanswered... I know that's scary coming from someone who's working on Lost, but some things should be left alone."
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• Pia Guerra's next book, which she announced exclusively, is going to be Doctor Who for IDW, which will come out in July. However, according to Brian, "The story is just all the different Doctors having sex with each other. One big circle jerk."
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• Brian couldn't have been nicer and more generous to Pia, saying "Those of you who know the book know it's mostly Pia, and a little bit me." Seriously, we almost got a cavity from how sweet he was to her. What a guy. However, according to him he's a guy who "Likes naked boobies and severed heads."
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• One fan asked Pia about the copy of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash on Yorick's bookshelf, and Pia said she put that in because it's on her own bookshelf at home.
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• Brian doesn't care who plays Yorick in the movie, but he has to be someone who is pretty annoying. "I like Topher Grace, who you mentioned" Pia said, to which Brian who replied "SHHHHHH!"
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• Pia cried like a baby while illustrating the scene with Ampersand in the woods. You aren't human if you can read the whole series and come to that scene and not be moved.
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• The first issue of Y was meant to have scenes of Agent 355 in Afghanistan with a Taliban artifact, but then 9/11 happened and they took it out because they thought the U.S. would bomb the country back to the stone age.
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• Brian quipped that "I only have three ideas. One is monkeys, the other is lions, and the third is jetpacks. So my next project will be monkeys with jetpacks. Fighting lions."
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• Joss asked what happened to Alter, because he hated her so much. Brian said he thinks the best way to handle villains is just to ignore them. Rather than tossing them into the heart of the sun, you just let them fade away.
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• According to Brian, he originally came up with the concept for Y as a project called Boyson, "The Last Boy On Earth" for Penthouse Comics full of "women built like robot fuck machines" and one boy remaining on the planet. After they folded, he replaced the robots with a Gloria Steinem quote and sent it over to Vertigo.
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• They live auctioned-off a page of original art from the comic book, and a Y: The Last Man straightjacket (the real thing!) which raised more than $3000 for the CBLDF. All told, the 140 people who attended the party paid admission which put more than ten grand in their coffers.
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• "The Watch": This was the kickoff scene for these scenes, and it didn't bode well when there was some hammy acting and dialogue. Basically, Jack's father gives him a watch, which belonged to his father. And no, he hadn't been keeping it in his ass. The moral of the scene is "Don't be a crappy father like I was."

  

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• "The Adventures of Hurley and Frogurt": Remember Neil, the frozen yogurt salesman from Season One? The producers always promised he'd become "more interesting." Sadly, that doesn't happen in this clip when he tells Hurley to make a move on Libby or he'll step in.

  

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• "King of the Castle": Ben and Jack play a friendly game of chess, and Ben promises Jack he won't try to stop him from leaving the island... but the island might. He also tells Jack that one day he might look back and regret leaving, and that if he does he hopes that he'll remember this conversation. Ooooooh! This is probably the best acted of all of these, and written by comics scribe Brian K. Vaughan to boot.

  

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• "The Deal": Juliet visits Michael while he's held captive by the Others, and tells him that he can believe Ben's offer of freedom. She confesses that she's staying there to help save her sister, and wouldn't he do anything to save Walt? Michael sure isn't happy about it.

  

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• "Operation: Sleeper": Juliet wakes Jack up and tells him she's been working with Ben all along, and that the other survivors have been right not to trust her. Off all the mobisobes, this one felt the rip-offiest.

  

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• "Room 23": Alarms and panic around the Barracks! Juliet tells Ben they need to let Walt go, but Ben tells her he's special and that Jacob wants him there. She shows him a pile of dead birds around Walt's window and wants to know what's so special about that. Is Walt's power the ability to get birds to commit suicide? We've seen it before, and we'll probaby see it again.

  

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• "Arzt & Crafts": It's Arzt! He's in his pre-dynamite phase, and he's trying to convince everyone on the beach not to move to the caves. That is until they hear the smoke monster's crazy horn bellow, and he craps his pants.

  

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• "Buried Secrets": Michael stumbles across Sun burying her fake California driver's license in the woods, and she confesses that she was going to leave Jin. They almost kiss, but then Vincent cockblocks them. That's right, the dog makes 'em stop.

  

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• "Tropical Depression": Arzt confesses to Michael that he lied about the monsoon season, and that he just wants to get off the island. He also tells him that he'd flown to Sydney to meet a woman he'd been chatting with on the internet, but she left him at the restaurant. Boy, this guy really has a depressing life.

  

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• "Jack, Meet Ethan. Ethan? Jack.": Jack meets Ethan while looking for medicine, and Ethan whips up a few tears and tells Jack his wife and child died in childbirth. Then he creepily stares at Claire. After he leaves, Jack creepily stares at Ethan, like "Hey... I know something is weird about that dude."

  

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• "Jin Has a Temper-Tantrum On the Golf Course": Jin has a Happy Gilmore freakout on the golf course after he can't sink a putt. While Hurley and Michael look on, he sinks to his knees and curses the ball. Probably the best scene out of all of them.

  

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• "The Envelope": Juliet burns her hand on something in the oven, and then almost confesses to Amelia and shows her Ben's x-rays, but someone rings the doorbell. Another exercise in frustration, since this one is really just a deleted scene. Okay, maybe this one was the big ripoff.

  

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• "So It Begins": There's a POV shot of Vincent running through the forest until Jack's dad stops him and tells him to go wake Jack up on the beach, just moments after the crash. So is Jack's dad alive? This is the only real "What the hell?!" clip in the whole bunch.

  

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For all Vaughan's other failings - improbably named characters and pop-culture-heavy dialogue, anyone? - he's certainly a writer who knows how to do attention-grabbing openings, and the couple of surprises he throws into the first few pages (Flying cars! Clones!) certainly count as some of the more unexpected moments of the series. Happily, though, they're just there to provide an introduction to a future in which eighty-something year-old Yorick Brown is locked in a straitjacket, just as he was when we first met him years earlier.

Despite using the elder, melancholy, Brown's flashbacks as a device to show us what happened to the main characters of the story - they all die, for the most part, although Beth and Hero both find love - the issue manages to avoid being a downer in part because of its upbeat final scenes (which you knew were coming as much as you didn't think Vaughan would actually go for it), and because Vaughan didn't wuss out in his final steps. There is no magic turnaround resurrection of the male species, no "it was all a dream" headfuckery. Life continues on, different, but with the survivors trying to rebuild their lives as best they can. Unusually for a popular comic series, the end comes exactly as the creators (Vaughan is joined here by series co-creator, artist Pia Guerra) intended, quietly and surprisingly gracefully.

If - as USA Today's Pop Candy blog suggested - the series is to be adapted into a trilogy of movies, here's hoping that they manage an ending as successful as this one. Now, of course, let's wait and see what Vaughan has planned for the conclusion of his other long-form series, Ex Machina...

Good-bye to Y I: Brian K. Vaughan, I, Good-bye to Y II: Brian K. Vaughan, II [Newsarama.com]

All proceeds of the party (the 70 advance tickets cost $100 each, with an additional 70 being made available on the day of the event itself for $25 each, which means that there's still a chance that you, too, can attend) go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which offers some solace to the embarrassed Vaughan, who clearly isn't used to this kind of attention.

Over on his blog, by way of announcing the party, he wrote:

I would never dream of charging money just to see my stupid moon-face, but this is a 100% tax-deductible donation to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a charity that's vitally important to our medium, and I'll be joined by lovely co-creator Pia Guerra, and it sounds like editor Will Dennis and Y colorist Lee Loughridge will also be on hand (though they're probably only coming out to meet Joss Whedon, which is the only reason my wife will be there).

CBDLF, MySpace host Y: The Last Party on February 8th [Newsarama.com]

Y: The Last Party [bkv.tv]