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.)

Next: Laika

Although the screenplay for Jon Favreau's much-anticipated sequel was written by Justin Theroux, Fraction - who, in addition to the monthly Invincible Iron Man series, also writes the Uncanny X-Men comic for Marvel - consulted on the story in its early stages, and spoilers suggest that the movie may follow the comics' development of Gwyneth Paltrow into a superhero of her own. Fraction calls the IM2 game "something wholly unique," explaining,

[It's] a story that exists at the crossroads of the comics I write, the film universe I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute to, and a wholly immersive interactive experience like this game... Writing a game presents an entirely new challenge, where the player engages with the world, with the big and small aspects of the place and characters. They're a coconspirator in the narrative. I hope it's as exciting and challenging to play as it was to write.

With a storyline about the abuse of Stark's Iron Man technology, the game will include characters who haven't yet appeared in the movie universe, including the much-anticipated Crimson Dynamo. This crossover between movies, comics and games is the latest step in Marvel's corporate synergy, which has previously included Ultimate Spider-Man writer Brian Michael Bendis working on the videogame of the character and created a short-lived MTV cartoon based on his take, in addition to the fabled Marvel Brain Trust of comic creators involved with plot decisions on Marvel Studios movies.

Sega's Iron Man 2 game will be released in Spring next year, ahead of the May release of the movie.

Fraction To Write "Iron Man 2" Video Game" [Comic Book Resources]

Talking to Newsarama.com about the upcoming storyline in Marvel's Uncanny X-Men about an amendment to the California constitution denying mutants the right to reproduce, Fraction explained:

You know, I've officially become one of those writers that writes something and then-a couple of months later-it really happens. I thought only Grant Morrison and Alan Moore wrote things and then they actually occurred... This is one of the dilemmas of writing contemporary science fiction; we started planning and writing out these stories close to two years ago. Simon Trask and Prop X had been written into our plans before I had even heard of Prop 8. Were I a California resident-that may have been different; it's just one of those strange synchronicities.

On the plus side, if this track record holds true, then San Francisco can also look forward to becoming invaded by a team of beautiful-but-evil super-villainesses; Fraction's "Sisterhood of Evil Mutants" make their diabolical debut in next month's issue. If the city survives that, then maybe Matt could write about Prop 8 - I mean, "Prop X" - being repealed sometime soon? Please?

An Uncanny Update with Matt Fraction [Newsarama.com]

Both authors were clearly fans of one another's work; the format was something akin to a very digressive chat show with Matt Fraction hosting, feeding in questions and moving things along. Chabon energetically defended and riffed on the idea of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who could break out the deepest geek shibboleths at need, talked about encounters with Stan Lee and Will Eisner, and generally paid homage to the culture that had energized a lot of his work.

If there was a narrative line to the appearance, it was the tale of Chabon's gradual coming-out as a genre fiction fan and author. He painted a vivid picture of a lit/nerd's progress. He was born in 1963, and grew up during a Lee/Kirby hegemony, immersed in genre fiction of all kinds - Lovecraft, Conan Doyle, Moorcock, Leiber (if I judge Gentlemen of the Road's influences correctly). In the days pre-internet, even pre-VHS, fans of pulpy genre work had a lonelier watch to keep, turning out for only the rare face-to-face moments at screenings and conventions.

When he tried to bring this material to the MFA fiction program at U. C. Irvine, he was frozen out - it was still the age of Carver, of brief, lapidary studies of broken marriages. He made a breakout debut with Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but the material that had such a hold on his imagination and sense of identity only gradually made its way back into his fiction - comic book allusions in Wonder Boys, where he pushed some of his genre passion onto a fictional alter ego, a Lovecraftian author name August Van Zorn (who at one point was purported to have written a collection entitled The Abominations of Plunkettsburg). Then the early slipstream of Werewolves in Their Youth, then the full-on comics fest of Kavalier and Klay, which at the time seemed like a dead-end project. He credits comics fans as the early adopters of the work that helped turn it into a success.

This narrative was framed within a larger story of a kind of nerd cultural insurgency by which the literary and artistic worlds are gradually being made safe for geekdom. Since 2000, we've seen Lethem's Fortress of Solitude followed, Susannah Clarke, Kelly Link, and so many new slipstream authors we're at a point where it's hard to count them all. As staple SF magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction lost prominence, McSweeney's took on their role in a high-art guise. Chabon edited McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, where he deliberately mixed genre authors and literary fiction writers.

He also described the backlash his fantasy novel Summerland received, and pointed out that on the other side of the coin, a high-art author like Cormac McCarthy can write Westerns and post-apocalyptic SF, but will never get moved over to that side of the bookstore, because "if it's good, it can't be SF."

But if it's a gradual struggle, victory feels inevitable. The hardened boundaries between high and low culture handed down from the early 20th century can't stand forever. As Chabon pointed out, 1963 was a year with a powerful cohort including Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro, and Jonathem Lethem is only a year behind. Today, the closeted nerd artists have now infiltrated culture's governing institutions as editors, studio execs, and reviewers. Today, our boundary-annihilating president collects Conan the Barbarian comics.

Image via ToFuGuns.

The crossover, bringing Marvel's bad-guys-pretending-to-be-good face-to-face with everyone's favorite mutants, starts with June's Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Alpha, before running through each of the two titles for two months and concluding with another special issue in September. Don't expect this to be a quiet meeting of the teams, though; according to writer Matt Fraction, "[t]his ain't one of those stories that the teams can settle by a rousing game of softball":

Things are certainly dire, and the stakes are certainly high, and through it all there are still no more mutants being born. And this confrontation propels the whole of the Marvel Universe forward, whether it's the Avengers family or the X-Men family of stories. What comes next is as inevitable as the sunrise.
We've both got some big stories to tell — here's where they intersect... It's great – you never get to write like this, so it's a lot of fun. And what comes out of the X-Men/Dark Avengers story is big - it's another game changer on top of the earlier game changers. It's virgin territory for these kinds of stories. The bad guys have never won this big before – this...perpetually before, so it's a blast because we've never gotten to put the heroes through wringers like this before. It's a lot of fun.

That's fun for the readers, of course; there's less chance that the X-Men are going to find themselves laughing and smiling by the time this story reaches its conclusion.

Fraction Talks Uncanny X-Men/ Dark Avengers [Newsarama.com]

To hear him describe it, Fraction's take on the Iron Man concept is very clear:

To me, Iron Man is a science fiction book wearing a superhero's costume. Or he's a superhero starring in a science fiction book, I dunno. And to me, the most evocative science fiction, the most frightening science fiction, is the stuff that takes place in the next twenty minutes, the stuff that's recognizable just over the horizon. I mean, hell, William Gibson is writing books that take place in the past now, right?

That take is what fired up "The Five Nightmares," Fraction's first story as IM writer: A story that pits Tony Stark against Obadiah Stane's son, Ezekial - a genius who retrofits the Iron Man technology to create the ultimate human bombs - while also touching on the characters and themes (What happens when Pepper Potts has to get her own version of Tony's electromagnetic heart implant after being caught in an explosion? And how does Tony deal it?) but most importantly, tone that made the Robert Downey Jr. movie work so well. Something that, according to the writer, was a happy accident:

Well, I had no idea what the film was gonna be. I had no special access to anything different than anyone reading this. I saw the trailer when everyone else did, I read the casting announcements in Variety like the rest of the world. So basically I just made a lot of lucky guesses. I saw the movie opening night like everyone else. I had three scripts in the can and was starting on #4 and couldn't have been happier with how close we were, tonally.

I just wanted folks coming out of the movie to be able to plug into a character with forty-five years of history to him, and those who've read those forty-five years to get a book worthy of their time and attention.

Those lucky guesses didn't just help The Invincible Iron Man sell out repeatedly - they also landed Fraction in LA, meeting with director Jon Favreau and screenwriter Justin Theroux to discuss Iron Man 2 - but that doesn't mean that he's blase about it just yet:

I've already been out to LA for three days, working at Marvel West with Jon, the screenwriter Justin Theroux, Kevin Fiege, the head of Marvel Studios, and Jeremy Latcham, the film's producer. We went over the thing, basically, the spine of what Iron Man II is and how it moves and why and who's in it and what they want and how they get it and what happens and were it takes place and why and everything. Workshopped it all.

So, in a very literal way, it meant me, being in a room, with those guys. Which is brain-meltingly awesome. And the movie's gonna be amazing.

Invincible Iron Man #6, the conclusion of "The Five Nightmares," is in stores now. A hardcover compilation of the storyline will be released December 3rd.

Matt Fraction: Invincible Iron Man & Iron Man Movie Sequel [Newsarama]

Speaking at a press conference for the DVD and Blu-Ray release of Iron Man, Favreau talked about what he'd like to do to make the sequel much more impressive than the original, if money was no object:

I would love to do some of it on Imax for Imax. It's all a matter of dollars and cents for them. I would also love to do 3D... because 3D because, just think of the hub, think of the virtual space and what that would be like, the layers. How what fun that would be. And it also drives people to see it in the theater, it makes that much more of an experience. But it all comes down to how much does it cost, and what they get for it.

As to what we can definitely expect from the sequel, Favreau admitted that Dark Knight can own the dark and brooding "side of the playground"; the next movie will keep the light tone of the original movie, but may build off of the storyline from Matt Fraction's enjoyable Invincible Iron Man comic - which may mean that, before we get to the Mandarin (who we'll get to see, eventually), we may be seeing the Iron Man technology being reverse-engineered by terrorists out to destroy Tony Stark's business as much as the man himself. Even without the seeing a giant Iron Man fly off the screen, that alone will get me to be first in line when Iron Man 2 appears in 2010.

Could Iron Man 2 Be in 3-D [Collider]

Thursday afternoon, EW's Nisha Goplan introduced Jim Lee, John Cassaday, Matt Fraction, Mike Mignola, Robert Kirkman, Colleen Doran and Grant Morrison to an eager audience, and then shut up and let them do the talking. The short version of the event would go something like this: Comics can do anything, comic creators should be less afraid to try to do anything and everything they want, and Mike Mignola really can't stop himself swearing accidentally. But why give you a short version when we can let the panelists talk for themselves?

On Movies' Influence On Comics:

Kirkman: I don't think [movies] will change the content, I don't think it should change the content. Hollywood comes to us because of our content.

Morrison: I think we should write comic books that are more like comic books.

Mignola: The plus side is, I think some things are getting published... because they might see potential in it somewhere else...

Morrison: Hollywood's got a lot of rules, it's very formulaic. Comics should break those rules.

Mignola: It's sad to see people changing their structure to fit [the Hollywood rule]... Let's do the comic and see someone else turn it into a film.

Lee: I think it's the opposite, I see a lot of movies and TV shows like Lost following the comics form.

Morrison: Death to Hollywood!

Mike Mignola On The Pluses And Minuses On The Hellboy Movies:

You try your best to convince yourself that you're doing the best thing, and then you spend the rest of your life explaining yourself that, no, Hellboy doesn't have a girlfriend... You live in the shadow of the movie. But you make your peace with it. Or don't license the character.

On The Future Of Print Comics:

Fraction: As long as there's print, there'll be comics. We're a cheap, easy, nasty, swarthy medium. We'll be the last to go... I've yet to see an iPhone that can beat a comic.

Cassaday: I can't stare at my computer screen for very long.

Morrison: You can't take your computer in the bath,

Kirkman: Yes you can!

Morrison: This man knows more than me.

Kirkman: Do you mean bathroom or bath?

Morrison: I mean bath, being immersed, I mean, water is the best element.

Kirkman: We'll talk later.

Mignola: We sure sound like visionaries, don't we?

Grant Morrison On The Need For Superheroes:

I think superheroes are more relevant now than they've ever been before. Superheroes have become this desperate attempt to imagine the future for ourselves. Superheroes and Star Trek. They represent something that isn't a cowboy for the West to be. I don't know if we'll ever reach it, because we have a lot of good bombs.

On working on personal projects against corporate creations:

Fraction: A lot of guys like me, their own stuff doesn't pay the bills. It doesn't even buy lunch. If you write the X-Men, it's okay, bills are paid.

Mignola: Find some time in between commercial projects and try something. I firmly believed that, after I'd done the first Hellboy, I'd go back and do another Batman book. But when you try that thing, you should really make sure that it's something you love so that if it's successful, you're stuck doing the thing you love.

Doran: Too many people treat their entire project as an audition for the rest of their career.

Robert Kirkman On Killing Characters:

I never think of this stuff, or else I wouldn't do it. I just write things and think, yeah, I think this guy's gonna die now. The main character in Walking Dead gets his hand cut off, and I didn't think about it. I remember thinking, I should think about what this will mean. Oh, he can't button his shirt, this'll be easy. And then, ten years later, I was like, oh crap. I shouldn't have cut that guy's hand off.

On Why They Create Comics:

Kirkman: I do it so my wife doesn't think if I'm a failure. I can't do anything else.
Fraction: I've never run across anything that you can't do in comics. No-one ever says that you can't afford to blow up New York. We can blow up New York and rebuild it twice if we want.
Lee: I always figured that if I was ever arrested, I could be the big guy's art bitch. I'm being completely serious.

On Why Colleen Doran Got Into Comics:

Doran: I had a crush on Aquaman.

Morrison: What was it about him?

Doran: He was wet.

On Who Today's Visionaries Think We Should Watch Out For:

Fraction: Jason Aaron.

Doran: Derek McCullogh.

Kirkman: Jonathan Hickman.

Mignola: It's not that I don't think that anyone's good, I tend to not remember anyone's names.

Morrison: I want to see an entire generation of crazy 17 year-olds doing this stuff.

According to Fraction, who'll be co-writing the Uncanny X-Men comic with Captain America-killer Ed Brubaker, readers should expect the following new take on the evolutionary-based franchise:

These people were once the future, and now they're standing on the verge of extinction. And they still defend a world that hates and despises them. The ones that believe in tomorrow are running on faith and fighting off doubt. What's to keep them holding on? That crux at the core of all the characters, in all of its different forms, is what we're going to be looking at. There's a wildly new status quo that speaks to the very heart of who the X-Men are, and who they've always been. Facing the end of the mutant genetic line only serves to magnify that.

Oh! And stuff blows up; everybody has lots of sex, and then dies.

Brubaker and Fraction Talk About Uncanny Days To Come [Newsarama]

The indie books this week are really stepping into the Way Back Machine; Dynamite Entertainment goes for the genre vote with a collection of the Dark Xena series, telling you just how everyone's favorite Warrior Princess came back from the dead at the end of her TV show, as well as Zorro #1, launching a new monthly series for the formerly-Gay Blade.

Dynamite is also pushing out something called Battlestar Galactica: Cylon Apocalypse, which admittedly sounds awesome until I tell you that it's based on the original series and not the current Sci-Fi Channel version... In other words, for those who are unafraid of Dirk Benedict likenesses only.

IDW is picking up some of the nostalgia slack as well by releasing Classic Transformers, Volume 1, giving you a 312-page slab of the comics of your youth by collecting the original Marvel series from 1984.

As far as the "big" publishers go, DC Comics essentially give the week up for dead with the exception of the Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps War hardcover that slipped from last week.

Image Comics also goes relatively quiet aside from the relaunch of some cartoony ghostbusters (and I mean that in a good way) with The Perhapanauts Annual #1. You can download a previous issue of the series for free here)

Marvel Comics, however, makes a major play for your dollar. Matt Fraction, whom I talked to a couple of weeks ago, gets his WWII kung-fu groove on in the pulpy one-shot spin-off from the regular Iron Fist book, Iron Fist: Orson Randall and the Green Mist of Death. Yes, it's not exactly sci-fi, but it'll be fun, dammit (Fraction's also the mind behind the super-heroes-for-one-year series The Order, the first half of which is collected in this week's The Order: The Next Right Thing paperback).

The big io9-friendly book of the week, though, is undoubtedly Marvel's The Many Armors of Iron Man, a collection of stories from Tony Stark's 40+ year history that gives you the chance to remember some of his lesser-known looks. You all know the classic red-and-gold armor, sure, but how many of you knew that there was a "stealth armor"? Or space armor (It had no mouth. No, really)? Or even special deep-sea armor? You can tell that Stark's a genius from the number of variations on his one invention that he's managed to crank out over the years; there was even one with a nose on it.

As always, you can have a look at the complete shipping list for this week and make up your own mind, and then go to your local retailer to find out where to pick it up. Just make sure that you take a look at that Iron Man book, is all I'm saying.

Elsewhere on io9 I described Casanova like this: "Every science-fiction super-spy idea gets mixed up in this story that shows what happens when the black sheep of a spy family gets stolen into an alternate dimension where he's the white sheep for a change. Sexy robot girls! Floating heads that are scientific genuises! Incest! Catatonic mothers! It's all here, friends."

Matt Fraction: Hey, dick, you spoiled our surprise cameo color in that post. How about some spoiler warnings next time for people that might not know there's some purple in their future?

Spoiler: we see "Luxuria Green" come back in CASANOVA #13.

Ahem. What?

So, obvious first question: What the fuck, Matt? Where did this all come from?

I dunno. It was the first ongoing comic I was given and I was convinced I'd never be offered another one. So: get busy quick, you know? Cue "Lose Yourself." One shot, one moment, Mekhi Phifer, all of it: I thought nobody would ever ask again or give me the opportunity to lose their money and waste their time again. So if you (I) only had once chance to write a comic book, what would you (I) write— the 9,000th Batman rip-off, or would you (I) dig a little deeper maybe? In spite of the received wisdom suggesting the direct market seeks otherwise, I wrote a book I wanted to read; I wrote a book I hadn't seen before on the stands but had always wanted.

The series deals with some pure sci-fi concepts (time travel, alternate universes, robots, etc.) in a very offhanded, throwaway manner. Do you think that comic readers in general are so used to this stuff you don't need to spend time explaining it, or is it that it's so secondary to the human interactions that you want to write about?

Nah, it's just not what the book's about, at least to me. It's not about spies or floating heads or giant robots; it's not about what movies I've seen or what bands I like, no matter what the text bits at the back go on about. All that's maybe the form but not its content. Or not its only content, anyway.

Like, there's a line Ballard said of science fiction that "from the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century," and I guess, in my own sweetly retarded way, I'm looking to make Casanova the kind of "literature" from which my own intact reality might spring, or at least from which said reality may be divined. And not even in that base, Rod Serling sort of "Oh noez the martians are an allegory for immigrants and science fiction is really just symbolic social fiction and we've seen the enemy and it is us" sort of reality, not the shared reality of this craa-aaa-aaa-zy world we live in, but the brute, base reality of MY life, of my world and whatever it is I'm going through at any given moment. You make it all up and it all comes true anyway. As a writer, Casanova is the lens through which I try to view my life.

It's also an excuse to execute every abject genre jolly I ever had, so, y'know. Bonus.
Okay, so you say that the book's the reality of your life and whatever you're going through, which makes a lot of sense; reading the text pieces in the back of each issue, the reader gets the feeling that Casanova (the series) seems to be developing into some kind of allegorical almost-autobiography, with what happens to Casanova (the character) happening in some form to you, and vice versa - Is that why you decided to get rid of the character for the majority of the second volume, to give yourself a less dangerous life?

I think I can answer this question, and be somewhat disingenuous, as the answer would be predicated on what your personal perception of the second volume is, to date, which is — incomplete, or I can answer it and completely blow the ending and the resolution to the story and more than a couple fairly complicated reveals that I've worked really hard at not resolving prematurely. So I'm going to answer a question you didn't exactly ask and hope that it suffices.

In a story about choice, responsibility, and identity, I thought it might be of some value — as a writer — and hopefully of some entertainment — to a reader — to completely disregard any and all assumptions we all might have and see where that leads us. The biggest assumption, the most basic assumption, being that this is a book starring Casanova Quinn. The first volume studies Casanova as a character in positive space; the second, in the negative space that surrounded him. When it's done, both volumes form a kind of whole. For a book starring twins and drawn by twins, that felt kind of fitting. Then again, I'm easily entertained.

Talking about drawn by twins... Your artists Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon — Greatest comic artist brothers in existance? Discuss.

Ask me in about thirty years— Los Bros. Hernandez have a goddamn monstrous head start on them. That said there will undoubtedly come a day when people look back at their careers and marvel and laugh at the fact that they ever were saddled by working with a "writer."

Modesty or cheap shot at Gerard Way? Something else that seems to be happening in the second volume - and maybe connected to that last question about autobiography, or maybe I'm just reading into things — is that the writing seems to be going beyond the surface cool and into deeper, and kind of kinder, areas. The book seems to be more willing to wear its heart on its sleeve, instead of its influences, as it goes along if that makes sense. If I'm not imagining that, why the shift?

The short answer? It's a different volume, and if I had to write the same thing every month for the rest of my life I'd kill myself from the boredom. The first volume is very much about surfaces, about influences and reflections and the components of identity we scavenge from the world around us. As young people, becoming adults, I guess I think that so much of our character isn't actually our own; it's learned, reflected behavior, it's magpied aspects of personality we adopted from others. Like any arrogant teenager and like Hollywood, you get beneath surface tinsel to get to the real tinsel beneath.

So, now, moving on to the second volume, we explore what happens when an identity is chosen, a personality is set and a code is decided upon. Rather than action, it's about effect.

If we get to do the third volume, it'll be different still.

There's an "if" about that? Last chance to woo the io9 faithful, Matt: You have to choose between rebooting NBC's Bionic Woman or Sci-Fi's Flash Gordon on fear of death. Which one do you choose, and what do you do with it?

Flash Gordon. Hands down, not even an eyeblink worth of thought. The source material is crazy-rich, vivid, fantastic, fanatical, and pulpy and woefully, direly incorrect. To say nothing of having some of my very favorite art of the Golden Age of strips from both Raymond and Raboy. Hell, I'd rather reboot the Sam Jones FLASH movie a thousand times over. I love that movie. It's like what would happen if lycra and cocaine decided to make a movie.

Bionic Woman is a remake of a spinoff, for fuck's sake. That's like making a commercial for book of coupons.

If you haven't read Casanova yet, you really are missing out. Luckily, the entire first issue is available online here. You can also find out more about Matt Fraction at his website. Go and learn who Sister Fister is. You'll thank me, I promise.

Probably the big book of the week is IDW's Angel: After The Fall #1, which follows in the footsteps of Dark Horse's Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Eight in letting Joss Whedon himself (co-writing with Brian Lynch, with art by Franco Urru) tell you what happened after the cancellation of the Angel TV series. You can learn more about it here, if you're so inclined.

Other multi-media crossover books this week include Marvel Comics' Iron Man: Director of SHIELD Annual #1 - written by Law and Order's Christos Gage - and Incredible Hulk #111 - written by io9 favorite Greg Pak - laying the groundwork for next year's big summer blockbuster movies. If you're more of a video game person, then Image Comics' Dark Sector #0 might be your thing if you're the kind of person who wonders where your black ops avatar got his super-powers ahead of the game's release at the start of next year. Alternatively, you could pick up the long-delayed second issue of Marvel's adaptation of the Halo franchise, Halo: Uprising, which manages to make it into stores only two months late. Hey, space carnage takes time.

If alien war is your thing, then Marvel are also putting out the third collection of their Annihilation series, in which bug-like aliens decimate various alien planets while space-bound superheroes get their asses kicked trying to stop them (Imagine Star Wars meets X-Men, but with more death). There's an interlude of Earth War in DC Comics' very enjoyable 52 Volume 4, but you might miss it in between the other moments of sci-fi genius (Parallel earths! An island populated by mad scientists doing the bidding of a giant evil talking egg!). Equally idea-packed from DC is Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Volume 3, which takes you into the last half of the inspiration for the successful part of George Lucas's career.

My pick of the week, however, would be Casanova #11. Matt Fraction's post-post-modern mash-up of every spy movie, science-fiction book and superhero comic ever made continues to amuse and delight with every new issue, and this latest chapter promises no change. How could anyone resist this come-on?

Her name is Suki Boutique, and she runs the most powerful and glamorous criminal casino on Earth. Through her bank flows the countless illicit fortunes that keeps the underworld turning on its axis. Through her doors pass a veritable who's who of fabulous supercrime. And tonight, Zephyr Quinn has come to collect a bounty. Has she met her match?

Angel image courtesy of IDW Publishing, Casanova image courtesy of Image Comics

Famous names: Writer Matt Fraction was one of the founders of hip designhouse MK12 before the lure of comic books ruined his life. Artist Gabriel Ba draws purty.

Crunchy goodness: 4

Elevator pitch: "Repo Man meets Danger Man via Quentin Tarantino's popcultural headswim."

Life lesson: Loving your sister is one thing, but if she starts to grind herself against your crotch while simultaneously torturing you with power tools, it may be time to rethink that strategy.

Design breakthrough: The three-color format of the book originally came about as a cost-saving exercise, only for their choice of third color to be as expensive as full-color printing. But watch for a fourth color to appear as a plot point towards the end of the book.

Matt Fraction's Web site