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.)

On a similar reboot theme, Marvel's Ultimate line reinvigorated the publisher's core franchises at the start of the decade with varying degrees of success - I'm not sure anyone would really be able to argue that either Ultimate X-Men or Ultimate Fantastic Four were overly revolutionary, for example. Although Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's The Ultimates was, at the time, the critical favorite, we've got a soft spot for Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man, which rebuilt the character as the teen soap opera where great power means great amounts of confusion, bad decisions and all kinds of responsibility that we never even knew we wanted. With art by Mark Bagley, Stuart Immonen and now the wonderful David LaFuente, it's been consistently entertaining for the last ten years, and consistency is worth something, right?

Next: Scott Pilgrim

Whether or not you believe Pluto is still a planet, it turns out there are tons more bodies in our solar system just like it. As Wired.com explains, we went from thinking that Pluto was a uniquely icy planet among our system of rocky planets and gas giants to realizing that we have a ton of icy planet(oid)s out in the Kuyper Belt:

"When Pluto was first discovered in 1930, it just looked like an oddball," [planetary scientist Alan] Stern said. "We had the four rocky, terrestrial planets and the four big gas giants, and then we had this odd thing Pluto."

But with the discovery of the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s, scientists discovered that the small, icy orb was hardly unique. "We found out that there are a lot of Plutos," Stern said. "In fact, it's the dominant class of planets in the solar system. This transformed our view not only of the solar system, but also of the importance of sending a spacecraft to Pluto. We realized that we had never sent a spacecraft to the most common type of planet."

The Kuiper Belt sounds more and more intriguing as we discover more — like the mysterious red spot on the surface of Haumea, one of the largest objects there. The red spot may be a gas leak, or the result of a recent collision. But most of all, there's the fact that if we ever do get our lazy asses out of this solar system on our way to other stars, then whatever resources are in the Kuiper Belt will be a crucial refueling stop.

Photo by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. [Wired]

Magical Realism
Air
What It's About: At its heart, Air is a love story between Blythe - a flight attendant who's afraid of flying - and Zayn, who is as much a mystery to himself as everyone else. But Air is much, much weirder, and more interesting, than that: For one thing, Blythe is a natural hyperpraxis pilot, which means that she can travel to places, times and ideas that don't, theoretically, exist... a skill she's honing with the help of Amelia Earhart, who by the way is still alive. For another, there's a war brewing between terrorists over control of the skies, and for a third, certain people may be very interested in that whole "hyperpraxis" thing. A series that's gentle, human, full of wonder and emotion, and at times just beautiful, Air is unlike most comics - and television shows and movies, for that matter - out there.
Where To Start: Two collections are available, Letters From Lost Countries and Flying Machine. Pick both up; the series is great, but the first collection (Letters) stops at a frustratingly bad point, and you need to read the second to fully appreciate what's going on.
Click here for a preview of Air.

Post-Invasion SF
Resurrection
What It's About: We've all seen stories about aliens invading Earth, but what happens after they leave? FlashForward producer and Green Lantern movie scriptwriter Marc Guggenheim's series starts with that idea and spins out a series that's part Y: The Last Man, part Lost and all-over fascinating. Why did the aliens invade? Where did they go? No-one knows yet, but considering they've left behind technology and even one of their own, you can sure that we'll probably find out somewhere down the line... but along the way, you can get sucked into the more down to earth stories of the humans left behind. Even if one of them is former president Bill Clinton, who was revealed to be more alive than everyone thought at the end of the most recent issue.
Where To Start: There's already a collection of the first black and white series out there, but we'd actually recommend waiting until the start of next year, when the 368 page Resurrection Vol 1: Deluxe Edition, featuring the complete first series and the first seven issues of the current series, hits the shelves.
Click here for a preview of Resurrection.

Urban Fantasy
Locke & Key
What It's About: Ignore the punniness of the premise - The Locke family move to the family estate of Keyhouse, wherein there are magic keys that can do various weird and wonderful things, which puts them right in the middle of some bad things that're about to happen - and instead, embrace and enjoy those weird and wonderful things that the keys can do: like open doors that turn people into ghosts or even open their own heads so that you can reach in and take out unpleasant memories. Mixing horror, fantasy, comedy and family drama and featuring moments that are genuinely unsettling, Locke & Key deserves all the praise it's gotten, and a lot more.
Where To Start: There're two collections out already; Welcome To Lovecraft and Head Games. Start at the beginning (Lovecraft), bearing in mind that Head Games is the better, and also the more freaky.
Click here for a preview of Locke & Key.

Nostalgia Done Right
Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka
What It's About: A reimagining of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy (with some nods to his other work thrown in), Naoki Urasawa's Pluto is inventive, dramatic and in almost every single way, a lesson in how to take reboot and update an old concept the right way. Instead of retreading the old status quo, the series centers around robot detective Gesicht, who's investigating the murder of various high profile robots around the world... Murders that may have been committed by another robot. Even if you don't get sucked in by the economy and subtlety of the writing, there's no way you could fail to admire Urasawa's amazing artwork.
Where To Start: Unsurprisingly, Vol. 1. The seventh volume of the series is due in January, but that's still too far away; when you finish the first volume, you'll be hooked and get through the other five in days.
(No preview available, due to licensing issues. Sorry.)

Crime/Romance/SF/Everything
King City
What It's About: I've written before about Brandon Graham's stunning future crime book, but now that it's being re-released in an easier-to-find serialization by Image Comics, I'll use the opportunity to gush again; the bastard child of an orgy that included Moebius, Vaughn Bode, Jamie Hewlett and Osamu Tezuka (and maybe a little Alex Toth, come to think of it), King City is the tale of one thief, his broken heart, his cat that can literally do anything if given the right drugs, werewolves with war trauma, stolen organs, sidekicks in wrestling masks and pretty much all that's good in the world, all wrapped in something that takes noir's cliches and gives them a makeover laced with enough absurdity and love that it all seems new again. The whole thing manages to be both laid back and electrifyingly kinetic, and your heart will break for multiple reasons while reading it. Really, really worth tracking down.
Where To Start: The serialized reissue is on #2, so picking up back issues from the start really shouldn't be a problem. The original Tokyopop release may offer more story in one sitting, but the Image re-release comes with bigger pages and brand new material to accompany the serialized reprint.
Click here for a preview of King City.

Many of us who grew up learning about the nine planets took Pluto's reclassification hard, championing it as a celestial underdog. Meanwhile, astronomers were left to grapple with the question of what defines a planet as such. Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, suggests that Pluto's demotion by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stems from a misconception that full-fledged planets are somehow unusual:

"We are [now] in the midst of a conceptual revolution," he says. "We are shaking off the last vestiges of the mythological view of planets as special objects in the sky - and the idea that there has to be a small number of them because they're special."

As we learn more about Pluto and about objects outside our solar system, astronomers may well learn that the other eight solar planets have much more in common with Pluto than with other celestial bodies that exceed it in size:

Sykes believes that missions currently en route to Pluto and the asteroid Ceres, which orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter, will reveal these dwarf planets as active and intricate worlds. Meanwhile, astronomers may find distant objects as large as Earth which the IAU would not define as planets.

This leaves many astronomers clamoring for the view that any planet large enough to be pulled into a sphere by its own gravity should be considered a planet. By this definition, not only would Pluto be a planet, so would Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris, all currently considered dwarfs.

Although the International Astronomical Union, which classifies celestial bodies, convenes this year for the first time since Pluto's demotion, its chief does not expect any challenges to Pluto's status. But in 2015, NASA's New Horizons missions will reach Pluto, giving us our first up-close look at the sphere, and perhaps making Pluto the little planet that could.

Is Pluto a planet after all? [New Scientist]

The Illinois State Senate has resolved that not only was Pluto's 2006 downgrading to a dwarf planet unfair, but that they're revoking it, and that - for as long as Pluto passes over Illinois - it will regain "full planetary status," as awarded by the state. And that's not all; March 13th has been officially designated "Pluto Day" in the state, to celebrate the date of the (dwarf) planet's discovery in 1930. Sure, it may only be one state now, but you know what they always say*: "As goes Illinois, so go the rest of the United States."

(* - This may not be true.)

Illinois plutocrats are frakkin' goof [Discover Magazine]

Mercury is about twice as big as pluto, but still is the smallest object called a "planet" orbiting the Sun. The question is: how much smaller will it get? It will never get anywhere near as small as the former ninth planet, but will the IAU see fit to demote it too as it continues shrinking? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, Mercury's molten iron core continues to cool, shrinking the planet from the inside. Small particles of solid iron 'snow' rain down toward the ever-widening solid core. But even as the solid grows it's denser than the liquid and so takes up less space. This has been going on probably for billions of years and over time the shrinkage has caused Mercury's crust to buckle and fold up on itself, as seen here (that y-shaped fracture in the left side of the image is a huge fracture in the rock. The whole picture is about 200 kilometers wide):

(from NASA)

On the right hand side of the image, the craters with the soft-looking rims appear to be old impact basins that have been filled in with lava, indicating the Mercury once had some serious volcanoes exploding on its surface. Why did the volcanoes die off? Mercury cooled off. Just like on Mars and the Moon, Mercury was fiery when it first came into being, but lost its heat in the roughly 4.5 billion years since, silencing is volcanic activity. Earth is cooling in a similar way and in a few billion years it will get too cold for volcanoes too. When it does it will go quiet forever.

Source: Science, NASA, via LA Times