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.)

And, yes, we know that between this and Laika, we've got two animal-centric comics in our top 10. What can we say? We're pet people.

Next: Y: The Last Man

Wired's Underwire blog premiered these two clips from Patrick Meaney's upcoming documentary on the Scottish writer, teasing his particular take on George Bush (and world leaders in general) and why our Earth would seem like hell to fictional characters:


Featuring not just a lengthy interview with Morrison about his life and work - including the alien abduction that led to his 1990s series The Invisibles - but also contributions from friends and collaborators like Blackest Night and Green Lantern writer Geoff Johns, Seaguy and Invisibles artist Cameron Stewart, and DC Executive Editor Dan Didio, Meaney plans to have the movie (tentatively called Grant Morrison: The Documentary Film) complete in time for a world premiere at SDCC 2010. We'll see you in line.

Counterculture Comics Hero Grant Morrison Gets a Biopic [The Underwire/Wired]

Morrison's comic is basically Watership Down for turn-of-the-century biopunks - a serious story about a merging of animal and artificial consciousness that gets at something fundamental in humanity. But a huge part of what makes the comic work is the art. The animals, created out of Quitely's stylized curves, look surrealistically like missiles or tanks. And their adventures bloom with lurid, unreal reds: Of blood, of fire, of sunsets. And eye-watering greens.

And yet producer Don Murphy told Shock Til You Drop that the movie is going to live-action. By which he must mean photorealistic CGI, which seems to me the wrong way to approach a tale whose look has to be as stylized as possible. I hate to sound like a kneejerk fan, getting all mouth-breathy about how the original is being desecrated. I don't care if the original is desecrated, as long as what results is cool in its own way. I just think this tale can't stand the jump to live action without major tweaking. Maybe, if "live action" means something like the pseudo-live action of a Frank Miller flick, it will work.

Even more potentially disturbing is the director. Shock Til You Drop reports:

Even though the film is going to be live-action, we brought on the lead director of Kung Fu Panda [John Stevenson]. He's attached to direct We3. We're doing it as an R-rating. It's not going to be cutesy. There's killer rabbits and stuff. We're in the process right now of trying to figure out where we're going to make it.

Stevenson's known best for a cute animal comedy whose tone is precisely what We3 turns on its head.

Stevenson may hit it out of the park, though - I'm hopeful about that R-rating. And Grant Morrison adapted the comic for screen himself, which is also a good sign.

Stevenson Attached to Direct Comic Adaptation We3 [via Shock Til You Drop]

Both books come out in early September, just in time for the back-to-school blitz. And they share a similar theme: young people in the future discover that everything is frakked up and they're being lied to. But Resistance looks a good deal darker than Cyberia.

Malley's Resistance is a sequel to her first novel, The Declaration. In her first book, it's the 22nd century and children have been outlawed. Society has developed medical techniques to keep people young and healthy forever, so there's no room for new children. Everybody has to sign the "Declaration," agreeing not to have kids. The only way to opt out and reproduce is to agree to grow old and die. Anna's parents break the rules by having her without giving up their own immortality. So the state seizes Anna and sends her to a boarding school for "Surplus" kids, where she learns how to become a "Valuable Asset" doing shit work for "Legal" people. When Anna turns 15, a kid named Peter turns up at her prison/school with news of her outlaw parents, encouraging her to escape and join them. (And here's Malley's list of dystopian novels for teenagers, including some classics.)

In Resistance, Malley turns her first novel's premise on its head: the Pharma Corporation comes out with a new drug to let people live forever. Unlike the existing drugs, "Longevity+" will actually reverse the aging process altogether. But there's a catch, as Peter and Anna discover when they infiltrate Pharma Corp.: in order to create "the building blocks" of Longevity+, scientists will need to harvest them from young people. So it's sort of like that Maureen McHugh story I mentioned a while back: older people gain eternal youth, at the expense of the truly young.

Meanwhile, in Cyberia, Zane is a teenager living in a totally cyber future. His parents are hardwired into the Cybernets, and his bedroom is 100 percent cyber. Even his pet dog is cyber, thanks to an implanted microchip — in this world, all animals can speak. But then Zane finds a mole, a contraband animal, and takes it home. He hides it, and somehow discovers through it that the cyber translators are lying — the animals aren't really saying what the voice synthesizers are representing them as saying. Instead, they're saying something totally different, and they want Zane's help to fight for their freedom from the chips, which control their behavior. The animals want Zane to take them to a technology-free safety zone. I'm kind of intrigued by this concept, which sounds sort of like We3, except for the part about the animals "saying" stuff they're not really saying.

By the way, I found these titles by looking in Susan Fichtelberg's invaluable listing of new and forthcoming YA speculative fiction titles.

"Give me some sugar, I am your neighbor!" Morrison growled as we started. He jumped right in, happily answering even the most controversial questions from the audience; we've got a recap below.

To what extent do drugs play a role in your creative process?
They were very big in The Invisibles. I was a very straightedge kid until I was 30 years old — I didn't touch anything, and I was anti-drinking, anti-drugs, everything. But I got to 30 and I kind of decided to treat myself as a laboratory and become something else — I wondered how much you could mess with your own personality. I became a tranny for awhile; I used to dress up as a girl, and I was beautiful! I just started to take tons of psychadelic drugs, though I was never into amphetamines or anything. But I'm getting old now, so I don't do so much of that.

Did that also have a role in your experience in Kathmandu?
The Kathmandu thing was really weird. I had taken a little bit of hash — but just a very little bit. That experience was so profound — nothing like that has ever happened to me again. Part of taking so many drugs in the 90s was trying to recreate the experience: the clarity of everything was so much more real, the way things are made ... all this is just cheap dream compared to the place I was. I've taken DMT, high doses of mushrooms, high doses of acid — nothing took me back. I've never been able to go there again.

In the script for Arkham Asylum there's a joke about two nuns and a donkey. Is that a real joke?
That is a joke. Two nuns find this gigantic penis, and they're working away, and the Mother Superior says "Oh my God! Look what's happened to Flannen McCafferty!" The idea is that some old guy's donkey dies and the donkey's got the biggest dick in the wall, so he cuts it off and throws it over the nunnery wall, which takes me back to the punchline, and ... I can't tell jokes. That's the only joke I know and I still can't tell it.

What writers have inspired and influenced you?
There's a ton of 'em. A lot of playwrights: Peter Shaffer, David Sherwin, Alan Gamma, Timothy Leary, Tolkein, the Beatles, the Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols ....

What's going on with the film for We3?
The film's script's actually better than the comics script. There's a lot of stuff happening at New Line right now, though. We've been through like 16 different directors, because none of them just really got the movie for me, but they've been really good about it. They really want to create the book. The animals will be CGI, but everything else will be real.

What kind of music do you listen to?
I started out as a punk, I used to play in bands. I was a weird punk, a psychedelic punk. My three favorite bands are the Beatles, the Buzzcocks, and the Sex Pistols. We used to play psychedelic music and speed it up really hard. Just psychedelic pop is my favorite music — stuff that lasts three minutes but transports my head.

Where will you be taking Batman?
To the grave. [laughs] There's a new Batmobile, and it's one of the greatest drawings ever — Daniel really surpassed himself on this. I kinda wanted to humanize the guy, 'cause he's been such a dick for awhile. But if you were Batman, you would be a dick, so that's fine. But underneath it all there's Bruce Wayne, this aristocratic kid who was just growing up and probably going to be a doctor, and then suddenly BANG BANG — so there are psychological weaknesses underneath that superman. It's a total deconstruction of Batman. I've just written the second part, where the bad guys actually take him down, and I'm thinking, "how's he going to get back from this?!" The way I'm doing this is possibly the most shocking Batman revelation in 70 years.

You mentioned putting a lot of autobiographical stuff in your comics. Have you ever considered doing a real autobiography?
Nah, you wouldn't believe it. It makes more sense in comics. They were always more like real life to me. David Lynch is more real life to me than any soap opera. All of our lives have weird shit. British kitchen sink cinema in the '60s was like that, about people having abortions and everything, but what they missed was the weird stuff — everyone has dreams and fantasies, everybody's mother's seen a ghost, everybody's got a weird witchy relative. Like — have you seen the South American dwarf on the internet? Have you guys seen that thing? That's the world we live in — filled with gaps and weirdness and strangeness. I'm just trying to be realistic. This is realism to me.

How did you get into comics?
I took some pages that I'd drawn to a convention in Glasgow — a convention just like this one — and I showed it to a bunch of guys doing a magazine called Near Myths, and they paid me for it! They paid me like 10 pounds a page. I was a poor kid, so to me that was like I was a millionaire. "Hey, I can do this, I can make money!" I thought, and then, twenty years later ... [laughs]

What do you think about the fact that you're a character in the DC Universe?
I think it's pretty cool. And they tried to kill me, but I just keep coming back!

When you were young, who did you want to be?
The Flash — he was the coolest. He was always getting turned into puppets and paving stones and stuff. It was like he was constantly tripping. Also, he's got the greatest suit — the way Carmine Infantino would draw his ass in the books! And the boots, those inch-thick treads. I still want those boots. If anyone here can make boots like that, please.

What do you find most enjoyable about your work? What are you reading right now?
The Filth is my favorite all-time thing I've written. It's the most consistent. It's really wrapped 'round its themes quite well. What am I reading — just superhero comics. I'm a boring guy. Geoff Johns' Green Lantern, Davis' Avengers. Just basic stuff. I'm just like everybody else — I like what's cool and popular.

What do you think of the different Batman movie versions?
Something like Batman can be interpreted so many ways — I love the Adam West Batman, and I love the Christian Bale Batman more than ever. That guy is good — I think that's the best Batman ever. Batman's so adaptable, you can do almost anything with it and it still works. I don't like every version. There are a lot of really good superhero movies, and a lot of really bad ones. [someone yells "Batman and Robin!"] Batman and Robin — Yeah, but the colors are brilliant! Just switch off your brain and think, "okay, I'm watching the gay Batman"!

I heard that Final Crisis begins with the funeral of Captain Marvel ...
Yeah, that's true. It was originally in a thing called "Hyper-Crisis" which I pitched years ago, at the time when I was leaving X-Men — not to say Marvel is dead, 'cause it's a colossal industry, but for me it was kind of over, so I wanted to do this thing where everyone was standing at Captain Marvel's grave. I wanted to do this thing with the Chronovore, where he had eaten the first years of the 21st century, so there was no 21st century, and Superman and his allies had to build a bridge of events across this abyss. It means you have to go tell Batman, "if you don't do this, we're all gonna die, 'cause we need this event to be rivet 205." It was kind of interesting, but I'm glad they went with Identity Crisis instead.

What are you doing next?
Next year I'm doing this thing called War-Cop, this other atomic bomb thing which is kind of psychadelic — back to being me again, a little bit.

Can this really be THE final crisis?
It's definitely the final crisis for me. But who knows? You cannot predict what these people will do in the future. If Final Crisis sells, then there will be more crises — there's no stopping it.

Your characters tend to escape the comic book and go into the real world. Does that happen in Final Crisis?
I was always fascinated with dimensions as a kid. I was five years old, trying to draw the fourth dimension: "I know I can draw a point, a line, a square, a cube ... arrgh!" There won't be any of that in Final Crisis, no. But the idea was: Superman, Batman, they're much more real than we are — created long before any of us were alive. Superman is still vital and young and communicating to people. When we're dead and gone and dust, there will probably still be a Superman. And the world that they inhabit is a two-dimensional world. You can pick up different comics from his whole span of existence, but it's all still there. I began to imagine: what if there were things above us, on a hyper-cube level, if there were people who could look down on us like we look down on Superman, and see the entirety of our lives? The same way we can see the entirety of lives in the second dimension? The experience of The Invisibles in Kathmandu was kind of an actualization of that reality — that there are things up there that can see the entirety of Earth time and Earth space like that. It's an ongoing fascination for me.

What happened in the last issue of The Invisibles? I've read it like 20 times and I have no idea.
Yes, you have. Of course, you have! What happened was that thing you read and all those words. That's what happened.

Earthling: Futuristic burglar Joe may be the official star of King City, but it's his pet cat Earthling that steals all of the scenes that he appears in. Joe, having trained years to become a "Cat Master", has the skills and medications to repurpose Earthling into whatever he needs in any given situation - whether it's as a screwdriver, skateboard or just plain cat burglar.

Bandit, Tinker and Pirate: We've gone on about We3 before (and we'll continue to do so until everyone has accepted it as the greatest funny animal comic ever made), but there's no avoiding the fact that these cyborg animals aren't the type to perform stupid pet tricks. With laser-sighted guns and enhanced reflexes, you'd have to be a pretty bad stink boss if you expected them to roll over or play dead.

Rex The Wonder Dog: Ever wondered what would've happened if Captain America was a dog? The answer comes in the form of Rex, a patriotic dog injected with a super-soldier serum in World War II before the creator of a serum was killed by a Nazi spy. Suddenly blessed with increased stamina, strength and intelligence, Rex dedicated the rest of his life to solving crimes, battling injustice and fighting T-Rexes. Because, really, what else would a super-powered dog do?

Jake, The Cat From Outer Space: Move over, Star Ka'at - There's only room for one extra-terrestrial feline in my heart, and it's the star of this 1978 Disney movie who can not only talk via his special collar, but also influence the outcome of sporting events to benefit his gambling addiction. Sure, he said that he needed the gold to repair his spaceship, but who hasn't come up with a ridiculous story like that at some point?

The Legion of Super-Pets: Easily the greatest collection of crime-fighting house-broken animals in existence, and that's including Captain Carrot and His Zoo Crew. Also, proof that creators of Superman comics in the 1950s were beginning to get desperate. This particular Legion was made up of past and present pets belonging to Superman and Supergirl - there was Beppo the Super-Monkey, Krypto the Super-Dog, Streaky the Super-Cat and Comet the Super-Horse, all of whom traveled through time to team up and defeat the evil Brain-Globes of Rambat. Yes, you read that right: the evil Brain-Globes of Rambat.

Things got worse when, years later, Comet turned into a human lesbian stand-up comedian who was in love with Supergirl, and also a personification of the Angel of Love, who had once been a male jockey, and... Oh, never mind. We'll just pretend that never happened and think of Comet as a horse with super-powers. That's much better.

So there you have it: Some of fiction's greatest super-powered pets. Because I hate all Hanna-Barbera cartoons, I've missed out Scooby Doo, Dynamutt and Gleek, but who else should be added to the list?

Famous names: Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely

Crunchy goodness: 5

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: New Line Cinema has optioned We3 as a movie, with a script by Morrison. The three animal protagonists would be all CGI.

Quotable: The animals have basic speech capabilities, thanks to computer implants. The cat mostly says "stink boss," while the dog keeps asking if it is "gud dog."

Social message: Grant Morrison uses the cute (and heavily armed) beasties to preach against animal experimentation, a theme in his work going back to Animal Man in the 1980s.

9th Art Review by Matthew Craig