Over at my comics blog, I did a 10 for 10 post about comics. You should really check it out.

The focus here is on American mainstream comics. I have no apologies for that These are in no order. They are, however, presented with plenty of love for a decade chock full of good comics.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Sleeper

Comprising Sleeper: Season One and Sleeper: Season Two, this series went way too far under the radar. It was clearly one of the best superhero efforts of the decade, although at the end of the day it was more cloak and dagger than capes and cowls. Thankfully both Phillips and Brubaker went on to become fancy, big-selling stars for Marvel after finishing up this classic. I just wish a few more people had been able to check out Sleeper when it was running. It was tough talking into a vacuum.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal

Criminal took the Noir aspects of Sleeper, jettisoned the superhero aspects and distilled a pure drauft of crime drama. I have an affinity for their source material and love these two guys as individual talents so I was basically made to love this book.
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Secret Asian Man: The Daily Days

The self-published collection (which means you really ought to buy it since all the money goes to the artist,) collects all the strips Tak did when he was syndicated by United Features.

Have you pre-ordered it yet?

I love those comics. I've read every mini-series for the past 8 years.

I even liked the movie.

I've been reading the 30 Days of Night comics from the very beginning. Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's original mini-series is one of my favorite works of the decade and, while none of the follow-up series have quite matched that original brilliance it's been a great run of horror comics. Wonderfully scary.

With that in mind, it should be noted that my opinion of 30 Days of Night is probably worthless to most of you.
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So I finally saw The Dark Knight. It was really good.

With that out of the way I'm going to be a little geeky for a minute. While Heath Ledger was certainly good as the Joker within the confines of the role as defined in this film, I simply don't like this characterization.

I'm a comic book geek, so this is The Joker I like:

Maybe I'm old school, but I've spent 25 years reading Batman comics so I've got a pretty narrow image in my mind when I think "Joker." The gruesomely scarred, disturbingly made up, lizard tongued character Ledger played? Not so much in my range. The character worked for this film (an understatement), but for my money it really didn't even need to be the Joker. It could have been any depraved psycho.

Yes, I'm doing some geek style nitpicking. I'm a geek, sue me

Other than that? 15 flavors of awesome.