I may be outgunned but I won’t be outdoned by the Comic Book Club. Here are my comic picks for the year:    

Best Ongoing Series: Regular, ongoing comics will always have their ups and downs–creative inconsistencies and other assorted hiccups on the road to long-term serialized storytelling–but a few titles had me hooked all year long. My pick for the best is a three-way tie between Walking Dead (simply my favorite monthly), Fantastic Four (Millar and Hitch kicked ass in “The Master of Doom,” and Hickman and Eaglesham’s “Solve Everything” blew my mind up) , and Batwoman: Detective Comics (gorgeous, sexy, badass…and that’s just the artwork).

Best Mini Series: Old Man Logan. I had more fun with each issue of this over-the-top, masterfully drawn post-apocalyptic, super-powered spaghetti western than I did with any of my favorite ongoing titles, and it was certainly better than watching Wolverine: Origins  or reading Young Man Logan in Fraction’s Uncanny X-Men or Bendis’s New Avengers.

Best Event: Blackest Night has certainly been a doozy–a zombie action movie in sequential print form–but I’ve also been loving the flagship book in Marvel’s “Dark Reign” event, Dark Avengers, and the epic tangents from that storyline in Invincible Iron-Man and Captain America. Let’s just call it a tie and hope both events lead to more quality storytelling from their respective publishers in 2010 and beyond.

Best Job of Pulling Me Back In: Amazing Spider-Man. I hated One More Day and the idea of the Brand New Day reboot, and I don’t exactly appreciate the cost of keeping up with a weekly title, but a love for the wall crawler (my own and the obvious love the rotating legion of creators on this book have for him) and some top-notch storytelling made this one of my favorite titles in 2009. The possibility of some serious long-term payoffs to the One More Day mess in the coming months could mean good things for the series in 2010, as well.

Best Hero: Barry Allen almost ran away with this honor for me when he started to outshine Hal Jordan and the rest of the Green Lantern Corps in their own event, and the new Dynamic Duo of Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne would have had a chance at sharing this title had their series not sputtered after two issues and become irrelevant after DC announce  the return of “the real Batman” in 2010. Norman Osborn has certainly worked hard to make people think he was the hero of the year, but we’ve got a better category for him coming up. So, back to Blackest Night and the color war going on across the DC Universe, the best hero of 2009 has got to be Green Lantern. The excitement and build up from Blackest Night leading to the upcoming live-action GL film would be enough to set Hal above the rest of the superhero landscape, but the main GL book and Cry for Justice have helped to cement him as a powerhouse character deserving of the same recognition as DC’s “Trinity” of the always awesome Batman and…those other two far less compelling characters. 

Best Villain: Doctor Doom had a big year, but it involved him being eaten by a prehistoric shark, being labotomized and imprisoned by an army of Reed Richards across multiple dimensions, and getting bitched repeatedly by the Green Goblin’s secret identity. And Norman Osborn would have taken this title for that very reason, if not for a brilliant stroke of villainy from the big bad to our best hero. Blackest Night’s architect of evil, Nekron, revealed himself in a major way, claiming responsibility for the revolving-door afterlife of the DC Universe and control over the souls of all of the major ressurected DC heroes–not to mention a galaxy-spanning army of nigh-invincible zombie Black Lanterns. We won’t know how it all plays out until 2010, but DC’s intergalactic demilich ended the year with some seriously big evil.

Best Graphic Novel: Stitches. Under almost any other circumstances, I wouldn’t have cared enough to read it, and my man Jay, the Mayor of Bookville, wouldn’t have even thought to give an advance reader copy to a mainstream superhero fanboy like me. But there was something extremely comforting about reading a comic about one family’s drama surrounding cancer, strained voices, and a gnarly neck scar right when my own family was coping with my own of the same. This book also wins the honor of being the only comic my wife read this year…and possibly ever.  (Confirmation on that, babe?) Here’s my original review.

Best Anthology: Doctor Dremo’s Taphouse of Tall Tales and Short Stories. Obviously.

Best Comic-Related Meme: Marvel by Disney!

Most Important, Best-Reviewed Book I Have Not Read and Probably Won’t Unless You Lend it to Me: Asterios Polyp. I can’t even spell Dave Mazza…Mazzi…Mazzu…Mazzucchelli…ah ferget it!

And with that, on this Palindrome Day 01.20.2010, may your New Year be filled with much sequential joy and hardboiled happiness!