It was a busy weekend, full of comics and other emotions. What, comics aren’t an emotional state? Then you’re doing it wrong. These were the best of last week:

THE X-MEN, NOW WITH 100% MORE FASHIONABLE SCARVES

Marvel‘s Season One initiative struck me as something filled with a lot of cool potential. Despite reading enough comics that co-founding my own site about them on the internet seemed like a viable idea, I haven’t actually read the origin stories of, well… any of my favourite superheroes (that wren’t included in limited edition sets of Batman Begins). And while I’m actively trying to change that, Season One presents an enticing thing for someone who wants to learn about their favourite heroes: graphic novels, made by up-and-coming talents, set in the early days of the heroes’ careers, but with a contemporary approach and setting to interest new readers who aren’t enticed by the original art or by old ones who have already seen it.

Of course, that just gets someone to pick up the book and open it; the comic itself has to do the rest. And X-Men Season One, by Dennis Hopeless and Jamie McKelvie, is a fantastically crafted comic and introduction to the world of Professor X’s first class of students. Not only is McKelvie‘s art spectacular, filled with energy and style, but Hopeless does a smart little trick: he doesn’t pretend for a second that virtual reality combat simulators and battles against mutant terrorists are anything other than an absolutely insane thing for a teenager to have to deal with. Through Jean Grey’s point-of-view, the creators emphasize something that’s often forgotten in the day-to-day stories of the monthly comics, but which is often the first response of someone seeing it for the first time. Combined with elements of young love, friendship, humour and alienation, Hopeless and McKelvie have made a comic that fits alongside a 50 year-old one but is wonderfully new, and that’s a nearly impossible thing to do. I’m happy to share some of my Coconut Popsicles of Achievement with them. (J)

BRENDAN SCHOTZ: SEX MACGUFFIN?

Paul Cornell has yet to fail me.

While all the so-called cool kids knew him best from his episodes of Doctor Who, I knew him as the guy that once had Dracula declare war on Britain by firing vampires out of canons from his castle on the moon. For that moment alone, he will always hold a special place on my book shelf - but as I’ve subsequently gone through his various works (including those stellar episodes of Doctor Who), I always find myself quite taken with the way he approaches story telling.

Almost invariably, Paul Cornell tells stories with a “why not” mentality. Meaning, instead of always and continually asking why, he will pre-emptively retort why not. It’s a simple statement that is often times misused in comics, confused with a lack of internal logic. Saying why not gives you the ability to live like Lloyd Dobler did before that unfortunate plane crash that took his life and that of Martin Crane’s daughter. It opens story possibilities and gives you the ability to say absolutely anything - and that often makes for some amazing stories.

Saucer Country is a ballsy book - one that wouldn’t exist without that old why not mentality. The elevator pitch is “The West Wing meets The X-Files” which is almost as ballsy as “Runaways meets Lost“. How exactly can a person try and channel Sorkin, with his verbose walk-and-talk, ground level story flow and drop in something higher concept like aliens? Part of Sorkin’s inherent charm was the fact that the things he would write about were just on the plausible side of reality. Heightened reality for sure, one in which man’s inherent self-interests were often scuttled for “the greater good” in situations that would never play so altruistic in real life, but reality just the same. But Cornell makes it all work. He plies his story with a healthy dose of Sorkin style politics (a female divorced Hispanic woman making a plausible run for the presidency? How utterly American) and crazy ass alien shenanigans with equal measure and respect. Neither is treated as being more important or more ridiculous than the other - and it’s that balance that allows the book to work.

This is not to short-shift the amazing work of Ryan Kelly. Kelly is a guy whose work I discovered when he and Brian Wood did Local together all of those years ago. I’m not a person who is really good at describing art, but suffice to say, Ryan Kelly’s people often look like people - albeit ones who are a touch more inky and stylized than ones we would see on the streets. His faces are always expressive, and the way he makes various characters act and carry themselves is second to none. Everyone’s posture fits with their tenor, and his staging is quite lovely. (Or to use a term Paul Cornell will more readily understand, loverly.) It makes for a characters you can believe exist, despite the fantastic circumstances that you find them in.

This review has been light on plot details - and deliberately so. A first issue, I think, needs to be experienced as fresh as you can possibly approach it - and going through plot beats will usually deaden an experience. I don’t want that, and chances are, you don’t want things ruined for you. That said, this is a book that you need to seek out and try - even if you’re just grabbing the first issue as a taste before you wait for the collections. Paul Cornell has yet to fail me, and the strength of this first issue emboldens my opinion that he will not do so anytime soon. It’s why we’re giving the book our Aaron Sorkin’s Brick of Cocaine Award, which should almost definitely carry some caché, right?

Right??? (B)

Let’s get this out of the way: Brian K. Vaughan, I’ve missed you. Ever since I first cracked open a page of Y: The Last Man, your comics have enthralled and entertained me, and I’m so very glad to have you back, especially in such a fantastic debut issue:

Vaughan‘s major strength, crafting a full, believable fictional world, is a deceptively simple one, because it’s actually comprised of so many smaller ones. Not only does a world - or in this case, galaxy - have to be big enough in scope to fit a story and its title, but it has to be filled. A world where only enough exists to tell the words that are on the page isn’t a very good fictional world, and where Saga #1 succeeds is that it makes Alana and Marko, its two main characters, feel like a truly small part of their own world. Because of this, the danger feels real. Will they make it? Will their daughter? The voiceover narration subverts the expectations of this kind of fiction by telling us that she’s not going to be a great war hero or savour, just that thanks to Alana and Marko, she gets to be something. At the end of a first issue filled with blood, death and dystopian war, that’s enough. It gives me hope, and it makes me want to follow that story wherever in the galaxy it takes me. It’s a series filled with characters I already care for, whom I already want to see do well. That’s Vaughan‘s magic: an epic story in a galaxy filled with wonders, populated by people who feel real enough to care about.

The world itself is interesting: a blend of sci-fi and fantasy, it’s a world where spaceships and magic seem to exist side by side without feeling weird. Instead, it feels fresh and new. Have we seen something quite like this before, with aliens and people with horns and people with wings and people with televisions for heads? Large cats that detect lies? Treasure maps? I don’t think so. Like Y: The Last Man before it, Saga #1 combines a multitude of factors to make something bigger. Unlike Y, it veers from a brutally realistic, familiar world to one that’s fantastical and filled with wonders, but still feels real. Fiona Staples fills the issue with lush, wonderful art - some of the prettiest you will see all year - and, like the best of Vaughan‘s collaborators and co-creators, does an equal share filling the comic’s world with its characters and places. Would Marko be the same character if anybody else had helped develop him? Would Alana have that same wry resolve? I don’t think so, and I don’t ever want to find out. I just want to see Staples‘ beautiful hand-lettered - or is it brushed? - narration, and I just want so much more of this comic, for as long as I can get it.

This is Comics! The Blog. We now commence our broadcast week.